• Introduction
• Our Proposal
• Why Did We Use Flickr?
• History and Thank You
• Reactions to this project

SIX YEARS AGO IN INTERNET YEARS...

This design experiment owes a very significant debt of gratitude to Ellen Kampinsky, Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis, who in 2001 developed a wonderful white paper called "Amazoning the News".

At the time, Travis was working at a large newspaper's Web site, and Susannah was working for a large university's online journalism program. We believed that their "mashup" (the word wasn't even in use yet) was a visionary work, and believed that their tools and ideas would soon be adopted by major news outlets.

Well, long story short: it was, but they haven't.

And while Amazon is still the, well, the Amazon of the Internet, it's no longer the touchstone for online excellence and innovation^[1] that it once was. We felt it was time for a new look at media, and we believe, (perhaps naively still), that we will see traditional media sites adopting methods much like these in the near future.

We'd also like to call attention to the Los Angeles Times' 1999 redesign, which attempted to create some of this "circling the story" effect, but was doing so before blogs, comments, and social networks were commonplace, and so, in our opinion, had the right idea but didn't have the necessary tools to pull this off. More newspapers should be experimenting like they did.

WE'D LIKE TO THANK...

Our parents, our agent, our ... whoops, wrong cue card. Here's the right one!

Flickring the News is a joint project by Travis Smith, Susannah Gardner and Matt Gardner, of Hop Studios.

We'd like to thank George Stankow, Darren Barefoot, Monique Trottier , Boris Mann, Alfred Hermida, Eric Ulken for their assistance. And of course, we thank the designers of Flickr for their inspiration.

DISCLAIMER

While we've done consulting work for Yahoo! in the past, and we've attended several Flickr parties, Hop Studios has no financial connection to Yahoo!

But we do hope that they like what we've done.

View reactions to the project >>>

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^[1] Is this a fair characterization? Maybe not. Amazon is continuing to innovate and improve and influence. However, Jeff Bezos was Person of the Year in 1999, and yet he hasn't been mentioned in Time about an Amazon-related project since Nov. 2005. The spotlight has moved on.