hydrangea blossoming

hydrangea blossoming
Hydrangea on the Edge of Blooming

Friday, October 2, 2009

Where in Point Roberts?

We have been taken with Flickr, which, for those of you who don’t know, is a website where you can store your digital photos and where people whom you choose can go to look at your photos.  I started using flickr for the blog because it let me put a bunch of pictures about a single subject (like the July 4th parade) in one place for people to easily look at when I couldn’t put that many pictures on the blog easily or at all.

But now Ed has shown me things about Flickr that I didn’t know.  First of all, you have to know that Flickr has millions of users worldwide.  The other day, I was uploading a single photo and the site informed me casually that, during the last 5 minutes, over 5,000 photos had been uploaded.  Day in, day out, people are putting pictures of their cats and kids, of their vacations and their work products and their anything and everything up on the net, most of them for us all to see.  Those are all individual users (and use is free, although if you want to use more space/upload higher resolution photos or do various more complicated things, there is a small yearly charge).

Many of these users have, in the social network way we now are learning to deal with, also voluntarily joined themselves together into groups with a very particular common interest.  Groups are constituted by some kind of unique subject matter.  There are groups  that include photos only of pink flowers, of golden retrievers (every picture is exactly alike here, of course), of seeds, of trees, of stick figures in peril; there are about 50 different groups about quilts, each one focusing on a somewhat different aspect of what a quilt could be about.

We have barely looked at the extent of these groups because we are currently stuck on a group called ‘Where in Vancouver?’  This group has 750 members and the members post photos of places/things/phenomena in Vancouver and  the other members try to figure out exactly where in greater Vancouver a picture was taken.  Currently we have achieved two points for being the first person to identify a photo (one was of a ship in Burrard Inlet facing West Vancouver; the other the ‘reducing congestion’ sign out by the Port Mann Bridge).

So we were thinking about starting a Flickr group called ‘Where in Point Roberts?’  If there are 750 people in Vancouver’s group, there would be about 1 person in the Point Roberts group, so we may not rush to do this.  But until we do get around to doing that, here is the blog’s ‘Where in Point Roberts?’



Post your answer in the comments.  You don’t have to leave your name.

[I’m not sure who can look at what on Flickr, but here’s the link to the ‘Where in Vancouver?’ page, in case it’s just open for anybody.  You can’t post an answer if you don’t have an account (the free kind), though.]

2 comments:

geonrose said...

I think that's over on Marine Drive, north of Lighthouse park but South of the Reef Tavern. I know I've seen it via bicycle, but forget exactly where. There's an even funnier mailbox over there of the back end of a cow! What the postman thinks as he opens it to insert the mail I can only imagine.

Rose

judy ross said...

yes, on marine drive, but it is the marker for something else other than an interesting mailbox...