With
Google Plus opening its domain to the public, maybe the people who made accounts in July but didn't really do much more than add a profile picture, and perhaps a few words to their about section, might surf back over on the growing wave and find that there's some really good content being shared around.
If you sometimes feel that there's too much broadcasting noise on Twitter and an overflow of updates floating fast and furious through your Facebook feed, it could be worth expanding your social circle - on Google; or at least test the waters.
You might even find it to be the harbour that rocks your boat.
If you like pretty pictures there are some great photographers sharing their work on Google+.
You don't even need to worry about not being in their 'circle', just join in a hash tag theme or two on various days of the week and showcase your work alongside them.
These are some of the photography themes I like the look of:
Street Saturday;
Sunset Saturday;
Sacred Sunday;
Selfy Sunday;
Mountain Monday;
My Town Tuesday;
Waterfall Wednesday;
Wildlife Wednesday;
Travel Thursday;
Silhouettes On Thursday;
Thirsty Thursday;
Food Friday and as it's the Fally Folly season -
Fall Friday.
You can always save the searches that appeal to you to get easy access to the theme's latest additions.
For the full list, along with the relevant curators, see
Daily Photography Themes on Google+ by
Eric Leslie.
It looks like a lot of fun and I'm sure the list will expand. You might even have an idea for a subject of your own.
Google Plus looks like it could be quite a photographer's paradise, especially with how some of those awesome images display, that many are starting to
Forget Flickr for Fotos,
SmugMug might be better in the image quality respect but Google has the mass photo-sharing capabilities within its tentacticles; served up from the free-hosting,
Picasa Web Albums, back-end.
Serious photographers would probably not want to lock up their work solely on Google though, but the search giant is providing the ideal forum for showcasing their portfolios and making more contacts.
Excuse the pun, but the one thing you would probably hope for on Google+ is more exposure, especially if +1 starts to have an effect on search results served up to friends of friends; whose circles just keep getting wider.
Dynamic Views on Blogger
Even the new changes to the Blogger platform seems to be aimed more at the photo blogger.
There are a couple of problems with these dynamic views, as I see it, for your average blogger though.
Firstly, it appears all your own navigation and extras around the content is lost, so no more advertising or widgets when people read posts through those entry points.
Also, some of the themes like Flipcard, need your images to be stored on Picasa to work.
For photo sharing, it does look like a big plus for Google. Just make sure you store a hard copy of your portfolio elsewhere.
SmugMug to Google Plus
If anyone is trying to get their
SmugMug travel photos into Google Plus you could follow the road I travelled.
First use the
Photo Smuggler App to get them into Facebook, works with profiles or pages.
Then move your Facebook albums to Picasa and share it with your Circles with the Chrome Extension that was
Move2Picasa.
+
Michel Guntern.
