On Saturday, June 12, I uploaded a series of vintage NASA photos to Flickr.
I wrote a blog post about how I found the photos, Stumbled the Flickr set, and also emailed a link to the set to one of my favorite blogs, io9.
When I woke up on Sunday morning, the set had over 10,000 views. As the day went on, and I kept checking the stats, it continued to gain more views.
What happened?
io9 wrote about the photos, referring to them as "the motherlode of space porn" and linking to the set on Flickr.
That post received approximately 52 different tweets, while a link to the set itself has received almost 90 tweets.
Jens told me he was going to submit it to Boingboing and Reddit, but he was too lazy to do either.
According to a little search I did, it was also shared on Facebook 82 times, got 45 "Likes" and 35 comments.
Since then, 52 different people have added me as a contact on Flickr (you can too: I'm ParkerNow there as well). My photos have had over 50 comments and tons of them have been made favorites by other people. Even better is that some of the Flickr people commenting are incredibly knowledgeable about the photos and are adding information, like when the photo was taken and who is in it (as below):
Admittedly, the photos weren't really "mine" to begin with (as various comments have pointed out, better quality versions of some of the pictures are available on the NASA website and are in the public domain), but I wanted to put them in a public space and the whole thing has turned out to be a pretty rewarding experience.
On a related note, this graphic of "Your Flickr Stats Explained" is pretty good.
-Parker