Shootings
by Doc Searls Thursday, June 30, 2016

The most popular thing I do on the Net, by far, is publish photos on Flickr. They get about 5,000 views per day, with about 10.6 million views so far. More than 600 have found their way to Wikimedia Commons, and many (or most) of those are also in Wikipedia. I put none of them there. Nature did: all are permissively licensed for easy use and re-use, so they get used and re-used.

One of the reasons my photos get so much action is that I don't do much editing of photo sets, also called albums, when I post them. In effect I chum the waters with lots of bait for visitors. And I make the bait tempting with the aromas of wordy captions and large tag sets. It's a kind of SEO that works mostly for searches within Flickr.

It'll be a shame to see it all end when Flickr dies, either as an organ in the corpse of Yahoo or as a sold property some other company will alter or neglect to death. I just hope that the archives will be preserved somehow, by somebody. As a legacy resource, they're enormous.