Blog Streaking, Google-stalking and Photolurking

Posted on January 27, 2007

A New Scientist article looks at new activities and habits of people in the Internet age like egosurfing, Google-stalking and being a Wikipediholic. Photolurking is probably the most disturbing activity discussed in the article.

Photolurkers spent most of their time online flicking through photograph albums posted by strangers

Whose looking at your family Flickr photos? Photolurking definitely has a creepy One Hour Photo feel to it -- as The Guardian suggested. The New Scientist article says two researchers at Lancaster University in the UK discovered photolurking.

Then there are photolog sites like Flickr. While most of us would rather die than be caught surreptitiously browsing through someone else's photos, there need be no such qualms about the private pics people put up on these sites. Haliyana Khalid and Alan Dix at Lancaster University in the UK have studied this new practice of "photolurking". Most people they interviewed who used Flickr and similar sites spent time each day browsing albums owned by people they had never met. They do this for emotional kicks, Khalid and Dix suggest: flicking through someone else's wedding photos, for example, allows people to daydream about their own nuptials.

What most of us find excruciatingly boring others apparently find quite fascinating. BuzzFeed has links to a few more blogs discussing the subject of photolurking.

Bloggers may also want to avoid this one:

Blog streaking: Revealing secrets or personal information online, which for everybody's sake would be best kept private.

Blogging under the influence is probably the best way to get yourself involved in a blog streaking incident.