{"id":1939,"date":"2009-04-03T07:47:55","date_gmt":"2009-04-03T12:47:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/?p=1939"},"modified":"2009-04-03T07:54:23","modified_gmt":"2009-04-03T12:54:23","slug":"project-365-confessions-of-a-praise-junkie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/2009\/04\/03\/project-365-confessions-of-a-praise-junkie\/","title":{"rendered":"Project 365: Confessions of a Praise Junkie"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been thinking this week about how much my Project 365 <\/a>experience has mirrored my blogging experience, at least in the early days. In both cases, I started out on a whim with no plan except to satisfy a creative urge. And in both cases, I got totally sucked in by the comments and feedback, and the gravitational pull of that praise pulled me completely out of my own orbit. Both have been extremely satisfying, but my own insatiable need for external validation has completely hijacked any sense of doing the thing simply for its own merit.<\/p>\n

Until I started up the 365, I was only marginally aware of Flickr’s “Interestingness<\/a>” feature. The idea is that through a secretive algorithm that encompasses number of times a photo is viewed, number of comments, groups to which the photo belongs, and number of times someone selects the photo as a favourite, Flickr assigns an “interestingness” value. Thanks to a third-party hack, I’ve made up a little set of my 20 most “interesting” photos<\/a> at any given time — it changes daily.<\/p>\n

Flickr also chooses the 500 most “interesting” photos each day and puts them in its own showcase, called “Explore<\/a>“. I get a lot of inspiration and ideas just from paging through some of the great pictures on Explore, but it never would have occured to me that some day one of my pictures might make it up there. My main 365 group on Flickr seems to have extraordinary success in having their photos “explored” though — more than 100 of them in March alone. <\/p>\n

Suddenly, I began to think that maybe I could get one of my photos in Explore, too. I started looking at the factors that go into the algorithm and thinking, hey, I’m pretty close on some of these. And then, I found myself disappointed when people weren’t commenting or favouriting my photos because I wanted that spot in Explore so badly. (Because that, too, is a feature of my personality — the pattern that goes oblivion -> awareness -> desire -> obsession.)<\/p>\n

And then this week I realized that I was actually causing myself no small amount of anxiety in my covetousness of this arcane little bit of recognition and I gave my head a shake and said, “Why are you doing this project? Are you doing this to express your creativity and improve your skills, or are you doing this for some sort of esoteric bragging rights?” I don’t know why I let myself get my knickers in a twist over something like this in the first place, but it was a huge relief to absolve myself of the need for that particular bit of praise and get back to taking pictures because they were interesting, instead of Interesting. Or just, you know, pretty.<\/p>\n

(The big irony is that Flickr must be well aware of how deeply some of us desire that spot on Explore, because on April 1st all of my photos were deemed worthy of Explore! April Fools or not, I was happy to grab a souvenir poster <\/a>that marks membership into this exclusive club.)<\/p>\n

Ahem, anyway, here are this week’s pictures. All of them have captions on Flickr, if you’re curious as to the story behind the photo. None of them have been Explored — but I like them nonetheless!<\/p>\n

\n\"67:365<\/a>
\n67:365 Sunrise on Mooney’s Bay<\/p>\n

\"68:365<\/a>
\n68:365 Back in the day <\/p>\n

\"69:365<\/a>
\n69:365 Slinky<\/p>\n

\"70:365<\/a>
\n70:365 Fool’s Gold* <\/p>\n

\"71:365<\/a>
\n71:365 The wonders of spring <\/p>\n

\"72:365<\/a>
\n72:365 Just dropping by <\/p>\n

\"73:365<\/a>
\n73:365 Starbucks revisited\n<\/div>\n

* For a theme on ‘Fool’s Gold’. My caption said “Oh, pyrite<\/em>? I thought you said pirate<\/em>!” I also lamented how it’s difficult to compose a good shot when the talent keeps trying to eat the props.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been thinking this week about how much my Project 365 experience has mirrored my blogging experience, at least in the early days. In both cases, I started out on a whim with no plan except to satisfy a creative urge. And in both cases, I got totally sucked in by the comments and feedback, … Continue reading “Project 365: Confessions of a Praise Junkie”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1939","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-project-365"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1939","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1939"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1939\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1952,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1939\/revisions\/1952"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1939"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1939"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1939"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}