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Here is mine as well: “http://wendymarijnissenphotojournal.blogspot.com/”
Of course the Harvey blog is fantastic as a resource and just a great read: “http://davidalanharvey.typepad.com/”
The Magnum blog has recently been revived by fellow LS Martin Fuchs:
“http://blog.magnumphotos.com/”
I always check out Alex Soths’ one as well: “http://alecsoth.com/blog/”
And this one can be an interesting read as well at times: “http://politicstheoryphotography.blogspot.com/”
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Here goes for mine, http://blog.penso.info/ If you look at the bottom, you’ll get an audio podcast from David Alan Harvey at a Seoul party. It was fun.
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Michal Daniel :))))))))...
i should tell u that I LOVE THAT BLOG…and i love that digital machine u use and the resulting pics :)))...that’s the kind of digi-vision that I love so oooooo much: not about perfection of camera, but about the mystery of photography and of life, the living…that’s what i always mean when this nonsensical debate comes up with digi vs. film: i loved using my old, shitty sony camera 10 years ago as offset for film….and I REALLY REALLY LOVE THAT 1ST IMAGE (MAN ON TRAIN WITH BUILDING): lIke dream from my skull ;))...beautiful….
http://www.640×480.net/album.php?posn=08_31_07_05_45_48pm&size=large
although i havent looked at all your images there (like way too many even for my insatiable appetite to digest): i’ve looked at that blog lots times and i draw inspiration from it, from one photographer to another, someone who gets the strangeness of the living at that the beauty of digital (besides economical reasons) has the same importantce as film: its about convey the wonder, the laughter and the sorrow in the weirdest way: i dont know how a photographer can make a precise, balanced, careful image…that’s just not life (maybe Italian vogue ;) )....just wanted to pass that on…long-time looker of 640x etc
i so love that low resolution: really, like the sound of blood shooting swiftly through the skin….
wearied
b
by
Bob Black
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23 Sep 2007 22:09
(ed. Sep 23 2007)
| Toronto (for now),
Canada
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This is GREAT! I wonder how I might go about forming a directory listing here with everything. Maybe just a link to this thread will do. Fun stuff. I have time to myself tomorrow and will peruse these various blogs. I’m so looking forward to it. I’ll add a directory of these blogs to my own.
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This is GREAT! I wonder how I might go about forming a directory listing here with everything. Maybe just a link to this thread will do. Fun stuff. I have time to myself tomorrow and will peruse these various blogs. I’m so looking forward to it. I’ll add a directory of these blogs to my own. Keep it in the family, so to speak.
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Rather than list interesting blogs at my own, I’ve simply added a link to this thread.
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Hey Paul, that is a good idea. I also added this link to my blog…let’s see how this works.
I love these blogs, as I have seen everyones’ webpage, agency, etc ….but the blogs are always being updated…and they are really a lot of fun…
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I can otherwise make a blog directory list, similar to the one I did of the Lighstalkers Photographer Directory Link Exchange which you can see at http://www.pixdesk.ca/ls_links/links.php .
That way, it will be easier for everyone to implement the links on each others websites.
If there is an interest, I can set that up in a few hours.
...Mikael
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That sounds cool Mikael. Lots of work though. I was going to do something similar though time would have been an issue then I got to thinking that all we needed was a link to this thread from each of our blogs. Simple really.
Perhaps tonight I will have time to explore the links added here. I very much look forward to it.
Thanks everyone. I hope we all take some time to peruse these links and set up a network.
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Paul,
The link page is more of an automatic thing. I just need to create the input and output webpage which will take me an hour and then people can add their blogs by themselves. That way it is self lived and will grow as people add their blogs.
I enjoy seeing so many [photographer blogs out there :):)
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This is a resource in and of itself. My google reader is much happier now.
Here’s my blog, shamelessly full of typos.
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Mine is currently random posts about assignments but, I am going to try to narrow the focus and post more topical stuff, just sort of “finding my voice”
http://www.onewordphotography.com/blog
By the way, I remember a post a while back about linking to sites. Do links on your blog count? If so, I’d be glad to add all of the above if people would do the same for mine.
Cheers,
Dan
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the last 3 months or so include posts from my internship at VII..
HTTP://ASYOUWERE.WORDPRESS.COM
will start posting my work from the current position at harvard news..
i’m enjoyin everyones blogs!! take care
.m
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Talkin’ incoherent shite, so you don’t have to…its all part of the service at the SionPhoto Blog
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Oh ok then..
http://hmmm.co.za
And as soon as i get a chance to develop this roll of film, it will be updated
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This is fun. . .
Sucka Pants
travel, live music, general craziness from Brooklyn, NY.
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mine:
left-eyed right-handed
including many links to other photography related blogs/websites (there are far more links than posts on my blog… too busy reading what others have to say…)
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My blog: >Re:PHOTO: http://re-photo.co.ukPronounced ‘Ray-photo’ which is how I learnt to say ‘Re’ many years before the internet existed. I started it in May, after the NY Times decided they didn’t really want a photography site that was really ‘About Photography’.
I also have a photo-diary, which isn’t a blog for various reasons (mainly that it started a long time ago), but is a kind of personal web diary, called ‘My London Diary’: http://mylondondiary.co.uk
I think there are now almost 25,000 pictures on it.
Peter
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Hi,
I have also just started building my blog: http://thecamerawala.blogspot.com/
You are invited there. Looking forward to your valuable inputs and comments.
Thanks
Santanu
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bANDa.co.ba is a true proof of Bosnian tolerance and it’s cosmopolitan nature. :D
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Have finally gotten around to update my page and get it into a data base system.
Blogging about everything concerning photography and then throw i some poetry if in good mood :)
http://www.aurora.is
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Looking at different ways of showing documentary photography…. Exploring new opportunities that the internet and new technology offer the photographer.
http://www.docphot.org
Martin
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I think it’s great everybody is sharing their work. I’d like to offer a suggestion for how this list could be taken to the next level. Google loves links. Knowing this we can use this to our advantage. If each person chooses one lightstalker member who has listed his/her blog here and writes a post about their work and in that post links to that person’s website, over time each person here will gain many links to their site which helps their page ranknig in Google an thus elevates us all with regard to search engines, primarily Google. In addition the website stubmleupon.com (and similar social bookmarking sites) can be used to drive traffic to our websites as well.
I created an account on stumbleupon.com and added an entry for my own blog. I got several hundred hits on that day. While that might not seem like a lot, I had just launched the blog so I went from 0 to several hundred views in one day. I didn’t consistently get those several hundred views on the following days but, if somebody else were to stumble my blog and yours on a weekly basis, over time a lot of traffic would come. If in addition to writing about each person we also took a couple minutes to “stumble” the person’s blog too it would drive additional traffic to our sites and perhaps gain viewership among people who weren’t necessarily searching for photography related sites with a search engine.
If we collectively do things like this on a weekly basis the mighty internet powers will think that our sites are consistently getting attention and are therefore important and worthy of attention.
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Seth,
Can you tell me how you submit your own site or blog to Stumble, I’ve gone through it and can’t see how to do this. I do have an account and have used it.
BTW, great idea.
Dan
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probably the easiest way is to install the toolbar for firefox or IE. you can get it on their website. After it’s installed just go to your site and click the ‘thumbs up’ icon. If nobody has ‘stumbled’ your site before it will tell you you’ve discovered a new site and you can add a blurb about it that other stumble upon users will see.
IMPORTANT NOTE:
I’ve read that stumbleupon keeps track of the domain that each stumble comes from and doesn’t give as much weight to stumbles for a given site that consistently come from the same domain. So constantly stumbling your own site doesn’t do much and can actually work against you. However stumbling once shouldn’t hurt anything. I don’t know this for fact but i’ve seen it mentioned among discussions of stumble upon and it’s inner workings.
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just in case anybody out there is unaware, there are 2 very good Google tools for website owners.
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tour/tour1.html
the webmaster tools tell you how many sites link to yours and who they are, as well as telling you how your site looks to google, keywords, search terms etc.
another free tool is Google analytics
http://www.google.com/analytics/
I think both of these tools are indespensible with the added bonus that they’re free.
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As I walked to the movie theatre tonight I couldn’t get this subject out of my head so i’m posting again while everything is still fresh in my mind. I realized that as a (semi)organized group we lightstalkers have quite a lot of power we’re not taking advantage of. There’s a lot of power in the “group”. Take for example the strikes in France right now. As individuals the workers have no power but together they have quite a lot of power. It’s the same with all of us on the Internet. We all try to figure out ways to get our websites higher page ranks but as individuals it’s very difficult. If we were to make an organized effort to work together we could elevate ourselves with the power of our shear numbers.
Google doesn’t go into detail about the nuts and bolts of it’s page ranking system but they do state publicly that fundamentally they determine page rank by quantity of links to a given site and the quality of those links. So a link from a site like cnn.com would be more powerful than 10 links from john q. nobody. However, we’re not really competing with cnn.com for search results we’re competing with everybody else with a website displaying photos.
As an example, if I do a Google search for ‘photos brazil’ Google returns 56 million pages. So I’m competing with 56 million other websites for that coveted first page listing. OUCH!!! Now, heavy hitting sites like Nat. Geo don’t show up on the first page and neither does Getty. In fact the pages that did show up on the first page of google had photos that for the most part were not very impressive. I’d be willing to bet that none of the pages that showed up on the first page of my search have more than 100 links to them. I don’t know how many lightstalkers members there are but let’s say there are 10,000. So if I had a link from all of the lightstalkers members that would give me a page rank far beyond any of the other sites that showed up in my search. An extreme example I know but let me illustrate my point. Suppose all 10,000 members of lightstalkers had links to each-others sites and let’s say that 50% of lightstalkers members have pictures related to brazil on their website. That would mean that theoretically google’s first page of search results would contain only lightstalkers members since we would all have a quantity (and quality) of links much higher than anybody else on the Internet. Now i’d be competing with 5000 other websites rather than 56 million!
So how can an extreme example such as this be put into practice? This thread was created in an effort to address the issue of getting our websites seen. Since many members have blogs that are most likely used, at least in part, as marketing tools. We can utilize these tools to elevate ourselves as a group which in the end benefits each member. Like an ant colony, each individual is fairly powerless but as a group they are very powerful and each member of the colony benefits from the work of each individual.
As a more realistic example suppose some (hopefully large) number of lightstalkers members agree to participate in an organized campaign of promoting fellow participants. If once a week (as an example) each participant posted in their blog a blurb about another photographer, who happens to be another participant in this campaign, and included a link to that person’s website, over time each participant gains links to their own website from other participants. This gaining of links would be organic and beneficial to all who participate. Imagine if you gained a link a week to your website. It would appear to the big computers in the cloud that your website is really gaining in popularity from seemingly random sources .
The obvious course of action is for all of us to start making linking deals, “you write about me and I’ll write about you”, etc. This may seem like a good solution but I think the result would be an initial spike in posting and linking but would eventually die out and in addition it would introduce yet another popularity contest. Since we have a community here we ought to approach this as a community effort that would benefit all members of the participating community equally. We’re already competing with the rest of the internet world, competing amongst each other seems counter productive, at least until every first page of a google search has exclusively websites from lighstalkers members. :)
I propose a more systematic approach that I think would be longer lasting as well as offer a level playing field so that everybody can benefit equally from the collective effort.
I’d be willing to create (and host) a web page that would allow lightstalkers members to add a URL to the site they want written about, maybe it’s a blog maybe it’s a portfolio site. The URLs would be stored in a database and I can create another page with a small flash program with a button that when clicked will randomly select a URL from the database. The person retrieving the URL would then take a look at the site and post an entry on their blog with a few words about the site and/or photos and a link to that person’s site. The idea being that each person writes about other members and other members are writing about you. In the interest of transparency I could also post a statistics page showing the quantity of URL selections for each participant so that everybody can see there’s an even spread and nobody is getting favored. Of course each participant needs to go the distance and actually do the blog post, the whole thing is on the honor system but the more active participants there are the more everybody benefits.
In effect we would all be implicitly promoting our websites by explicitly promoting somebody else’s. Over time we would all gain links to our individual sites raising our page rank which then raises the value of every link we give to somebody else. Like a swarm of locusts we can descend upon the internet. (evil laugh)
I’m interested in everybody else’s thoughts on this issue, i think together we can hammer out a plan of action to benefit us all.
footnote: it’s 2:00 a.m. on a sunday, please forgive any signs of mental instability in my post.
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Seth,
At first glance, this sounds like a good idea. Since this post started, I wondered how many people actually put a link on their site to other sites from this post. For just the reasons you mention, I assumed not many. I added a half dozen or so then accidentally wiped them off my blog today when I was monkeying around with it. As well, many people just don’t have a links page on their site so, would prefer not to bother.
Anyway, I’m in and will do whatever I can to help. On the surface, it sounds like a workable idea, I’m hoping someone with a significant amount of google/seo experience will chime in with their opinion.
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Mine is just under a year old and I srtarted off posting much more regularly then then I do these days. Nevertheless, I’m surprised how many bother to read it. It’s not so much about standalone pictures but about what they trigger for me:
http://englandspastures.wordpress.com/
Thanks,
Richard.
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If anyone wants to add their photography related websites and blogs to the list that Sarah Underhill mentioned, visit the URL http://www.pixdesk.ca/ls_links/
...mikael
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I think there is a crucial detail being overlooked by this movement to aggregate links of our websites. I looked at the site mentioned in the previous post: http://www.pixdesk.ca/ls_links/
While the list does provide a centralized list of lightstalkers’ websites that can allow for other members to view eachothers websites, it doesn’t do much to help us increase the likelihood that our pages will show up in google searches. Google relies heavily on page rank. Here’s an excerpt from google’s website regarding page rank:
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PageRank Explained ( http://www.google.com/technology/ )
PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.” Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages’ relative importance.
Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines dozens of aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.
/
So just having a page of links, even if we all put it on our sites doesn’t count for much because the link page itself wouldn’t be considered “important”. There are several reasons for this.
Firstly the page contains primarily links. From other research i’ve done, google doesn’t give much weight to pages made primarily of links because it would be easy for unscrupulous webmasters to manipulate their system by creating endless numbers of link pages.
Second there’s not much content on the page for a search engine to sink it’s teeth into. Sure it would pick up everybody’s name but unless somebody is searching for your name specifically there’s no reason that link page would ever be returned in a search.
What is needed is an organized effort to raise our collective page ranks. This means creating content that itself has (at least the potential for) a good page rank and links to the sites of other members.
As was proposed in a previous post, if we use our blogs to occasionally profile other lighstalkers members, describing their work and providing a link(s) to their site in the post we would be using google’s system as a tool for our advantage. A good example of what was mentioned previously is the blog of lightstalker member http://www.lightstalkers.org/tewfic-el-sawy with his blog: http://thetravelphotographer.blogspot.com/ he does exactly what we all should be doing. If we all used our blogs the way tewfic el-sawy does and wrote/linked to each other using this method we would be collectively raising our page ranks. Each time somebody wrote about your website it would help raise your page rank which in turn raises the value of each link you give to another lightstalker member.
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Seth,
Your idea is great, and you should go ahead and implement it.
The list I created was setup in a couple of hours to save people the time and aggravation to have to enter other photographers manually.
I just wanted to create a simple centralized place where people could put their name and website. I also created a description field, so if you ended up looking at the http://www.pixdesk.ca/ls_links/photographers.php page rather than the links.php page, you will see that there is more information.
I can also say that I have many google searches on my server logs when people have been searching for individual photographers. You are right though, that they will need to search for the photographers name.
...Mikael
PS! if anyone want’s to add a description field to their already listing, send me the text and I’ll add it to the database. Max 55 Characters please.
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