Google And Photography Thursday September 6, 2007
I don’t understand Google. The current trend seems to dislike them as an empire-building monolith, but I liked them when I first saw their totally clean, white, uncluttered search engine with the best search results. All the others, Yahoo, Excite, MSN etc were full of flashy, buy-me advertising bullshit and it was and still is nasty. Google has quietly moved into all kinds of other areas, notable perhaps for buying up the newsgroups a few years ago – but the information in the latter, such as it is, became more accessible and potentially coherent. I liked seeing them owned by Google. I like their business model: produce a great service, get everyone to like you, and continue in the same way into other areas. If it grows and grows…well I don’t object to that.
Today, September 6th 2007 I get a third page rating for “street photography”. Here it is, though ratings slip and slide around and if you read this at another time it won’t necessarily be the same. But here is it, for today.
My little site gets a third page ranking in the entire world, for my article on street photography. I’ve had similar results in other topics and subjects; they do change, as I said above, but some are still current. I’ve even had top, first place rankings on some subjects like those associated with “jazz photography” and first page rankings for “mountain photography”. Indeed, check this out: I am currently top in the world, number one, for mountain photography advice
And this (addendum): at 11/09/07 I even beat the BBC itself in searches for Wainwrights Walks BBC
I don’t understand Google and how it works, but thanks guys. I like to think of the internet as an empowering and democratising medium, and I think initially five or ten years ago it was that. People put up their little home pages, and if they were interesting folk would wander by and read them instead of browsing AOL. Sadly it’s not like that any more; big players moved in like Microsoft and AOL and their content now dominates the internet as a parallel to what happens in other media. Even the so-called blogs are largely dominated by an A List group who work in the media; they are effectively an extension of the latter. Personal home pages didn’t have a chance; I remember for example reading someone say if they get a good idea anyone else can steal it, improve it, and post it at AOL and AOL get the benefit, not the poor dude or dudette quietly tapping away on their keyboard in the bedroom, while wife or husband keeps telling them to come to bed.
James Lomax Towers is not exactly aiming for world domination. Indeed, it’s pretty quiet around here. In some ways I like that, and I’m actually ambivalent about the idea of getting heavy traffic and a big audience. Heavy traffic on motorways is grim; some of the cars are nice BMWs but lots of them are old, unwashed, and unattractive (like mine, heh). But while everyone else is scrabbling around with mutual links, trackbacks, meta tags, and weird stuff I don’t understand and have no interest in researching (Diggit, Delicious, what the hell is all this nonsense?), I just keep posting my photography and writing stuff. The current fashion is referring to ‘Web 2’, and all that means is you produce your own content, seen most notably at YouTube. It’s more nonsense: the internet started with people making their little home pages, it’s not suddenly become a medium where you make your own stuff. Sure, the networking potential is massively advanced and most important of all, bandwidth is no longer a problem even for video. But whether it’s a home page in crude HTML or an amateur video at YouTube with all the groovy Diggit, Delicious, CheckItOutEveryoneYeah associated nonsense, it’s still just people making stuff.
But thanks Google for placing me on the third rank page in the world, today, for “street photography”. You’ve given me even more impressive results than that, sometimes first page and even top entry (“mountain photography advice”), but I forgot to thank you for that so here it is.
I don’t understand it (I have no illusion that my writing deserves a place on Mount Olympus), but it’s pretty nice. Indeed, it affirms what I’d like to think about the internet, that it’s democratising and empowering for quiet dudes tapping away on keyboards in their bedroom…even if mine is in my lounge, and there’s no wife in bed complaining about me working.
Comment
