The medium is the message
Or so said Marshall McLuhan. The form of the medium embeds itself in the message and the medium influences how the message is perceived. This was either prescient of the age of the internet or merely a reflection on the changing way that radio, cinema and other channels were already transforming our lives. Whilst we are seduced by the content, we were oblivious to the real transformation that was taking place.
But when you announce your news using an image or a poster, the web still struggles to interpret it. The poster may say everything you think it needs to say, but actually if your message is propelled into the internet using rss, email or some web sharing service consider whether the images can actually be seen at all!
Most people have images turned off on their email (on their phone too) while rss and web sharing services can throw up entirely different images drawn from your web page.
Images unaccompanied by explanatory text may be completely meaningless if undisplayed and won’t be found easily by search engines. Regardless of the medium the message is unintelligible. In fact the medium mangles the message.
Posting images on their own is fine on instagram – that is the whole point. Facebook, if accessed through facebook, lends itself to unaccompanied images with or without parental consent. But websites, unless they’re photoblogs don’t. So to get the most out of your blog or website add good old fashioned text, it works and much easier to embed than an image, but may take a little longer to create. But it is worth it, for all the talk of a semantic web, ever spotted how search engines come up with some pretty daft results. It is down to you to help.
