August 14, 2003
Lazy Guide to Net Culture: Random personal pictures.
Via the
Scotsman, and a good example of why it's one of my favorite sites, is this ongoing series,
Lazy Guide to Net Culture.
This one focues on people's personal pictures. Quotes by Stewart Kirkpatrick.
If you want to appear like you’re at the cutting edge of net culture but can’t be bothered to spend hours online, then never fear. Scotsman.com’s pathetic team of geeks, freaks and gimps will do the hard work for you. While you sip wine, read a book or engage in normal social interaction, they will burn out their retinas staring at badly designed web pages and dodge creeps in chatrooms to prepare for you: Scotsman.com’s lazy guide to net culture.
... Personal photos have fuelled the next evolutionary stage in blogging: photoblogs. These are, as the name suggests, online journals illustrated with pictures. (OK, it's not the most earth-shaking innovation but it is proving very popular.)
Photoblogs.org contains a list of fairly decent examples.
Even we at scotsman.com have succumbed and have an Edinburgh Festivals photoblog
here.
Quite a few more links there. Even better are these random picture generators.
By far the best use of personal pictures on the internet can be found at
diddly.com/random.
Dave Mattson's Random Personal Picture Finder generates random numbers and puts them in the default filename structure of some makes of digital cameras. It then runs these through a
Google image search.
The result is a page full of pictures with those filenames (because they were taken by a digital camera and put online without the filename being changed). They are pulled from people's websites across the world.
If you want, you can click on the images to see the different website where they appear. But the point of the Random Personal Picture Finder is that it misses out the middleman completely. Instead of having to wade through commentary, personal recollections and an account of what Tiddles had for breakfast you can just look at what pictures are being put online.
Warning: you can waste a lot of time looking at these. I've resisted for the most part so far, but there are some talented people out there.
Luckily I don't have a digital camera yet, or I'd be doing it myself. I've seen a lot of beautiful country lately. It'd be nice to wander around and take photos and put them up. Pretty soon it'll be possible to do it entirely wireless from almost anywhere.
A couple sites they don't mention, but which are two of my favorites for photos are:
burningbird.net, from the American midwest, I think, and
Andrea's site, from Germany.
Add: Just checked out photoblogs.org a little. Like I say, you could waste a lot of time, they have a LOT. The first one I tried,
George Bailey's Nature Images, was beautiful. Incredible colors. So is this one,
Digiteyesed Photography, by Sean David McCormick.
I can't believe some of these photo sites. I've done some sites, and it takes a lot to build sites of this kind of complexity, especially involving lots of graphics that must load quickly. Impressive. And photographers seem to possess the ability to focus on detail that also makes great sites.
