Deborah Lipp

I’ve been spending way too much time browsing images at Flickr. There are just so darn many of them–millions of them, with tens of thousands more being uploaded every day. I find it fascinating to browse at (more or less) random…and I end up killing hours at a time.

Not everyone renames the images they upload; a lot of the images are just titled with whatever image number the camera gave them. Of these, some have tags or descriptions, but others have no contextual information at all. I find this irritating. I also find it intriguing. Browsing untitled images, I’ve run across wedding photos, unidentified landscapes, a picture of a guy throwing up, a photo of a tank in Afghanistan. You could find anything.

And I had an idea: random Flickr-blogging.

So now I’m recruiting bloggers to participate.

Here’s how it works:

1. Every week, we all start with the same randomly-generated four-digit number (call it ####).
2. Go to Flickr and search for “IMG_####”. There should be anywhere from a few hundred to a couple thousand results.
3. Choose an image from among the results, post it to your blog (be sure to include attribution and a link back to the page where the image appears–this is done automatically if you use the ‘blog this’ feature in Flickr).
4. The rest is up to you. Write about the place shown in the image. Make up a story about it. Connect it to some issue you care about. Or just post it as an image you really like. Do whatever you want.

I’m going to start doing this on Mondays (because Mondays really need more amusement). If anyone is interested in participating, post in comments or e-mail me at tvhilton [AT] gmail [DOT] com. The more bloggers we get on board, the more interesting it’ll be.

Update: Debra, Maurinsky, SAP, Nobody in Particular, Ben Varkentine, and Foxydot are all joining the fun.

[Cross-posted at If I Ran the Zoo]