Flickr Archives — Bill Weye

Tag: Flickr (page 1 of 2)

How to be generous and drive more traffic to your blog

Mar 27, 2010 / Bill Weye

Don’t know why I didn’t think of this sooner, but yesterday I did a little experiment that’s going to change the way I write and publish blog posts. I learned that the more generous I am with crediting photographers who offer their photos with a Creative Commons license on Flickr, the more traffic my blog will get.

When I publish a post, often I’ll find an accompanying Creative Commons photo on Flickr; they’re easy to find using the advanced search. As long as I give credit to the photographer with a link back to the original photo, I’m not really obligated to do anything else. But yesterday I went back and contacted each photographer whose photo I used in a post, giving thanks and a link back to my post with their photo.

What most of the photographers did next was the great thing: not only did they visit my blog, but they also posted a link to the post on their Facebook pages, which drove more traffic to my blog. Moreover, it looks like some of those people subscribed to my RSS feed.

To recap: I spent about 30 seconds per photographer contacting them, and they were kind enough give a link back to my blog. I hope they feel as good about this “transaction” as I do. Thank you Creative Commons, and thank you photographers.

Photo (CC) micah.e (thanks!)

Yahoo + Microsoft = Trouble For Flickr?

Feb 2, 2008 / Bill Weye

A couple of weeks ago, on my Photo Share Podcast, we talked about the possibility of Microsoft gobbling up Yahoo. It wasn’t hard to see the writing on the wall, if you paid attention to the business news. There was some speculation by analysts that Microsoft would make the offer soon. Little did we know that Microsoft had been courting Yahoo since late 2006, making occasional offers during the past year.

Microsoft needs Yahoo. Despite its dominant position in both the operating system and desktop application realms, the computing world is changing, and if you look closely you too can see it. The web browser is becoming more powerful, designers and programmers using their skills to greater affect to get the most from the browser technology. With this shift to a browser based computer experience, more applications are being ported from the desktop to the web; see Google Docs, Salesforce.com, Flickr, Basecamp, and many more. This shift isn’t unlike the same one that took place when computing world moved from mainframe to personal, desktop based computing.

When Microsoft gets Yahoo, which may take a year or more after regulators in the U.S and Europe finish digging their teeth into the deal, they’ll have to “integrate” Flickr into Microsoft. If they don’t, Microsoft will be wasting their money. When Yahoo bought Flickr they could afford to leave Flickr to its own devices because the two companies operate on a primarily web based business model. Microsoft’s business model is not web based, and when they’ve tried to make the shift the results have been a failure, for the most part. See the latest, Windows Live. That’s why Microsoft needs Yahoo; it’s an admission of failure.

What might the integration of Flickr into the Microsoft world look like? From jump street there are going to be problems: what ID system will you use to login to Flickr? Well, given that Microsoft is buying the Yahoo users, I predict you’ll be moving over to the Microsoft system.

Expect new features to roll out at a much slower pace. More advertising. More integration with Microsoft proprietary technology (fewer implementations of open standards). A new Office program that will integrate the desktop and Flickr (of course, it will be clumsy and crash a lot). A change in the Flickr terms of use that will allow Microsoft to use your photos across its various sites.

Stay tuned. Things will get interesting. We’ll be having a new podcast up by Sunday night or Monday morning, covering all the latest news in the Microsoft/Yahoo mess.

Photo Share Podcast #2 Is Live

Dec 19, 2007 / Bill Weye

Creating a podcast involves some heavy lifting! This is our second podcast . . . which we only had to record twice. Seems there were some technical glitches that just couldn’t be edited out with Audacity.

Lesson number 1: make sure you have your microphone cables under control when recording, because they sure make a lot of noise if they’re knocking around.

One thing our second podcast features, and that I want to talk about more of in the future, are applications (and mash-ups) that people are creating using the Flickr API.

Check it out, along with links to our Flickr group, at Photo Share Podcast.com.

Go away Microsoft, and take your Zune with you!

Dec 11, 2007 / Bill Weye

I‘m in the process of trying to get a new podcast off the ground (if you haven’t heard it yet, check out Photo Share Podcast), and part of that means spreading the word to listeners of podcasts, or people who might be interesting in the subject of online photo sharing (like Flickr!). And I want to help users of both iPods and Zunes to hear my podcast. But . . . Microsoft won’t let me contact users of the Zune because I’m a Mac person and can’t install their special podcast submission software (it’s PC only). If you want to submit a podcast to their “marketplace” for consideration you’ll need a PC, thank you.

I put a special button on my site for Zune users to quickly add my podcast to their stupid brown machine, but Microsoft can’t give me any love back? Truly, a screwball company.

I miss Hamburg, Germany

Sep 13, 2007 / Bill Weye

I was here, looking at the harbor in Hamburg. It’s a pretty impressive place, with all of the shipping and commerce happening every where you look.

At night this scene is definitely eye catching! Dim yellow lights from the ships and cranes light up the harbor.

3 Tools I’m Using To Crank Up My Online Networking

Sep 6, 2007 / Bill Weye

In preparation for launching my new Web sites/businesses, I’ve begun cranking up the amount of energy I spend on using the Web for networking. I guess that means going from no energy to some energy. I have never been very good at putting myself into circulation, so it’s not a big surprise that I struggle doing that online.

Currently I’m concentrating on 3 tools to help build more traffic to this site: my Flickr page, my Facebook profile, and soon I’ll start building an email list using Constant Contact to reach out to potential users of my sites. First I’ll ask people on billweye.com to subscribe then snowball that subscription list from there. As that traffic builds, I’ll introduce new projects to my growing readership, which will hopefull check-out what I’m doing.

The most experience I have so far is with Flickr, and that has been pretty good at driving traffic to this site. I’ve added some relatively popular photos, and with those alone embossed the photos with this website address. If you dig around my Flickr page it shouldn’t be that hard to discover what might be so popular.

Facebook I have just started using, but thus far I’m impressed with the ease of use. In terms of driving traffic, I don’t have any kind of data yet, but I’ll let you know when the numbers come in! Frankly, I’m not sure I would use Facebook if it weren’t the fact that I can post on both this blog and Facebook at the same time; Facebook has an application that hooks into this blog and grabs each post so that my “notes” mirror this site. Nice touch.

So, how have you worked to increase traffic to your websites?

more notes from Germany: Ech!

Jul 20, 2007 / Bill Weye

One of the tough things that make writing quick posts difficult here in Germany is using a German keyboard. Every time I want to use a y, a ‘z’ is entered . . .

Security in the airport in Milan, Italy and from what I have seen in Europe is very good; it may look like less security, but there is less “show” and more real useful observation. It seems like they rely less on technology and more on observation and questioning. Dogs too! A cute little dog smelled everyone has they entered the airport from the plane, with security officers pulling other people aside for questioning.

Last night after dinner and many drinks I dropped off a tipsy Babette in the room and went out in this little town by myself (the town is Leer, Germany). Walking around at midnight in the little town (a port town) was interesting because I didn’t want anyone to know that I was an American, so when someone would say “hello” (I think it was hello, but I couldn’t be sure), I made a sound that I thought resembled German: “ech!”. I would grunt “ech!” to everyone that said something to me. According to Babette, “ech” doesn’t mean anything.

I’ll try to write later, plus post some photos to Flickr. Off to the first wedding!

Images of “evil”

Jun 10, 2007 / Bill Weye

Go take a look on Flickr and see what people think is evil. These are photos that people have tagged with “evil”. Some of the photos are kind of funny, like this one of “Evil Bert,” but there are also photos of land mines, clowns, dogs . . . well, at this point there are 20,244 photos of evil.

If you want, check out what people think is good, true, a lie, smart, or dumb.

Bill Weye