How Photobloggers are Framing a New Computerization Movement

Photoblogging, photo-sharing, and other internet activities geared toward enabling photography as a central purpose have been growing in number and popularity in the last several years. Photographs have been part of websites since the beginning of the graphical internet era ushered in by the Netscape browser. However, only recently have sites appeared that are geared toward sharing photographs as a central concern rather than just one element of a website really started to spring up. Flickr.com, for instance, was founded in 2004 and photoblogs.org was founded in 2002. Most other photo-sharing websites were started in the last 2-3 years (see Table 1 below for details). Due to their novelty, relatively little research has been done into the nature of photo-centric websites. In particular, there has not yet been 1) a systematic accounting of the landscape of photo-centric websites and a description of how they are being used, 2) an analysis comparing photoblogging and more generic photo-sharing sites, nor 3) a discussion of whether these represent a potential long-term computerization movement in photography or a short-lived fad. This paper is an early attempt to address these issues by presenting some preliminary research data on photoblogger's behaviors.