Five Years Ago on Flickr

FIVE YEARS AGO, FLICKR LAUNCHED during ETech at 2315 Irish time during the “Virtual Worlds, Distributed Interaction: Extending a MMOG with Remote Scripting, IM, Mobiles and REST” panel. I'm looking forward to how Flickr will celebrate its fifth birthday. I was late to the party, posting my first Flickr image on 30 June 2004. It was a screenshot of Konfabulato. at left. I snapped a shot of a duck mirror a few months later on a second Flickr account. And I started sharing homeless dogs on a third account. Some Flickr staffers didn't like me spawning multiple accounts but that's something I normally do everywhere. (Everyone needs three Twitter identities, I think.)  Back then, I was thinking about putting Irish artist Francis Tansey on my desktop, and possibly giving him some search engine boosting by writing about his work. Along with creative multimedia students that I took into Tansey's Bennetsbridge studio, I like Tansey's big art and I like knowing it takes technical skill to mix the polymers for canvas paintings that can be rolled, shipped, unrolled and stretched. You don't learn that skill overnight. And I don't think I've ever seen the haunting depth of blue and red that Francis Tansey can paint on canvas. His work makes abstract concepts of technology come alive for me.

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Heather Champ -- "Five years ago today" on the Flickr blog.
Bernie Goldbach -- "Francis Tansey as desktop"on Irish Typepad, 10 Feb 04.

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