It can be said that many of our photoblogs fall into categories of types of photoblogs.
We have city/place centred photoblogs like Chicago Uncommon and Mike Golding's Photos From London, portrait filled photoblogs such as 52: A Portrait A Week or more personal photoblogs where the photographer shoots their world around them such as Catriona.net.

Whether they are personal, political, seasonal or travel oriented, I think the style of photoblog is becoming more and more important in an ever-growing community.
We all want people to come to our photoblogs and with the fast rate at which photoblogs are appearing, there almost seems to be a need now to create your own niche.

Obviously your photographs are the most important ingredients but do you think that you have a particular style or fit into a particular category of photoblog?
Photoblogs.org has photoblogs listed by country..it would be interesting to see just how else they can be broken down. In fact, I'd even like to see the ratio of boys to girls, but that is another completely different story all together!

Has anyone had any bad experiences trying to photograph a stranger? I mean, to take a full-on portrait of them, not a covert sort of photo which you take from lens which zooms all the way to space.

I've seen many people on the street I'd like to take a close-up of, but I've never quite been able to ask because it just felt sort of strange, and it doesn't help that people stare at you wherever you go with your big SLR (big comparable to point-and-shoots i mean). But I tried it yesterday, and it wasn't too bad, but then again, it wasn't I who approached him in the first place. But after this experience (which wasn't at all unpleasant), I think I'll be a wee bit more adventurous - there are some people who are nice about you taking their photo, and others who think you are crazy, so what the heck.

And thinking of this subject, immediately I am reminded one of btezra's old entries - a private moment between two young people, and he'd told them after that he'd taken their picture dancing. But they were nice about it, luckily. Btezra's bold in that way, and I guess it's one of the reasons why he takes such good pictures.

What about everyone else?
Has it been good or bad for you?
Any tips for photographing close-ups of strangers?

p/s: how do you balance the right of photographers to take pictures of whatever they want?
do private individuals have a right not to be photographed?

There's a little disagreement whether Emily's post asking for submissions for her artzine is a conflict of interest or not, and it got me thinking about some of the great side projects run by the Photoblogs blog regulars:

Brandon's PhotoMemes (and some other site I can't remember
Heather's Mirror Project
Rannie's photojunkie
Karen's 50 States

I'll bet there are a bunch more I don't know about -- where's yours?

I am an avid armchair traveller. Photoblogs are an easy way to explore the world. I recently discovered the photography of Geoffrey Hiller. His website is not presented as a traditional photoblog, but provides a multimedia experience that is a treat for the senses. His work has one has earned three Macromedia "Site of the Day" honors, as well as awards from Apple, CNET, USA Today, and The Christian Science Monitor. Canto do Brasil is a documentary about four regions of Brazil with music by Gilberto Gil. You need Flash and a high speed connection is suggested. Check it out here.

While on a recent trip to Croatia I got to see how my photoblog looks on an old PC running Win98. Most of my images ended up much too dark and contrasty which is not that surprising since I work on a Mac. It did look better on the more recent PCs in the lab but this begs the question: How do you calibrate your monitor to ensure that your work will look its best in a variety of settings?

Michael Julius's Myopic.us shows life from the perspective of a paramedic in Putnam County, Florida.

Not only does he show us interesting observations of people, shapes, and light, but he brings us along on his job to experience things and events from a perspective that we normally wouldn't see.

This site is definitely worth a visit.

Hello. Like I've said before I am Emily of Beautiful Life (or see weblog). This is all the identification I can give you now. I currently have nothing of substance to show you of Melange Magazine, a new magazine I am working on with a few others, for which I am looking for photos that fit the debut issue's 'Adolescence and Adulthood' theme.

'Melange' is not purely a photography magazine. It will feature opinion articles, fiction, essays, film and book reviews, but there will also be a collection of photographs in every issue which goes with the theme.

Send all submissions to emilyATholeinmyhead.net
Obviously, replace AT with @.
Hope to see them flooding my mailbox soon!
Where possible, send a link instead of an attachment.

Photo comic strips. That is the essence of A softer world. It is an ongoing project by two people called Emily and Joey. Emily takes the pictures and Joey uses words to create stories. Very ingenious.

So, did everyone already know about this site?
I hope not.

* I've just joined this blog as a contributor, and I'm Emily from Beautiful Life.

It looks like TypePad will be getting a hardware upgrade on Friday, so this blog will be down at that time. Apparently the blog will run faster after the upgrade, so that's good.

The actual Photoblogs.org site won't be affected by this. Only this blog will go down.

Rannie brought up something in a comment that I wonder about all the time: how do other people publish their photoblogs?

So: how's yours set up?
- do you use a CMS?
- if so, which one, and why that one?
- do you use any plugins?
- do you use plain HTML or do you have a more complex method of publishing the photo within the page?
- how do you use multiple fields if you have them?
- do you incorporate multiple blogs into your photoblog?
- how are your archives set up?

I'll start:
Currently, I use Movable Type with the MTEmbedImage plugin.

The Title, Category, and Body fields are used in the standard sense.
The Extended Entry field contains only the image name (without the extension, just YYMMDD_description), which is used by the plugin to write the img tag in the entry, and also creates the thumbnails used on my archives.

I also have an extra index template that publishes just the latest entry's thumbnail and a link that I use as in include on a couple of my other blogs. (My old photoblog used an include from a separate links blog in the sidebar, I'm going to reincorporate that eventually.)

I have thumbnail archive pages, sorted by category, and a full archive page with all of them -- I'll probably delete that one once I get to a certain number of entries and that page gets too big...