BLOG DIRECTORY

AGSTAR Photojournalism

and here is my family blog. Para los que leen en español.

Las Stargardter Nicas

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/”

http://www.lightstalkers.org/good_photo_blogs

http://kahtan6.blogspot.com/

http://kahtanjournal7.blogspot.com/

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

http://bagnewsnotes.typepad.com/bagnews/alan_chin/index.html

http://vebahood.wordpress.com/

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…

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

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.

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 :):)

http://myphotojournalism.blogspot.com

Cheers

Here’s my blog, shamelessly full of typos.

http://jonathanelderfieldphotoblog.blogspot.com/

Done about 10 posts so far.

Jonathan
www.jefoto.com

In spanish, not that I’m writing too much, but I hang a picture every now and then.

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

HTTP://ASYOUWERE.WORDPRESS.COM

will start posting my work from the current position at harvard news..

i’m enjoyin everyones blogs!! take care

.m

http://hmmm.co.za

And as soon as i get a chance to develop this roll of film, it will be updated

http://www.oliverparini.blogspot.com/

Visual diary from Japan…

link text

and

link text

and a group blog coming soon – watch this space.

Sucka Pants

travel, live music, general craziness from Brooklyn, NY.

NZB Photography

Kuwentos

My personal blog, Flipland

NZB Photography

Kuwentos

My personal blog, Flipland

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…)

A new blog for discussion of images and projects…

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

have fun.

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

Thanks, Stefan

i keep my panoramic street (and occasional landscape) blog up at:

www.memorieslikefingerprints.com/blog

enjoy!

Dylan

Blogging about everything concerning photography and then throw i some poetry if in good mood :)

http://www.aurora.is

http://intphoto.blogspot.com

Here’s mine:

http://kouroshazar.blogspot.com

http://www.docphot.org

Martin

http://jb.alkos.info

Aleksander

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

http://www.pixdesk.ca/ls_links/links.php

and this:

http://www.lightstalkers.org/blog-directory-

On my blog, and I have got hits from others who have these linkied on their webpages or blogs….I have a site meter and I can see where the hits come from, and the outclicks-where people go next….

It’s very easy to add these….you can see how I did it on my blog. Have a great M0onday…

http://englandspastures.wordpress.com/

Thanks,

Richard.

http://narua.org/new

In Portuguese, though.

For English, my Flickr page will do it: http://flickr.com/photos/streetlife

And this page goes straight to my bookmarks :) good to see good photography on the blogosphere…

Paulo.

jeff

…mikael

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:

/*
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.

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.

In an effort to improve our collective page ranks ( http://www.google.com/technology/ ) with google it was proposed that we work together as an organized group, to use the web and it’s technology to our advantage rather than working separately and competing with the millions of amateur photographers and their websites as well as the websites of microstock companies for search engine results.

The steps required to participate in this project/experiment are few but success will require a commitment by everyone involved. The more participation both in numbers of participants and frequency of participation, the more we all collectively benefit.

The premise is based on google’s page ranking system which is explained by google in the link above. Many of us have blogs. The idea behind this project is that we use our blogs to occasionally (but consistently) profile the work of a fellow lightstalker who is participating in this project by writing a post about his/her photography and including one or more links to their website in the post. Over time all participants will gain more links to their site which will increase each person’s page rank. As each person’s page rank improves, by receiving more links from other sites, the value of each link given to other sites goes up. Thus we raise each other up collectively.

To participate:

1. go to http://www.cafesilencio.net/lightclub and enter your lightstalker member ID and the URL for your website.

2. when you have the time to profile another member, go to the same website and click the ‘get URL’ button. a URL from the database will be randomly selected and displayed on the screen along with a button you can click to go to the site.

3. look over the website and write something about the photography on your blog, be sure to include a link to the person’s website in the blog post.

4. get yourself a cup of coffee and enjoy a feeling of satisfaction that by promoting another lightstalker member, somebody else is promoting you.

Personally I’m going try and do this once a week.

Also, on the screen of the web applet there’s a button to see all of the sites that are in the database and the number of times they’ve been retrieved from the database as a result of clicking the ‘get URL’ button. Those who get their site in early will naturally have a higher number than those who add their site 3 months from now. The URLs are retrieved randomly from the database in an effort to provide a level playing field to all participants.

I hope that this can be a long term successful project that we all benefit from. Please spread the word among the other lightstalker members who may not be monitoring this thread.

On another note, when I added the description field to my list I manually went and checked more than 50 of our members website, to put their info into the description field. I was very chocked to discover that most people did not have any META keyword or META description fields in their html head section. Not that you should rely on it to much, but it should be there.

Good job Seth,

…mikael

www.micheletraglia.com

ciaoo :D

http://a-third-eye.blogspot.com/

I’m gonna check now.

just started it

great thread…!

cornershots.com

www.emmeclausi.it

cheers

cheers.

mine:

http://millicapelgren.blogspot.com/

http://mapelgren.blogspot.com/

and a current photo blog of interest w/ lots of great links:
http://politicstheoryphotography.blogspot.com/

something good to watch:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/speakers/view/id/84
this is James Nachtwey, but there are plentiful people of interest.

enjoy!

It forces me to write instead of looking at blogs. I have added a whole new truckload to my google reader.

Tom Leininger

jaymather.blogspot.com

http://sumaryantobronto.blogspot.com/

One day I hope to be able to do some reviews of interesting blogs and to invite many of you from time to time to write about your blogs and what you hope to achieve with them. I hope to bring in some sponsors too and see where that can take us.

I’ve just secured PhotoBlogCentral.com and will start working on it by the end of January 2008 with hopes of going online at some point in February.

Please let me know if this is something that interests you and if I can list your blog.

I’m inexperienced at this sort of thing but hope to learn a lot over the coming months. I have the time between now and June to get stuck in. I will be moving back to London in the summer and so will have much of this time available to try and make something interesting and worthwhile of this.

Any and all pointers would be hugely appreciated.

First up I need to design a logo.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this.

Paulyman.

PhotoBlogCentral.com

I’m available to ensure it’s not hacked in any manner, just shout if you need it

I like your idea and I’ve started something similar.

During the past few months I’ve been looking a lot of photo blogs. Being me, I really like the ones I like. I have pondered the question, “How do I find more photos that I like?” Searching doesn’t really get me there and rifling through the hundred or so blogs I have aggregated into my feed reader takes a lot of time.

In short, I want a way to find people who like photos that I like. I want to be able to see the photos they have marked as good.

I set up http://phot.ographs.com/ in the hopes of finding more feeds I like. Here are the nuts and bolts of how it works:

The blog I set up at phot.ographs.com has the capability to mesh several feeds together. I set it up that way because I am hoping to find feeds of shared photographs that I also like. In this way, I see photos that are more relevant to my interests.

My question to the community is: Are any of you using Google Reader to share your favorite photographs? If so, please post the link to your shared feed. Here is mine: http://feeds.feedburner.com/phot_ographs

All of the photos are linked to their original location. In that way, all the work is always attributed to the original author. Each work is displayed with all the information the author included in the original blog post. In no way am I claiming any of this work. To the contrary, I am offering my endorsement for the photos that are part of the reading list.

The site is fueled by my viewing preferences coupled with an automated process that neither asks permission nor informs the author in a traditional sense.

Regarding your question about copyright notices appearing next to the photographs. I’m not quite sure what you mean by “free for the taking.” Can you expand on that?

I think Stumble Upon works best in a community. My user name is lmgotera, although I’m a bit unsure about how to add a community there.

It seems to me that as photographers we should be first in line to respect the intellectual property
of our peers/collegues. I’m not suggesting you committed some great sin but personally I wouldn’t
want my rss feed scraped and my images to appear on an aggregate site such as the one you’ve made.
It’s just my personal point of view but I think others would share the same point of view, but
with an automated rss scraping site like yours the individuals appearing on your site aren’t
getting the opportunity to say ‘no thanks’.

For me personally it would be different if someone said ‘hey i want to write a blurb about your work on
my blog and i’d like to include one of your pictures, is that ok?’ With this situation I have the
opportunity to decline and I know which image is going to be used and where.

There are a lot of rss scraping sites that take other people’s writing and photos and display them
on sites with advertising in an effort to use other people’s work to make money.

You’re not doing that and I think it’s great you’re not trying to profit from other peoples work but if
it were me I’d want to be asked, they are after all my pictures.

That’s just my 2 cents, other people’s change may vary.

I want to clarify on one point. My site is not an RSS scraping site. The only automated bit of it is that it posts what I have chosen to ask it to post.

I hear what you’re saying about wanting to be asked to place a photo somewhere else than one’s own site. I had never thought of endorsing photos as taking away from the original work so I had never thought to ask for permission to share the work.

If I may, I’ll explain my philosophy behind why I maintain phot.ographs.com.

There is an immense sea of content online. As more content is added I have found that looking for it in traditional ways such as search engines has become much less rewarding. I believe that there are other people online who have similar tastes and I want to be able to see what they are reading (or endorsing as good). In a way I am hoping to expand my list of friend advice to people I have not met. I know I can go to my friend’s house and look at the titles on their bookshelf. What I hope to accomplish with phot.ographs.com is to be able to peruse the virtual coffee tables of photography enthusiasts in order to discover new photography.

To address your question about asking permission. Let it be known that I will remove any post that the author does not want to be on my list of endorsed photographs.

http://mvlimbert.blogspot.com/

Cheers from the Detroit Metro area. M

www.DODGEnBURN.org

hope you enjoy

http://photojourno.blat.co.za

Shayne.

http://blog.ryanroco.com/

http://www.photobatam.blogspot.com

http://www.nohansland.com

Photo stories close to the heart that wouldn’t be published anywhere else.

Good day yall !!!

http://www.petemarovichimages.com/37thframe/

Thanks for looking

The ideal is to update the blog almost everyday
with a new image.

Basically to let people at the agency know what I’m up to. But might as well share x others…

It’s all about using the Canon G9 in documentary, journalism etc. for pro’s and keen photographer

http://polverino.blogspot.com/

http://www.12thpress.com/blog

the address is http://mikkotakkunen.com

I also keep updating a blog dedicated to providing good photojournalism related links (photo essays, interviews, multimedia…) from sites like New York Times, New Yorker, LA Times, Washington Post, TIME, Newsweek etc.

the address is http://photojournalismlinks.com

Take a look.

Cheers.

Mikko

http://chobiindia.blogspot.com

http://www.cannedhate.com/blog

http://fuerst.my-expressions.com

A mixed bag of all sorts of things…

I hope to post regularly in 2009. I was a little lazy in 2008.

Any updates we all need to know about? My plans for photoblogcentral have slip what with the move to London and such like.

Are there more blogs to know about?

All the best for 2009. See you back here later.

What happened with formating… Has it changed, how do we make link live?

http://www.orangeblob.com/blog/

Travel photos and the story behind them / technical specs of the photos etc. Also some other posts on tools/technology related to photography.

thanks!
tim

http://www.sakulsky.com/blog

it gets random…

http://armyphoto.wordpress.com

Hooah!

venividiphoto, travels&photography

http://venividiphoto.blogspot.com/

http://www.realworldworkflow.com

http://wdunleavy.wordpress.com

Still-Dancing Blog

Series and Exhibitions

milosdjuric.com Blog

if you like it, you can grab the rss-feed here: milosdjuric.com RSS

http://www.alphareporter.org/Carnets/Carnets.html
(in french)