We couldn’t have said it better ourselves
I wanted to give a quick blog shout-out to our Canadian Australian Crank’r Sue Blimely over at SueBlimely.com. She wrote an awesome blog about her thoughts on PhotoCrank and why she has added the Crank Engine to her blog.
Rock on, Sue and thanks for the love!
UPDATE: For some unknown reason I said that Sue was Canadian, when she is in fact Australian. My apologies go out to all of the Canadians out there for the accidental association. 
A new blog joins the family and Crank’n the F1 experience
First things first, I wanted to welcome a new blog to the PhotoCrank family, which is always exciting news to spread around the Interwebs. The blog I’m talking about, WILLisms.com, is a very smart, edgy and entertaining blog written by my man Will Franklin that makes politics fun to read even for a guy like me(which is an amazing feat in itself). WILLisms is going to be using PhotoCrank as a way to add a new interactive element to their caption contests starting next Wednesday, so be sure to check it out if you can remember.
Will, you rock. Moving on…
As I continue on the adventure of contacting bloggers in hopes of getting them to realize the current and future potential of what the PhotoCrank Engine can add to their caption contests, I have been finding hundreds, even thousands of blogs who run caption contests on a regular basis. These have ranged from blogs that talk about comic book characters all the way to blogs that talk about the automobile industry and everything in between and even though the subjects of the blogs vary tremendously, the value that they could realize by adding PhotoCrank to their contests is the exact same across the board. Higher user interaction, an easy voting mechanism and the ability to bring their visitors back to the blog again and again to view all of the new Cranks are just a few of the reasons that I can think of off the top of my head. Considering that all of these new features can be up and running in a matter of minutes and that the content is already being posted anyways, I feel like all of these blogs can definitely benefit from a little bit of Crank’n. But hey, that’s just me.
Anyways, a blog that I have recently contacted about using PhotoCrank with their caption contests is BlogF1, which is a British blog that covers all of the action from the F1 racing series. The blog is well written and very well designed and they run caption contests on a fairly regular basis, which is why I initially contacted them about PhotoCrank (with ‘them’ meaning Oliver White, his dad and whoever else they bring into the mix).
Well, the good news is that Oliver really likes the idea, but he is still questioning how PhotoCrank could fit in with his BlogF1 audience. This is a legitimate concern and one that I’m going to have to answer more and more as I continue to contact bloggers, so I decided to take one of the last images that he used for a caption contest and Crank it a few times so that he can get a better idea of how fun it can really be. I also wanted to show Oliver how a custom images can be added to the Crank Pallet specifically for his blog so that the Cranks are more relevant to the world of F1, so I dug up a few images from other places on his blog and from Google Images. By the time you read this I will have Crank’d the photo below a couple of times and please, don’t be shy - go ahead and Crank it, too!
More than just word bubbles, PhotoCrank as a photo tool?
As with any other group of people who are developing a product that is new and innovative, all of us here at PhotoCrank are constantly seeking out new and different ways that Crank’n an online photo can add value to anyone and everyone’s web experience. Although we are constantly coming up with some great new ideas (and some that aren’t so great), the core of what PhotoCrank is and what it provides those who use it doesn’t ever seem to really change a whole lot. No matter what our crazy brains have come up with, PhotoCrank still is, and probably always will be an easy, fun and informative way to make photos more relevant to people across the Internet.
But, just because the core of PhotoCrank doesn’t change doesn’t mean that Crank’n can’t be used to do many different things for many different types of people. While a majority of the current Crank’rs out there may be using PhotoCrank for mostly entertainment purposes on photos, I feel that there are also powerful ways that PhotoCrank can become a valuable and useful tool for online images as well. A quick example of what I mean can be found over at TechCrunch, which if you don’t know is one of the most popular tech blogs on the Interwebs (I read it several times a day). In a post that I noticed yesterday titled MySpace Embraces DataPortability, Partners With Yahoo, Ebay And Twitter there had been a mocked-up screenshot of a Twitter profile page posted above the text content that had been written. The screenshot was circled in certain areas that TechCrunch wanted the readers to pay special attention to and although the circles were easily noticed, the sections of the image that they were surrounding was unreadable and hard to make out due to the width restrictions of the blog. For those blog readers out there like me who mostly use the skimming method to keep up with posts, I felt that the image wasn’t getting a good enough point across just standing there on it’s own, which could lead to less time on site, less interest in the actual text content and possibly even a frustrating user experience.
After I saw this particular post, my wheels began to turn a bit and I came up with a potential way for blogs like TechCrunch to use PhotoCrank in these types of situations (screen shots, graphs, etc.). The first image below is what was posted by the TechCrunch guys and as you can see it’s not very easy to quickly understand what the image is trying to get across to the readers:
The following image is a mock-up screenshot of my own Twitter profile page, with circles added just like they were on the original image that was posted with the TechCruch post. To make the image more relevant and easier to understand I simply Crank’d the image with some cropped closeups and short captions of what was circled for attention. Once the Crank is played, the closeups and captions appear and they are very easy to read as they seem to ‘pop off’ of the original image. See the example below and click the Crank It button in the bottom right corner of the photo to play the Crank:
In my opinion this is a simple and powerful way to use PhotoCrank as a tool for images and photos, which takes the value of Crank’n to a whole new level. As more examples like this come along, I’ll post them up here in the PhotoCrank Blog so that I can get your thoughts and comments on each one. Until next time, make sure that you Crank it like you want it.