That's seems to be a nice place and even lots of people and the page itself looks familiar, it's not flickr...

So I'll not leave flickr and move cmpletely to this place, but I'll stay here too and post some picture. And maybe some day...

What does this mean? Just for curiosity a made blog search here on ipernity for 'flickr' and 'ipernity' and that's the result: There're more posts about flickr than ipernety on ipernity ;)

That leads me to the question if anyone has meet an ipernety member without an flickr account?

This is a very special webpage, mainly born out of the frustration about flickr, optically a clone between flickr and myspace (which makes it to a very interesting place, with good and useful features).

How will it procede? Will there ever be an ipernity live without having flickr mind, too?

 

We'll see...

What I like of course is this blogging function. I like the write down some thoughts, so this is nice feature. While I was with my girlfriend in Japan we wrote a quite succesfull blog about Japan and our life their. You can still find it here:

gunda-und-thomas-in-japan.typepad.com

Of course it's no longer up to date

What else I like? It's the statistics (sorry, but I'm a freak about this). Here I can see who when was watching which of my content. That's fine for me, but I fear that will lead to problems if ipernity grows.

The networking I like. It's really easy to see what's going on, finding new people. It's really fine how they managed all this.

A big plus is the reply function. Here I can now directly reply to comments and look for answers to my own comments. flickr has no comparable functionality.

 

Anything else is okay, it's a flickr clone, so the basic functionallity to share your pictures excists (sometimes I think they could have cloned to much, like the organizer thing, it really looks like a 1:1 copy, only with reduced functionality), the multimedia options are a nice add, especially the possibilty to upload videos wwould have been nice while I was in Japan. We made a lot of them and couldn't really share them

What did I miss? The internationallity, mainly this a home french people and german flickr refugees, but I miss it to see pictures from all over the world. I had contacts in North- and Soutamerica, in Asia, Australia and so on. I miss this really here...

 

And then I miss explore. Sorry, but I'm a little bit addictit to flickr's explore. I had a lot of pictures there and I like the resonance that this produce...

Beside that, resonance here is quit good, but manly produced by visits of old flickr contacts. But maybe that will improve...

I also miss the photo centered layout of flickr. When I move to a flickr homepage of someone I get a fast imoression of his work. That's not so easy here, it's too myspace like. Sorry, I prefere the clear, minimalsitic, white layout of flickr!

And some technically stuff: I'm a 'tag spammer', I hate flickr restriction to 75 tags, so more I hate the 20 tags limit here. It's afful!

Geottaging works not so well, or has someone found a possibilty to tag the pictures directly?

 

he recent activity page of flickr I really prefer. This one here is too caotic for me and I can not change the time I want to look back, or?

There some errors or even strange behaviours: Exploring tags gives allways less results than searching for pics by tags. For from flickr imported pics I couldn't change tags in the organizer. When I go back to the pic, the tags haven't changed. The messge counter is sometime not right, showing less or too much mails. And the tag cloud on the explore page doesn't fit.

 

That's not much, so mainly the page works very well.

 

Think I missed some aspects, but for the moment, that's all :)

It's interesting to see how fast ipernity is going to take over lots of flickr things. Even though we have no groups here, we have selfmade pseudogroups for certain pictures, we have the some photo contests here and, thanks Carsten, I'm using the same script for my vistor statistics...

We are like the old colonialists building up our 'New Flickr' on the newly dicoverd continent. Hey, where're the indigenous ipernity people, don't surrender!

 

 

 

Hi my dear new ipernity friends and ex-flickr members,

please forget your anger about flickr for a while a look here:

www.flickr.com/groups/temporary_gallery/

It's the temporary gallery, a great idea by ionushi and some others, giving one person the chance to present a collection of his images to a large audience for some while.

This week it's my time. So if you like my pictures go and have a look at them. To see them here, you'll have to wait some time.

So, take your chance!

 

 

Even though I took my first picture with my parents simple camera 30 years ago and got an SLR when I was 14 or so, I'm a pure amateur. The SLR was a Minolta camera with auto focus and anything else also automatic, and all the years I never switched the automatic off. That was pretty easy to get some snapshots on holidays, family parties and so on. Nothing really serious. That wasn't caused by an lack of interest in photography, but I'm not a very patient person... Taking pictures with different apertures and time, and then waiting days for the pictures is nothing that suits me. So there was no development and only a very poor output.

But something changed 7 years ago. With two friends, both passionated photographers, I went to Brazil. In ten days I took almost 400 pictures and the output was at least partly rather encouraging. First time I started to think a little bit more, when I took a picture. But still photography was only triggered by special events, in between nothing.

The next step was a short trip 2004 to Japan. There I bought a small Casio compact camera. And that was the right thing for me. I could take pictures, look what happened, i it okay or not. Trying something else, playing around with different settings and one could have it always in the bag to take a picture. So I and my girlfriend, she was affected by this little tool, too, went trough Berlin or somewhere else and took hundreds of pictures :)

The same year October we moved to Japan and then really increased a lot. In two years in Japan we took more than 20000 pictures, I think. Crazy, but true :)

And while taking all this pictures I started to see the limitations of the little Casio thing and noticed what it mean to have a SLR. The quality of my Minolta camera was much better. Just go to my flickr account, make a tag search for Casio and minolta and you'll see the difference. 

So what to do? being aware of limitations, starting to be a little bit ambiguous, and on the other hand still not satisfied with the analog work flow... I needed a DSLR! That's the solution, but such things are expensive. So I had to wait until my birthday last year when I presented me myself a Nikon DSLR. Know I could do what I wanted to do, but still not having learned how to do it...

A few months before my birthday I was looking for a solution to present our pictures from Japan on the our homepage. I was looking for some photo service having an API which I can use to present my pictures in a way I liked, while storing and organizing them somewhere else. And so I found flickr...

And sooner or later you will not only store pictures there, you started to look around, people are giving comments, choosing you as contact. So you see what is possible, and you're encouraged to try it out. It's fascinating: Colorful pictures, b&w, sepia, portraits and landscapes, macros, still life and action shots, all the variety of pictures I saw and started to try it while learning by doing. I bought some books and journals, looked around in the internet and so I learned a lot, but still I didn't how to do some pictures, but maybe I'll learn this some day, too, but it's a long way to go...

Meanwhile I quite satisfied with my current output. I think my photostream is really versatile, and very different people are enjoying my pics. But that's me, to specialize on one thing is nothing that suits me, always doing macro would certainly improve my skills on that, but I would stop it soon while being bored... So I'm trying everything, not perfect, but it's okay, at least for me. 

So I 'll go on, on flickr and here, showing my pictures, looking  what people  are thinking about them and learning...

One week ago I uploaded my first picture here on ipernity. It had the number 107381, my last picture I uploaded a few minutes ago, has the number 194863. S the number doubled in just a week. That sounds good!

Nearly the same if you look at 'Lea ipernity's' contacts. Now she has 5670 contacts, last week it was about 2000 less. So more and more flickr user come here. But the number of them I know, is almost constant now, but maybe that's clear, my German contacts are all here, the rest is maybe not so motivated to move.

A look at the number of blog posts reveals the same result as a few days ago: 663 about flickr, 650 about ipernity. flickr's shadow is long...

Personally, I think, I had a good start here. Having the low overall number of users in mind, nearly hundred people call me a contact. Thanks to all of you, my friends.

And I really appreciate all your visits, comments and votes. You are much more active, than on flickr (but still the overall hugh user number overthere leads to much more total response...). I think, that's mostly originated in the stronger networking component here on ipernity. You're much more aware of what's going on in your network and the comment reply function leads to more direct communication and interaction. At least for me, the motivation to answer comments is much higher, cause I know the other one will be informed about it. On flickr it's much harder to establish at least short dialogs with other members.

That's something I really like and leads to a genuine ipernity experience, something different from flickr. It's like having a large family or living in a small village, where you always know what's going on in the neighborhood.

So I think ipernity has good chances of a flowering future. Let's see what happens 

Hi friends!

Maybe I should also start a pseudo group. There's nothing for minimalistic shots, so post them here!

 

P.S.: Please small size only

 

P.P.S.: Think I need some invitation and comment code for promotion

So let's see...

That's for invitation:

********************************************************************

Hi! That's a excellent example of minimalistic photography.

Please join us at the minimalism pseudo group.

www.ipernity.com/blog/manganite/13975

********************************************************************

 

And that's for comments:

********************************************************************

Hi! That's a excellent example of minimalistic photography.

Saw this in the minimalism pseudo group.

www.ipernity.com/blog/manganite/13975

********************************************************************

 

 

So copy the code (you know, the stuff between the stars...) and then go commenting

 

... my old and new friends. I'll be back next week.

Enjoy this place, enjoy the pictures and have a good time!

 

 

P.S.: Love these smilies :)

Hi my fellow ipernity members!

Still we have no groups here, so meanwhile let's play with pseudo groups.

 

Here's another on: It's about black & white!

I think you all have some beautiful black and white captures in your streams, so poste them here. And if you came along a wonderful b&w capture in your friends stream, invite him to this group using the code below

Here comes the code:

 

That's for invitation:

********************************************************************

Hi! That's a excellent example of b&w photography.

Please join us at the b&w pseudo group.

www.ipernity.com/blog/manganite/14659

********************************************************************

 

And that's for comments:

********************************************************************

Hi! That's a excellent example of b&w photography.

Saw this in the b&w pseudo group.

www.ipernity.com/blog/manganite/14659

********************************************************************

 

 

So copy the code (you know, the stuff between the stars...) and then go commenting

 

P.S.: Please small size only

Taste is always a very personal thing. What I like someone else might is awful. And so it's here on ipernity or on flickr with our pictures. You're at home looking trough your pictures and then suddenly you think 'this one is it!'. You take it, maybe adding some photoshop and than you post it. And then? Some people may like it, some ignore it. It's like a lottery, you can never predict for sure the result.

That a picture is unpopular you'll mostly only notice by  low number of views, comments or faves. Even if you spam the whole page with it, it fails. And you don't really why. Cause most people (liek myself) prefer to say something only about pictures they like, others are just ignored.

So maybe one should directly try to ask people what they think what's wrong with a certain picture. So I will do with this post for the following picture:

 

Fifty meters to go...

It shows a sign marking a railway track crossing the street 50 meters ahead. I took from a lower position with wide angle to get some contrast with the cloudy blue sky. I like very much, the colors are vivid, with good contrast between the red in the sign and the blue sky. The contrast in the sky and sign itself are also strong. it's sharp, not over or underexposured (at least I think so).

So i see not really a big mistake in this picture. Nevertheless almost no one seems to be interested in it. Maybe it's the subject. Is it too conventional? Not extraordinary enough and therefor boring? But I personally like such kind of shots, am I the only one?

Please help, give me some hint what's wrong with this one?

... and the third one could start now. It seems that ipernity is being more and more an own community. For the first time I noticed that more blog posts are about ipernity (854) than about flickr (819) (of course not including an unknown number of posts avoiding the word 'flickr' and using some abbreviations...).

On the other hand anything settles down. Lea ipernity has increased the number of her contacts by about 1000, the week before it was 2000. The number of pictures is constantly increasing, again 100000 new pictures. I think mainly caused by the mass import tool. So some people have transfered their whole stream.

On the other hand I noticed the some people have left ipernity again. Their pages doesn't exist anymore. And I noticed some inactivity on some accounts for more than one week, while they are still active on flickr. So it's difficult to say if the effective number of people is really increasing or stabilized or maybe also decreasing.

Speaking of my own ipernity experience I must say it's more and more positive. The network (due to the superior communication possibilities here) is growing and growing. The exchange with, which was limited on flickr often to 'wow' and 'wow, too', is much more intense and personal. Compared to the total numbers of contacts and members at flickr, reduced possibilities to spread your images in the community, the response is really very high. The number of daily visitors has doubled since last week, soon reaching a value of 100 a day and maybe I'll see the number thousand of total visitors already this weekend. And also the response to certain pictures is high. The first ones have gained more than 100 hundred views in total, or more than 50 different people visiting a certain picture. That's very encouraging, cause to see appreciation to your work is the most motivating thing to go on. And beside bare numbers, the average quality of every single comment is much higher compared to flickr.

And not only the response to the pictures is encouraging, it's also fine that the blog is being visited, read and commented. About 20 (long and meaningful) comments, more than 100 visitors for my last entry. That makes me happy.

So I'll stay on here. Let's see how it will go on...

Some word more about statistics (sorry I'm addicted to this since my childhood...). I like the fact, that ipernities statistics really counts people and not just total numbers. To see that really a lot of different people  are viewing and commenting on your stream is much more meaningful, than anonymous numbers, maybe caused by the same small group of people.

To have  a name and an image connected with a visitor is, even I think so, a key for the success of the networking here. It shifts the communication here on a more personal level. If I can noticed that a certain person i coming again and again to visit my stream or watching my pictures, even not leaving a fav or a comment behind, will help to keep him or her in mind, and motivates you to make a visit in return.

That's enough about the second week. Let's wait for the next one

Maybe just a few words about what I'm doing for my daily outcome. I'm a scientist, or being more exact a physicist, doing optical experiments now for more than 10 years. Part of my job is taking pictures like the one you can see here. In principle I'm doing something like tabletop macro photography, beside the setup is a little bit special. As light source I'm using a laser shining on a crystal where by some magic the frequency of the light is doubled. That means shining in red light and afterwards I got blue light.

Manganite

Behind my crytal is just an old Nikon lens with about 100 mm focal length to image the light on the camera. The camera itself is half a meter away, so the picture is about 3 or 4 times larger than the crystal itself. The camera is very special, cooled by liquid nitrogen to -100°C, so the readout noise is almost neglectable, making it possible to detect almost every single photon coming from my crystal. Or in other words: In a practically totaly dark room I could get good images in seconds :)

In principle this would be the perfect tool for infrared photography, cause it's sensitive up to wavelengths of more than 1000 nm, but unfortunately you have to connect it to a special power device and a computer. So it's nothing what I would call mobile :(

But maybe once I'll try to make images from my laboratory with it...

The job in genaral is really interesting, we are investigating mainly magnetic materials, like the one in the picture. It's Yttriummanganite, and from the family name of these crystals I took my user name, manganite.

If you ask for any purpose of my research, than I can tell you the usual story we have for this: It's i.e investigating how fast I can switch magnetism, so what is the limit of the speed of my harddisc? Or looking for new materials which allow different ways of data storage. But that's far away, so basicaly I'm doing, what is called basic research with no practical immediate use. Therefor it's not so very different from hanging around at a photosharing site :)

Hope, that makes it more transparent who I am. I think it's good thing to know at least a little bit about each other.

Sometimes I'm just clicking through the ipernity network. Choosing someone of my own network, than choosing someone I didn't know from his and so on. Just to get an impression which people are here around and sometimes I find an interesting new photostream.

But what puzzles me is, whoever I visit always there is the message "xxx is in your extended network." So what's my extended network? so is everyone of my contacts other contacts in my extended network? And their contacts also? Wheres the end? And if everyone is Lea ipernities network, are we all together one single extended network? But in this case why this message? It doesn't make sense...

... has passed away and I got the impression settle down a little bit. Just some numbers: Lea ipernities number of contacts increased only by 800 instead of 1000 or 2000 as in the weeks before. The number of pictures increased by 70000 instead of 100000 before. So the whole bunch of people who wanted to leave flickr seems to be here now and their pictures have been almost all transfered. And beside the numbers this is also my subjective impression. I rarely have seen any new familiar face from flickr last week, the part of my flickr contacts willing to move is now here and I don't ecpect much more of them in the near future.

So from now on I think ipernity has to stand alone, attracting people by quality of service, interaction and of course of pictures to motivate people changing to this place or to attract new people not coming from flickr. That will be a hard job, so expect a further slow downed growing. Nevertheless, ipernity posts, docs and profiles are no found in google, so maybe it will be noticed by a large group of people.

On the other I noticed more inactive accounts here. So some of my contacts never appeared here in the last week. So the bare number gives some misleading impression of activity.

But personally I'm very satisfied with the situation here. The number of people looking at my pictures is still increasing, the contact is much more personal and intense, so that's a big plus for ipernity. But it will take lots of time to reach the same quantities than on flickr. But that's a rather secondary thing, cause I will not quit my flickr account. And at the moment I will not buy a pro account here. Two pro's is too much and not really needed, I think. The only thing is, I have to be careful with my monthly uploads. So I stopped transfer of old stuff from flickr, only new pictures are now seen here. But if possible in future I will put more old pictures here, too.

But while I see lot's of positive aspects here, not everything is naturally as I would Iiked it. Still I miss the internationaly, both in members and of pictures. I like to see pictures from Japan, for exmple, but there are only a handful of people beside me posting such images in reasonable number. The German community is very strong here, so lots of discussion is in German. That's okay for me, but it's excluding non German speaking members. And I'm not sure how many Asian or Amarican people will join a mainly German community. maybe most people don't care, but for me it would be a big minus for ipernity. And I miss discussions about photography. Beside lots of 'Hi, I'm also here and dislike flickr at least as much as you' and 'I dislike this and that on flickr and here everything will be better' posts, there is the tendency to use the blogging function just as any other topic free blogging platform. That's a little bit a pity, cause I think there a lot of people want to talk about photography, and the blog function could be used rather good for this purpose. But maybe that will change, otherwise this will be just more an myspace clone, than an alternative to flickr.

Some thoughts about that desire to make things 'better' than on flickr. I think that's rater unrealistic. With a growing number of members there will be the same user behavior as on flickr. Some people for example fear groups cause they expect what's from their point of view misuse of groups. They're right! There will be this misuse appearing in groups, cause what some peopel think is not right others will like. And if the ipernity staff interfere in the use of groups, they will loose customers. flickr staff knows why the let going things on in flickr groups without restrictions. It would give an uproar larger as the last one otherwise. So all the 'bad' things will exist also here after the introduction of groups. Best of groups, comment groups, award groups and so on. It's a natural thing. The influence of certain users on the style of the community is marginal if the community is huge and diverse. Only stuff could have some influence by strict rules and technical barriers. But why should they do? Flickr got 9 million users with out doing such things. I doubt they would be as large in the other case. So dream on while this is an idyllic and small village, but awake if this is going to be a big city.

While we still have no groups here, there's lots of discussion about this topic here. And the majority of people seems to agree in two points (beside many detailed suggestions for different aspects): We need groups here, and groups should handled better than on flickr from both sides, from the technical and from the way they are used by the members.

Before writing something more in detail, two things: Yes, we need groups, and no, groups aren't bad on flickr and will handled here on the long term naturally in the same way.

What is a group? On a place like this, it is two things. It's a pool of pictures and a forum fro discussions, and from that one can distinguish roughly three types of groups:

1. The exhibition type. Pictures are dropped into the pool to be seen by other people.
2. The discussion and interaction type. People met in the group forum to discuss about different topics.
3. The discuss about the pool type. Pictures and discussions are more or less closely related somehow. At least both features are used with equal frequency.

Naturally these are no sharp borderlines, the differences are partly fluent.

In the first group I would put all the groups dedicated to a certain aspect like topic, style or technically points of a picture, and groups sharing images with common secondary properties like popularity measured by views, counts and faves or pure invitation groups. The main purpose of this groups is exhibition of pictures and have two, sometimes identical, user groups, the posters and the viewers, respectively. So people put their bw portrait of girl in Germany in the bw, portrait, girls and Germany group, and if it got's lots of views or favs in a most views or faves group. And if they are invited, they put it in an invitation group.

So this groups are filled sooner ore later by a huge number of pictures having some common aspects, so interested viewers can go through searching for good or interesting pictures. Interaction of the users is low, sometimes no topics posted at all. Such groups are like museums, were artists put their pictures and people come and have a look at them. That's a fair trade, I think, and satisfy a certain desire of being seen and seeing.

In the second type of groups one can find very often technical aspects discussed. They're about cameras, lenses, tools, software, scripts and so on. Sometimes they also have some social aspect, it's a meeting point for people, sometimes accompanied by meetings outside in the real world. The picture pool is here not the main point, sometimes almost no pictures at all in the pool. Interaction and discussion is the point. And also this satisfies a certain desire.

In the third type of groups both aspects came together. People are posting pictures and discussing about them directly, sometimes both things a re independent. Maybe this is the largest type of groups, at least it's the most diverse, I think. Here you can find something like the comments groups, often organizing additional photo contests, you have the pure contest groups with a pool of winner pictures. You have the purpose free fun groups like 'the biggest one', you have very ambitious groups like Utata, people presenting their picture and interacting closely with each other at the same time and many more groups where the forum and the pool are closely connected. And I think for lots of people, especially the more active ones, this is something like the ideal type of groups. The group itself transforms in the ideal case to something like a closely interacting sub community, something like club in the real world.

Yes, indeed, that's a good thing. But it's not better than the other three types. All types are needed, cause the satisfy different desires and so they all should exists side by side. I think it's unfair, for example to accuse someone of dumping and running, if he doesn't always go to tens of pages with certain pictures and gives a comment on everyone (by the way, it has some irony, that the same people often accuse members of comments groups, where you are forced by rules to give a comment, as attention seeking freaks...). They just doesn't see the purpose of such groups and that there existence is appreciated by people who just want to look at certain pictures.

The existence of different types of groups results of the diversity of users. I think that more than 8 million of the 9 million flickr user have no desire in using the community elements of a side like flickr. They just want to have a place where they can easily present their photos to friends and family. And maybe from time to time they have a look at explore or go to a certain group hopping to find a picture about a certain topic. For them the first type of groups is ideal. Another user group I think is looking for help. So they're satisfied by the second type of groups.

And there are the users searching for community. How many? Of course, I couldn't know exactly, but judging from the size of certain groups, the activity in groups and other place I would say it's something like 100000, at least a minority compared to the first user group I described before. Nevertheless this group is he driving force of a place like flickr or ipernity (at the moment this group is here the majority...), due to their activity. But sometimes I fear people forgetting that they're not alone and there are more ways to use a community or especially groups.

What does it mean for this place? This place is full of idealism. Most people are driven by the ida of making everything better than on flickr. So after the start of groups I would expect  a majority of groups belonging to the third type. People will discus a lot and post their pictures. The number of pictures is small, so one can spend some time on looking and commenting. So expect a good start and many happy faces around. But what happens one year, two years later? Either ipernity will die after having a short but joyful life or it will grow. In the latter case we will see that the same 'problems' appear as on flickr. Cause they're only problems from a very narrow point of view, for the broad mass of people they are needed and useful.

So we will have dump and run groups, we will have dead groups with lots of pictures, but no discussion, we will have comments groups, we will have best of and award groups, cause it's natural that they exist. So sooner or later there will be complains about that (even now without groups we already have them). But I don't agree with this.

There's no good and bad in the existence and way of use. Groups may work or not, but that's something different. So what should people do? Wait and have a look what happens and then build up the kind of groups that sweats you and your network in the best way, and let other people do what they liek to do. Do not complain about things you can not influence, maybe you don't like but causing no harm for anyone, just fun for people different from you.

That doesn't mean stopping discussions about technically aspects, that's helpful, especially many technical aspects of flickr groups are not satisfying.

Yesterday I wrote something about different kind of groups and beside one side discussion about the necessity of pictures pools for groups, there was the typical award and comment group bashing.

This kind of bashing is rather popular, not only on flickr also at this small peaceful and everyone is my friend community. So there are discussion threads dozens of people agreeing to each other that this kind of groups is the most evil thing in the photo community world. That reminds me that everyone who you ask tolds you he will never eat at McDonald's and (in Germany) is never reading the 'Bild-Zeitung', while both are making money with out beside the fact they are completely ignored by everyone. Strange such things happen all the time...

It's also strange, that all people I invited to post a picture in my small pseudo groups, has followed the invitation... And the participation in some other game pseudo-groups here is also high. And if you look around at flickr, then you can see that beside 'flickr central'such groups as 'A big fav' or 'the world through my eyes' are with about 25000 members each really big groups you can find hardly otherwise. It's similar for the newer groups of this type. If you have in mind that maybe only 100000 or 200000 user are what one could call actively participating in flickr community stuff, this groups are extremely popular. But I know popular is the opposite of being of high quality. And anyway, as anybody seems to believe the purpose of this groups is only to game explore and used by attention gathering freaks. Strange that some of the groups are older than explore itself, as it was confirmed by flickr staff.

One thing I often notice is that people doesn't exactly know what they are talking about and happily mixing up all types of groups. Award group is not a comment group, and not all comment and award groups are working in the same way. So maybe some definitions at this point.

• The comment groups. The purpose of this groups is to post a picture and in return comment on some other pictures in the pool. Here one can distinguishes two subgroups:

• You are free which pictures you comment on. The classics are the '1-2-3' type groups, or something like 'The world through my eyes', or the newer ones like 'A+++'. So in this way the pictures which are of highest quality get the highest number of comments. Or in other words most popular.
• The next type are the groups where you are not free which picture you have to comment on. Normally it's the pictures next to yours,or the last ones in a small pool. Classic examples are the 'Score me' or 'Delete me' kind of groups. In this case the number of comments is equal for each picture. The purpose is to get some comment on the quality of your picture. This is useful, cause normally you get only positive comments, but in this groups comments are also often negative.

Still asking my self this question to understand why people looking more on some of my pictures than on others. Last pictures I had a deeper look at, was my contribution for the 07-07-07 Group on flickr. You can find the group here:www.flickr.com/groups/07_07_07/

Here and on flickr I posted the same 21 shots taken on that specific day. A large variety of nature, people, landscape or more abstract ones. In color, bw, or toned somehow. All of them you can find here:

www.ipernity.com/search/...

Down to the subway station

As one could expect, some are more appreciated than others. But which pictures are most popular is almost the same flickr and ipernity. Especially the most popular/interesting on of them is the same on both sites. It's the one you can see here. It's the first one of the series and the one which is far ahead counting faves or comments on both sites. In flickr it stayed for some time on the front page of explore, here it you find if still on the start page.

This is no exception, 4 others are also on the same place in this rankings, 3 differ by one position, 6 by three , 2 by four and five, respectively. Only 2 differ by 10 places and one by 13 (which is caused by reaching explore frontpage on flickr, which always boosts interestingness). So statistically the popularity/interestingness ranking is the same on both sites.

'81'

And that's in spite of the different user/contact groups on places. Here it's more centered on Germany or Europe, there it's far beyond that limits. So cultural differences seem not to have so much influence on the first glance. So what is that determines the ranking? What is it, what makes a picture like that above popular everywhere, and a picture like the one on the left unpopular (it's number 18 on flickr and number 21 here) everywhere?

Every comment on the two pictures here, that would clarify a little bit, what makes the one popular (good?) and the other one unpopular (bad?) for you, I would highly appreciate.

One year ago- Arakawaoki matsu…

That's it for the next two weeks. I'm not an ipernity pro user, so I can upload only 200 MB per month which I reached today. So the picture number 98 you can see here, is the last one until first of August.

I reached the upload limit so fast, cause I always upload original versions. I do this for flickr and use the ipernity script to put them here including tags. That's the easiest way and I'll not change it.

I also will not become a pro user here in the near future. Two pro accounts on photosharing sites would be one too much and I still think flickr is the best solution to present all my pictures, share them with family & friends. Simply cause the layout of flickr is much more suitable for this. Pictures on the impernity homepage is only a minor part, but it's the main part for me.

Even though I don't like flickr as company as so many others here, I'm practically not affected by any changes recently done on flickr, I have no pictures which are restricted in anyway and I'm not interested in stuff I would call restricted (which is not equal to flickrs Uncle Bob definition). So for me life over there has not changed much.

Anyway, I like this place, too. And my impressions so fare are very positive. I will continue uploading pictures next month, but maybe not everyone. I think of some 'best of' selection, adding one or two pictures a day. So I can spread my uploads over a whole month.

Meanwhile I will look around here at your pictures, your blogs and maybe writing something from time to time. And if we got groups in the next two weeks, of course I will participate in building up the first ones :)

One year ago- Arakawaoki matsu…

Yesterday, exactly one year ago, it was a Sunday and in the little town we lived in Japan, called Arakawaoki (which was only famous for it's railway station, which you had to use traveling from Tokyo to the booming science city Tsukuba), the local matsuri took place. Or more exactly, the matsuri on our side of the railway. The other side's matsuri was a little bit later.

What is a matsuri? It's a kind of festival held in every place in Japan during the summer time. The most famous one is the Gion matsuri in Kyoto. The origin lays in the Shinto religion of Japan. Every place has is own Shinto shrine where the local Kami, the God, lives.

One year ago- Arakawaoki matsu…

It's the meeting point between the Kami and the people living in his area. But not everyone can go to the Shrine and the Kami can not go into the town. So the idea is to transfer the Kami from the Shrine into a portable Shrine, a mikoshi, and carry him around the town, so that the Kami can have a look and the people can see him. Afterwards the Kami is returned to the Shrine (once we had seen this ceremony in Gion itself. It was amazing).

To make the trip enjoyable for the Kami,

One year ago- Arakawaoki matsu…

the mikoshi is followed by people making loud music and dancing and the mikoshi itself, carryed by young men and women, is always shaken around while people are shouting loudly. So everyone has a lot of fun and small children and elderly people together participate in this festival.

For us this was always a big event and we joined each year the matsuris around our place. But of course, the one in our hometown was very special for us. Being a foreigner in small Japanese

One year ago- Arakawaoki matsu…

town is something like being an animal in the zoo. People are very friendly, but also fearing to came too close in contact with us. So it's not so easy if people always starring at you and hold you on distance. But at the day of the matsuri this was different. People were proud that we joined their festival, were happy that we walked with them through our neighborhood. And as usual we were forced to take a lot of pictures, especially of the children :)

One year ago- Arakawaoki matsu…

So matsuri day was not only for the Kami a happy day, also for us. And when I looked through the pictures yesterday I was a little bit sentimental. Both of us are missing Japan almost everyday. It was a great time in a wonderful country, not always easy, but nowhere live is always easy.

One year ago- Arakawaoki matsu…

I decided to upload a bunch of pictures which, I hope, carry something of the atmosphere of the matsuri to you. The people dancing on the street, the children with their masks, the young men carrying the mikoshi, the light of the paper lanterns, all that I hope you can see and feel the enthusiasm and joy of the people. On matsuri day you will not find this stereotype of the always controlled and quite Japanese. On that day all social and cultural boundaries are forgotten.

Arakawaoki matsuri

So, enjoy the pictures of that day, I posted here again. It's six new pictures, and an old one, taken on the same day but posted long ago...