Announced: Murketing Flickr group

As mentioned earlier this morning: I used to post what I called “Flickr Interludes” on this site all the time. I did so because I enjoy looking at Flickr, and I’m consistently impressed by the stuff I see there. I always linked back to the originals, and credited each image as a Flickr photo by [whatever the photographer’s user name is]. The point of the Interludes was to show off cool work that I think is relevant to the subject matter of this site, and obviously giving people full credit is intrinsic to that, so that’s why I always did it. Also, I only used an image here if the “blog this” feature was enabled.But I stopped when I got some mild static once or twice and didn’t understand what it was about.

Someone explained to me that it was indirect fallout from this apparent controversy: Consumerist.com was taking images from Flickr and using them without any particular creidt, and at first responded in an asshole-ish way to complaints. Soon the Consumerist guy wised up and backed off and more or less made amends and promised to give people credit and all that, so the controversy blew over. But it all still made me decide not to do the Flickr thing for a while. Credit or no credit, maybe some people just don’t want their images on this site.

Finally I found the time (okay, it only took five minutes, but still) to create the Murketing Flickr pool. I created the group Wednesday night, and it already has 53 members and 159 images, which is cool. As is clearly explained there, it’s open to all kinds of images of consumer culture, defined as broadly as possible, and I will post highlights on this site from time to time. So if you don’t want to see your Flickr work highlighted here, don’t join. But if you do want to help brighten up Murketing — join in.

More early highlights later today and this weekend and on into the future.

Meanwhile: If you’re a Flickr person and I have highlighted one of your images in the past and you don’t want it used here, just say so, and I’ll take it down. Fair enough?