Attention!

weighty sign
People clearly have different motives for signing up to a photosharing site. My original motivation was to create a bank of pictures online that I could use on this blog. Since then things have changed a little - friends, family and a few online acquaintances will, from time to time, visit and comment on my photostream. I enjoy playing a small part in this community. This is quite a typical story of social networking. I’m aware that for others popularity/ attention is a strong drive. If you’re one of those, then Thomas Hawk has 10 tips for getting attention that you might like to look at. But of course it’s not a simple divide between attention-seekers and the rest. I quite regularly check on the popularity of my pics (mostly because it’s an accessible feature and partly because it’s nice to get some approval). The fastest climbing picture in my ‘views’ count is shown above. It’s a quite unremarkable picture of an icon on my daughter’s door. Posted on January 8th it’s now at Number 11 out of the 200 listed why? I guess it’s the tags. I’ve noticed ‘home’ and ‘house’ always attract attention (interesting)… ‘sign’ isn’t exactly a crowd-puller. So I guess it must be ‘weights’ and ‘lifting’. Now I’m running an experiment. I’m going to give the same tags and title to a random image and see how it goes on the ratings. There’s nothing better than a bit of attention, after all.