Pic Your Friends
Phenomenology, folksonomy, and the reification of personal experience made fun, easy, and social
Julian Dibbell
Tuesday, March 22nd 2005
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image: flickr.com
A frozen moment, about to proliferate
Most Popular
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You Can't Escape the Canvasser's Pitch 'Got a minute?' The young bleeding-heart carnivores who hunt you down on your lunch hour
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The Coen Brothers Make Another Mockery with Burn After Reading Remarkably consistent, there's nothing these boys can't hold up to ridicule
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No Witness Protection for Mobster Turned Snitch Joe Campy. PS: He's Hiding in Plain Sight. PPS: He has a web site.
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Mickey Rourke is The Wrestler The onetime Hollywood A-lister climbs back in the ring with Darren Aronofsky's latest
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Midway Through the Toronto Film Fest, and Things are Looking Bleak Oh, Canada
Flickr didn't invent online picture sharing, of course, but it was the first such site to recognize itself as much more than a hosting service for personal photo albums. Tricked out with features inspired by the latest fashions in online-software design—post-Friendster social-networking tools, "folksonomy”-friendly image-tagging code—Flickr turned enough industry heads to win itself a $35 million buyout from Yahoo, announced last week. Flickr has also won a devoted following of users hungry to explore the possibilities its Web-centric toolset opens up. It's a place not just for self-display, but for an emergent visual conversation: One popular thread consists entirely, and with a certain random elegance, of pizzas, manholes, coins, and other circular objects centered squarely in the frame. The "Iraq" tag joins snapshots of anti-war protests and Baghdad patrols in a piquant mix. The frozen moment proliferates here, as it has done increasingly since photography was invented, but never before has its social life been such a party.
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