The reason I can use this photo above to illustrate this nomination for Best Group Blog in the Cliopatria Awards is because of the blog I’m nominating, the Chiron Photo Pool on Flickr. I’ll admit there might be a few problems with this nomination, so I’ll explain why Chiron would be an excellent choice for a Clio.
First off, is it a blog? Yes it is. Flickr is effectively photoblogging software. You upload entries like you would for any other blog, you can leave comments, you have an RSS feed. You have pages where you can see multiple entries and can click on individual entries, and there’s a basic chronological navigation with the photostream. It is blogging software. I’ll concede it might not sometime look like it, which is the next problem.
Is photoblogging really blogging? Yes it is. Take a look at this entry from Irayholly. Photo and political comment, that is more than you got on text blogs for that day. It’s a means of expression. But while the individual accounts are individual blogs, is Chiron really a group blog, after all it’s just bits of entries from these individual blogs.
Yes it is, and this is where Chiron gets really interesting. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve fallen asleep while a literature student has tried saying HTML is radical because it’s non-linear. It’s like no-one’s ever read a dictionary or encyclopaedia, dipping into and out entries is not in itself radical. Chiron is more interesting because clicking on the thumbnails takes you to the individual entry. Here you have the individual’s navigation stream and the Chiron stream. Additionally you can have many other streams as well meaning you have the photo in all sorts of varying contexts. Clicking on any individual entry can take you on a strange and surreal safari of wild associations between photos. It sounds like anarchy and this is where Chiron gets even better.
It is pretty rigidly themed. Chiron is a group blog of photos for the Classical world, which is the bits invaded by Greece or Rome. Additionally the photos are supposed to be all licenced with Creative Commons licences. The licences vary. Some are free for any use. Many have ‘no-derivatives’ as a condition, which is why you don’t have a mosaic above. Many have ‘non-commercial’ as a condition, which is a shame if you’re on a Wordpress.com blog (Wordpress.com puts adverts on your pages in some circumstances), but the result is a flexible but coherent blog where anyone can contribute. This occasionally means you’ll find a photo by someone who doesn’t understand what Creative Commons is, but on the whole it’s a great source of photos to use in other blogs or in lectures.
It’s also a fantastic example of a collaborative effort which works despite very little visible administration. The admin is done by the people at Chironweb, a Spanish web hub for the classics, but the pool itself is, within its rules, a bit of a free-for-all and as a result there’s now over 16,000 photos from over 250 members on all sorts of topics, tagged in many different languages, connected to the ancient world. It’s a great example of what you can do on the web which you simply could not by traditional means.
The most amazing thing is that I haven’t seen any major societies rip-off the idea for themselves. With the fuss being made recently over collections like the one from Time/Life going online you would have thought someone would have realised that their members were collectively possessing a major asset. When they finally do, their photobank will look something like Chiron.
