Poor composition, haphazard arrangement; the orange and white check pattern of the bedspread beneath it all.

Impressed with the amount of quality items in the tote bag — posters, notebooks, stickers, candies, graphics and papers — I hastily arranged everything into a sort of aesthetic garbage pile and snapped off two shots. It was a moment of documentation, if anything.

On the return from Lisbon, I selected a set of photographs from the trip which I felt best captured the experience. A quick upload to Flickr, with appropriate Creative Commons licences and tags. It was the ‘uxlx‘ tag that garnered the most attention. The curators of UX Lisbon tracked the social media response to the conference, and quite effectively promoted the results. They were quick to integrate public-sourced photographs back into their website for future events. Including, a sneak peek of the gift bag conference attendees receive.

Less than a year later, that photograph has reached over one thousand unique views: the large majority of referrers are from ux-lx.com.

In retrospect, had I known the image would prove so popular I might have taken the time to arrange a proper shot. It’s nearly taken for granted that the power and influence of social media can return such gains from very little effort. Significant exposure on the wings of quick and dirty categorization — accidental success. Consider the possibilities inherent with consistent effort, energy and focus.

This is my Moleskine notebook. I have a number of Moleskines in any number of formats and sizes, but this is the only one that matters. I purchased it four years ago. It contains notes, sketches, recipes, hand-drawn maps, addresses, phone numbers and countless half-formed thoughts written in moments of inspiration or intoxication. So much information, in fact, that I have exhausted the available writing surface. The notebook is set to be retired this week; an identical Moleskine will replace it. The pages of the new notebook will slowly fill, the spine will deteriorate and everything will start anew.

1. Gallery is a wonderful, robust open-source platform for hosting and sharing photographs on a personal website. Unfortunately, the larger the database gets the slower it runs. The interface, while infinitely customizable, isn’t particularly user-friendly (an aside: the beta for 3.0 looks very promising, and I would encourage others to give it a try). Flickr exists to host and transfer tremendous amounts of data to users quickly.
2. The social networking aspects of Flickr are unparalleled and steadily growing. Flickr can be seamlessly woven into dozens of applications and services — and where a gap exists, an API sits ready.
3. The community at Flickr. As I connect with others and add contacts, I am committing myself to a community that encourages sharing and networking. Hosted here, I am only responsible to myself. Two years passed as I delayed uploading photos from my trips to Europe. With a firm deadline and the knowledge that people will be actively viewing new images, I pushed through and finally finished what I started.
4. A simple, transparent method for implementing Creative Commons licensing.

The first attempt at integration with this site will be via the Flickr Gallery plugin by Dan Coulter. There seems to be quite a few options out of the box, but it also looks to have excellent support for the Flickr API search method, which allows for a great deal of flexibility.

The existing albums at arcade will remain live indefinitely. I was less selective when posting photos to Gallery, so there may be value in the additional images that haven’t been migrated.