Usually, people want to be #1. I’m happy at #5.

I of course found this out in a roundabout way. I was trying to get a sense of overall traffic to my photoblog site – and as Google Analytics doesn’t handle RSS feeds, I was going for image views in the apache logs. While looking at the logs, I noticed there’s a lot of hits with a source URL other than my own site. Many were for images.google.com or the googlebot, but there were a also lot of blog and forum posts and other things that looked like someone was hot linking my images. Needless to say, it’s without my permission. The only people I’ve given explicit permission to publish my images was Shufflegazine for their July Photography issue.

Long story short – I noticed that time and again it was this water glass image being linked to. So, I threw ‘water glass’ as a search term into Google Images – and I’m #5! I’m not sure what to think of this yet. I mean, I like having my work recognized, but I’d also like to be consulted… or at least given credit. So I got a little hot-tempered, and started leaving comments. I keep forgetting that this is the internet, and text is forever. Thanks to a gracious response by Mr Beagly, I’ve calmed down and started to take stock of the situation.

I’m just amazed by what little internet-fame I have. It may be fleeting, and it may not mean much to others, but it means something to me.