magpie, a flickr experiment

I've been thinking a lot about shopping recently (obviously).

Shopping is one of the great all-time urban pleasures (that and parades with impressive floats). I like cities, and I like shopping. A lot. As a theater designer, I was a professional shopper, and have kept the habit of always being on the lookout for things that might possibly be useful or pleasing to someone, somewhere. I enjoy it, but it doesn’t really do any good because I never share my finds with anyone.

I have an experiment to propose. I’ve been playing with a Flickr photo pool called windowshop, which I was using to show photos of shop windows. It seems to have some interest. So I just started a new group called magpie to see what happens if the windowshopping is a little more shopping focused and a little more group oriented.

Here’s how I described it on Flickr:

Magpie is a collectively created shopping guide to local stores - wherever you are. It's intended to support small, indepedently-owned businesses that we might not otherwise know about.

Here's how it works:

1) take a photo of something for sale that you think other people might want and post it to the group pool
2) give enough information in the subject field that any viewer can figure out how to find that object again. You can give the full address of the store, or just the name of the store and the city in which it's located. If you want to be nice, add the price and any other comments.
3) tag the photo to help other people in the group search more effectively

AND

4) tag other people's photos as well - the more tags, the easier it will be to find what you're looking for - and help out small, local businesses in the process.

At the moment I’m working on making my own search functions to extend the somewhat limited default set on the Flickr site.