Curiouser and Curiouser

I’ve never had reason to doubt the analysis of Google, or any other social media service. Mainly because Views, Favs, Likes or Plus Ones are not things I follow too closely. However the recent discussion on the worthwhile podcast This Week in Photography which focused on “Where’s the party at?” dealing with social networking for photographers got me thinking about they way things where going, less community and sharing and more a focus on klout scores, likes, views and copy cat homage of the perceived trendy and celebrity photographers (aka those with big numbers of followers). Ok I have a personal conviction that all this is discouraging creativity and originality. Anyway when +FredrickVanJohnson mentioned declaring Social Media Bankruptcy, I had to smile, but it made me have a quick reconciliation of where I getting the most “connection”. Looks like Flickr & Google+ get more response than Blogger and Twitter, for me at least. I soon lost interest again but I did discovered there was quiet a discrepancies on what google was reporting for one of my recent ThePatch posts.

How can I have more Plus Ones than Views? Especially when google+ photos reports no plus ones of views for the actual photo that was shared! I have previously noted that the number of views can suddenly change from zero to many hundreds. This doesn’t worry me personally but there does seem to be a lot of questioning of the counts on the web and this post by +YonatanZunger tries to explain what the counts mean. However I still find it hard to explain what I see.

For the record I follow +ThomasHawk, +MattKloshowski &  +TreyRatcliff and think they consistently show great creativity and originality. They are definitely worth following on both Google+ and Flickr. I don’t include them in the great celebrity photographer fairytale.