onfocus

So the big news in my corner of the Internet on Friday was indie photo site SmugMug buying Flickr from corporate bohemeth Yahoo/Oauth (or whatever). You can probably tell by my framing how I feel about it. I'm hopeful!

I posted my first photo to Flickr on August 18, 2004: luna in her office bed. (This was back when the founders would comment on new photos!) I wrote little hacks for Flickr like Add Camera Images to Flickr. And a year after that first photo I was co-writing a book about Flickr that was released a few months later. I was all-in on Flickr and it was central to my online life.

But all was not well in the Flickrverse and I became more and more disappointed with what Yahoo! was doing with the service. A year after Flickr Hacks came out I started writing here about ways to move off of Flickr and back to hosting my own images: Going Off the Flickr Grid. My personal photo site/Flickr clone lived from 2007-2010 or so at photos.onfocus.com. (I posted what I thought would be my final photo to Flickr, here on March 14, 2007: 301_moved.)

After that initial burst of off-the-grid activity, my personal photo blog features couldn't compare with the upload, album, and sharing features available at Flickr. I didn't have time to scale up my site so I continued posting to Flickr—especially when I wanted to share a collection of photos. I was disappointed with myself for not living up to my online ideals. (This is a constant life theme!)

Anyway, all of this is just to say that my relationship with Flickr is complicated. I know my mixed feelings are nothing compared with the folks who were inside building Flickr and I hope their story gets told. I'd love to know why Flickr missed the mobile revolution and today we have Instagram influencers instead of Flickr luminaries (or whatever). I think this acquisition (is it? More details please!) is a great chance to revive the good parts of Flickr—especially its sense of community where Flickr started.

I stumbled on this great podcast about philosophy that you should check out if you also like things such as philosophy and podcasts. (I didn't so much stumble on it as Spotify's recommendation algorithm put it in my path and then I stumbled on it.)

Each episode is about 20 minutes of host Stephen West walking us through some problems that philosophers have tackled through years. For example, are we condemned to be free as Sartre thought or are we limited by the structure of our cultural mythologies as Barthes thought? If you need a place to start, you can't go wrong with his look at Simone De Beauvoir's The Ethics of Ambiguity. West has a real knack for making dense, often technical philosophical ideas accessible.

When the prescription for fixing our dystopian techno-hellscape is often adding more humanity, I think it's worthwhile to take some time to think about what it means to be human. Philosophize This is an entertaining way to see how that question has been answered in many radically different ways.

I have about 30 articles related to the Facebook Trainwreck bookmarked but I'm going to skip them this week. (I don't have to tell you things are bad — everybody knows things are bad.) Instead, here are some other links:

• Wired: It's Time for an RSS Revival - You can't...
• Dan Cohen: Back to the Blog - ...go home again...
• Anil Dash: The Missing Building Blocks of the Web - ...but we should try!
• Transitioning Google URL Shortener to Firebase Dynamic Links - What an incredible journey, etc.
• Perspective-aware Manipulation of Portrait Photos - This one made my brain hurt in a good way. They're making wide lenses look like long lenses with 3D awareness.
• The Last Conversation You’ll Need to Have About Eating Right - Because it's so long and you won't want to talk about eating anymore.
• Community Interaction and Conflict on the Web - A study of inter-community conflict at Reddit. 1% of communities initiate 74% of all conflicts.
• Jeff Simmermon: This Is A Boring Shark Attack: 8 Rules for Fascinating Storytelling

I have watched this video about aluminum cans a few times over the last week or so and I keep sharing it with people in person. It has five million views on YouTube so I'm not alone. I think it's so fascinating because we are alienated from many of the things around us and this video undoes a small piece of that: