One of my 2009 resolutions was to try to do a better job with this blog.  Keep it simpler and more frequent.  Not daily, ok, but hopefully once every month or so, or who knows, maybe more?

I’ve been going over my website traffic numbers lately, hadn’t paid attention for a while.  I was not displeased to find that 5687 people (supposedly unique) visited my website last year; there were 8394 total visits.  (That’s up from 1518 people in 2007, to put it in perspective).  Moreover, a bit over 10% of these visits lasted 5 minutes or longer; that’s supposed to be a quite good ratio, actually.  It’s a good feeling to note that I am not quite invisible; my thanks to all of you.

Before going any further, I would like to headline my interview/featured artist page on MTLS, the Maple Tree Literary Supplement.  It should be up for the next couple of months in the current edition, and afterwards will still be available in the archived issues.

Since the interview was conducted over the internet – Patrick would send me a new pair of questions every week or so, and I would mull over my answers for a day or two – doing this interview was actually quite pleasant.  I was happy to be able to give reflective and well thought-out responses, instead of worrying endlessly beforehand, “hmm, what would I answer if he asked such and such,” and during, feeling hints of panic and “oh no my mind is blank!”.

I’ve been greatly taken with that photo phenomenon, Flickr, lately.  My photostream has been rapidly evolving:

I signed up in the last couple days of 2008 to host a bunch of thumbnail versions of images from this website.  I needed the images online to experiment with a databasing program (http://dabbledb.com/ — more about this in another entry to come) that I have been using to try to organize all my data on my work.  I couldn’t access my website at that particular moment, so I signed up with Flickr and stuck the thumbnails there in a matter of minutes — one of the joys of Flickr is the ease of posting.  (I soon realized this was an inappropriate use of Flickr and put the thumbnails on my own site; funny bit about this later).

I then thought, well hmm, while I’m here…. I’ve been meaning to share some of my photos, on an informal basis – to let some more of the nearly 2000 photos I took in 2008 have some chance at life beyond a dark corner of my HD on the one hand, or making it to the two dozen or so that I either published as finished work on their own, or incorporated into mixed-media digital prints. (In fact I meant to do that in this blog last year, but never got around to it).  So I cleaned up some photos and posted them up; it was liberating working with photos for web, a less serious prospect than for print edition.

At the next level, instead of just putting up pictures where friends, or my website visitors (once I get around to putting the link on my website, which won’t be till I post this blog…), might go to see them, i.e. using Flickr as a static repository of images, I quickly became interested in the community aspect of it – the seeing of others’ photography, and having others view one’s work.  This latter doesn’t happen without working at it – but it is straightforward and enjoyable work.  Find groups of work you enjoy, submit your work, find pieces of others’ work that you like, comment on them, favorite them if you like the work a lot, put them as contacts if they have many such pieces…rinse and repeat.  And all that looking at other people’s art hones one’s aesthetic senses and inspires one with new ideas.

Of course the whole process functions better when one shows top quality work, so, without abandoning my posting of “other photos”, I’ve also been posting a lot of finished artwork (pieces on this website), first the ice-storm photos and then my abstract art, moving to concentrate my networking efforts to what is closest to my heart.

As I started putting up my abstract art, people started commenting, favoriting and inviting me to post my thumbnails, which I meant to take off, but hadn’t done so yet.  (they were linked to my website, so people weren’t necessarily making their judgements based only on the thumbnail…) That wouldn’t do…  Encouraged me to get my act together and get them off of there pronto.

Networking on Flickr has had interesting effects on my website traffic.  My average traffic last year was 23 visits per day.  This month I have had spikes of 54 visits on Jan 8, and 250 visits on Jan 16.  I think it’s no coincidence that my Flickr stats show spikes on the same days.  (Not that all those people come directly from Flickr.  On Jan 16, I apparently caught a “Stumbleupon” wave  (the social bookmarking site that sometimes triggers mini avalanches)).  And I’m just getting started building my contact list on Flickr.  I’m quite happy with how it’s progressing though, and how quick and easy it is to build up a list of people whose work I like and who like my work.  I’m quite happy with my favorites list too, some interesting work there, and I invite you to take a look.

Finally, I am also starting to use Flickr at yet another level, the nearly daily visual blog, something of a graphical journal, to show the latest photos I’m taking or drawings I’m making, or small scale images created on the spur of the moment, made expressly for Flickr.  I think this is the ultimate, deepest way for me to use Flickr.  But since it’s barely been three weeks, maybe I haven’t finished finding new ways to see Flickr!