Throughout the years Flickr has become the primary requirement for many brands to consider bloggers when opening their ranks to new team members and while there’s many other social medias available that could help you land that job for the most part Flickr is a necessity we all need to live with. However what happens when the platform SL content creators and bloggers have agreed on makes abrupt anc random changes or pulls a fast one on the community making us fell… unwanted.
This is exactly what has been happening in the past few days in regards to Flickr, its tag and people tagging policies and more. So, let’s talk about it.
This is the part of my MBS Blogging in SL series; where I talk about subjects like blogging, how to start, Branding yourself and representation and the social media game.
Before we start, I have written before about the reality of blogging in Second Life and Blogging basics in previous posts, please take the time to read through them as more than once will I refer to them.
MBS | The Reality of Blogging
MBS Blogging in SL | Blogging Basics
MBS Blogging in SL | Am I a brand?
MBS Blogging in SL | The Social Media Game
We all remember fondly of 2022/2023 great exodus and the mass changes Flickr began implementing and restricting the SL community on. From forcing PRO for accounts with content marked as mature or restricted to now this issue in regards to tags and people tagging. There has been many changes that have affected the way blogging is viewed.
And while many other platforms can offer a somewhat easy solution it is not an easy task to move an entire community from the place they have made home into a new one, especially when there is not a consensus of where exactlty we are moving. It feels almost like everyone is in need of stretching and start creating and carving presence in new spaces where networking is not established, let alone present.
So what happened?
Now a new “issue” has come to light. There was a situation where a Flickr community member was informed that the action of “tagging” was against policy. This conversation is what was shown to everyone and several people, reading said message were visibily confused and somewhat even upset (with just reason). Which led to speculation and several people looking trying to get confirmation from the mod-team on Flickr.
After many attempts 2 answers were found, one in the EB Blogger section (shared in one of my sponsor’s discord) and another coming from Facebook user Nora Bambi Brent both of which expressed the same sentiment: Tagging and people tags are allowed as long as context is present, meaning as long as the tag is relevant and it involves the appropriate participants, you should be safe.
So what does this mean for the average blogger in Second Life?
Simple, it means you should still be tagging store accounts and designer accounts related to the content present in your picture, but do not just randomly tag people not related to said picture/content!
As a blogger manager the way I read this message it seems like blogger managers should not be tagged, since there is no direct relation to the content in the images. So personally I will be moving to hashtag tracking only, as I have been doing for my brand for around 3 years now.
Now that we have some context, let’s talk:
Flickr and Blogging: a complicated relationship
As mentioned, Flickr is the chosen social media for blogging and content creation, while in the later years it has become less and less mandatory, it is still a big part for sharing, networking and discovering content. Basically everyone in SL uses it in one form or another so I always recommend people get familiar with it and have an account.
So with the new changes and all mentioned above, what exactly should you, as a blogger, be doing?
Understanding your dos and do nots.
Below you can find my rules for posting as a blogger in each account type with Flickr.
MiwaBunny 