Prospecting for Gold Among the Photo Blogs

May 25, 2003 6:42 AM

Prospecting for Gold Among the Photo Blogs

Photo blogs are the colorful offspring of blogs, or Web logs, written diaries posted and updated regularly on the Internet. For a half-dozen years people have been posting text blogs to rant and to ponder the events of the day and the dust beneath their feet. Then, sometime in 2000, people started posting photographs to go with the text. The photo blog was born. Now photo blogs often are posted with no text at all. And there are thousands of them.--Oolong gets his picture in the New York Times, among other things
posted by y2karl (20 comments total)

Things that make you go Hmm---Oolong's picture is now Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
posted by y2karl at 6:46 AM on May 25, 2003

poor Oolong. too bad he's not with us anymore -- he could have balanced on his cute little head the Sunday Edition with his picture on it

too bad. thanks for the link karl
posted by matteo at 7:36 AM on May 25, 2003

I miss Oolong. I hope there are plenty of pancakes for his head in bunny heaven.

The article didn't mention the embrionic 'phone cam' logs like phlog.net. Phlog allows you to post pics to your photo log directly from your phone via mms or email.

Although phlog photos are still embryonic in terms of composition and quality as cameras find there ways onto more and more phones, we'll probably see more of this.
posted by birdherder at 7:44 AM on May 25, 2003

Fotolog ROCKS, dude. The Times must have had a lot of extra white space today to allow somebody to go on at length about something so trifling in light of all the horrible suffering in the world, though ;-). My face is the guy who blogs only fotos of his feet (he has another where he blogs everything he eats.)
posted by hairyeyeball at 8:06 AM on May 25, 2003

kittybrain
"...this is what happens when you put a wireless camera on a cat."
posted by NortonDC at 8:44 AM on May 25, 2003

The Times must have had a lot of extra white space today to allow somebody to go on at length about something so trifling in light of all the horrible suffering in the world, though ;-).

And one that's been on the spike awhile, too, considering his dated Oolong references...

So, do you have to be pretty faced to write face for favorite?
posted by y2karl at 9:14 AM on May 25, 2003

what are some good photo blogs that y'all recommend?
posted by mcsweetie at 9:46 AM on May 25, 2003

I put pictures up all the time. Here's my favorite.

It's from my grand experiment burn, garfield, burn.
posted by hipnerd at 10:04 AM on May 25, 2003

There's another big list at photoblogs.org.

This guy is a friend of mine, so I visit his page a lot. He's done a good job getting a new picture up every day. Mostly, though, I tend to avoid the blogs that aim for artistic, indefinite photos--I'd rather see a story myself. Sites like abandoned places (not a blog in particular, I guess) are good for that.

My own photo journal (1,090 images and counting!), on the other hand, serves mainly to remind me of the places I've been, and if other people find the images useful to them, then great!
posted by tss at 10:49 AM on May 25, 2003 [1 favorite has favorites]

Yeah, I've got a lame-o photoblog-- I've only been doing it for a few months-- that accompanies my main blog as well.
posted by keef at 10:51 AM on May 25, 2003

The Times must have had a lot of extra white space today to allow somebody to go on at length about something so trifling in light of all the horrible suffering in the world, though...

You must not be familiar with the Sunday edition.
posted by mrbula at 11:21 AM on May 25, 2003

The GammaBlaBlog has been pretty much a photo-blog, specializing in NYC street photography, since I bought my $100 Visoneer LX200 around the start of this year.
posted by gametone at 1:31 PM on May 25, 2003

wow. photos, right alongside text. what a concept. how did we ever function without blogs? blogs redefine journalism. blogs reinvent visual layout and photography itself. but i mean, photos! with text! how fucking awesome! next thing you know they'll combine moving pictures with radio. they'll call it bloggovision. metafilterians will immediately adopt this nomenclature and rave over this new advancement. *coughschmucks*
posted by quonsar at 1:52 PM on May 25, 2003

ho ho ho !
posted by sgt.serenity at 3:08 PM on May 25, 2003

Got to admit, I think quonsar has a point. Could someone please explain how remarkable photoblogs are to me? Photographers have been keeping diaries and their photographs for as long as there's been photography. Photojournalists have been recording events for nearly as long. People have been putting photos online for nearly as long as there's been an online. Thousands (millions?) of photographers, amateur and professional, have websites, many of which are updated and captioned in a somewhat chronological way. So... ummm... what am I missing here? Is blogging simply defined by the software you happen to use?
posted by normy at 3:39 PM on May 25, 2003

I think that it's pretty much only the NYT that's being so effusive about the revolutionary nature of photoblogs. The rest of us are just talking about 'em. "Photoblog" happens to be the nomenclature of the day, unfortunately, but IMHO occasionally updated pages entitled "Here are some of my pictures!" have been a staple of the Web since shortly after Mosaic came out.

Despite the deliberately journal-like nature of my page, it'll be a long time before the word "blog" shows up on it anywhere. I think it's time to give the B-word a rest anyway, if for no other reason than to prevent quonsar from having another one of his episodes.
posted by tss at 4:09 PM on May 25, 2003

Is blogging simply defined by the software you happen to use?

Depends who you ask.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 5:21 PM on May 25, 2003

To me a blog is just a web page that you update frequently, and sequentially with stuff you find of interest. "Blog" is just a funny, and useful term for such a beast. It comes equipped with inherent sonic self deprecation. Say Blogblogblog! You gotta laugh, or at least spit. I deal with serious subjects on The GammaBlaBlog, but I purposely gave it a silly name. I mean, after all it is just me blabbing away. I guess now that the Times has jumped heavily on the blog bandwagon, someone will have to come up with a new term for it that most won't get until it's already passe.
posted by gametone at 6:38 PM on May 25, 2003

My own tastes tend to run toward photos that have some type of description attached to them. Some people in the mistaken belief that they're Ansel Fucking Adams, plaster a photo of an out-of-focus neon sign or some snow covered tree in Hew Hampshire and expect me to buy it when in reality they're just damn boring to look at.

alifeuncommon.org has always been fun for me to look at mainly because of it's Chicago base.
posted by KevinSkomsvold at 12:59 AM on May 26, 2003

My pencam site was one of the 14 winners of the Photobloggies, but I wasn't mentioned in either of the two NYTimes stories on photoblogging.

Although after reading the emails sent to Heather Armstrong after Dooce was mentioned in a recent NYTimes article, I'm quite glad I wasn't linked. (I know my site is pretty mediocre -- I don't need hundreds of people who read the NYTimes to email me and tell me so.)
posted by jennak at 8:19 AM on May 26, 2003