Results tagged “dog” from Birmingham Post - Lifestyle Blog

It's one of the dread phrases in human conversation. No, not "please welcome our special guest Robbie Williams", but "why don't you come and see our holiday snaps?". The crushing boredom of other people's pictures was a sitcom staple for many a year, so why is one of the biggest activities on the internet photo sharing?

The boom in digital cameras, and the increasing quality of mobile phone cameras, has created a glut of photos that sit on hard drives across the world. It's now easy to take 20 photos where years ago you'd have taken one carefully-posed snap, counting down from 24 and wishing you'd have paid the extra for the 36 exposure film for your holiday. All these photos have got to go somewhere, but online sharing is so much more that the digital equivalent of a battered shoebox in the loft.

Flickr, the most famous photo-sharing website, is four years old this week and hosts over two billion photos. Facebook holds even more, over four billion they say, but most are visible only to friends. So, given that they're mostly the kinds of photos that we'd have faked a prior engagement to avoid, is the whole thing so popular?

The names people give to their pets can open the door to their minds just a crack - my dad named his cats Sid and Nancy, revealing a love of punk that I wouldn't have suspected from his James Taylor-heavy record collection. I've known a man with a dog called Colin, this amused me as much as anyone popping down to the Registrar and jotting 'Spot' down in the forename box for their newborn.

As a person obsessed by cats and the internet, I'm now a little tired of the hilarious act of having a kitten called Chairman Meow. Beware a person with such a self-consciously wacky name for anything, it's a short hop from Chairman Meow to loud Hawaiian shirts and and stickers that read "You don't have to be emotionally empty to work here, but I am".

Pets' names aren't broadcast around the neighbourhood, except when you're calling your dog across the park, but the name you give to your WiFi network is. I care about these things, and I've been writing them down.