I found the Song Chart group on Flickr by accident the other day. What you do is pick a song, create a chart or graph that illustrates the song, and post it to the Flickr group. The cheesier you can make the chart, the drier the humor, the more ridiculous the graphic effects, the better. And it’s best if you make it a good puzzle, and don’t list the song name or even the artist in the chart or title. I love stuff like this. It’s right up my alley. When the group was first formed, there were something around 140 pictures in it. I raced through them all. Most of them are very clever, and some of them are brilliant. I was instantly hooked.
Right away, a handful of charting opportunities came to my mind. In just a few minutes, I made this one and posted it (click to enlarge):
The response was phenomenal. It rapidly shot up over the next 24 hours to enter into my top 10 most-viewed pictures ever. I’ve got photos that had been there in my Flickr photostream for years whose position at the top were being threatened by this little thing that had only been alive for one day. Now I was finally getting to experience what it was like to be part of a hot Flickr fad. The first three charts I had posted all at once were proving to be among the more popular ones in the Song Chart group, especially that one about levees. More and more ideas occurred to me, I took a few minutes and created a couple more, and they also took off.
Then I took a concept-mapping view to a popular song by Barenaked Ladies, “The Old Apartment” (click to enlarge):
Not only did this fulfill all the nerdy promises of the Song Chart group, what with its cold examination of a loudly emotional song, but also I made the physical shape of the map resemble a crooked house. The popularity streak of this one diagram was, in a word, meteoric. Before this chart, my most popular photo, by number of views, was a black-and-white shot of a pencil and some notebooks. That one had been in my Flickr photostream for just over two years and had a respectable 1,700+ views and had been marked as a favorite by 14 other Flickr users. This one song chart racked up over 2,200 views, six faves, and six comments in less than 48 hours.
So far I’ve posted nine charts to the pool. Making these is a lot of fun, and a stimulating mental diversion for the end of a day. They don’t take much time to think up, but the more clever I can execute the ideas, the more rewarding the feedback is when someone gets the joke. I think I will keep making song charts, but I’ll stop posting them to Flickr. I don’t want them to take over my photostream any more than they already have. I’ll still post the really good ones.
