Space Miner

Inspired by Foo Camp, I’m going to host an invite-only camping trip this fall for dozens of top emerging photographers.

I must be crazy. I just invited way more photo nerds than I can count on all my fingers and toes to come camp out in the woods with me.

It all started when I was putting together this interview with Paul Octavious Cribb. While editing it together, I thought, “Man, Paul is so creative. I bet he would really get along well with Steph Goralnick. I would about pee my pants to hang out with both of them at the same time.” And then I realized they would probably about pee their pants to hang out with each other, and the many other amazing photographers I know. Why not get a group together? I was pretty sure magic would occur, or at the very least bushels of fun.

So I floated the idea out to Paul and Steph, and Kevin “Lomokev” Meredith and Cody Austin (who deserves a special shout-out for his help), too. It’s a real testament to each of them how enthusiastic and supportive they’ve been of the idea. As I write this, Kevin has booked his flight from Brighton, England (and is planning a book signing and course while here, check it out!), Cody has booked his flight from Houston, Steph has booked her flight from Brooklyn, Paul has committed to being here, and I’ve booked the campground. And, I’ve started hearing back from the big group I emailed today: “Ummm… yeah this sounds amazing. 100% in!”

The campout isn’t until October, but keep an eye out afterwards for the results of the photo sessions, photo scavenger hunts, brainstorming sessions, and s’more-making contests that occur. We’ll definitely put together an online showing of the results.

NOTE: Didn’t get an invite? Don’t feel bad. Most people didn’t — I even turned down some of my closest friends! There’s a good chance this could become an annual event, so drop me a line if you’d really like to be considered for next year.

ANOTHER NOTE: This isn’t my big project, but expect to hear an update on that very soon. You can also sign up to be notified when it’s launched here.

A collection of excellent Tumblr sites.

What is popular is not always good, and what is good is not always popular. Many of the most viewed Tumblrs (per the Tumblr directory) are like Flickr “interestingness” or top 40 music: predictable.

I’ve had better luck finding my favorite tumblelogs through tweets, posts on other blogs, the staff pics, and completely random trips down the rabbit hole. After six months of using Tumblr, I feel pretty good about this set, and thought I’d share.

STYLE

Nerd Boyfriend

Classic pictures of nerd icons with links to similar but purchasable clothing pieces. Whoever you are, I appreciate you and your contribution to my “nerd wife” wardrobe.

See also: http://theimpossiblecool.tumblr.com

PHOTOGRAPHY

Photons

I love Tumblr, but the number of images posted without photographer credit makes me sad/angry/frustrated. (We’ve chatted about this before.) That’s why I love Photons, which features only work from Tumblr members, and makes it really easy to click through to their sites.

See also: A few blogs from individual photographers, http://funemployed.tumblr.com, http://claytoncubitt.tumblr.com (NSFW), http://blog.noahkalina.com

DOCUMENTARY

What It’s Like to Die

It seems like a blog about terminal illness would be depressing, but this one isn’t. It’s full of important life lessons like “Be nice to yourself” and “Find joy in the little things” from someone who’s been known to eat caramel corn for breakfast lately.

See also: http://beansy.tumblr.com

MUSIC

Just Watch the Sky

Ryan Sims, the designer of Virb, shares his new favorite songs along with type-art he’s created from the lyrics.

See also: http://tuneage.tumblr.com, http://copycats.tumblr.com, http://hipstertracks.tumblr.com

HUMOR

Illinois Airship

Gus Menary embellishes personal experiences in Chicago (soon to be LA) and he’s funny. Young, but funny. With heart. Careful sending this to coworkers—it’s been known to destroy office productivity.

See also: Gus also writes for http://bonerparty.tumblr.com (sometimes) and http://gusmenary.tumblr.com (always)

DESIGN

Curated by Jon Kyle

Wow. Gorgeous design. But more than gorgeous: really ingenious, too. Jon Kyle’s site is super wide, and he cleverly combines smaller source images to make them fit in the design. Also, his quote style looks individually constructed until you realize that the other quotes have the same background and font. And how many people realize Baskerville is a web font? (In Safari anyway.)

See also: Matthew Buchanan, who not only created a gorgeous design for himself, but also designed Tumblr’s best openly available templates: Vertigo and Esquire.

COMMUNITY

Dawdler

I’ve heard of Slow Food, but Slow Blogging? “I thought it was time we had a really slow Twitter.” Russell Davies rented a P.O. box and scans in snail mail answers to Twitter’s famous “What are you doing right now?” question.

See also: http://postsecret.tumblr.com

EDUCATIONAL

Science Tumbled

Check in for a dose of education on everything from space travel to optical illusions.

See also: http://orbitdecay.tumblr.com/, http://macmankev.tumblr.com/

INSPIRATION

Arts and Crafts

There are many tumblelogs that spit up inspirational photographs/drawings/designs and this is one of them. Arts and Crafts makes an attempt (though not a particularly successful one) at image attribution, which is why they get the nod over Ffffound’s more prolific tumbleloggers.

See also: http://ffffound.tumblr.com, http://stealourideas.tumblr.com

MEME

Crappy Taxidermy

Tumblr’s been getting a lot of attention lately for meme blogs like Look at this Fucking Hipster and This is Why You’re Fat. My favorite though, for its bizarre hilarity, is the amazing Crappy Taxidermy.

See also: http://whythefuckdoyouhaveakid.com, http://scanwiches.com

Do you have a 10+ favorite tumblelogs list you’d like to share? Blog it up and I’ll add the link at the bottom of this post.

Ben Lansky’s Top Tumblelogs

Carrie Ford’s Top Tumblelogs

I’ve had time to think about Facebook’s role as a communication medium while receiving the equivalent of a busy signal for the last two weeks.

A few weeks ago, my purse was stolen. What a headache — replacing credit cards, phone, everything. Luckily service providers like AT&T and American Express are prepared for such a situation, and quickly handled it, whether it meant replacement cards or shutting down the phone line temporarily or whatever.

Coincidentally, a few days after that, my Facebook account was mysteriously shut down. I had been logged in and poking around, and it suddenly logged me out and told me that my account had been disabled. I shot a quick note off to support and assumed it would be righted soon.

At first I thought, well, maybe this is good, I’ll waste less time. But now that it’s been more thantwo weeks, it’s become more and more apparent how much I had used Facebook as a tool in everyday life. I messaged (and had messages out to) friends, old professors, etc. I received party/event invites a couple times a week. I fly to my hometown today and had been planning to try to have lunch with some old high school friends — except I don’t have any of their real world contact info.

I don’t feel that I’m entitled to anything from a free internet service. Facebook has 200 million and counting users to think about — that’s 3% of the entire world’s population. I have to realize that I am just one of an inconceivable number of things Facebook employees have to be concerned about right now.

But Facebook is more than just 24-hour-news-for-my-social-life. It’s a communication medium just like phone or email, and a damn useful one. I don’t own these tools and have little control when they are revoked.

When it happened to me, it made me realize the value of reliable service providers, and responsive customer service. I would absolutely pay a membership fee to be able to count on both, even on a social community site.

Just re-ordered Moo business cards with a few new additions.

These first two are images I’ve shot since blowing through the first set at SXSW in Austin. The rest are the same, because I was thrilled with the print and paper quality of these recycled paper cards from Moo.

Notes on what we can contribute to the communities we belong to, in real-life and online.

Nothing makes you more keenly aware of community flare-ups than having lived through one (or several) from the other side. Inside the affected company, meetings are called, people argue about the best way to handle it, and productivity and morale hit rock-bottom. And there’s inevitably someone who mentions the Worst Case Scenario: what if this is it? The moment every community site staffer lives in fear of, when a sea change occurs and hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people leave immediately for greener pastures. (Help me out — has this ever happened that way? That suddenly?)

In watching Twitter and Tumblr flare-ups over the last couple of weeks, I’ve heard lots of opinions. Some people are leaving. Some people are furious and determined to get things back to the way they were. Some people have blogged that it’s now clear that social sites can’t take away features once the members have gotten used to them. Some people are upset that Tumblr added features. And some people just don’t think things are right and want you to know that.

I think we have responsibilities as community members. Forget the age of entitlement — we all have room to grow as people by looking at what we can do to contribute.

• Give feedback and offer guidance through our words and actions. In my opinion we’re better off doing that in a “adult writing a letter to our congressperson” tone than a “teenager screaming hateful things to our parents” tone. Even if you don’t believe in the “more flies with honey” adage, waiting for calm, rational thoughts usually brings better ideas and arguments.
• Encourage these organizations to grow, change, and try things. I can’t agree that social sites should never take away features previously offered. So, what, then they’d have a “loyal” fan base of their most vocal (and perhaps angriest) users but would have stagnated the progress and evolution of the site? I don’t see who wins there, except a potential competitor.
• Wield our power wisely, and when it counts. It can be tempting to release real-life frustrations on a virtual community. We need to consider who and what we are really angry with before potentially creating mob mentality in our peers. Each one of us has more power to create damage than we know.
• Remember that these are just people. Tumblr is not a huge corporation getting rich off of us. They’re just seven guys with venture capital to try this out. Just people like you or me.

These are just preliminary notes, and there’s definitely a lot more to add. If you have something to add, please drop me a line at lbrunow at gmail.com.

See also:

Community Whisperer