manganite's blog/

...and the feeling of stagnation (or more positive, stabilization) is still there. Lea has today got her contact number 9000, so still something like only 50 new user a day. Number of new pictures has over the last 3 weeks stabilized at 40000 per week. That's not much... The personal experience is almost the same. While in the first weeks activity has always increased , up to  90  visitors a day and  is now at somewhere  at 30-50  a day.  And that in spite  of the fact  that I have uploaded more pictures as usual  in the  last days  (which has increased daily visitor number on flickr). That's not very motivating if less people are looking at your pictures, while at flickr it's not the case. So I will go back to my usual habit of uploading one or two pictures a day.

And I think it's not only me who feels that way. Most of my contacts are still active on flickr, and their activity over there has increased again in some cases, others are doing almost nothing here or, in the extreme case, have canceled their ipernity account. It's hard to find new, interesting streams here.

I know, many people are very happy with the situation here, they are living in the same 50 people network they had already at flickr, so for them it makes no difference at all. But you cannot build up a community like this in that way. You need growth, you need new customers and you need activity to build up a vital community. I hope that groups will wake up people, will motivate them to post pictures, look at them and comment them. If nothing changes, I fear sooner or later this place fell totally asleep.

And that would be nothing I wanted. I like many features of ipernity, like this blogging function, I like the more personal interaction, and many other things. But the main point for me to join a photo community is to share my pictures and to get some response. I'm realistic enough not to expect the same activity as on flickr, but as things go on here like now, it's not so satisfying.

...for fixing my search problem. Since a few days all my new pictures I uploaded from flickr didn't appear in any search results. But since today everything is back to normal.

So I would like to thank ipernity staff for the fast reaction and finding a solution

...I'm a little bit tired at the moment of looking around at your pictures, my friends. Concentrate at the moment more on looking through my own old ones and preparing them.

So not much viewing, commenting and spending favs activity from me. Hope this will change soon.

...and in principle nothing really happened. Still I have this impression of stagnation, of less activity of most of my contacts. Some fresh impulse is needed, I think.

Personally I noticed some new people the last 2 or three days looking at my pics and more anonymous visitors, so that the picture views have noticeable increased. That's maybe related to the fixing of the search problem I had (my new pictures didn't appear in tag searches for some time) and that two pictures appeared in the 'what's hot' list. It's also possible that ipernity pages got higher google rankings. Who knows, but I would count that slight increase of activity as a positive signal.

Let's see what week eight will bring :)

I'm a little bit confused. When I came here, I'm pretty sure, I saw some adds around here. And when I look at the page for buying a pro account, it says:

No ads in your space

But where are the ads now? I looked at home pages, photo pages and elsewhere, but no ads. I'm no pro and even if I log out I don't see them.

Am I blind? Or have they removed the ads?

Ipernity is rather young and not so popular up to now, but if you look at flickr or other big content sharing sites, then one problem could come to your mind: Who profits mostly from the content you publish? Take as maybe the most extreme example someone like Rebekka on flickr. Why has she to pay for a pro account? Through clicks on ads, public relations generated by her pictures, I'm sure, flickr earns several times more money than she pays for her pro account. And she get's no share of it. In the opposite, she has to pay for putting content on a page others make money with. Is that fair?

Maybe one can say what would be Rebekka without flickr, would have she ever sold a picture without being popular due to flickr. So in that sense she's indirectly payed back her pro account. But also that is, I think, not really fair, cause her popularity is not made by flickr staff, is made by other members. And what about the endless number of users who fill explore and the search result lists with high class content and never selling one picture. A photosharing site would be nothing without them.

So wouldn't it be fair, that flickr payed some amount of money back to the users? For example if someone clicks on an ad beside a search result page, wouldn't it be fair to pay everyone whose pictures are shown there some small amount of money? It must not be much, let's say 10% of the money they earn distributed between all users. Something like that. From my point of view that sounds fair, cause no content sharing side would be anything worth without the content we share with them, but we have to pay for it and all the money belongs to them.

...if one of my pictures is seen, commented and faved by many people and, sure, it makes me feel a little bit sad if another one, I like too, is not so successful. And I think this a pretty natural reaction of posting pictures to a public community which is made for viewing, commenting and faving pictures.

And, yes, I like it to see one of my pictures on the front page of flickr explore, see the view count rushing up to thousands of views in a few hours. That's just great!

It meant that people I don't know appreciate my work, take their time to look more in detail at my picture, while there are millions of other pictures they do not.

I don't know how many people so far have seen my picture. Next week I will have my photo stream visitor number 500000 on flickr, what means that since little more than one year 1000 people every day are looking at my stream and at my pictures. And an unknown number is looking on pages like explore, group pools, search result lists and several third party pictures.

That means hundred thousands of people have seen the world through my eyes, have seen what I have seen, my memories are now part of their memories. Isn't that great?

Certainly that's something an average guy like me wouldn't have ever managed without a platform like that. Years ago all the pictures would have been lost on a hard-disk or some private photo albums. By platforms like this or flickr one can share them with the world. Something that was unbelievable just a decade ago.

So let us be happy about the possibilities  new technologies offer for each one of us :)

From this point of view I could obviously not understand people always claiming they are not interested if their pictures are viewed or not, who claim to give a dam on comments and feel more happy if their pictures are practically be ignored. Why? Is it some kind of jealousy? Self defense? Ignorance?

...and nothing really exciting happened in the last two weeks. Where are the groups?

This month I've still left a lot of my upload quota, so in the next days I'll  upload more than one image  a day not to waist any capacity.

...I started here posting my pictures the ipernity hype definitely has reached an end. Last week for the first time the number of contacts Lea ipernity has, has decreased instead of increased. And it's not just some  anyway unknown members, I lost some of my active contacts, cause they quit their account here. And the ones still here are more and more quiet.  Even some of the people who have announced on flickr very loudly that they will move to this place show not much activity.

And don't tell me about summer and vacation, they are still active on flickr.

Something is not working here. I'm not sure what it is, but I think it is connected with the poor possibilities to present your pictures here. No groups, only tiny icons of the pictures on the user homepage and the blog entries on top. I think that this leads to the stupid situation that my three line blog entry from last week got ten times more views than my last pictures on average in the last days.

Yes, I like the blog feature, I like the fact that you can upload documents, music or videos, but that's not why I am here. I'm here to share my pictures and that is working less and less, cause only a handful of active people is left. So I think, that I'm still uploading pictures here, is only because it doesn't cost me much effort to do so.

I hope, the situation will improve in future. The big thing will be groups I think, so staff has to do the job soon. It was announced almost two month ago and nothing had happened. And I think nothing is worse than announcing something and not doing it on time. But anyone, for some people it will be too late, they're gone and I don't think they will come back. Hopefully not much more will leave...