RVA Zombie Walk and Internet Karma

I brought my two older boys to the RVA Zombie Walk. It was our first time and it was pretty amazing just how many people participated and how professional many of the costumes were. I wanted to take pictures but I also wanted to be able to give those pictures to the participants if they wanted them. As a result I put a little more effort into metadata than I usually do and I made sure I got the pictures online quickly.

Flickr stats post zombie walk
My daily Flickr views usually hover around 2,000. You can see just a bit of a spike as a result of the zombie pictures. That’s amusing in certain ways but if lots of views was my aim I’d play a very different game. I do like that the people looking for these particular images were able to find them.

What’s more I got some comments on a few of the images from people who knew some additional details. I love those interactions. It’s something that Alan talks about with his True Stories of Openess.

zombie doctor
Here Bryan talks a bit about the screech he made that impressed me so much. I was also able to point him to another picture I took of him that I liked. It’s not a world changing interaction but I find it fascinating and more of motivator to post images like this than the views.

green zombie hospital crew
Here’s another interaction in the comments where I found out the crew of zombies with the hospital bed were members of the Richmond Volunteer Rescue Squad.

I really do love how the little pieces like this add up.

I need to think more about ways to make that metadata1 happen more naturally. I wonder how intelligently you might blend data from publically available event calendars to the exif data from photographs, especially those that include GPS data. Maybe there’s a way to auto-provision that kind of metadata from the host of the event.2 All things that others may have already thought through. I’ll have to wander around the Internet and see.

A few other shots I liked . . .
badminton zombie
IMG_0508
IMG_0350
bloody zombie


1 one of the main keys to discovery

2 A QR code might be a decent way of passing this data on. I don’t know of a decent way to then associate that metadata with all of those images. It’d be slick if cameras would do it for you based on photographing a QR code.