PHOTO-SHARING APPS command riveting attention on social networking sites, something an analysis of my Flickr photostream documents. With more than 700 people visiting my Flickr collection every day, it's an important adjunct to my online presence.
I am trying to illustrate every blog post with an image from my Flickr collection and I am trying to optimise the sidebar content on my blog with fast-loading thumbnails drawn from Flickr. I know some visitors like to come and look--just look at images--and then they leave my blog behind. Sometimes a well-illustrated blog post keeps visitors looking for more than 15 seconds.
My most popular image of 2011, with more than 14,000 views in 2011, is a screenshot describing How to Lose a Job on Facebook. The stats on my other frequently-viewed photos pale by comparison.
More than 12,000 people looked up a YouTube logo that I'm using in one of my creative multimedia modules at LIT-CLonmel.
And just over 8,000 people stopped to look at a shot taken by a Chinese student of the Chinese Tibetan Himalayans moving it up to 21,335 views.
Over on my main Flickr site (the one I use with my mobile apps), Sam the ugliest Dog clocked up another 38,334 views, pushing his total count to 138956visits. He also has a long tail effect on my blog and he illustrates this blog post.
More than 80,700 people have seen the Tampon Chandelier, well above the total footfall that piece of art enjoyed at La Beinalle where I snapped it.
And just under 1,000 people a month (now 49,981 in total) looked at a shot of an oil depot burning during Hurricane Katrina.
A lot of people think Flickr is waning and hipsters point to the rabid communities springing up on easy apps like Instragram and PicPlz. I'm topgold on both of them and know that I'll get ten times more views of photos I share on those networks so I think I'll start pushing the best of my Flickr shots onto the two most popular photo-sharing apps (Instagram and PicPlz).
At the end of 2011, my Irisheyes photostream had been viewed 186,056 times and 78,851 people had viewed the Topgold photostream. Paul Watson earns a gold star for being the most frequent visitor.
