Okay, I keep trying to get the ball rolling on this Web 2.0 thing but other stuff just keeps getting in the way. As you can see, I never got around to posting Flickr vacation pictures, but I have always been terrible at personal picture management. I probably set the bar too high.
Flickr is pretty darn fascinating and I am most impressed by the LoC project. I wonder how many other photo archives will follow in their wake? I once had the job of handling permissions for the image copying department at a private historical society. At the time we were spending a lot of time evaluating our options for getting our images online–but not merely to share, rather to generate revenue to support the organization. Our goal was to make money on selling high quality reproductions of items from the collection and more lucratively, to charge permission fees for each and every use. This meant we needed to carefully track uses of our images. I think putting things up on Flickr would not have been considered a viable option at the time. (Although I guess we could have put up tiny files with watermarks, but that seems kind of antithetical to Flickr.) I looked around on Flickr to see if the particular organization I had worked for had anything form their collection up–Ironically, the only shots I found were from visitors to the collection, but nothing from the rights and repro office. So, I guess if it is going to happen anyway…
Another interesting thing about Flickr is the prominence of Creative Commons licenses (http://creativecommons.org/about/), which I understand to be an alternative to traditional copyright protections. They’re all over Flickr. I wonder if anyone has gone to court over a creative commons license yet?
Oh, yeah, about the non-linear approach…I think I’ll skip ahead to Flickr next. I hear it’s a lot of fun. I’ll double back for the other stuff later.
Whoseywhatsit 