“The way you make yourself valuable on the web is you edit the fucking web for people.” Yaaaay Jay! Be an intelligent filter! – via Rachel Sklar quoting Jay Rosen
On a daily basis there’s plenty of good photography related information floating around the web but most of it’s not really worth a full blog entry, especially if you’re only going to contribute to the echo-chamber effect which is very prevalent around the photography blogs. My solution for this is to use Twitter and Tumblr for the daily tidbits. I want this blog to be primarily for promoting new content and LPV related news and not re-hashing what others are doing. As the regular readers of this blog know, I tend to prefer purely visual blog posts. I’m not against writing or dialogue but for me so much of what I read on the web about photography is just hot air. I enjoy some of the interviews and more well thought out essays but most of the daily writing could be summed up on Twitter.
Editors and curators have an obligation to reduce the amount of noise on the web by becoming diligent, trusted filters. Of course, some will claim that Twitter is nothing but noise and I can see their point to a certain degree, but I’d much rather have it filtered there where you’re limited to 140 characters than on a blog where you can ramble til no end.
Tumblr fits into all this by creating a place for the one off visual content that you come across on a daily basis. I consider it the LPV back room, a place where I can pass on photography and art related content that caught my attention. I know there are people that feel overwhelmed by the number of feeds and such, but this is the reality of content distribution on the web right now. I know people that only grab content from Twitter and others that only use RSS or bookmarks. For me, different types of content require different distribution methods.
I hate to sound like a Twitter evangelist, but I would encourage all photographers, bloggers and editors to use it. There are several prominent photography blogs up already and a good number of interesting photographers as well.
