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

KEY FEATURES

Here are some of the key features of Flickr that have been adopted for this demonstration. If you're impatient, skip below to the full screen shot.

1. We started the the basic idea that the story is the most important thing on a news site, and that all navigation and content should revolve around it.
   
   

2. We decided the clean, white background was a great canvas, and we left it unspoiled.
   
   
3. Readers should be encouraged to do more than just "print" and "email" — blogging, digging, bookmarking, tagging, adding notes and adding comments should all be encouraged all around the content.
   
   
4. Stories shouldn't be organized into sections; they should be gathered into more granular either by algorithms (for easy sets like "NHL" and "Microsoft") or by humans for more esoteric / arbitrary groupings ("Charity" and "Robotics"). Traditional news site sections are holdovers from old media where sections (Sports, Business) were as much about describing the internal structure of employees and printing deadlines.)
   
   
5. Flickr offers RSS for most feeds, but we think RSS should be even more prominent.
   
   
6. Stories themselves should be capable of supporting photos, sidebars, and captions, as necessary.
   
   

7. Users should be able to annotate stories by highlighting and linking from relevant passages, as well as by commenting on them as a whole. This functionality challenges the idea of the news story as a finished product, frozen in time. We see stories instead as seeds of information planted in a knowing community.
   
   
8. Stories should be anchored in space with geographical tags and in time with a variant of Flickr's excellent chronological photo stream metaphor.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
9. The whole story should be accessible from one page -- no jumps!^[1] When was the last time a user said they wished stories were divided onto more pages? Never! But, the entire story does not have to be fully visible unless the user triggers it. Think of this as a "zoom in" function.

Ultimately, our goal was to show how much functionality of existing media sites was already replicated by a social media interface. It was simply the hierarchy of those tools, and the greater diversity of tools given to the user, that would make a meaningful difference in the quality of participation and community.

TICKR: THE FIRST

So, why did we choose Flickr for this experiment? >>>

 

---

 

^[1] Yes, Flickring the News is divided up into multiple pages -- but it's not a news article, it's a mini site with different sections that have different functions. But thanks for reading the footnotes!