I was steaming with anger! Flickr wouldn’t let me post to my blog likes its been doing smoothly for the last 5 years. 2 days in a row. That’s ourageous! I repeated that simple Post It keystroke time and time again. First patiently, then more firmly and then with expletives and finally with the plams-up appeal gesture so well rehearsed as a way of communicating with bad decisions from referees. How could this possibly happen? I tried again, hitting the keyboard hard, as I imagined that the faceless operatives at Flickr would sense my frustration telepathically through the keyboards. And then sotto voce ‘Come on you bastards!’

After an episode like this I usually manage to calm down again in a routine probably instilled in me way back in childhood. OK calm down there’s probably a perfectly good reason. Try another machine. ….same again. All right then look around Flickr and check the blog registration. No fine. That’s fine, so what’s really going on? Eventually I thought I’d check the boards (I don’t really like them which is why that was the last port of call) and lo and behold there’s a long long trail of similar complaints, reassurances from the Flickr people, advice from other bloggers and so on. I just put ‘Get it sorted’ and left.

Co-incidentally - I think - I went on and posted this on digital provenance using the Blogger picture function. The irony being that part of the digital crossing that I was tracing involved a direct reference to Flickr!
In the cold light of day, and in the reflexive spirit that is the Blogtrax project, I’ve been pondering on why the Flickr glitch was so emotional for me. Do I become socially or digitally dysfunctional when apps go out of wack? What would happen if blogger went down with the credit crunch/downturn/financial tsunami whatever? How many expressive tools need to shut down before one has to seriously reconsider one’s habitual identity performance?

Anyway it was so reassuring when coming around to posting these troubling thoughts to find a comment here. Sometimes Blogtrax feels like a lonely outpost on the digital frontier. Blogging has become so normal that its getting harder to ‘make the familar strange.’ Harder, but of course no less worthwhile because of that.