Thanks to the magic of flickr stats, I’ve been able to track views of specific photographs on my flickr stream. Now I usually get 20-50 views per day (aside from last month when a private set was getting a few hundred views per day for over a week) and one photo in particular keeps cropping up in the daily viewed list.
This one: Sea slater (Ligia oceanica)
I’d not bothered to consider why, until I received an email from a Hong Kong based publisher requesting permission to use that image in their new biology text book, to which I agreed (Published! Yay!)
A bit of further digging, and I found out that image is also the top hit on yahoo image search for Sea Slater and for Ligia oceanica. Flickr is owned by yahoo, so it makes sense that yahoo image search would index the flickr database and that the publishers found the photograph via yahoo image search.
Eager to see if my luck was as good on google image search, I searched for the same two terms that works on yahoo. Nadda. I’m not anywhere on the first 5 pages – I gave up looking after those. So, perhaps this post, when indexed by google, will also get my sea slater (Ligia oceanica) noticed.
Oh, the creature in the photo? It’s a marine dwelling relative of the common woodlouse. Looks a bit like a modern-day trilobite to me. There is some more into over at the wiki page.
Yes, this post was pretty much a blatant attempt to manipulate my GIS rank for that photo. Will it work?