Tuesday July 12, 2005
Tuesday July 12, 2005 After talking about the coolness of the Art of the Start cover design contest last week, I poked around on istockphoto a bit more. And here are some interesting things I discovered about the istockphoto stock photography community - a few of which might prove useful for those of us in OpenSolaris-land.
The photo on the front page changes with most reloads. Needless to say, I reloaded the page, um, well, more than a few times. What can I say - it was fun discovering which photos the editors had decided to promote. My favorites - Blue Moon, Gorilla and buzzard roost. Oh, and I have to give an honorable mention to Female Gremlin.
Next - I like the articles section. I read through several of the articles (White Balance, Underwater Photography, and yes, even Efenzi) and each was conversational. If you'd read my earlier blogs, you know I'm a big fan of authentic voice. More than that, I like that there's a clear process for submitting articles, and given the number of authors it certainly seems like articles are written by community members. As we move forward with OpenSolaris, I want to see more community contributed content. Jim mentioned this earlier today as well.
I also like the use of statistics - number of uploads, downloads, most popular art for each designer, the public view into each designer's "creative network" of designer friends which makes it easy for me to go exploring and follow links to friends-of-friends, top designs, most popular files, highest rated designs. Bottom line - multiple different views are presented so that I can effectively "browse" when I'm not sure what I'm looking for. It isn't too hard to find the interesting parallels for OpenSolaris here - while we've got a wicked source browser on the OpenSolaris website, we can still make it easier to browse other aspects of the project. And - the member profiles on istockphoto are way more useful than they are on opensolaris.org - we've got some work to do to make it e-z for people to provide more useful (and personal) views into who they are.
Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris Technorati Tag: istockphoto
(2005-07-12 01:04:52.0) Permalink
