07-28-10 – Dirty Pictures

I don’t think we have to worry about the death of Farktography because I know as long as Fark is still around and I can wield a camera, I’ll probably be playing.
I know it can be hard to get friends/family to participate but keep telling people about it. I’ve told lots of people at work about it, none of them have started playing yet but I keep bugging them and really, picking up 1 and 2 more people is actually huge. And ennuipoet is right that things go in waves. clouddancer and I started about the same time, then we didn’t have any notable new voices until recently when ravnostic, zincprincess and BecauseISaidSo all started about the same time.

I am committed to finishing the book up too, even if the contract thing with Drew falls through and we make it through blurb.com.

Kestrana: …notable new voices… Thanks! *sniff* That may be one of the nicest things a stranger on the internet has ever said about me. 😉

I just checked my Fark account date and in a strange coincidence it turns out today is exactly the 7th anniversary of my signup. During that time, other than my recent posts in the Farktography contests, I’ve posted exactly once. All of which I say to emphasize my credentials as a long-time lurker. So, here’s a slightly different take on recent discussions from the POV of an “outsider”:

* Increased participation beyond a certain point may not be a desirable thing from a viewer’s standpoint. When I browsed the Farktography threads, I found that I could only seriously consider so many entries before either giving up or fast-scrolling to the end.

* From a strictly financial viewpoint, the eyes-on-a-page count is probably more important to Fark, LLC than the number of participants (which may only correlate up to a certain point based on #1). I’m guessing probably only Drew would know how those numbers have fluctuated.

* As a viewer, I found some of the more “esoteric” themes (probably what some are describing as likely to limit casual participation) quite enjoyable. It was always interesting to see the different interpretations.

* As a participant, I certainly understand the desire to shoot new material specific to a theme (and I hope I get time to start doing that soon, but honestly all of my shots thus far are from the archives). But as a viewer, I really prefer both. Archival shots are likely to be of scenic or interesting places or infrequent events that would otherwise not be convenient to shoot within any given week.

* Casual participants with P&S’s can still be competitive. Much to my chagrin, 3 of my top 4 placing pix (including this week’s) were taken with a P&S.

July, 2009 vs July, 2010, it looks like we’re about 30% lower overall page views based on number of hits to my website on contest night/the day after. It’s kind of difficult to tell by that month though, because July of last year was bookended by “Dragons” and “Man’s Best Friend”, which were exceedingly popular and are about double anything I’ve seen for this month. June seems to correlate somewhat with the standout being ’tilt-shift’.

Poking around a bit, our popular contests seem to be as popular this year vs. last, but it feels like the less popular themes aren’t getting as much general attention. Again, this is based on website hits, which *should* equate roughly to page views somehow on Fark (obvious spikes on contest nights are obvious).

What does this mean? My hunch is that we’ve got a lot of people looking at the contests, but not a whole lot of people bothering to vote these days.

What does this mean? My hunch is that we’ve got a lot of people looking at the contests, but not a whole lot of people bothering to vote these days.

That could well be true.
I hope we don’t go the way of Photoshop themes, which now generally seem to be lowly populated in terms of entrants, low-vote garners, and–I suspect–low in terms of views.

/maybe it’s like the marriage after the dating. Still good, better in lots of ways, but less fireworks. 🙂

I will say the regulars, and the semi-regulars, still have a lot of the ‘passion’ that has made these threads what they are though.

But on that tack, maybe we should lean a little more towards ‘giggling like young lovers’ in our themes. Voting and winning aside, I think we all feel better about what we do here when we know that people that don’t even participate love what we’re doing.

I’m a relative noob to Farktography, and I have browsed the stats pages here, one thing that pops up is that most of the voting takes place in the first hours of the competition, while it’s still in TFland. Some of us do not have TF and by the time we post no one is voting. So a casual poster (or liter) may get discouraged from posting because there is no way of winning or placing in the top ten, because there just aren’t enough clicks to get the votes.

Another issue could be that some of the themes are too well defined, and may limit choice. In Games, how many Scrabble pis were posted (I know I put one in), this week there were 3-4 with cigarrettes. Maybe a looser definition would help. Themes like Green, or teh funnay may produce more variety in the posting and therefore more interest. I know I stopped looking after the 3rd Scrabble pic.

None of this going to stop me from participating. I’d like to win, but I know I have a long way to go to be as good some of you guys and girls. I’m here because the theme gives me boundaries and a goal to shoot for. I really just want to get better at photography in general.

that’s just my 2 cents.