Work(ing Title)

This morning Marco Arment wrote:

Dear internet “social media experts”:

I really, really don’t care which office or restaurant you’re sitting in and checking into Foursquare from.

It’s important to balance the abundance of cheap, widespread internet publishing with appropriate considerations for your intended audience. If you’re trying to be interesting to anyone beyond… yourself, you have to consider whether anyone else in the world will benefit from spending a tiny slice of their time learning where you’re having coffee or holding a meeting.

This isn’t to say that such posts can’t contain other value. On the contrary, many of my favorite internet writers (like meaghano) write amusing, insightful, or touching stories around the trivial task of getting coffee. But when you tell Foursquare or Brightkite to automatically publish your location to Tumblr or Twitter, that’s not adding any value.

If your location isn’t interesting enough for you to manually write a post about it for some reason, why should your audience spend their time reading about it?

My experience using foursquare and Loquacious have developed a somewhat contrary opinion to Marco here. From the out I believe it’s important to state that I think Marco is a brilliant developer, and anyone who uses Tumblr or Instapaper should be glad he’s doing what he does. I’m not writing to pick a fight or insinuate that I believe he’s anything less than an inspired individual. That said, I think he’s going down the wrong road. Also, I don’t let foursquare publish to my Twitter stream, but I do allow Spymaster, and I’ve heard similar criticism of it.

First, foursquare evolves the criticism I’ve heard about Twitter time and time again, and the main point I believe Marco’s making: “Why do I care about your ____?” While those friends of mine who live in Washington may find value in some of my tweets, they almost certainly don’t give a shit when foursquare notifies them (on my behalf) that I’ve stopped into Mojo Bicycle Cafe. However, that information can be of value to say, the friends I have who find themselves nearby Mojo when they read that tweet; They have some amount of encouragement to swing by and join me for a pint. The point here is that each tweet I publish has a different potential value for each person who reads it.

Second, while I was in New York last month my good friend Niall Kennedy loaned me his HTC Magic in order to get a feel for Android 2.0 (I’m a big fan). One of the applications I used while carrying the phone was the Loquacious Twitter client. The killer feature here is the app’s ability to filter out things from my Twitter stream. Specifically, Loquacious gives me the ability to select particular users or services that I don’t want to see on my phone. Anyone who considers themselves a serious Twitter user probably has feelings similar to mine and Marco’s, where there may be users (or services) which publish what they believe is low-value information. By having the option of pruning my Twitter reading, I was able increase the value of my stream as a whole. A perfect example here is Urban Journal; when I’m sitting at my desk, the tweets about new posts to this blog are of high value to me, whereas when I was walking around Brooklyn, those same tweets were of significantly lesser value.

What my experience with Twitter and Loquacious have shown me is that intelligent software design can be a more effective means of resolving the sorts of criticisms of technology that Marco makes, rather than trying to directly influence how people choose to use those same technologies. I believe there’s a ‘lazyweb’ request here for developers start to consider the different conditions under which the value of communications change. If a future version of Loquacious (or Tweetie, or Peep, or TweetGenius) included support for location-based filtering of my Twitter stream, they’ll have my money shortly thereafter.

has been brewing in my world for some time now, and with this most recent batch of photos staring back at me, I believe it’s time to describe the problem ‘out loud’ in hopes that some clarity will develop.

Speaking in extremely rough estimates, each time I pick up my camera I come back with around 100 RAW images (sometimes I don’t feel so inspired and I end up with 20-50, while other times I’m in the zone and I end up with 200 or more). Each of these events creates a multi-stage processing commitment of 1-2 hours: an initial review to delete failed images, anywhere between one and three rounds of curating in order to ‘tell the story’ of that event effectively, the Photoshop work to make them all beautiful, renaming and tagging of the finished collection, and finally determining which photos are suitable for publication (not everything I shoot gets out to Flickr).

Given how inordinately easy it is to capture an event, when compared with the time and attention necessary to produce a finished product that satisfies me, I find myself with a perpetual backlog of photos. Paraphrased below are the great many conversations I have which speak to this backlog:

Them: Hey, when the fuck am I going to see the photos you shot?!

Us: It’s slightly more complicated than that dickweed.

Then, once I finally get through my process:

Them: Wow thank you! You made me look like a god-damned supermodel.

Us: You’re welcome cunt.

I’m thrilled and flattered to get the sort of response I do from my friends and family, whether it comes in the form of emails, comments in my photostream, or noticing my work in new social profile portraits; I just wish there was a way to minimize the frequency of those first conversations. However, a significant motivation for me to photograph anything in the first place is the selfish desire to document my own life. There are few things I find as enjoyable than looking back at old photos–they’re a fantastic memory accelerator.

One of the difficult philosophical issues here is how do I view photos as a medium? They occupy space both in art and journalism. I’ve always recommended to the less-nerdy of my friends that big cameras are worth lugging around if your goal is to create beautiful imagery, while tiny (read: phone) cameras are perfect for recording moments in time. However the fact is that these two goals are rarely disconnected; the most exquisite photograph often has a story to tell, and the frozen piece of a story can also be art. Journalism should be prompt, whereas art is (relatively speaking) timeless.

Fundamentally I think the only solution here is to make processing my photos a higher priority when I sit down at my desk, but that’s just a fancy way of saying I should procrastinate less (and we all know how easy that is to resolve).

Postscript - Still feel relatively fucked in how to deal with this, but somewhat more motivated.