Blippast and Blipfuture

Another busy day at work and then straight off down the boat club for the committee meeting. From my position at the head of the table, I've taken this stunning little shot using the famous iPhone. I wonder if the Stills Gallery should host an iPhone photography course. Of course, they'd need a tutor. Someone with a track record ....


But enough! Time to share my musings on blipfuture. Forgive my long-windedness - reading it isn't obligatory, obvs...


So, what about this blip future thing then? Well done to those peeps for stepping up to try and 'do something' before the plug is pulled.
However.. misgivings, I have a few. Without going into some serious analysis of the blip model (which I can’t do as I have no stats to work from – I should ask Insto) I would observe that Joe has done his best for a period of eight years or more to make this work. And clearly it’s been a bit of a financial failure. Now that should give anyone food for thought (note to self: try to avoid clichés).
There’s something fundamentally wrong with the model – and I’d say that blip as it is currently configured and presented just isn’t scalable and therefore sustainable. Here’s an example – take the 'recent page’ category - imagine if instead of 2,000 users there were two hundred thousand (a modest target for an internet offering) – how quickly would that recent page zip along? It would be a blur!
And here’s another thing – I remember when I was first introduced to blip I met a fellow (he’s now stopped blipping, tellingly enough) who followed over 200 people. I did that mental arithmetic thing and thought – that’s impossible, there aren’t enough hours in the day to look at all that sh*t. And indeed there aren’t - I suspect that most of us old timers actually only look at a handful of blips on a daily basis. So the maturity model, I would suggest is that you end up following a small number of others and you become ‘full up’. I’m not about to start following anyone else – no matter how often they visit me. I simply can’t do it. I’ve seen others try and apart from a few heroic individuals (you know who you are.. nutters, all) they burn out. I’m stopping blipping for a while, they wail. I’m switching comments off. To be expected. Or you start posting less and less frequently.
Given that, just how attractive is this site to newcomers - sure, you can put your lovely photos up, but can you expect any community engagement? Does anyone know anyone new? And that, combined with a high attrition rate due to burnout, boredom and simply other new pastures is a killer. (I don’t know what percentage of people who start blipping are still here after one month.. one year …two… three years).
Clearly, it’s an interesting and strangely addictive site to those of us here and surely there are enough strange and addictive people out there to make it work, you may say. There are! But they’re thinly spread - I think that maybe it’s only because of the initial seeding of a few localities from launch that it’s managed to bump along. Edinburgh and a few other places have managed to get little communities, almost a critical mass. So, I’d say that seeding has to be done afresh, aiming squarely at the generation with time on their hands. Yep, and advertising too – we’ll have to swallow it. Step forward the new community – SAGABlipfoto. Adverts for stair lifts, incontinence pads, baths with doors and seats…. at least it’s a growing and affluent part of the market….