Some photo links, or RSS food

Here are a few links to sites that I enjoy:

• Flak Photo: this one is definitely well-known in the Serious Art Photo world. You'll be noticed by Important People if you get your work up here. I think it's great because it has an RSS feed with really big images, and it never posts more than one photo a day.
• photographs on the brain: the Tumblr of Bryan Formhals, one of the prime movers of the Hardcore Street Photography group on Flickr. He tumbls interesting articles on photography and striking images from 'round the internet. Note that this is not part of the "network of cool" photographers, which is a good thing.
• Hardcore Street Photography: basically the best Flickr group. The images are highly moderated, so you can subscribe to the feed and end up with around 15-20 photos per week. They're usually of a very high quality, but what really sets this group apart is the discussion. This is an actual community of people who are extremely interested in talking about street photography. It's well worth stopping by, even just to lurk.

As I started writing this, I was just thinking of sharing "links." All three of these sites are highly adaptable to RSS, though, in fact with the exception of the HCSP discussion board I do not visit these sites at all. So, got any hot feeds of your own?

Curating

One possible way to make this blog good would be to make every post an extension of the first, and it would form a collection of thoughts about blogs and blogging.

I use Google Reader to share certain items in my RSS feeds. The process is simple: let’s say I read an interesting item in the Guardian Unlimited Football feed. If I click ‘share,’ it gets marked as one of my ‘Shared Items,’ which changes nothing about the display of this item in my Reader, but adds it to a list—or collection—of other items that I have marked as ‘Shared.’ That list of items, in turn, gets its own RSS feed, so anyone who subscribes to my Google Reader Shared Items will see the GU Football item in their feed reader.

This is exciting to me because it’s a form of instantaneous, perfect blogging. As I said, the blog is a perfect collection. The Shared Items feed is nothing but a collection in RSS form. Sounds like a blog to me. Anyone who subscribes to a Shared Items feed knows that each item is selected, or curated—by a real curator, no less!

We need more people to do this, so we don’t have to do as much work to get our information (i.e. Erlebnis). When I share an item about the Carlos Tevez transfer saga, I've saved you the work of trawling through the Guardian's football feed to find that interesting story. You have to trust that I'll only share the best of the best, but chances are you probably don't care about that anyway, and you can gloss over that item in less than a second. I still get the pleasure out of curating a the item for myself, so everyone's happy.

(In the world of technology, the revolution is always getting dumped for something hipper.) Join the Google Reader revolution!