BuzzNet: A Photo Blog Community Of Note

I spent a couple of hours yesterday with Marc Brown taking a closer look at the BuzzNet system and some of the innovative things they are doing over there. For anyone that doesn't know, BuzzNet is one of the earlier photo blog communities, started in early to mid 2003.

There's an active, vibrant community and I'll be damned there's even people paying for the service (that's so rare is noteworthy). Marc clicked around and showed me the ins-and-outs of the system. This wasn't the first time, but there was so much new stuff there it was hard to get my head around it.

As I was introduced to these new features, I couldn't help but bring comparisons to the blogging world's posterchild, Flickr. To be honest, there's really very little difference when it all boils down to the bones, and I can't bet that both have served as inspiration for each other at one point in time. One of the things I have been most drawn to with Flickr was the public API. Wearing my developer hat, it's hard to not see beauty in such a thing. I polled Marc on their API and he gave me a sneak peak. All I can say is, it will be stern competition in the future.

Looking forward, I hope to figure out how to tie some of this into what's going on with the SparkCard. More on that later. For now, I definitely recommend giving it test drive.