manganite's blog

Exhibition

So if you're able to come, please join us! The event will be held at an office in the Gotenstraße 27 in Bonn and will start at 5 p.m.

Every one is very welcome :)

...is the new video feature on flickr. Like last year when the safe search filter was introduced an uproar goes through the flickr community with all the same side effects as last year, emotional discussions in the forum and groups, anti-video groups and anti-video pictures.

And hundreds of people claiming that they will leave flickr. Maybe some will really do, but for them ipernity of course is the wrong place, not only that it allows photos and video, it allows all kind of media at the same time... ;)

So this time another page or different pages will gain from the new flickr feature, I fear...

Just noted a strange thing in my archives. Even though I uploaded some pictures in April, the archives page shows no uploads for this month. And when I look at the specific pictures the upload date are really some days in March.

I'm using the greasmonkey script for the picture transfer from flickr to ipernity to upload my pictures. Seems the scripts takes the flickr upload date as ipernity upload date. Is this a bug or a feature?

Anyway it's a little bit confusing, cause the order of the upload dates is different from the order in the photostream...

I'm asking this, cause I do not understand it at all. Compared to my flickr account I get about 10% visitors to my photo stream on ipernity, so I would expect that this roughly holds also for the views on single pictures (as it does for comments or faves). And in the first view days it really does. I got some visits from my contacts and some anonymous visitors. Than the number of daily views drops down. Okay, that's reasonable and I can observe the same on flickr.

But while the number of daily views drops down to something  between  0 and 5  on flickr, I still god dozens of anonymous views on my pictures every day. There are pictures in my stream with almost no comments but 1000 views after little more than one month! On average it's something like 20-30 views per day and picture.

I can't believe that this is real traffic, cause where should that people come from? Of course not from inside ipernity, cause in that case the quota of non-anonymous visitors should be higher (but that's almost zero). And I don't think that they come from search engines like google, cause ipernite's page rank is much lower than flickr's and even on flickr one get  only something like 30% visitors via search engines.

The only thing I can imagine are search robots or just an error in the counters... Anyway it would be nice to have like on flickr a statistic function to see in more detail how people are coming to your stream.

To have pictures from our international meeting in Berlin on ipernity's front page or in the 'what's hot' site, one can expect, but to have one flickrs explore page, is something different. Especially not just one picture, accidentally taken on that day, no, it's a picture of Lea, one of ipernity's team members...

Nottiestyle added some wonderful links to the Japan group. Please go and have a look:

www.ipernity.com/group/japan/discuss/14757

Museum Insel Hombroich

I think, now I should start with the pictures from my first international ipernity meeting two weeks ago in Berlin... :)

I just want to say thank you to all people who joined the Berlin meeting last weekend! Really a pleasure to see the faces behind the avatars and talk in real life to you :)

Cause I have no appropriate internet access, pictures will no be here since sometime next week...

...in Berlin!

More infos you find here:

www.ipernity.com/group/meeting.berlin.2008

Don't miss the ipernity meeting from February 23-24 in Berlin!

Detailed information you can find in this group: www.ipernity.com/group/meeting.berlin.2008

See you in Berlin!

Hi friends!

Please have a look at nottiestyle's great work in the Japan group:

www.ipernity.com/group/japan/discuss/13803

Since I joined flickr two years ago people were complaining about the takeover of flickr by yahoo. And when people were forced to get a yahoo-ID to keep their flickr account there was a great uproar in the flickr community.

The world was very clear: flickr is good and yahoo is evil. Many people left flickr cause of yahoo, others stayed but never stopped complaining.

And now? Just a few hours ago it was announced the Microsoft wants to take over yahoo and what is the flickr community doing? They're afraid to loose their yahoo-ID's!!!!

The status of yahoo has just changed from evil to at least acceptable, because the real evil has now  entered the scenery...

The same people writing always against yahoo are now defending it and started to fight against Microsoft.

Isn't that crazy?

All this, flickr, yahoo, Microsoft, google and also ipernity is not about good and evil, it's about making money, and therefor, I think, there's no need for discussion on the level of morality...

I think some of you have already sold some pictures for different occasions, so maybe someone could help me with the following problem:

How much money could an amateur like me could take if someone want to use his pictures. Up to know I sold two times some pictures. The first time it was someone who need some pictures as decoration for a restaurant. He offered me 200$ for four pictures. The next time I got 200  Pounds for 10 images  from an tourist agency.  They always  wanted  them  as digital data, not as a print.

I was quite happy about this, but of course I don't know if it was a reasonable prize. At the moment I have two other offers. One is a picture for a book title. No idea how much they should pay me.

There's also someone  who wants to use them on his webpage and offered me a prize like on pages as istockphot.com. It's something like 3$ for a midsize picture. That's not really much money.

At the moment I always ask the people how much they want to pay, but of course, that could be stupid, if they offer a less money as it would be reasonable.

Are there any webpages or other sources to get information about prizes for pictures. Or has someone of you experiences with that and could give me some hints?

Hanabi Taikai

May it be as good and successful as the last one :)

Last few weeks I hadn't really much time for all this community stuff, so I was rather quite and almost not looking at your pictures, my friends. Really sorry for that...

Some of the time I spend on setting up my private homepage. It's still far from being finished, but I at least I have started ;)

If you like, just take some of your time and have a short look at it. You can find it here: manganite.net

Christmas is coming...

And even if it is a little bit early now (but I'm not sure having enough time in the next days...), I'll wish already everyone:

Merry Christmas & A Happy New Year!

Memories of Shibuya

Hope you'll like it :)

Sorry, but I like numbers, therefor here is something about them ;)

The girl with the purple parasol (II)

Now the picture has went away from the frontpage and also the feeling of activity on my stream. That's not very surprising, I know, but something is strange... Still more than 100 people are visiting now my stream. Of course almost all are anonymous ones (the number of non-anonymous visitors is back to same low number as two weeks ago), but why are they coming? I had expected this number will also drop down, cause I thought the visits were only triggered by the picture on the frontpage...

I don't maybe it will go down slowly the next days...

Beside that, there are other numbers to think of. Looking at groups I got a very mixed impression. On the one hand, people are founding, joining and posting pictures to groups very actively. Some of my groups have far more than 100 members and some hundreds of pictures. That's really great. And I also noticed, that people are looking at the pictures in the groups (if you post a picture, you can see an increase in the number of views), but that's it... I don't have the impression that the groups are resulting in more activity like making comments to pictures. That's a little disappointing, I think.

Last time I was complaining about the 'What's hot' list. And I have to say, that this has really improved, since that time. I don't know the reason, but I have the impression the list is now much more diverse, the quality has increased and the number of pictures with icq like chatting comments has dropped down. Maybe that's cause of the new frontpage layout which has moved the focus of this page more in the direction of  photography and more people are now in the focus of attention of a broader group of people as before. And that would be a key to make this place more attractive.

In principle the last change on the what's hot list is an improvement. More pictures is a good idea, I think. And the list seems to have no certain ranking, at least I cannot detect any, and that's also fine.

But the way how pictures are selected is still a mess. I can't be that a picture is hot if half of the comments are self generated (which leads to the curiosity of pictures with more comments than views in the list) or that comments are only from four or five very talkative people.

If one want to have really hot pictures in this list one should not count absolute numbers, one should count the number of individual visitors and the number of different people who left a comment. And I don't see why this is  not done, cause in the beginning it worked (at least for your personal popularity charts) in this way and suddenly it was changed.

But maybe I miss the intention of this list, and the list is doing exactly what the team wants, but in that case I personally don't agree with this intention.