Jake asked an interesting question the other day: how do people keep up with the constant flood of new work and ideas in the world of photography? Is there some sort of aggregator or meta-site that keeps track of such things?
It’s a tough problem to solve, because everyone has such different tastes. It would have to be a sort of “uber-aggregator”, that allows users to be selective in their subscriptions. I would want to tune out certain genres of photography and certain kinds of news.
In my comment on Jake’s post, I mentioned two of my favorite sites for discovering new work, Conscientious and Flak Photo. I should add Humble Arts Foundation to that list, because I love checking out their online Group Show every month. In reality, I have at least 50 photo-related sites in my feed reader at any given time. There’s a lot of good and an awful lot of bad (or more accurately, an awful lot that is completely irrelevant to me), but I manage to keep up for the most part.
In a sense, through our own blogs, Flickr, and bookmarking services like del.icio.us and vi.sualize.us, we’ve all become curators of some sort. It becomes another stream of information to subscribe to; once you get the right mix, the signal to noise ratio goes way down.
Thanks to mash-up technology like Yahoo Pipes, combining and outputting these streams is trivially easy. It’s the curatorial aspect, the input, that still requires some thought and energy. For my own benefit, I’m going to start working on a Yahoo Pipe that aggregates content from some of my favorite Flickr users’ favorites feeds, collections of images that my friends on Flickr, whose taste I trust, have decided are worth bookmarking. In a way, it could turn out to be the opposite of Flickr Explore, which, as a general rule, is guaranteed to find some of the tackiest junk on Flickr on any particular day. Find several sources that you can trust, aggregate them, and I think something might come out of it. And if it does, I’ll either share the link or somehow integrate the feed into a viewer on this site so it’s easy to find.
In the meantime, here are some links to Flickr feeds you might find of interest:
Joe Holmes’ favorite photos on flickr:
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