Preoccupations

Gawping in amazement: Flickr & Upcoming

Prelude: TechCrunch says 'Flickr continues to rock along, with 4.5 million registered users and 17 million unique visitors per month. They have just under 230 million total photos uploaded and 900,000 new photos are uploaded daily on average'.

And after that, the stats for geo-tagging (launched 28 August) are still amazing! '24 hours in, there were 1,234,384 geotagged photos (and now more than 1.6 million geotagged photos as I write this, about 9 hours later)' — Stewart Butterfield, Flickr blog.

But how much more impressive is this (all from Stewart Butterfield's posting):

One of the "little" things that was incredibly complex technically was the integration of location-based searching into our existing tag and text-based search technology. That means you can do things like search for photos matching "food" in southern Asia or architecture in South America. … marrying "traditional" search with spatial search in a real-time context is extremely hard, especially at our volumes and rate of growth. More than 228,000,000 photos have been uploaded, with over a million new photos being added on a good day. There are billions of bits of data that go into the search (more than half a billion tags alone), along with privacy controls, group membership, and so on. This is one of the largest real-time search indexes in the world. In contrast, nearly all web search is done in a "batch" mode with periodic updates, while nearly all real time search is done on a small set of items which "expire" after a short period. But new or updated Flickr photos are typically searchable in under a minute.

And:

… today we're also releasing extensions to Flickr's API to enable adding and retrieving geo information, setting privacy permissions, and searching by location: everything you need to roll your own. … This also means: "hey, if our maps don't work for you, use whatever maps you'd like!"

Finally:

… if you take a photo "near" an Upcoming.org event (in time and space), it'll automatically get tagged with the correct Upcoming event and show up on the corresponding event page without you doing anything.

For developments at Upcoming (also 28 August), go here: undiscovered events ('a very deep well of events that Upcoming members haven't added yet, collected from around the web and updated daily by our friends over at Yahoo! Local. To put this in perspective, we increased the number of upcoming events by 3000% overnight'), event filters, Flickr photos for events, buddy icons, new event pages.

All this is already old news on the web. I blog it because the value of this to anyone involved in education is immense and the achievement it represents (on the part of Flickr and Upcoming staff, but also, of course, the user communities) is the kind of stuff about which we should be telling our students — the next generation of innovators and co-creators.

Best overview of Flickr's geotagging I've seen to date? Thomas Hawks', here. (Hawks is the Chief Evangelist for the photo sharing site, Zooomr — 'We would be seen as a competitor to Flickr'.) A 'Go Read'.

Update:

1) Bokardo has posted on it, too: 'With geotags, Flickr pushes the envelope that much forward. I think it’s a great social feature, and one whose surface has only been scratched so far. I’m excited to see what other views people will come up with, given what we’ve seen in the first few days'.

2) Google Earth Blog: Better Method for Geotagging Photos for Flickr Using Google Earth/Picasa.

Technorati tags: Flickr, geo, geotagging, maps, mapping, Upcoming, events, calendars, calendaring

Participatory Media

Stewart Butterfield, as reported by AlwaysOn:

… the key to success in participatory media (a term he prefers over consumer generated content) is the people, not the photos or medium. The photos are just the “locus” for people bringing people together. You can’t have one without the other, and when you put it that way, calling it participatory media does make a lot of sense.

There's a tension here: that last sentence ('you can't have one without the other') doesn't sit so easily with the rest of the paragraph, and in fact what Stewart Butterfield says (play the 2½ minute Google Video at AlwaysOn) is suppler, weighted, much more nuanced — and made me recall what Jyri wrote in 2005:

The fallacy is to think that social networks are just made up of people. They're not; social networks consist of people who are connected by a shared object. … The social networking services that really work are the ones that are built around objects. And, in my experience, their developers intuitively 'get' the object-centered sociality way of thinking about social life. Flickr, for example, has turned photos into objects of sociality. On del.icio.us the objects are the URLs. … Approaching sociality as object-centered is to suggest that when it becomes easy to create digital instances of the object, the online services for networking on, through, and around that object will emerge too. Social network theory fails to recognise such real-world dynamics because its notion of sociality is limited to just people.

See also: Russell Beattie and Anne Galloway.

Technorati tags: Stewart Butterfield, Flickr, Jyri Engeström, participatory media, social networks, object centered sociality

Understanding MySpace

Jesse James Garrett in BusinessWeek online:

It seemed like an also-ran. But in less than two years it built up a community of more than 20 million users. And then it sold for half a billion dollars. The site is MySpace, a social-networking space where people connect with their friends and make new ones as they share their interests and personalities through the blogs, photos, comments, video, and audio they post. MySpace has developed a particular appeal for young people because the site makes it especially easy for bands to set up pages to communicate with their fans. Today, the statistics are staggering: 43 million users so far, 150,000 new ones every day. Ten percent of all advertising impressions across the entire Internet happen on MySpace -- twice as many page views as Google (GOOG). And in the wake of its recent acquisition, MySpace's growth has only accelerated.

… the system allows users to do almost anything to the look of their pages, whether it's a good idea or not. Regardless of its aesthetic consequences, this customizability is one of the site's most attractive features, and the do-it-yourself sensibility of the site resonates with the audience's desire for self-expression. …the unpolished style invites users to try things out, telling them they don't have to be professional designers to participate. The unrefined look of MySpace sends another message to users: We're like you. You're not a designer, and neither are we. We're not here to show off our design skills, we're here to connect. … Throughout, MySpace knocks down the distinction between the people who run the site and the people who participate. You'll never be isolated on MySpace, because the site's operators are your friends.

… crafting a site experience that acknowledges both what users care about and what they don't may be the smartest design strategy of all.

Technorati tags: MySpace

Yahoo! Go Mobile

Yahoo! Go Mobile is here:

With Yahoo! Go Mobile, emails, phone numbers and pictures synch with your account. So your stuff is always with you and easy to use.

• Contacts — Stored phone numbers are automatically synched
• Photos — Take a picture and it's stored online
• Messenger — Record voice instant messages
• Mail — Get notified when new email arrives

And …

Yahoo! Go - Get Started on Your Mobile

Yahoo! Go Mobile is available for download today on select Nokia Series 60 handsets. Prior to downloading the application, you should review the list of compatible handsets and read the installation instructions.

Technorati Tags: Yahoo!, Yahoo! Go Mobile

Coco Rosie at Scala

Last Thursday, I caught Coco Rosie (biographical info here) in fine form at this great venue. Unlike the Astoria, Scala is a fun place to go to and the irony this time was that had I had my camera with me (as opposed to leaving it on the number 35 — thank you, Oxford Bus Company for getting it back to me safe and sound) then my photos from the front of the pit would have been sensational. As it is, I have some photos from a Nokia N70 that are not bad, all things considered: on Flickr, here. (The day will come, and soon, when our phones will take great photos. The N70 is still just a 2 megapixel camphone, but that's such a step up from the 6630 and its 1.3 megapixel camera.)

What a gig! Coco Rosie are a phenomenon: a highly sexualised act, led off by a very male black dancer with a skirt on over his trousers and a keyboard player who looked male but, after ten minutes, was, we realised, a woman … The sisters, Bianca Casady and Sierra, sported moustaches drawn with a childlike hand. Cross-dressing and gender confusion, but not as in drag — all very see through, yet enough to be provoking and arresting. Gender, identity, gay and straight sexuality, loss and dream-like longing were all very strongly present themes throughout their set, on stage and in the lyrics. And there was downright, straightforward exuberance, too!

The music is far better live than recorded (and I really like their two albums): innovative and eccentric, but seen in the act of composition with little of the studio (pre-recorded/recorded) about it. They use a wide range of instruments, including "toys", and their sharply contrasting voices (Sierra is classically trained and had been destined for an operatic career) are often set against each other in ways that are by turns uncomfortable and beautiful. For the latter, I think of 'Good Friday'; for the former, 'The Sea is Calm'. 'Tahiti Rain Song' showed Bianca's voice to great effect and 'Candyland' Sierra's harp playing and singing. 'K-Hole' was another memorable song from the night. 'Beautiful Boyz' could easily have suffered from the absence of Antony, but the sadness of the song was well caught by the group.

From Chicago Innerview:

The music on La Maison de Mon Reve evokes genres of soul, gospel and blues, but Bianca and Sierra don't want to be limited by a certain type of music. Their songs play with an older Southern vernacular, with fictionalized stories and monologues. Bianca writes most of the songs and plays with various toys while Sierra puts the writings to melodies and vocals. "Everything is basically the way it sounds. It sounds like an endless resource of sound that creates a story or a feeling or even a sense that it's real, that you are just listening to a real moment," states Bianca about their music.

They integrate their own recorded samples that sound like degraded old records (similar to what Moby does except with authentic samples) and field recordings such as falling rain, birds chirping and an ambulance siren. Even though Bianca and Sierra used degrees of improvising on the album, they let it evolve naturally into structure …

The first track is the melodic "Terrible Angels" where Sierra sings as Bianca backs her up. The track combines their beautiful voices with a sawing sound to become a poignant lullaby. The next song is "By Your Side" where Sierra sings in a blues-inspired Billie Holiday or Nelly Furtado voice about a woman who wants to be a housewife: "All I wanted was to be your housewife/I'll iron your clothes /I'll shine your shoes /I'll make your bed /And cook your food /I'll never cheat /I'll be the best girl you'll ever meet." An array of sounds including crickets, birds and electro beats also accompany the track.

On "Jesus Loves Me," the girls continue with the Southern dialect to tell a story about how "Jesus loves me/But not my wife/Not my nigger friends /Or their nigger lives" to create a minimalist song with jangling tones at the end. The rest of the album appeals to romanticism and naturalism, with the dreamlike and poetic track "Good Friday" which features an acoustic guitar, whispering voices, and swirling sounds. The stripped down "Tahiti Rain Song" uses gospel vocals against the sound of actual rain falling onto a tin; the instrumental track "Candylandplaying" showcases Sierra's opera vocals with the piano and harp highlighting this angelic tune, while the romantic yearning of "Haitian Love Song" contrasts the other songs with its use of subtle hip hop beats. With this style of experimentation, Bianca and Sierra allow themselves to change with the music. "Part of it is an evolving regression to kinda go against myself, to create and consider different types of music. For me, it ended up with qualities people classify as folk/blues."

… Bianca says, "I guess I like the idea of doing something really contrasting - like with the Wu Tang Clan - something that would challenge people's idea of categorizing music." The duo are always recording and collecting new sounds as they embark on another record, which Bianca says gets "weirder and weirder."

See Voodooeros for other releases from the collective that includes Coco Rosie, Devendra Banhart, Diane Cluck, Vashti Bunyan … (There's a recent interview with Devendra Banhart which ropes in Coco Rosie and throws out links to many no doubt shared influences and listened-to bands/albums.) The Enlightened Family looks like an interesting album to follow up. The Milk Factory:

(Bianca) has collected a series of previously unheard songs from friends, both famous and unknown. The Enlightened Family features two tracks from a sixteen-year old Devendra Banhart, a 1968 recording from British folk legend Vashti Bunyan, an instrumental recorded by Patrick Wolf on a desert island, two tracks from Diane Cluck, an old forgotten piano track from Sierra Casady, and two of the sisters’ side projects, Metallic Falcons and Island Folk Lore.

Far from focussing on just one sound, this album changes direction with every track, from the fragile opener by Metallic Falcons and the soulful You’ll Never Know from Nomi to Houses, a track recorded by Devendra Banhart for a friend’s Birthday, which already showed signs of his particular aptitude at crafting perfect bohemian pop songs, or the chaotic gallic hip-hop of Rock N’Roll from CocoRosie’s regular collaborator Spleen, here with Zen, each track seems placed specifically against the one it follows to generate multiple clashes all the way through.

The two gems out of this eccentric family are to be found with Diane Cluck’s delectably sweet and sour Real Good Time and Vashti Bunyan’s long lost demo Song Of A Wishwanderer, which appears to encompass everything her followers thrive for in the astonishing purity of her voice and singing, which even the poor quality of the recording cannot alter.

The usually reliable Pitchfork gets it wrong, twice: La Maison de Mon Rêve, Noah's Ark. At Scala, there was a Dylan 1996 moment when someone shouted out during the act, 'You're a sham'. No, they're not: they're exciting, inventive and taking great risks — and they're taking people with them (as was obvious by the reception on Thursday and by the unusual composition of the audience — all ages and with evidence of some serious musicians scattered amongst us, there to check out one of the most interesting bands around).

Social Flickr

Back in June, after Reboot 7, when I posted my photos of Copenhagen (the out-of-doors ones rather grimly lit on the whole: beautiful weather, but such strong light made for difficult conditions — for this novice, at any rate) I asked if any passing, friendly Dane could amend or improve upon some of my descriptions. My thanks to Jan (Lausen) for stopping by and doing just this for the ones in question, urban buildings and scenes we weren't quite sure about or just got wrong.

I think this is still my favourite shot from the set:

The Round Tower: 'the spiral walk is unique in European architecture. The 209 m long spiral ramp winds itself 7.5 times round the hollow core of the tower, forming the only connection between the individual parts of the building complex'.

By the by: it would be very good if Flickr would support strikethrough HTML coding. Meanwhile, Flickr should update (as noted here) its FAQ advice: 'em' tags are said to be supported, but in fact only 'i' endure.

Fogged beauty

Wonderful shot of Didcot power station (which I pass regularly) in the fog, from the BBC News webpages (link via gilest):

Not the usual view, verbal or visual. I could live with them like this. (Years ago, I remember a friend arguing in defence of the station: 'it adds depth to the plain' …)

I found the Didcot image on the BBC (here) via a link to http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/. For a moment there I thought I'd found a whole new raft of BBC News images, but the url seems to point to the same pages as the links we're all used to, the ones beginning http://news.bbc.co.uk/. Browsing around to check this out, I came across this stunning AP image, captioned 'China's security services provide a rare glimpse of preparations for the 2008 Beijing Olympics':

Not being a lawyer, I'm not entirely clear of the copyright position on either image ('own personal non-commercial use' seems to be OK, which is what this is), so these may have to be taken down, but the link to the original BBC page with the image from China is here.

All in all, I prefer the image of Didcot power station in the fog. Less colourful, but much more calming. What is it with security services and Darth Vader?

Flickr …

… just gets better and better. View one of your photos and beside it now appears a new option to 'replace this photo':

Select this option and this follows:

Update (7.11.2005): I see from the FAQ that this is a feature only available to Pro Users —

2. Can I replace my photos and keep the comments and tags and stuff?

Yes! If you have a Pro account, you can replace a single photo at a time. When you're looking at an individual photo page, you'll see a link labelled "Replace this photo" under the Additonal Information heading on the right-hand side. If you do replace a photo, the title, description and all the comments, notes, tags, and favorites associated with the previous version will be kept.

Please note, if the new photo is larger than the original, the difference in bandwidth will count towards your monthly limit.

Flickr

Interestingness and clustering (Stewart Butterfield: 'It's easier to show than to tell, so here are some examples: love, terror, nose, bush, cameraphone'), two new developments at Flickr:

Both interestingness and clustering rely a lot on what people are doing, whether it's with the photos they like, or the tags they are using. You can think about it as people-powered searching. Yahoo! Search Blog

Of clustering, Cory says it's 'a major improvement to Flickr's "tagging" feature, whose main failing to date has been the ambiguity in tags -- some people tag photos of bushes with "bush," others tag pictures of the President with "bush." Clustering to the rescue -- it automatically finds the congruences in tags and groups them according to the discovered relationships'.

Interestingness (= photorank) is throwing up some wonderful photographs.

There are lots of things that make a photo 'interesting' (or not) in the Flickr. Where the clickthroughs are coming from; who comments on it and when; who marks it as a favorite; its tags and many more things which are constantly changing. Interestingness changes over time, as more and more fantastic photos and stories are added to Flickr. Flickr

A long time in the making, interestingness is a ranking algorithm based on user behavior around the photos taking into account some obvious things like how many users add the photo to their favorites and some subtle things like the relationship between the person who uploaded the photo and the people who are commenting (plus a whole bunch of secret sauce). Flickr Blog

The Flickr Explore page is a great front end for keeping users up to date with developments.

London bomb blasts

BBC News

bigdaddymerk

Flickr pools here and here; Wikipedia page here; Wikinews page here.

Update: all my friends are accounted for, but Jonny went through Aldgate East just before the bomb went off there.

Context Photography

Trying out Picture This! software from Future Applications Lab, Sweden. I love the Brecht quotation that heads up their home page:

New problems appear and demand new methods. Reality changes; in order to represent it, modes of representation must also change.

'Picture This! explores the future of photography. The mechanical and optical constraints specific to analogue cameras have disappeared with the advent of digital technology but still limit the way we conceive photography.This project aims at taking digital photography to the next level by developing new types of physical interaction with cameras, of visual representation and of hybrid picture-viewing.'

Much more on the background to all this here.

So, what I should be able to produce is the four effects pictured above (left to right):

1. Traces of coloured shadows follow the movement and the colour of the shadows changes with the frequency components in the surrounding sounds.
2. The part of the picture with most movement is zoomed in, and rendered on top of the actual picture with the amount of transparency determined by surrounding sound volume.
3. Small white dots follow the movement as a decaying trace. The picture is pixelised with the size of the pixels determined by sound volume.
4. Movement makes the picture look like liquid. As in 3, the picture is pixelised with the size of the pixels determined by sound volume.

Very cool. I've fired off a number of first (public) photos to Flickr. They're pretty awful. Last night, I got some much better ones around the school where I teach, but these raise inevitable issues of privacy. So for now these first shots will have to do. More (better ones) to follow, I hope.

Two APIs

Spell with flickr, by Kastner

amaztype: a typographic book search, using Amazon web services

Iraq: I — Hassan Family Relief Fund

Chris Hondros, Staff Photographer (New York City) with Getty Images News Service, very kindly allowed me to reproduce a stunning photo he took in Liberia in 2003 of a government militia commander exulting after scoring a direct hit on enemy positions. Today, he emailed me to say:

… if you're getting this email you wrote me in the aftermath of the terrible incident I photographed in Tal Afar, Iraq, in January.  If you recall, five children were orphaned by U.S. troops who mistakenly shot up their car when they approached a foot patrol.  The pictures of the incident have run all over the world and already done much to address the issue of checkpoint shootings in Iraq. 

Many of you expressed a desire to help the family; I'm happy to report that a website for donations has now been set up, http://www.hassanfamilyfund.org/.   Money donated to the cause will first go to arranging medical care for Racan, a boy in the car who's spinal column was damaged by one of the bullets and will never walk again unless treatment outside of Iraq is arranged for him.  (Humanitarian workers and others in Iraq are working toward this now.)  Excess funds will go to the extended family (the Hassan's had nine children) and to civil projects in Tal Afar itself, most likely a school built to commemorate the deaths.   Any help you can give will be appreciated.

More information about this story is available in this week's Newsweek magazine, on newsstands now or available online at: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7245228/site/newsweek/.

Chris's account of the shooting in Tal Afar can be read here, where there are also links to the photographs he took.

49PM NewsReader

This looks promising — 49PM:

Read any RSS or Atom newsfeed on your phone and view the photos formatted exactly to the size of your mobile display!

• Save downloaded photos to your phone and show them to your friends later.
• Only the newest posts are downloaded, saving time and money.
• Press the * button to find out which feeds have been updated since you last checked.
• Add any newsfeed you like, it'll even find the feed if you enter the web location of a weblog or newsfeed page.
• Works on virtually any Java enabled mobile phone with color display.

Feeds go through a dedicated server, where preformatting is done before the photos (etc) are sent on to your phone — ensuring photos match your display size and are downloaded quickly. Flickr-friendly, of course …

Bottom line: $19.95 a year. Free two week trial period.

Linking up

Much related to my previous posts on Mind-Web, there's what Jeremy Zawodny says we should 'Expect to see more of … in 2005.  Lots more' — as developers join the pieces together: Geo Moblog photos, a combination of Windows Moble Smartphone, Neil Cowburn's imaging library for .NETCF, MapPoint Location Server and Flickr.

More info here, Windows Mobile Team Blog.

"Taggregator" … for Flickr & del.icio.us — with a bit of help from 10x10

Richard S has mailed the del.icio.us discussion mailing list, drawing our attention to http://oddiophile.com/taggregator/index.php?tag= ,

a nifty way of displaying results from del.icio.us and flickr under the same tag (just complete the 'tag=' parameter in the querystring).

He had wanted to implement just such a "taggregator", but oddiophile got there first.

Instead I did this with it: go to http://rich.headsnet.com/news/ and be redirected to the taggregator results for the word currently most used in the news (courtesy of tenbyten). This gives a wider social context to the tenbyten results, letting you see what some of the internet thinks of the things in the news.

I was also intrigued by Richard's reflections on the differences in tagging between Flickr and del.icio.us, particularly in the light of Michal's comments to my earlier post:

One immediate thing that struck me about the taggregator results is how the different domains encourage very different approaches not just to the choice of tags but to the whole idea of what a tag is for. Flickr users seem to feel able to be freer, often using the tags given to a single photo to form whole sentences. They also seem to be keener on providing synonyms for things. Maybe there's more of a feeling that the tags in flickr are for display? Maybe the sense that flickr is more fun lets people go mad? Maybe del.icio.us is full of data geeks? Maybe in del.icio.us everyone's suddenly getting tag fear and is scared of adding more? Whatever. Seems like Taggle won't be replacing Google anytime soon. On the taggregator evidence, an "uber-tag search engine" would say more about the psychology of the tagger than about the tag.

Folksonomies & synonyms

In the discussions about tagging, the words of those who are actually wrestling with this behemoth can be a salutary reminder of just how demanding are the challenges of programming for a folksonomy.

Michal Migurski is the technology head at Stamen, a San Francisco design and development studio which focuses on interactive projects and which is behind Mappr. In a brief posting about Louis Rosenfeld's discussion of folksonomies vs controlled vocabularies, Migurski says:

His point about synonyms is a great one, though, and is pointedly ignored in Clay Shirky's rah-rah response. Folksonomies are unlikely to evolve synonyms for the simple reason that people will usually choose just one of the many synonyms available. For example, self portraits on Flickr are usually tagged with me (15,396 photos) or selfportrait (2,150 photos), but who tags their photos with both? Right. So the overlap just isn't there to be able to infer that these two terms are synonymous, just like people tend to use one preferred name for a place with names in many languages, or one preferred name or nickname for a person in particular contexts. We just happen to be in the early stages of a project that hopes to use folksonomies and user-generated meta-data to make sense of free form conversation, so this is going to turn into a bear of a challenge.

On remembering

Jyri Engeström:

Googlization: the embedding of personal collections in global networks. In commercial visions like Microsoft's MyLifeBits priority is often given to the image of a jukebox of personal memory artifacts. My guess is blogs, on the other hand, would emphasize the inherent connectedness of individual memory to a constantly evolving social context.

Capturing technologies shape the very nature of remembering as they become intertwined in our daily routines of our self-creation.

Flickr & the future

Two, linked postings have made me think more about Flickr — one by Peter Merholz and the other by Thomas Vander Wal.

Two things stand out for me in Peter Merholz's post: 'Those sites that truly succeed on the web do so because of a fundamental appreciation of what "the network" brings. Amazon, eBay, and Google being the biggest, shiniest examples. They get that the network, with its constituent elements of people doing things, and through those activities somehow connecting to each other (whether it's direct, as in items on eBay, or indirect, as in different people buying the same product on Amazon, linking to the same page in Google), they get that that connection is meaningful, exceedingly meaningful, and if you can leverage that behavior, you can provide an experience orders of magnitude more interesting than when you ignore that connectedness'; (unlike a MMPORG, Flickr) 'provides joy through its multiple perspectives on reality' — yet play is important to the experience of Flickr.

Thomas Vander Wal picks out certain (innovative) features of Flickr as significant for the way the web might develop: it's a 'social network that makes sense' ('As physical space gets annotated with digital layers we will need some means of quickly sorting through the pile of bytes … to get a handful that we can skim through. What better tool than one that leverages our social networks'); it's a tool that extracts something of an individual's "vocabulary" for things ('metadata tools that add text-addressable means of finding objects').

I have been "playing Flickr" since about July and I feel I am only just beginning to make use of many of its features. Finding photographs (out of interest or for specific purposes) via RSS feeds, or taking pot luck and exploring various tags (the tag suggestions that Flickr throws up during this process are themselves a remarkable feature of the site — very clever) has been both intuitive and great fun. Then there's the ability to create groups (social, work-related, topic-focused …): this is a very powerful feature and I have recently started exploring these, socially and for work. Couple all this with a project like 43 Things (can Basecamp come on board, too?), with weblogs (as here) and you begin to have something that is very powerful indeed. Using Flickr is influencing my choice of phone (coming to upgrade time). Much, much more importantly, I can begin to see how it can be put to use to effect vital social missions.

Update: I failed completely to highlight the excellent discussion threads in the Flickr forums and groups. Here's one that bears on some of the points above:

Pandarine: If someone still has the impression that Flickr is less of a community than Fotolog, please get involved in the active groups, and don't just wait for people stumbling across your fabulous work! You can get assignments, be creative or use your imagination, dream, learn something, discuss, share your life, laugh, cry, participate in group hugs, communicate without language barriers, or simply show off your work in the hundreds of specialty groups! Lots of us spend most of their time with hits like flashlight and squared circle. There is a birthday list, a workshop, a place to share your recipes - or you can privately show your wedding pictures exclusively to Grandma Polly and Auntie Bertha and wait until someone comments them. After all it's your choice! Note: These groups are randomly picked, and my list is not intended to be discriminating against the many other fabulous groups on this website. There is so much going on in this community, I can hardly keep up. So please don't ever tell me again that there is "lack of community" in Flickr - or I'll make the list even longer. That's a threat, not a promise ;-)

Zen: To me immediacy of this site has been tempered with an understanding that this is more than a photo storage site... in fact, it began as a cross between a technologically aware social-interaction environment and a sort of MUD (Multi-User Dungeon to use an ancient term) and is much more a collection of people whose thread is the visual image. That sounds more cerebral perhaps, but here is also the capacity for emotion and compassion along with thought and responsibility beneath the HTML.

And one final update (2.1.2005)! Credit for the "Flickr-is-like-a-MMPORG" idea goes back to a posting at giantant.com (well worth reading). And I ought to have thrown in Mappr here as another amazing development — made possible by Flickr:

Mappr is an interactive environment for exploring place, based on the photos people take. By adding geographical information to the wealth of photographs found online, it allows new ways of looking at spaces and images. Mappr adds place to pictures.

Mappr takes advantage of the cornucopia of descriptive information provided by Flickr's users to organize their photos. Flickr's admirable policy of openness with its data provides a way to anticipate and envision a future where cheaply-available GPS technology generates this placement as a matter of course. There's no reason to wait for this technology to become common; by mapping the millions of photos that Flickr makes available, we can start looking at its broad scale potential now.

There's a public Mappr group at Flickr (with feeds and project updates).

Some digital photography links (posted from 43 Things)

PC Magazine has an article entitled Troubleshooting your images and this deals with blurry images, pixelated or grainy images, images too dark or light and poor colour.

Then, Bob Atkins Photography has a new piece about digital image re-sizing:

One aspect of digital images which seems to cause a lot of confusion to beginners is the matter of image size. There are three basic measures of image size:

• Pixel count – e.g 3000×2000 pixels
• Physical size – e.g. 4” x 6”
• Resolution – e.g. 72 pixels per inch (ppi)

The confusion seems to arise because people aren’t sure of how these are related.

Finally, Outback Photo has an article about EXIF metadata:

Whenever you take a picture with a camera, or scan a slide, the firmware of your camera or your scanner captures not just the actual image itself, but also additional data, describing the environment in which the image was taken. This data is called metadata and its understanding and utilization can be an invaluable aid in your workflow.

All these links found via PhotographyBLOG.

(See more progress on 43 Things, "become a much, much better digital photographer"...)

Become a much, much better digital photographer

It would be great to pool ideas and know-how. I know far too little about digital photography and am not even sure I'm using the best format of file for shooting.

One resource I have found is this Flickr group (newsfeed here). Another (in the making) is 43 Things: see more progress on "become a much, much better digital photographer"...

Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii

Via Metafilter, amazing colour pictures of early twentieth century Russia: 'Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii took three b&w photos of his subjects using red, green, and blue filters. Now, they've been digitally composited'.

The Emir of Bukhara, Alim Khan (1880-1944), taken in 1911, shortly after his accession

A couple in traditional dress in the mountainous interior region of Gunib on the north slope of the Caucasus Mountains (now the Dagestan Republic of the Russian Federation)

For an explanation of "Digichromatography" and for much more about Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, see here.

Standard time

The graffiti reads, "thank god, now I can regulate my life".

Flickr

Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904)

(c) Cinémathèque française Etienne-Jules Marey

Boing Boing: 'The Musée d'Orsay has an exhibition of the mind-blowing photographs by physician and physiologist Etienne-Jules Marey, whose research in the 19th century led directly to the invention of the movie camera. The image below is a 1901 shot of a smoke machine.'

(c) Cinémathèque française Etienne-Jules Marey

On the occasion of the centenary of his death, this exhibition pays homage to Etienne-Jules Marey with a little-known aspect of his work, the study of air movement by means of a "smoke machine" he devised and of instant photography. The inventor among other things of chronophotography, this famous physiologist devoted his life to the study of movement in all its forms: animal and human locomotion, blood circulation, displacement of objects and fluids, gravity. Marey was one of the first theoreticians of aeronautics, the study of which led him to his aesthetic apotheosis during the years 1899-1902. His last major works were devoted to the observation and instant photography of smoke currents produced in his "smoke machine", one of the first modern aerodynamic wind tunnels, showing the diverse shapes of wisps of smoke according to the obstacle encountered in their trajectory. The shots thus made by Marey, fantastical images combining science and dream, poetry and technique, are aesthetic masterpieces that belong equally to the history of art, of photography, of aeronautics and aerodynamics. Mostly part of the collections of the Cinemathèque Française, they are hitherto unpublished material and some of them have never been shown since their creation. Several "smoke machines" are presented along with original plates and photographic prints. Musée d'Orsay

Online exhibition here.

10 x 10

Every hour, 10x10 collects the 100 words and pictures that matter most on a global scale, and presents them as a single image, taken to encapsulate that moment in time. … 10x10 is ever-changing, ever-growing, quietly observing the ways in which we live. It records our wars and crises, our triumphs and tragedies, our mistakes and milestones. When we make history, or at least the headlines, 10x10 takes note and remembers.

Each hour is presented as a picture postcard window, composed of 100 different frames, each of which holds the image of a single moment in time. Clicking on a single frame allows us to peer a bit deeper into the story that lies behind the image. In this way, we can dart in and out of the news, understanding both the individual stories and the ways in which they relate to each other.

10x10 runs with no human intervention, autonomously observing what a handful of leading international news sources are saying and showing. 10x10 makes no comment on news media bias, or lack thereof. It has no politics, nor any secret agenda; it simply shows what it finds.

Great design. Interesting idea.

Robert Frank

Robert Frank, Parade, Hoboken, New Jersey, 1955 (MoMA)

The Tate Modern's exhibition of one of my favourite photographers, Robert Frank, hasn't met with universal approval (see this thoughtful reaction by Richard Dorment) but the opportunity to see such a retrospective, and to enjoy a season of Robert Frank films, including the seldom screened Cocksucker Blues (a film the Stones found so unflattering they went all out to have it suppressed), is not something to pass up. The Observer has an interview with Frank which begins by recalling Kerouac's fine tribute to him:

It was Jack Kerouac who first defined Robert Frank's genius, who found in it some echo of his own vision of a vast, broken-down, but still epic, America, peopled with restless and lonely dreamers. 'Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice,' wrote Kerouac in his now famous introduction to Frank's collection The Americans , 'with that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand he sucked a sad poem right out of America on to film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world'.

Flickr

Flickr continues to impress me. It has to be one of the most innovative and exciting sites on the web. The new, very fast Organizr is a pleasure to use, but so much innovation is coming on-line that it's not always being trumpeted as it arrives. Last night, whilst reading the Flickr forums, I discovered that you can now give your photos the Creative Commons stamp:

'You can choose to use a Creative Commons license to allow more liberal use and sharing of your photos while still maintaining reasonable copyright protection' (here)

'You can also batch-select a license for all previously uploaded photos' (here)

NB: you need to be logged-in with a free Flickr account to view these pages.