wwp@yahoogroups.com:
Re: Comments
Bernhard Vogl 2007-Jan-03 09:56:00
There are several reasons pro and contra adding rating functionality.
I second the pledge for the WWP not becoming "another flickr" or similar. The WWP is event based and i see it as one of the rare projects where you - at least pretend to - submit your personal "art statement".
However - since the first WWP event, several thousand of panoramas have accumulated, and certainly many visitors become scared by the sheer amount of interactive imaginery you are ought to click through.
Extensions like the Google Earth help navigating through the panoramas from a geographical point of view. But still, there is enough room for other "systems" to categorize the respectable amount of data.
A "rating system" may not be such a bad idea at all. It just depends about the definition what such a rating may express. Imagine, there is a button you can click to express that you liked this one. This is a personal opinion of the visitor and perfectly valid. It is also valid in my opinion to share this feedback with other visitors - and at least the photographer himself.
Also, a new visitor can gain more joy from the whole project if he can watch some of the most popular panoramas before he digs deeper to discover his own personal favourites.
From my personal point of view, i have to say that i can live with the discovery that some of my panoramas are only appreciated by very few people, but i also wouldn't want to miss the surprise to discover some of them becoming all-time favourites ;-)
Just to tell a little story about seeing some feedback about your panoramas:
As certainly everybody else who runs a website, i check the access stats from time to time. When shooting this panorama: http://dativ.at/fotos/panoramas/neubaugasse.html
I did it "just for documentation". In the first days after upload it suddenly became one of the most viewed pages on my website with more than 20000 page impressions in a few days. This made me curious so i checked the referrer stats. I discovered that many blogs have reported about this art event - and - many of them used the panorama to "build their personal impression" of the installation by copying screenshots of their "aspect" of the scene into their blogs.
So this story ends with the insight that i'd have never found out about how people interpret a panorama - without having at least some sort of feedback...
Best regards
Bernhard