I cannot say anymore that flickr is not being responsive, after the knock knock post, I got a rather long, and detailed message, with some clarification of NIPSA, why it is there, and some re-assurrances that they are working on ways to flag things with categories for ones that are not photos.
NIPSA is all about what turns up in flickr-wide searches:
In the meantime, your photos will not show up in global search results. This is not because we hate Second Life, or hate screenshots, or hate you, or have any specific official opinion at all about philosophical questions like “What is a photograph?” or “Where is the dividing line between real and virtual worlds in our brave new digital age?” (personally, I’m sympathetic to the argument that ‘photos’ taken with ‘cameras’ in SL are actually photos).
It’s because Flickr is *for* photos. Even when we have support finer-grained distinctions in our search system, better tools for self-flagging, and allow users to choose what kind of images show up in their search results, by default we will only show photo results.
And really, I can do about 95% of what I intended to use flickr for our NMC Second Life Campus photos — what was missing is that I could not tag them with a common tag as planned “nmc-campus” that could be grouped together and syndicated with other flickr users who tag the same. But I can still achieve something similar with a shared photo pool. For everything else that flickr does, I can live with it.
But it has been interesting to push the talk about what is a photograph…. so keep on pushing.
At the same time, I will be exploring other services; such as SnapZilla, where you post images directly from your Second Life… ahem.. camera.
On a related front, Wired has just run a story Flickr Cracks Down on Screenshots – where at least you now know the magic formula- “real” photos ought to be at least 50% of your total, and I can bet they are looking more intently when a new account is started. My not so proven advice (which I did not do) would be for those that want to upload their Second Life PHOTOS (they are photos!), would to pre-load your account with a few hundred cat, baby, bird, food, car photos.
See also coverage by Eric Rice and more in the Technorati bin.
There is confusion running out there, and I am responsible for my share. Flickr is not prohibiting you for uploading these images- the NIPSA tag means your images do not come up on public tags or searches- but you can still build photo collections, sets, link there, use RSS feeds, create badges and posts to your blogs, all the groovy stuff I like about it.
