Tag: pictures

Getty pictures go non-commercial but there is a downside

Although I welcome Getty opening up there picture archive for us bloggers to use. However there are concerns or downsides…

  • This isn’t creative commons licensed, Attribution-Noncommercial NoDerivitives would have been good enough but Getty wanted to add additional conditions.
  • All the images are available via an IFRAME tag. And I thought Flickr’s embed was bad!
  • Reading the terms of conditions… They reserve the right to do what they like within that IFrame including as you imagine, advertising…

Be-careful out there people…

Following on… Juliapowles on Twitter mentioned this to me. As Dr. Adam D. Kline says later, the first comment says it all. And it really does sum it all up…

As someone who has grown old and weary fighting Getty’s ‘licence first and clear the rights later, if at all’ business model on behalf of impecunious photographers it is difficult to view this development with unalloyed enthusiasm

Facebook for my old crusty photo collections

Me and the wowball

Most people know how much I really hate Facebook, although in the last few months I’ve slightly warmed to it for certain things.

Recently I scanned all my old negatives into jpgs, and I’m not sure what to do with them?

Normally I would upload them to Flickr.com like most of my photos but to be honest I only upload the best of my shots to flickr.com (even though I have a pro account and I have done for the last 4+ years). It just didn’t make sense to upload the old crusty scanned pictures to flickr.com. So I had a think and decided that the best place to publicly put them is on Facebook. Yes the EULA still really bugs me and It probably means Facebook now owns my photos but heck, there so old and crusty, that I don’t really care. Better online somewhere that lost in negative form forever?

On the upside, most of the photos are from when I was in school, so most of the people in the photos will be on facebook too. This means they can tag the photos to death and write stupid comments which make youtube comments look like degree essays in comparison. Oh and of course there will be the crazy (its taking over the web like crazy) "I like this" button for those who can’t be bother to say anything meaningful… (Geez I’m so snotty about facebook, I should really stop being so darn negative about it)

I also reckon theres roughly about 300 of them once you take out some of the duplicates (I did the scanning over a few days and didn’t really do a good job of splitting the done and to do piles, so shoot me). No one really wants to see my photostream full of old crusty photos for almost 300 photos… Heck not even I want to see that. So I’ll use facebook as I’ve been using it previously, a massive dumping ground for publicly available data. I’ve marked the photos as public, so it will be interesting to see what that means in the great scheme of things.

I’m aware there is some facebook event later today but I doubt its anything which will change my view on facebook or using it.

So old friends of mine, do check out the tip of the iceberg collection i’ve uploaded so far under school days (I was tempted to write skool daze but I don’t want to encourage the super lameness which comes with facebook stuff). I’ll upload the rest once Facebook stops telling me to update my flash player or I can be bothered to deal with the crappy html uploader.

Oh yeah I’m aware that this does get fed into facebook via rss. So no offense meant to my lovely facebook friends… Actually screw it. Isn’t all this so AOL 2.0???? What did you all think about me making it public instead of just my little network? Whooo the public Internet is so scary 🙂

OS X Atmosphere Concept done with Flickr and clever scripting

OSX Atmosphere Concept

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.

Internet Application matrix

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Finding RachelC and my own blog mistakes

I just spent about 10+ mins looking for a decent picture of Rachel Clarke. I want to remember what she looked like as I spoke to 2 women at the last geek dinner with the name Rachel, no offense Rachel I'm pretty sure I remember you but wanted to be sure. So I looked through her flickr stream and blog and the best I could do was this picture. But just above it was a blog entry (dont worry it all relates) about mistakes bloggers make by Jakob Nielsen (I stopped subscribing to his alert boxes since I learned about RSS, and Jakob still has no RSS! Crazy but true).

  1. No Author biography – Yep I'm now going to sort that out. Its one of those things I've been thining about and i'm going to link to my o'reilly profile tonight
  2. No Author Photo – Dont worry the profile has my photo and I use the same photo across all my social networks
  3. Nondescript Posting Titles – I'm not so bad about this. I sometimes do get quite abstract with the titles.
  4. Links don't say where they go – no i'm really good about this and I use to add more titles for addional info.
  5. Classic Hits buried – right hand nav is very clutterd but the posts are quite clean and I tend to only to the key things.
  6. The Calandar is the only Navigation – Nope got, tags, rss and the post amounts
  7. Irregular Posting Frequency – No problem there, think the longest I've left the blog unposted is a week and a bit, if i'm holiday I will say so
  8. Mixing Topics – I'm not buying this for my blog so much. I mix topics but the categories can help somewhat.
  9. Forgettting I write for my Future Boss – Oh no, I know for well I'm writing for my next boss, no problem there.
  10. Having a Domain Name owned by a blog service – Indeed, cubicgarden.com is mine and mine for ever!

So back to RachelC and number 2. Rachel says this,

No Author Photo. mmmm – not sure if I want one of those. I'm one of the people in the photo a few posts down and I'm occasionally in my own photos on Flickr. Otherwise – I'll think about this.

Well sorry to tell you Rachel, I looked through your flickr pictures and tags and couldnt find one of you at all. Dont take this to heart (take this whole blog entry with a little tongue and cheek on my behalf), its been great looking through your stuff online and its made it clear to myself what I need to do for my own profile online. I'll see you at the next geekdinner Rachel.

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