Wednesday 21 March 2012

And it's not even mine

Courtesy (probably) of the chaotic intricacies of the interweb, this past week has seen this photograph ...

Skogafoss

... shoot up the popularity charts of my Flickr account. Prior to last week, it was sitting on only a handful of hits, but something happened on the 15th March and since then it's sky-rocketed to 720 viewings (the "second best" photograph in my Flickr collection is sitting at 298 viewings) ...


It's all calming down now, but along the way the photograph has also been "favourite-ed" 30 times by a slew of Flickr members I've never met before (thanks, by the way).

So, what gives? The clue [*] seems to be in the appearance of Tumblr in the referring website list. While I'd only faintly heard about this site before, a perusal of one of the referrers reveals it as some sort of recycler of images, where people can repost things they've seen and liked into a stream of (visual) consciousness. Or something.

Anyway, it looks like this image of Skógafoss has been sucked up into Tumblr and passed around various of its members, many of whom have kindly visited the original and bumped up my Flickr viewings count (not that I'm counting, OK). But, like the epidemic of an infectious disease, this surge has now run its course, and the photograph can probably now pass into oblivion once more.

The worst bit is that it's not even one of my photographs (... as is probably obvious from the fact that I appear in it).



[*] It can only reasonably be described as a "clue" by those, such as me, who are generally clue-less about social media sites such as Tumblr. Everyone else would just view that as an indication of the bleeding obvious.

2 comments:

Graham said...

Ah Tumbler. It's been responsible for a few spikes in my views as well. I would publish the URL's here but they're NSFW!

Plumbago said...

That's more or less my impression of Tumblr: porn collections. The ones who've visited Flickr that I've looked at have certainly tended to the risqué end of the spectrum. Curiously though, they seem to have a mixture of cool and dubious photographs, so I'm not at all sure what the purpose is. Presumably this just points to the Tumblr sites being run by kids who haven't refined their personal content control parameters yet.