"Flickr" entries

Four short links: 19 Feb 2009

Four short links: 19 Feb 2009

Art, astronomy and more fun for you in today’s four short links:

  1. Found in Space — there’s an astronomy bot on Flickr that identifies stars in the night sky, and from the unique positions of the stars figures out what bit of the night sky is looked at and then adds notes for interesting parts of the sky visible in the shot. A brilliant use of computer vision techniques to add value to existing data. (via Stinky).
  2. 99 Secrets TwitteredMatt Webb is posting a secret a day from Carl Steadman’s 99 Secrets, an early piece of art on the web. Matt’s explanation is worth reading. Ze Frank really made me realize that every web app is a medium for art, for provoking human responses, and now I keenly watch for signs of art breaking out.
  3. Internet Ephemera — a brief muse on “if we start with the assumption that everything we put online is ephemeral, how does that change what we put online?”
  4. Pockets of Potential (PDF) — a 52-page PDF talking about opportunities for supporting learning with the mobile devices already in kids’ lives (via Derek Wenmoth).

Understanding Web Operations Culture – the Graph & Data Obsession

We’re quite addicted to data pr0n here at Flickr. We’ve got graphs for pretty much everything, and add graphs all of the time. -John Allspaw, Operations Engineering Manager at Flickr & author of The Art of Capacity Planning One of the most interesting parts of running a large website is watching the effects of unrelated events affecting user traffic…

Four short links: 2 Feb 2009

Four short links: 2 Feb 2009

  1. Songs off the ChartsJohannes Kreidler‘s audio visualizations using Microsoft Songsmith. Reminds me of Douglas Adams in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency where the amazing spreadsheet program could produce happy jingles or funereal dirges based on a company’s revenues. (via Ben Fry)
  2. PWN! YouTube — elegant URL hack: replace “www.” with “pwn” in a YouTube movie URL and you’ll be given links to the Google content server location of the movie so you can download it.
  3. Apple iPhone and Microsoft Surface — the interesting folks at Stimulant have written the code to connect an iPhone to a Microsoft Surface. It recognizes one or more iPhones on the Surface and lets you display different things on the iPhone. In the demo you see an iPhone on a photo showing you a sketch version of the subject of the photo. The zoom is very smooth.
  4. Flickr, Getty, and the Greater Good (Phil Gyford) — “Flickr and Getty Images, the stock photography giant, are launching a new scheme which enables people to market some of their Flickr photos as stock photography through Getty.” Phil points out that CC-licensing and Getty-listing are mutually exclusive, and Flickr will switch the licensing on a photo to “All Rights Reserved” if you list with Getty. The first way people think of to profit from commons are to enclose and sell them. But the commons are a lot healthier when you make money by adding to them, not taking from them.
Four short links: 15 Jan 2009

Four short links: 15 Jan 2009

Today we have Tom’s Brain on Flickr, the Newspaper Industry’s Death in Context, REST with friends, and Filthy Lucre from Twitter.

  1. A map of my brain – Tom Coates mindmaps his interests as part of brainstorming for a Webstock talk. I’d love to see these for other geeks. I guess part of keeping up with your friends is building your own models of what their mindmaps look like.
  2. How Newspapers Tried to Invent the Web – a Slate piece showing that newspapers have always reacted to new media, from buying up airways when radio became big, to videotex and the proprietary information sources that predated the mainstreaming of the Internet. Puts the modern handwringing in context. Sample quote from 1980: “What you’re really worried about is an electronic Yellow Pages that will destroy your advertising base, isn’t it?”
  3. RESTful Django Practice – the full RESTian mindset is surprisingly difficult to grok, so one programmer has said “here’s how I think it works for a sample app” and his readers are using the comments to describe the choices, drawbacks, pitfalls, and best practices. I love the Internet.
  4. 1stfans – a mixture of social networking updates, Twitter feeds from artists, and in-person events that the museum hopes will be a good excuse for people to become members and support the museum’s operation. Twitter Feed as Membership Benefit goes into detail on their reasons. It’s always interesting to see people experimenting with finding things to charge for online.

Flickr Community Fills Gap

In the recent round of Yahoo! layoffs was someone I'd just met, George Oates. She started the Flickr Commons, where galleries, libraries, archives, and museums can post photos and the community can tag them. She was a tireless ambassador, as well, with a gruelling travel schedule to bring the word to other institutions on what's possible. Her blog post about…

The Barack SlideShow

When archives are built incrementally on top of access, instead of access being born of hard labor from accumulated storage, the nature of the archive is transformed. The possibilities for an Obama Presidential Library — built from today and onwards — are transformative.