Views

At the top of your Flickr account, should you have one, is a count of the number of “views” you’ve had. This, I believe, counts the number of times your photos have been loaded up on their own pages on Flickr and doesn’t count remote hosting (such as when I post to this blog) or viewing in RSS feeds. Last Monday my views passed 100,000. To put this in some perspective, most of the other Flickr users I’ve asked (which, to be honest, is about four) have between 1,000 and 6,000 views. I was rather chuffed.

A week later I had 102,000 views. That’s two thousand in a week. That’s actually quite a lot. I got a bit suspicious.

There are a number of explanations for this.

1) I’m a shockingly popular and everyone loves my photos. Actually I’ve got a fairly average rep for someone who’s been on Flickr for two years. 186 people have me as a contact and my photos get between 5 and 20 views in their first day or so of being uploaded. I’ve also been concentrating on the Birmingham photo scene a lot this year and don’t post to themed or popular groups that much. I might have a tangible rep within my niche but I’m no Laura Kicey. So that’s not the answer.

2) I’m a Pool Tart. Check this guy’s photo out. It’s a pretty good photo and its owner is somewhat proud that it’s been viewed 9,250 times. But look down the sidebar at how many groups he’s submitted it to. I don’t do this, partly because Flickr make it quite longwinded to spam the groups and partly because it really fucking annoys me when people spam groups I administer. So that’s not the answer.

3) I’m a Tag Whore. Generally I like to tag my photos properly. Some people don’t. Like this cock who has tagged his stupid Flickr Badge with seemingly every word in the dictionary and then some. I found this because he’d used one of our deliberately obscure Birmingham Flickrmeet tags, jqfm2006. The prick. By polluting the tag system he’s gathered 1,970 views for this “photo”. Needless to say I don’t do this, so that’s not the answer.

4) The hits are coming from somewhere else and have nothing to do with my activities on Flickr. I think this is the answer.

Here’s a mirror of my Most Viewed Photos page (you can’t see it on Flickr itself unless you’re me). You’ll hopefully notice this doesn’t have many of my “better” photos and bears no relation to my personal Top 100, something that has often bugged me. Number one is the Working Gloves montage with 2050 views which gave me an enormous clue. The related Working Gloves blog post on this site is one of my main Google honeypots, gathering (until I closed comments on old posts) 67 messages from Pakistani glove exporters who thought I was a shop which in turn got it indexed as the prime directory for Pakistani glove exporters, so the Flickr views are probably coming from here. Down at number nine is Polysics – Fumi, taken at their Barfly gig last November (and, I should add, one I’m quite proud of). Out of curiosity I Googled polysics photo and there it is at number three. Same goes for (sigh…) Monkey Penis.

Nuff said.

So having made stats watching utterly pointless for my blog Google has fucked up my Flickr stats as well, which isn’t that surprising given how much I link to my Flickr stream from here. It’s kinda ironic that while half the world is scrambling by means fair or foul to get up the Google tree here I am with PageRank of 6 (which in turn has given my Flickr stream a PR of 5) and it’s a mild irritant.

In some ways it’s nice to be this visible but in others it’s a bit of a pain. I’m sure a significant number of valued long-term readers came here via a random Google search but they only add up to a few dozen. The hundreds of thousands of others mostly come here by mistake and take the blog completely out of context and I could do without them. The reason I closed comments on all my older posts wasn’t because of spam (touch wood that’s reasonably under control right now) but because idiots who couldn’t read were leaving comments that showed off their inability to use a keyboard and it was getting boring. That said, I’m not ready to enter the gated community environment of LiveJournal or Vox or to strip down my RSS feed and stop search engines indexing me. I’m kinda stuck in the middle ground.

Moan over.