Starting today…All the details are here. But basically, grab your camera and shoot everything you did today (5th May).
My addition to the 24hours… 
Tag: flickr
London Werewolf Cards?
This was one of those what the f*ck moments. Found on Kid666
There was a lot of Werewolf playing at BarCampLondon2 as one would expect. There was also some talk of starting a Flickr group with CC licences. These could then be printed to Moo cards.
While I know some people want to do illustrated or CGI graphics I dont have any of those skills. I do however have a lot of imagination. In that spirit I decided some of our favourite British web-tech celebrities should be turned into Werewolf cards. My suggestions are:
- Werewolves
- Jeremy Keith
- Andy Budd
- Tom Coates
- Seer
- Mark Norm Francis
- Villagers
- Simon Willison
- Ian Forrestor
Who else should be on there where? And does anyone have the photoshop skills to make this happen? Write me!
I would do it this way.
- Werewolves
- Jeremy Keith
- Andy Budd
- Tom Coates
- Mark Norm Francis
- Seer
- Ian Forrestor
- Healer
- Natalie
- Villagers
- Sheila Thomson
- Steve Marshal
- Simon Willison
- Kapowaz
- Tom Morris
Yahoo are at it again…
I think it was about a year ago when Yahoo tried to sweet talk everyone who used Flickr into upgrading to a Yahoo ID. Old Skool flickr members revolted and staged a large protest. Well its happening again, I wonder if there will be a large protest again? I just received this email from Yahoo.
Dear Old Skool Account-Holding Flickr Member,
On March 15th we'll be discontinuing the old email-based Flickr sign in system. From that point on, everyone will have to use a Yahoo! ID to sign in to Flickr.
We're making this change now to simplify the sign in process in advance of several large projects launching this year, but some Flickr features and tools already require Yahoo! IDs for sign in — like the mobile site at m.flickr.com or the new Yahoo! Go program for mobiles, available at: http://go.yahoo.com.95% of your fellow Flickrites already use this system and their experience is just the same as yours is now, except they sign in on a different page. It's easy to switch: it takes about a minute if you already have a Yahoo! ID and about five minutes if you don't.
You can make the switch at any time in the next few months, from today till the 15th. (After that day, you'll be required to merge before you continue using your account.) To switch, start at this page:
http://flickr.com/account/associate/
Nothing else on your account or experience of Flickr changes: you can continue to have your FlickrMail and notifications sent to any email address at any domain and your screenname will remain the same.
Complete details and answers to most common questions are available here: http://flickr.com/help/signin/
Thanks for your patience and understanding – and even bigger thanks for your continued support of Flickr: if you're reading this, you've been around for a while and that means a lot to us!
Warmest regards,
– The Flickreenos
So as Neil and others have pointed out, the Yahoo/Flickr protest is back and this time Yahoo don't seem to be rolling over. So whats my beef with Yahoo? Well let me tell you in a couple of points.
- I bloody paid for 2 years of Flickr not Yahoo.
- My Yahoo ID is something completely different and getting ianforrester or anything close is going to impossible (trust me I tried)
- I don't want my non-commercial licensed photos involved in Yahoo's promotional warez.
- Sorry but I preferred to have my own ID not linked to Yahoo, simple.
- Why on earth does Yahoo want to know Birthday and Postcode? Is this needed just to share pictures?
What my wonderful wife bought me for Christmas
Yep for all the overtime she's been doing since the outbreak, she decided to buy me a Canon Powershot S3 IS today. This is also a good segway into the Flickr camera data pool which I've been meaning to blog about for flipping ages.
Here's all the cameras I currently own.
The Coolpix will soon be Sarahs and I'll start only using the HD1 for filming and quick shots. So far I'm totally in love with the Canon Powershot.
OS X Atmosphere Concept done with Flickr and clever scripting
I wish I had a XML desktop. Why? Well I really want to do some of things which can be easily done online, with my desktop machine too. Kind of application development using web technologies. Yes it would be slower that writing in C++ or something like that, but it would mean more people could write stuff for there machines. So whats prompted this observation? Well I'm already thinking about this for my Xtech Proposal (which I should be working on instead of blogging) plus I saw the OSX atmosphere concept on electro plankton just recently.
So what I'm thinking is this is kind of possible using a weather feed or api and Flickr pictures. Obviously I've not seen the application running but the general idea of what the wather is like outside on your desktop is very achiveable. RSS Screensavers currently are pretty lame, for example my current favorate displays the headlines and a random picture from the local machine. But it will also display markup as actual non escaped markup, yeah sucks when you get a feed with pictures. You would have thought it would be clever enough to display that picture or something. I mean imagine subscribing to a feed like engadget or gizmodo which are heavy with high quality images. The experience would be a lot different.
But back to the XML desktop idea, yes Vista with XAML looks/sounds like what I'm after but knowing Microsoft its not going to live up to the promises. Geez this is certainly geting close to my proposal but wouldn't it be great to have read only (at the moment) XML feeds for commonly used APIs on your own machine? Its kind of like a widget engine and how they make common desktop api's available for use. Well extend that out so you don't have to build just widgets. I know for a fact this has security and privicy implications but say we could find a way through those very serious concerns? Wouldn't that be fantastic?
Update: It looks Adobe'e Apollo could be the solution to this? Thanks Gareth for the heads up on this. I started think about Apollo a lot more while reading the PDF and thought of the parallels between it, Xulrunner and a widget engine. And came up with this matrix.
Moo Flickr mini-cards arrived yesterday
BBC issues recently
The BBC has been getting quite a lot of attention recently. I obviously can't say anything from a BBC perpective only my own personal view. So in lawyer speak, these are the views of myself and myself alone. They are not the and should not be taken as the official view of the BBC.
So the first and most public is the announcement about the Memo of Understanding with Microsoft. Via Slashdot
Microsoft has signed a memorandum of understanding with the BBC for 'strategic partnerships' in the development of next-generation digital broadcasting techniques. They are also speaking to other companies such as Real and Linden Labs. Windows Media Centre platform, Windows Live Messenger application and the Xbox 360 console have all been suggested as potential gateways for BBC content. It is unclear how this impacts on existing BBC research projects such as Dirac, although it is understood that the BBC would face heavy criticism if its content was only available via Microsoft products.
Slashdot has lots of critism and we didn't get a glowing review in the Guardian either. Dave's been sending me updates from the Free Software foundation UK list but Miles outlays a view point which I think quite a few people have (I assumed this was ok to publish miles?).
Any technology alliance the BBC enters into with a commercial software and DRM vendor should explicitly define open standards and open content. At the present time, where DRM implementations are not interoperable because of commercial competition in the DRM market, and software vendors' desire to dominate that market, producing proprietary and DRMed content locks the partnership in, and locks consumers in. Whilst it may be legitimate for a company to do this, a broadcaster that is funded by a mandatory public subscription (the license fee), and which has, in effect, as a direct result, a quasi-monopoly, should not abuse its position, and shaft a public which has no choice.
The cynic in me believes broadcasters are doing this on purpose – because they want “IP TV” to fail so they can prolong their existing business models.
Certainly these are very strong words.
And on to the other issue… Thanks to Bahi for this heads up. There's been talk about the BBC ripping off Flickr photographs. Ripping off and Scandal are very strong words indeed but if you do actually follow the Scotland Flickr discussion. The bit which got everyones backs up, lies in this part of what the editor of BBC Scotland says.
I wondered if anyone would be willing to give me advance permission to use their pictures as and when the need arises? We'd still always send you a message telling you we'd used a picture and we'd credit you in the alt tag (and possibly the caption as well).
All I can say is this was always going to be a difficult thing to explain.
Moo’s Flickr minicards
Found via Ben Hammersley's blog
Moo.com's Flickr Minicards service has launched and lordy is it good. Get up to a 100 of your Flickr images on the front of business cards, for $20? 10 free for all Flickr Pro users?
Free did you say? Yes and you know what its better that free? Free delivery to the UK too. I've already ordered my cards and if there any good I might just go for a 100. I've been looking for something different to my normal BBC business card for a while now. Oh they have a Flickr pool if your interested in seeing more.
Flickr reaches 250,000,000 photos
Found via BoingBoing
On February 15, 2006 I discovered that the photo sharing site Flickr had reached 100 million hosted photos. Today (September 22 2006) at 11.18 PM CET, only seven months later, Flickr passed the quarter billion mark – 250 million photos.
It maybe that Flickr is doesn't have the number of people that Yahoo Photos might do, but I very much douht that the quality and quanity of photos is anywhere near flickr. I do wonder the percentage which are creative commons licenced however.
Flickr releases maps for photos
There's some debate if this is geotagging or geo anything so I've used maps for now. Found via Digg, Thomas Hawk has a nice review of the new mapping feature in Flickr.
I have to say its pretty neat and works even better than Frappr at the moment. Although I'm wondering open this data is? For example will I be able to take the geo data out of Flickr once I've arranged all my pictures so nicely on the map? And if so, how? But for right now, London is looking a little bare at the moment so go add pictures! Look out for the lack of mapping from Yahoo maps outside northern america.