Did Flickr kill the Photoblog star? Does it matter?

Nearly four years ago I started my photoblog at TheOtherMartinTaylor.com; for a few months before that I had used a fotolog.com to try out the visual blog concept before the Brazilian invasion.  At that time there was a lively and vigorous community of photobloggers on the web.  We met on line, we met in person; if you wanted to have a visual journal or project of some kind, the photoblog was the only game in town.

But shortly after I began, photobloggers started signing up for a new service called Flickr.  I resisted for a while as I didn't know what I needed a Flickr account for as I already had a 'real photoblog'. Like most photobloggers I caved and got a Flickr account; at first I used it to house my b-list pictures and photos of events, dogs and cameras. It was quite some time later before I got sucked into the community aspect of Flickr and I finally understood flickr's real power.

A lot of that old photoblog community have given up their photoblogs and most of the rest of us soldier on in obscurity.  Just about all of that old community are still on Flickr and probably taking more photos and interacting more than ever. So what happened to the photoblog?  It's strength and weakness are that it is infinitely more flexible and technical than Flickr.  Back in the day it required that you installed your own blog content management system on your own server.  Then you had to learn some propriety markup language hybridized with HTML to create templates that defined the look and functionality of your photoblog.  

Spam was/is also your own concern.  When Google rank was largely a matter of who linked to you and from where sleazy search engine optimizers quickly realized the potential power of blog comments.  It wasn't long before they have developed bots that searched out blogs running on specific software and tired to add comments to the blog linking back to some site selling porn, diet pills or the promise of a larger willie.  Google has since changed the influence of blog links and the CMS software tries to help bloggers manage spam and yet I doubt I'm in the unique position of receiving thousands (no exaggeration) spam comments and spam attempts on my blog for every one ligitimate comment I get these days.  Many photobloggers have surrender and just closed comments on their sites, but isn't a photoblog without comments just a gallery?

Another problem was that the community was dispersed.  We all used to hit photoblogs.org at least every other day and comment on each others photoblogs and follow each others RSS feeds but Flick has all that built in one place.  I still use my photoblog but less of the old photobloggers are out there; where once my RSS reader lit up with hundreds of new photoblog posts everyday, now it's down to a trickle.  I get my photo community almost exclusively via Flickr who filter all the junk and allow me to follow friends, peers and heros effortlessly. If you're a photography enthusiast of any standard or experience and you don't have a Flickr account you're the exception rather than the rule these days.

So, what is to become of the photoblog if the community aspect has largely been replaced by Flickr?  I still post things to Flickr that I wouldn't post to my photoblog.  My photoblog is reserved for my better shots, but those images are usually available in my Flickr stream too.  Yet, my photoblog is not a portfolio but is still a visual journal of some kind.  I don't think I am unusual among photobloggers in using Flickr as my day book, my photoblog as a more exclusive subset of my on going pictures, and having a portfolio somewhere else altogether. Does this make the photoblog largely irrelevant? I would argue that the photoblog still has its place especially if you want creative control on how your images are displayed and/or you want to mix in other kinds of media (text, sound, video, flash widgets, etc.)  One of the problems with Flickr is that you're always aware that you're inside Flickr.  The look and feel is very distinctive and, although this does allow the images to speak for themselves to some extent, it does add a uniform conformity that can wear you down after a while.  The community is huge and diverse but you can sucked into playing the popularity contest game.  If you want your pictures to be seen, and what's the point of making pictures not to be seen, you have to get involved in some Flickr politics which can be time consuming - images rarely get to the front page of explore from a newbie, with few contacts, few tags on the picture and without the picture being in many groups - it does happen but very rarely no matter how good the image.

For now I won't shutter up my old photoblog but if I were starting afresh I don't know if I would take the time to create my own half-waylimbo between Flickr and a portfolio. The photoblog doesn't seem to have the same relevance as it once had, in fact it feels decidedly old school today.  Photoblog stars have largely been superseded by Flickr Rock Stars.  Modest daily photoblog stats can't really compete with the many thousands of views per image the Flickr elite can achieve.  Does it matter?  As long as we can still find quality, innovative, inspiring pictures and a community to go with them, probably not.