43,000 Google hits today for Whuffie, Cory Doctorow’s brilliant creation (which I suppose began life as a sniglet, but by now has passed into more general currency). And I discover that adding a single tag in Flickr (it was ‘tintype’) applied to 25 or so images got an immediate response from five old photo enthusiasts, who added me as a Flickr Contact. That’s more (and more instantaneous) attention than any of my previous cyberspace efforts have ever garnered, and there’s a lesson or two in that.
On the one hand, vernacular photography is of broader (and maybe deeper) interest to more people than maunderings about coulda shoulda in Education, and on the other hand, tagging really works when one plunges into it as a medium of social exchange. Neither observation is really news…