18 replies to this topic

[jefffwd]

Pics heave been lacking from the aerial shots of the new plaza.....  Hope all is well!

[Volare]

He has been around on here. Hoping he got some Cowtown marathon photos today. But I think his view got worse with the construction.

[Austin55]

He looks to be at the Marathon.  I'm creeping on you on facebook, Brian

[lcbrownz]

He has been around on here. Hoping he got some Cowtown marathon photos today. But I think his view got worse with the construction.

Brian was on the Facebook Remember in Fort Worth When page last week. 

[David Love]

He's heavy into the FB scene now days... as are many,  I suspect.

[lcbrownz]

FB has a larger audience.

[djold1]

Facebook has its advantages.  One of the most important to me is that images may be used directly from the user hard drive without having to use on-line storage space. Since there is no pre-uploading necessary, it takes much less time to get images ready to display.  This ease of use also exists on the Blog template I use.  A John has noted before, the Forum formats are getting very dated.   I still read the Forum almost every day and comment, but I haven't contributed a picture for a long time....  

[John T Roberts]

The nice things about the Forum formats are that all of the discussions are kept together and they are not fragmented.  Even though the format is dated, I will keep this forum going until the posting die off to nothing. 

[djold1]

I did not mean to suggest in any way that the Forum si not a highly desirable place for many of us to converse.

 

What I was trying to suggest was that the Forum developers which provide the on-line software should figure out some way to incorporate new and desirable features into their product.  The cost of image storage has dropped greatly in the past several years and I can conceive of several ways that exist that might pay for the hosting.

[Dismuke]

I don't agree that the format is "dated" any more than, for example, the notion that email is somehow "dated."

 

Two things have happened:  new means of interacting online have come along that are more suitable for certain types of communication than were older methods.  Facebook, for example, is great for socializing and for very informal interaction, especially for content that is of interest to only a small social circle.   But, as John points out, it lacking when it comes to discussions that have a wider audience.  Keep in mind that with this forum and any discussion forum the number of lurkers vastly exceeds the number of active posters.   People mostly come to forums like this because of the information that is provided and the topics discussed are of interest to them.   Facebook is a horrible format for something like that - in part because the topics discussed are not organized and kept together and because one often has to become a member of a group or, in the case of wall postings, become a "friend" of the person.

 

The other thing that has happened to discussion forums is the same thing that faces all forms of media - radio, television, blogs, YouTube, video games etc:  those in the audience only have so much free time that they can devote to such things.   A few years ago, Facebook did not exist and, for a long while, was limited only to an academic audience.  Now a great many people spend a certain number of minutes on it every day.   Chances are the free time they have per day has not gone up - so time that they now spend on Facebook necessarily came at the expense of time they once spent on something else.

 

So I don't think the message board format is at all outmoded.  It merely has more competition.   Like anything else, it cannot be all things to all people.  The long term trend with the Internet is for audience sizes to become increasingly smaller and more specialized.   That is what is killing off the Old Media - i.e, mass media formats.   But those same forces and trends will also have an impact on New Media formats over time as well.  Trust me, the next Big Thing that comes along that people choose to spend a lot of time on will come at the expense of time that people now spend on Facebook.

 

And, by the way, John - to bring up a morbid subject that will hopefully not be relevant for many decades, have you ever given thought to in some way preserving the Forum in the event something were to ever happen to you?    Just think of what a treasure trove this message board will be for people many decades in the future who have an interest in Fort Worth during the early years of the 21s century.   What a nice snapshot of the current events that were transpiring in the city along with what ordinary people in our area were thinking about and felt passionate about.    Your forum has already been cited by a number of media organizations - and, if it were preserved, I guarantee it would be similarly cited by future historians.

 

One of the great things about the digital age is we have an unprecedented amount of information about our times.   Just think of how many photographs you likely have on your hard drive (or, anymore, your cell phone) verses the number people had back when one had to pay money for both film and photo processing.   I clearly remember having to ration the number of photos I took so that my film on hand would last in the event that something I REALLY wanted to photograph came along.   Now I don't even worry about how many photos I take.   And think of the wealth of information that currently sits gathering dust in archives - old diaries, old letters and other documents - that remains untapped due to the amount of time it would take for a human being to have to manually sort through and actually read it all.   Future archivists will be able to mine today's information with key word searches.

 

But there is a downside to all of what we have today - it is so incredibly fragile.    Old letters can easily last a century or more and pre-color photographs can last even longer.  But how long does a hard drive last?  How many of us still have information stored on floppy discs for which we no longer have a drive that can read them?    A very significant percentage of movies from the silent era have been forever lost because the media they were on was so unstable.  And had it not been for the advent of television and the sudden need to dip into forgotten movie studio vaults in order to desperately find content that new TV stations could use to fill up the broadcast day with, many of the surviving films from the early talkie era would have also been lost.   I fear the same sort of tragedy will happen with our digital memories.    But even with the unstable media of early films, at the very least, the physical media was distributed to thousands of theaters across the country - which helped increase the odds of at least one copy managing to survive.  But when it comes to websites and blogs and message boards - even ones that have very large audiences - how many digital copies of it actually exist?  Probably just the main site and a very small handful of backup copies.   I have already seen a website disappear that contained information that I relied on - it was the only source online that provided hard to find discographical information about early 1900s European recordings.   There was a server crash and the owner did not have a backup copy - and he told me he had no desire to redo all of the work necessary to republish what was lost.   Fortunately, I was able to find a backup through Google Cache and save it to my hard drive before Google purged it from its cache feature.   But it taught me a lesson - if there is information on a website that is extremely important to you as reference material and is not easily obtainable elsewhere, best bet is to download the page or even the entire site.

 

Anyhow, I don't think the message board format is going to go away - though it most likely will continue to evolve.

[John T Roberts]

Dismuke, thanks for your thoughtful reply.  In answer to your question about preserving the forum and the website, I have not made any arrangements.  I will probably donate all of the photographs that I have taken to Historic Fort Worth and the AIA.  But, if something happened to me tomorrow, nothing has been addressed relating to the site and the forum.

[mmiller2002]

FB is scary and creepy.

[Austin55]

DSC_0480 by Micro55, on Flickr

 

I found him!

[Brian Luenser]

Thanks Austin.  Sure enough me!  I like that shot.   Here is another one someone took of me.  I am in a sky lift over Main Street on Sunday.  Was too much fun.  All.

 

[John T Roberts]

It seems like you are always high above us all on some kind of perch!

[Brian Luenser]

True John.  I will always be a tree climbing kid.  Pretty much how I spent my youth growing up in a forest.  I will never forget climbing a really tall tree one summer morning and spotting a town in the distance. (5 miles away. The town with the hardware store we would go to)  I was hooked.

[lcbrownz]

FB is scary and creepy.

The Remember Fort Worth When" FB page is self-policing when it comes to advertising and "mad dogs". A note to the moderator and the troublemakers are history. But one of the many things I do not like about FB is there is no way to catalog or organize the photos in any order like there is on this forum. Even the moderator cannot remove the dozens of photo duplicates. Out of the over 5100 photos on that page, quite a few of them are from here without any credit to photographer. After reading all of these posts, it is a general consensus that everyone has nothing but good to say about this forum. John Roberts has done a great job in keeping this forum on a historical keel. Google and the other search engines seem to be getting out of the history business and immersing their model into a large commercial yellow pages. Without this forum, and John's and others assistance, we all would be gravitating back to the public library for our reference photos. 

[ramjet]

Congrats to Brian - named best photographer in FortWorth,Texas magazine's "best of" for 2013.  I concur.  Although dangr.dave and others who post photographs here are pretty awesome, too.

 

http://fwtx.com/arti...est-2013-people

[Brian Luenser]

Thank you very much Ramjet.  It is really an honor for me, particularly as an amateur.   A total surprise.  But I owe any photographic success I have to this Fort Worth Forum including my knowledge of Fort Worth, and help and inspiration of  photographers like John Roberts and 360texas and many others.  This Fort Worth Forum has played a major role in my adult life.  (Why I live in Fort Worth and take 70,000 photos a year)  John Roberts is just plain a Fort Worth treasure to whom I will always be grateful.  Total quality.  I really appreciate all the friends and contacts I have made here over the years, including you Ramjet.