Someone on Flickr quoting Martin Parr on Flickr - he’s quite right, of course… there is a huge compulsion to conform to what will make an image that will be popular on Flickr. I do it all the time. So hard to be original and find your own style.
I also would say that a lot of the work on Flickr is generic. It looks quite modern, because you lot are aware of trends and the language of contemporary photography… But I cannot recall seeing a set of work that would make a stunning book.
Before you all bite my head off and tell me that you are all geniuses, you have to remember that there are over 1000 books of new work published every year and most of these tend to disappear after publication.The quality of this published work is high, but it is difficult to achieve the uniqueness that will assure you of a place in photo history.
It is a tough world out there, and I think that Flickr has a great contribution to make, but still feel it is unlikely that the next big photo star will come from this source.
I was doing a bit of writing this evening and ended up at one point including the phrase ‘ee-ay-addio’ which had me wondering about its origins. Via Private Eye’s football reporter E I Addio, I ended up looking at football chants and then back to the nursery rhyme ‘The farmer in the dell’, where it comes from. The rhyme itself is alluded to in The Secret History by Donna Tartt (a book I love), and I’m pretty sure it’s referenced by Dennis Potter in The Singing Detective. It is also the source for the title of the book I am the Cheese by Robert Cormier. For some reason I’ve been thinking about Robert Cormier recently, even though I’ve not read any of his books since I was a teenager. I went looking for any surviving Cormier books and found a long-forgotten copy of the screenplay to Jules et Jim. 
That and After the First Death are stacked up as the next books to read. And back at my writing - it’s a story about a computer - I finished a second draft, did a word count and discovered I had written 6502 words. The very first computer I used was my brother’s KIM-1, basically a development kit for the 6502 processor, and my introduction to computer programming was 6502 assembly language.
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