Looking For a Pat On The Head?

By Chris GarrettAdvertising

After a year of signing up to Flickr I finally managed to get one of my photographs into their “interestingness” category. While not particularly very important to anyone outside the Flickr community I feel really pleased with myself that I produced something others quite like. People who regularly get into those lists turn out to be semi-celebrities, I have a long way to go before I get there. The warm fuzzy feeling I got from this experience made me realise something; part of why I blog is for “virtual pat on the head”.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not an attention seeker as such. Well, not to that extreme. I do think though one of the reasons I like to blog is for the comments. In the past I have thought I just like to share my thoughts on things but the buzz I got from this Flickr validation makes me think there is more to it. I am an intellectual narcissist!

Is there anything wrong with this? Initially I thought, oh my God next thing I will be signing up for “big brother” but I think I have enough of a grip on sanity for that to not happen. For a blogger it could actually be a good thing right? I mean, what it basically amounts to is wanting to be liked because of your thoughts and ideas? It’s kind of like being a performer but through a different medium.

The problem of course is providing I get enough validation I will not put as much effort into monetisation or promotion. I have actually seen this happen where things have been going well (in my mind) so I haven’t felt like I need to work quite as hard. Thank goodness for the Performancing BlogRank, Metrics, Alexa and other such measures. There is always another mountain to climb.

Am I alone in this or are you looking for a pat on the head too? Come on, give me some comments, I need the attention! Heh

powered by performancing firefox

10 thoughts on “Looking For a Pat On The Head?”

  1. geeksaresexy, that has to be the best kind of recognition – a pat on the head that pays!

  2. Having this kind of recognition from the community is awesome.. I just received a major “virtual pat on the head” yesterday when my blog was featured on the front page of http://www.blogger.com for 24 hours.

    The traffic it brought was quite exceptional

    and the traffic was of exceptional quality, people clicked on ads and linked back quite a lot..

    My 24 hours of fame

  3. I am assuming that there are secret water holes where somebody with the right privileges is picking up photos for interestingness manually. Nothing bad about it just interesting 🙂

  4. It is an algorithm but nobody knows what the secret sauce is. Apparently putting it in a lot of groups lowers its interestingness, as does comments from your own contacts. From what I hear lots of favourites and comments from people you don’t know are the main things. Thing is my pic didnt have many of either

  5. Re: NYT account … Oops, I posted it yesterday on my site and it was freely available. Thanks for the hint.

    Re: Interestingness … Somebody must have chosen it manually. The numbers aren’t so high (90 views, 5 favs). It seems to me that putting pictures into the main Flickr groups FlickrCentral and Flickr Syndicate must have some influence. Interesting …

  7. You’ve got talent Chris. Next thing you know you’ll be leaving us for professional photography?

  8. I know what you mean Chris. I think a lot of blogging is about validating one’s identity – and I posted about it yesterday here

    It occurred to me that some people just don’t feel comfortable sharing their identity with ‘strangers’ on the Internet and therefore don’t comment or post. Others, perhaps like you and me, do feel more comfortable and actually feel validated when people identify with our points of view.

    Thanks for the post – very thought provoking.

  9. Thanks for the link Markus. I’m not sure what made it interesting, I didn’t do anything I don’t do ordinarily. Just luck I guess, must have been a slow day!

    If you are interested it was this pic
    Grazing

    (You need a NYtimes account to see markus’ linked article but you can always use BugMeNot.com)

  10. Congratulations!

    What did you or the Flickr community do for your picture to receive interestingness?

    May I point your attention to a very valuable and recommended New York Times article which says everything about getting compliments:

    What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage

    This is definitely also a good analogy for many things related to blogging.

Comments are closed.