Monday, 7th August, 2006

Whitbread Prize winner (6)

It's been almost a year since I spent a Saturday morning steeped in dictionaries, word-lists and up to my eyes in Google, desperately trying to pick apart the words and intentions behind the esoteric clues in The Guardian's prize crossword. It was something that Kath and I did together — a 'ritual' if you like — and usually in fierce comeptetion with other members of her family.

The kudos contained in getting there first, was quite astounding

Even though I've stopped doing them (it's just not the same on my own), I still get the weekly email from Hugh Stephenson, the crossword editor, and it's through this that I just found out about the death of Bob Smithies — aka Bunthorne.

"Bumhole", I used to call him, because seeing his name after the words "Set by" used to fill me with dread and the knowledge that I'd be racking my brains for the most part of the day — if not the week.

The man was fiendish and brilliant, and even though it's been a while since I tore my hair out over his clues, knowing that he's gone is a sad shock.

...

It's "Fatima" by the way

"Whitbread Prize winner, 6 letters" — Fatima — as in Fatima Whitbread who won prizes, as opposed to the Whitbread Prize itself. That was my favourite of his clues — it took me a whole morning to get it

Helvetica, The Movie

No really. A film about a typeface. This makes me happy — however the irony of writing "Helvetica" in Arial up above is not lost on me

Were it not in Boston, I just might

Curran's Law:

"As an online trannyflickr discussion grows longer, the probability of someone bitching about how many views they've had on their photographs approaches one"

Heh

I must admit though, that I'm getting more and more pissed off by the insinuation in a certain thread that there's an "inequality" as regards to the number of views that some people have on their photos as opposed to others, because I sense an implication that people with large views haven't done anything in particular to 'earn' them.

Which I feel totally ignores and undervalues the amount of effort that some of us have put in over the course of the past year/two years ... but I'll come back to that.

The first thing that narks me, is the complete lack of realisation that trannyflickr is not a vacuum, and nor is Flickr for that matter. As I think I showed yesterday, trannyflickr is just one of a large spread of tranny-based groups within everyone's favourite photo sharing website.

Whether you think there's too many of them, or there's not enough of them, or (like me) that it-doesn't-really-matter-but-then-again-some-of-them-seem-superfluous-and-a-bit-shite-really, what's important is that views on photographs come in from all sorts of places.

So yeah, no one group is an echo chamber — but neither is Flickr as a whole. Outside of the flickrverse, blogs link to pictures. I'm not sure that a view of a Flickr picture on an external website counts as a "view", but if you use the code that Flickr recommends then you make a link, and people like clicky-webby-linky things.

If you look through my stream, the photos that feature here are invariably the ones with higher views. It's not rocket science

But as well as that, other people link to pictures. Remember my birthday cake that I made for Apple a while back? It got stacks of view in one day because a couple of lovely people with enormous traffic saw it and linked to it.

But back to the "effort" thing ... I was narked by the "distressing inequality" that was mentioned. We all started Flickr exactly the same way — no photos, no contacts, no groups, no comments, no views. But some of us over the course of time have engaged with a large community of people, deliberately (in some cases) mixing our tranny photos with those from the rest of our lives, talking to people, linking to people, pushing transvestism outside of its traditional ghettos and echo chambers. And as a result, a lot of people have seen some of the things that we do.

Blowing my own trumpet for a second, I sometimes look through the list of people who call me a contact and smile. True, there's a fair amount of grey-face/black-eyed/straight-mouthed/square people in there, and there's a lot of other trannies too (I prefer the second lot myself ) but there's also artists, designers, photographers, poets, old people, young people, men, women...

...Flickr is a hugely diverse community of people, and I like to think that in some way, the little things that a few of us do are helping move the image of transvestism outside of its normal contraints, and ever so slightly Making Things Better™

Which is perhaps why it annoys me so much that some people waltz in crash their prams into the middle of everything, and expect some kind of attention.

...

Anyway...

Siobhan's Guide To Getting Lots Of Views On Your Pictures

There are other groups that get you more views than trannyflickr. Work out which ones they are, and use them sparingly. If the same(ish) photo of you appears day in, day out, then everyone will get bored and pissed off, and no-one is going to click-through.

Blog about your pictures. Spend some getting your blog listed in big directories. Link to people in the hope (not expectation) that they'll link back.

Build up a social network of people that you like, and like talking to. The more people who list you as a contact, the more people will see what you do.

Don't obsess about views and comments. Sod's Law works. And besides, ten views from interesting people is worth more than ten thousand views from people with their hands down their pants.

And finally, I hate to say it but have good pictures. In the polluted sea of photographs, people are only likely to pick on the bits of interesting driftwood that float past. They aren't going to stop and taste each brown-looking lump just to see whether it's not a turd or not.

"Her name is Rio, and she dances a little awkwardly on the sand"