The #Flickr walk was a joy! Met many good people, including a hero: George Oates. She was the first designer at Flickr and is now co-founder of @flickrfdn.
We heard from COO Ben MacAskill, CEO @d0n, and Head of Flickr Alex Seville.
Ben said that Verizon very nearly pulled the plug on Flickr before SmugMug saved it in 2018. Since then there have been many offers, but they refuse to even look at the numbers. They know wherever it would go in this tech climate, it wouldn’t last.
Ben also talked a lot about his personal interest in conservation and saving public lands, so wildlife and landscape photographers continue to have spaces to photograph.
The company’s philosophy is a stark contrast from burn-and-churn Silicon Valley. It’s a family-owned business focused on photography and culture. They grow slowly and they think long term. (Extremely long term – check out @flickrfdn.) They don’t take VC money. They work for their customers (not investors) and they take care of their staff (not one Flickr layoff since they took over, and the average tenure is seven years).
In my mind, there couldn’t have been a better home for #Flickr.
Do your children or goods inheritors a huge favor. Recycle, shred, and otherwise sort all your old paperwork. My mother-in-law, rest her soul, retained seemingly every piece of paper across 50+ years of her personal and professional life. I can see why: most of it was useful for a few months to even a decade later. But then 100% pointless for her or anyone else. There's a huge effort to go in and process that…so she didn't. Now her children have put in ~100s of hours in processing it.
I need some simple copyright permission and licensing agreements drafted/reviewed (I have a draft of both but would consider a standard form). I've been unable to find someone through referrals. Anyone have a paralegal (if that falls into their area) or copyright attorney who is affordable and could do that work? I need a permissions document (very simple) for libraries to be authorized to scan in-copyright work and a simple license to reproduce materials in my book.
Returning to an old birdsite tradition: the latest visitors to our bird bath.
Here’s this morning’s Steller’s Jay. (These crested beauties are sometimes misidentified by nonbirdnerds as Blue Jays, but those have white stripes in their head and they don’t usually appear west of the Rockies.)
As Mastodon has no algorithm, there is no machine pushing posts into your feed. You only see posts from accounts you don’t follow if they are “boosted” (reposted) by those you do follow. This setup is great for users – you see all your chosen peeps in a chronological timeline – but it’s obviously limiting for creators who want to spread their stuff far and wide. So, despite my pref for Mast over all networks, I assumed there is almost no potential to “go viral” here. … #Algorithms#SocialMedia
This answers a question for folks at orgs like the Archive. If you put the effort in, you will see benefits from a community who has rejected corporate social media.
I need to start storyboarding a book—and I can’t figure out what would work best. It's nearly 300 pages long, so paper would be unwieldly, even as thumbnails. It’s a quite visual book, with illustrations possibly on every page and many spreads. Figma? Canva? Other tools?