Blogs, Photos, Flickr, Community and "The Gates"

One of the reasons I decided to do a blog was to "force" myself to learn a bunch of new things about using the Internet. The way blogger's photo tool works you can only put one photo in an entry. Elise Bernard told me about Flickr which is an online photo service that provides a way to link other photos within a single blog entry.

Flickr is also an online photo community in and of itself, and you can click on "Everyone's Photos" and look at other people's work (if they set it to be open). Like Napster and other peer-to-peer Internet-based software tools and applications, such as Skype (which I don't have, but read an article yesterday about random Skype-calling, and the story involved John Perry Barlow who first wrote about it here) , it really has the opportunity to change how we connect in ways that are mind blowing.

Anyway, yesterday I was clicking on various photostreams and came across a number of interesting collections. Two people have some great sets of photos about "The Gates" in Central Park. I managed to not get up to see the installation, and reading various newspaper accounts, I thought that it was okay (I wish they'd been around a few weeks longer). But now, after seeing more photos, I have some deeper regrets that I missed it.

You can go back and forth about high art, low art, participation in the arts, and community building, but I think the power of the photos from Central Park shows that having an interesting reason for people to come out and explore at a time when they normally wouldn't, may be worthwhile in and of itself. Although I will say I like "The Gates" and its setting more than the more tourist-oriented Pandas, Donkeys, etc. (See this entry from DCist.)

These two galleries are photos of "The Gates." I recommended looking at them as a slide show with a duration of no more than 1.5-2 seconds per shot. Hbomb1947's collection is here and Stan Cherian's photos are here.

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Update: Harvey Silikovitz, hbomb1947, sent me this email: "I am flattered that you linked to my pictures from your blog. I would like to point out that I have a set of my Gates pictures. In that set, the pictures are arranged in a particular order, to kind of tell a story. Perhaps you might want to link to my set." I recommend that you go back and look at these photos the way Harvey would like us to see them.
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Photo by sytelus. I have no idea who these people are and what they do, but I definitely appreciate their work and the access to it that they give to us.

Here are 7,812 photos tagged as "The Gates" that you can view. Granted, not all of them are from Christo and Jeanne-Claude's "The Gates" installation, they are photos tagged as "Gates" so they can be anything, but most of the photos are "The Gates" related, and again, it's a pretty amazing thing to watch, kind of like the movie Koyanisquatsi.

Amazing.