January 10th, 2009, 3 Comments »
Back in October, 2007, I was messing around with Google’s then-new ‘My Maps’ feature. I made a map of all my favourite spots on Gozo (here’s the related blog post), the Maltese island where we lived for nine months. I added a bunch of Flickr photos and a couple of links to this site.
Today I was making a quick map using the same feature, and browsed through some of my older maps. I was surprised to discover that my Gozo memory map has received 13984 views. That seems like a lot. I just made it on a lark on a slow day in Malta.
I wasn’t sure where all those map views were coming from. I looked around, and wasn’t able to find a way to search all of Google’s publicly-accessible custom maps. Assuming they’re including them in Google Maps search results, I searched Google Maps for ‘Gozo’ (and variations), and noticed that my map is the only one listed under ‘User-Created Maps’.
I suppose, under certain circumstances, this would be a useful SEO strategy. You could embed links in placemark descriptions and, assuming they looked useful, Google Maps users might click them. I might add some relevant links to some more markers to test if it drives any traffic.
Browsing through my other custom maps, I see that our Sahara trip map has about 6000 views, and our zone-we-want-to-live-in map has about 4700 views. It’s not obvious what differentiates a popular map from an unpopular one. Any ideas?
3 Comments »
November 11th, 2008, 17 Comments »
We’ve finally gotten around to launching the newest version of this website. It’s about nine years old, and I think this is version 4.0. There are still plenty of bugs to squash (and the Jobs section is going to be ‘coming soon’ for a while), but all the basics are in. I also need to think about what the best stuff to include in the sidebars of the site is. I welcome any suggestions on that front.
I didn’t have a lot of grand plans for the redesign. Mostly I just was tired of the old design, and thought it was high time for a new one. Plus, I wanted to broaden the main column space a bit, make the site widget-ready, implement threaded comments, get all the static pages into WordPress and tweak sundry other bits and pieces.
One Mashed-Up Header
I am particularly pleased about the way the header graphic came together. Regular readers may recall that, back in March, I ran a competition on Pixish (now defunct, sadly) to get a new header graphic designed. It looked like this:
That was designed by a guy named Sam, who lived in Brighton. It combined a photo that Roland took of a film lot directional sign (that really said ‘DB’–no Photoshopping required) with a photo of me that Phillip took at BarCamp.
I handed the header graphic to Tzaddi, who tweaked it and built out the rest of the site’s aesthetic. In early previews of the site, people weren’t keen on that photo, so we replaced it with one that Scott Beale took at Gnomedex.
The header is the happy result of an ad hoc collaboration between five people and powered by Creative Commons. Plus sixty4media did the installation and upgrading of WordPress, so I suppose that’s seven people.
Feedback Welcome
I welcome any and all feedback. I’m pretty happy with the aesthetics at this stage, but I’m open to suggestions. If you spot anything that’s funky aside from the obvious, feel free to leave a comment. And do let me know if you have an opinion on what belongs in a site’s sidebars.
17 Comments »
October 1st, 2008, 6 Comments »
We bought these frozen shrimp the other day. They’ve still got the shells on, and I noticed that the packaging advertised them as ‘easy-to-peel’:
In what way are these easier to peel than the average shrimp?
On a related note, I’m becoming a bit of a Roland with my iPhone. That is, snapping and automagically uploading photos of random, mildly interesting stuff. You know, stuff like old card catalogs or strange signs or discarded roses or vaguely-yonic yoga posters. If that stuff interests you, you might want to subscribe to my Flickr feed. Or just pay slightly more attention to the thumbnails on the right side of my home page.
6 Comments »
June 6th, 2008, 19 Comments »
If you’re a regular Flickr user with Creative Commons-licensed photos, you’ve probably received a request from NowPublic to use one of your photos. I think this is a great application of the crowd-sourcing model, and they’ve got it 90% correct. I sent a feature request to NowPublic on the subject, and thought I’d share it here:
I’ve received a couple of recent requests to integrate Flickr photos into news stories. I’m happy to receive and approve them. However, your current setup obliges me to create a NowPublic account and subsequently log in every time I want to approve a photo (I’m not comfortable uniformly approving all future requests. That’s a pain point I could do without.
Philosophically, I think the question is ‘who’s doing whom a favour?’ The login implies that NP is doing me a favour by publishing my photo. I feel the opposite, that I’m doing NP a favour by permitting you to use my photo. If we work from my assumption, then it behooves NP to make the act of approval as effortless as possible.
Do you think I got this right? Or am I just whinging, and should be grateful for being asked to share my photos? And should that be ‘whom’ or ‘who’? I never committed the associated grammar rule to memory.
I’ve recognized that, personally, I feel quite differently about my photos on Flickr than I do about, say, this blog. While I strive to improve my work on this site, I feel much more ambivalent about my Flickr photos.
Flickr is really just a handy place to put and reference my photos. While I used to obsess about the visitor stats for this site, I almost never check the number of views that my photos have. It’s strictly a question of personal taste, but it’s probably that apathy that’s motivating this feature request.
19 Comments »
February 5th, 2008, 5 Comments »
The Intarweb has been very slightly b0rked over the past, oh, 36 hours. Everything works fine, excepting that I can’t access Flickr.com. When I try to visit the site, my browser just churns and churns.
Interestingly, I can see static Flickr images when they’re referenced elsewhere. For example, I can see the little thumbnails in other posts on my home page (like this one).
This wouldn’t be a big deal, except that Flickr widgets on other sites don’t load. So, I wanted to do a few things on the Northern Voice site, but the Flickr widget tries to load in the left sidebar before the main content does. So, the page only loads as far as the title “Photos from Last Year” and then hangs.
I checked in Safari and on Julie’s machine, so it ain’t local to my MacBook. Weird, eh?
Of course, when the service and the access to support for the service live in the same place, I’m kind of pooched on getting help.
5 Comments »
January 12th, 2008, 3 Comments »
I don’t often participate in Flickr memes, but it’s Saturday and this one was too fun to pass up. Via Neatorama, you compose faux CD covers for imaginary bands using these three sources:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first article title on the page is the name of your band.
2. www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four words of the very last quote is the title of your album.
3. www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/
The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.
There doesn’t seem to be much respect for copyright in step #3 there. I regenerated the Explore page until I got an image that was Creative Commons-licensed. It didn’t take long.
Here are my submissions. They’re not nearly as good as most of the others in the photo pool, but they were fun to make none the less.
- My Wikipedia article was about presidents of good ol’ Walla Walla University.
- My quote was, in full, by James Thurber: “He knows all about art, but he doesn’t know what he likes”.
- My photo was of a great-looking old hotel in Austin, Texas.
The result:
- For my second attempt, my Wikipedia article was about a town in Finland.
- My quote was, in full, by Andy Rooney: “Don’t rule out working with your hands. It does not preclude using your head.”
- My photo was apparently a self-portrait by this Flickr user.
I was kind of thinking of that famous John Coltrane album:
3 Comments »
October 2nd, 2007, No Comments »
I read about TiltViewer, a sexy photo viewer on del.icio.us. It displays Flickr photos, sorted by interestingness, in a three-dimensional black void that you can manipulate. The folks at Airtight Interactive built this bit of webby fun, and have a good attitude about it:
Does a 3D UI give more functionality than the equivalent 2D interface? No, but its certainly a lot cooler! Part of the motivation to build this was to explore ways to make 3D interfaces simple and intuitive.
Make sure you read about the controls. They’re not super intuitive (we don’t necessarily expect to use the keyboard)–the app could do with a little ‘?’ icon that users could click for pop-up instructions.
No Comments »
October 1st, 2007, 8 Comments »
The New York Times has caught wind of a story that first broke in July on Flickr:
One moment, Alison Chang, a 15-year-old student from Dallas, is cheerfully goofing around at a local church-sponsored car wash, posing with a friend for a photo. Weeks later, that photo is posted online and catches the eye of an ad agency in Australia, and Alison appears on a billboard in Adelaide as part of a Virgin Mobile advertising campaign.
At the time, I read about it on Gillian’s blog–one of her photos was used in the ad campaign. As the article points out, the issue isn’t so much about the Creative Commons licensing, but about securing model releases for humans featured in the ads.
Gillian points out that it would’ve been nice if somebody from Virgin had contacted her, just to say “hey, we’re using your photo on bus shelters”. I suspect that most photographers would be flattered to hear that.
Chang and the person who took her photo, Justin Ho-Wee Wong, have filed a lawsuit against Virgin. Rather stupidly, they’ve named Creative Commons in the legal action. They claim that “as the creator of this new license, they have an obligation to define it succinctly.” Er no, there are already laws governing commercial use–I think that’s outside of the ground that CC licensing covers. Lawrence Lessig says as much in the Times article.
8 Comments »
September 25th, 2007, 3 Comments »
Last night we tried to sleep through the loudest and most tumultuous thunderstorm I’ve seen in my adult life. The lightning flashes were so frequent, it was like Britney Spears getting out of a limo. And I saw it rain on Gozo for the first time since we arrived. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed precipitation.
While I slept, another kind of storm–a raging meme–swept across the Intarweb. I read it first on James’s blog, then saw it on MetaFilter, Boing Boing, Fark (where’s the Photoshop contest?) and later, in the Globe and Mail (thanks, Roland). You’ve probably heard or read about it by now, so here it is in brief. Two young thieves broke into Workspace, that most excellent Vancouver co-working centre. They stole a schwack of computers. I’ll let my friend and yours, Workspace owner Bill MacEwen take over from there:
They took with them four laptops and our two iMac’s. We have the crime on tape, but weren’t able to capture a high res. image. Amazingly, one of the thieves (or at least the new owner of our hot machines) was using photobooth and unknowingly uploaded a photo of himself to our flickr stream.
And Bill didn’t even have to use that Undercover software. Here’s the mental giant himself:
As some have pointed out, this could possibly be a friend of the thief, or somebody who bought the stolen computer. The likeliest scenario, though, is that this is one of the criminals.
Can You Clean That Up a Little?
Bill also posted some video of the thieves, as well as stills captured from that video. I tried to do that thing I often mock in crime dramas–magical photo enhancement to get a better look at their faces. My results weren’t quite as good as CSI: Miami (click for larger versions):
The second guy could be the tattoo’d fellow, but it’s far from definitive. Thieves of the future beware–the computers are getting smarter than the people stealing them.
UPDATE: It turns out that this fellow isn’t the thief–he turned himself in to Victoria police yesterday. He’s still a douchebag for buying a stolen computer.
3 Comments »
