A few weeks back I met the rather excellent Mario Cacciottolo at the Manchester Social Media Cafe. He runs this rather neat photography project called Someone Once Told Me for which he gets people to write something that (you guessed it) someone once told them on a big flip chart and then be photographed. A different one gets posted up every day and today is my turn for a spot in the moonlight.

Image by Mario Cacciottolo on Someone Once Told Me (cc-by-nc)

The story in question, as I explain in the audio commentary involved my great aunt Joan, a redoubtable and strange woman who as the years went on had got rather stranger yet. As a child I remember going to visit her in Bowness-on-Windemere where there was a huge and exciting rock to climb around on and a constant flow of Dropscones. As age crept up on Joan, her memory faltering, the last time I saw her was at my Grandmother's house for Christmas in 1999 where on my walking in the door she looked at me and uttered this now-immortal quote. Still, age didn't stop her engaging with Christmas passtimes of plastic-frog-racing and the annual "nut" game.

Mario's project is giving me some food for thought too. With one very simple idea and a little work to get the wheels of social media turning (a website, twitter account, facebook, flickr and so forth) the project has clearly made a major shift in his visibility as an artist. It's a perfect social media recipe, the subjects of the photographs themselves drive the visibility of the project - because it's them and because it's personal. Look! I'm doing it right now!

It also puts me in mind of something someone else once told me "Never give your art away too cheaply" - despite the fact that Mario is doing this on the net and using CC licences for everything, there is something very "not cheap" about it. Images are nicely presented with text and audio commentaries and the inevitable links for re-sharing, also the self-imposed rules by which the images are selected, processed and displayed one-per-day lends itself to a regular following - rather like webcomics such as XKCD it becomes one of those things you check back on and share around when a particularly good one comes up. For my own photography there are some serious lessons to be learned here - really to think about how people get hooked into the work and about what one gets back.