{ Monday, February 21, 2005 }
I hate it when I am out of town when there are interesting things going on in Vancouver. This weekend was the Northern Voice blog conference, and from all accounts it was a success. I've been reading about it at various blogs, and of course, looking at the photos tagged "northernvoice" on Flickr. Ryan in particular has a lot of great notes from the conference. I even ran into Phil Wolff on the plane on his way to Norther Voice, and he turns out to be much like you'd think: a very smart and friendly guy.
One quibble: Ryan notes that Stephen Downes in his talk said:
Two major elements of communities:
1. the network – elation in and among a group of people (not mere proximity)
2. semantics – the idea that these relations are about something – a topic, a value, an interest, a set of belief
I'd dispute this on two fronts. One, Flickr is not "all on one site" as you can see by the photograph in the post below this one; by the photos on the sidebar; by the fact that there is a feed available of all of my photos spliced into the caterina.net RSS feed; by the fact that any and all groups of photos are available by RSS, not only of individuals, but of group pools, tags, photosets, etc. There are also a number of fantastic apps built on Flickr's open API, making the idea of Flickr as a standalone site even less tenable. Proximity is not the same on Flickr as on, say Friendster. We also recognize that communities happen in places other than Flickr, and thus haven't built a walled garden. We believe that Flickr succeeds best when it turns your photos into a resource, which you can then pull into, say, your groups at 43 Things.
Second, I'm not sure what Ryan (or Stephen) means by "elation". But I'm assuming that he/they meant "relation" -- that people are "related" in some manner. I'd argue that Orkut, Friendster and Flickr have networks/relations in spades. On all these services, people designate their friends (or friends and family), and on Orkut and Flickr, very deliberately join groups around values, interests, topics and beliefs. And relation -- as well as occasional elation -- are certainly present in such participation, to varying degrees.
There is, undoubtedly, some finer distinction not captured in the notes or powerpoint of the talk, so I qualify this quibble by pointing out that I wasn't actually there at the talk. :-) But I surmise that what Downes was saying was that defining and making explicit your "social network" doesn't create actual community, and with this I wholeheartedly agree. Thriving online communities are only created by persistent and ongoing interactions, and this is where I think Friendster and Orkut differ from Flickr. Social networks qua social networks wither on the vine, but in contrast, a full 50% of Flickr members have logged into Flickr in the past 30 days -- and that doesn't count the number of interactions through RSS feeds, apps built on the API or any of the other means of interactions enabled through Flickr's permeable membrane.
We've taken pains to distinguish Flickr from social networks such as Orkut and Friendster, so I guess it pains me to see it lumped together with them. Flickr is a photo sharing site which uses a member's social network as a means of defining permissions for access to private photos, as well as aggregating the photos of a member's friends and family. Groups for photos from weddings, high school reunions and affinity groups -- vintage cars, for example, or chihuahua lovers -- are also built deep into the Flickr DNA.
LINK | 12:44 AM | TB