To some people, a photograph is forever.
To Ranjana Rajendran, a 26-year-old pursuing her master’s degree in secondary education at Roosevelt University, a photo is for today.
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Because tomorrow–and just about every day after–she will post at least one new snapshot on her photo blog at www.fotolog.net/ranjana.
She’s not alone. Photo blogs are the evolutionary offspring of text-only Web logs, or blogs, where anybody can write anything for posting on the Internet. Photo blogs let users post photographs and diary-like descriptions.
Rajendran uses a photo blogging site called Fotolog.net, which boasts about 1.2 million members.
Membership is free and affords users one picture posting per day. A paid option, for $5 per month, bumps the daily photo limit to six.
Free accounts, which are used by the vast majority of Fotolog members, include text ads from Google throughout member blogs.
For a year and a half, Rajendran, who pays the subscription fee, has shared pictures of her friends, her days, and that magical moment when her odometer hit 100,000 miles. (“Here’s to 100,000 more!” she wrote in the description.)
“I started doing it because I have family and friends that live all over the world and it was a good way for them to see what I was up to,” Rajendran said. “But now it has become kind of an outlet to talk about the things I want to talk about. It has offered a great deal of self-reflection.”
Rajendran takes full advantage of members’ ability to comment on their photos.
“I realized early on that this is a good place to write, too. So I use it as an online journal.”
A key difference between photo blogs and picture-sharing Web sites like Ofoto and SmugMug is that blogs are public and not protected by passwords.
Which means people Rajendran doesn’t know can get a glimpse of her life and thoughts.
“That’s kind of cool,” she said. “At first I was weirded out by it, but now I really enjoy it. These people have gotten to know my life with a strange familiarity.”
She has even become “cyber-friends” with some of them.
“I know people where we’ve been reading each others’ blogs for over a year now,” Rajendran said.
Fotolog is run and operated by Adam Seifer, 36, in New York City.
Seifer keeps his own photo blog on the site at www.fotolog.net/cypher. Its subject matter is limited strictly to the food he eats.
“I’ve been taking a picture of everything I eat for the last 2 1/2 years,” Seifer said, adding that 2,600 meals in a row are pictured on his blog.
Can that really be interesting to people?
“My food log gets 15,000 to 20,000 people per day logging in to see what I ate,” Seifer said.
Indeed, the interest to get a glimpse of a person’s private life–as well as the urge to share it–appears strong:
Fotolog.net has had more than 41 million photos uploaded since its launch in 2002, and more than 450 million guest-book comments have been left by photo blog browsers.
“These are pictures of little slices of daily life,” Seifer said. “These are not event-driven pictures of birthdays and vacations and Christmas. They are little things that capture your attention throughout daily life.”
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Fotolog.net recently obtained $2.5 million in venture capital and expects to be profitable in 12 to 18 months, Seifer said.
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