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United States♬ ‘Tis the Season, fa la la la la, la la la laaa, for aster eggs on the web. ♫
♪ Fa la la la la visit Flickr, and la la la la la go to any photo. ♪
♬ Then add “?snow=1″ to the end of the url. ♬
♫ Sit back and fa la la relax.. ♪
Example:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/thenextweb/3115017159/?snow=1
And there is more! Add a note to a photo with the text “ho ho ho beard” or “ho ho ho hat” (no quotes) to add a re-sizable hat or beard to any photo.
Like Faye (my daughter) in this example.
Written by Casper Oppenhuis de Jong
The World Economic Forum (WEF) is like a tweet-up with the Scobles, Kawasakis and Calacanises of the real world. This annual get-together in the Swiss Alps brings together the sassiest elite of business, politics, journalism and intelligentsia to talk about the world’s most pressing issues.
Experienced journalist & blogger Thomas Crampton reported this week that the WEF (hosted in Davos, Switzerland: therefore often referred to as Davos) will use a refreshing new social media strategy to gain attention. He had the chance to interview Matthias Luefkens, the man behind the 2.0 activities of the WEF.
A glance at WEF’s wiki shows us this:
All plenary debates from Davos are also available on YouTube, pictures are available for free at Flickr and the key quotes are available on Twitter. In 2007 the Forum opened pages on social media platforms such as MySpace and Facebook. At the Annual Meeting 2009 the Forum invites the general public to participate in the Davos Debates on YouTube allowing one user to attend the Annual Meeting in person. In 2008 the Davos Question on YouTube allowed YouTube users to interact with the world leaders gathered in Davos who were encouraged to reply from a YouTube Video Corner at the congress centre. In 2008 press conferences are live streamed on Qik and Mogulus allowing anyone to put questions to the speakers. In 2006 and 2007 selected participants were interviewed in, and the closing session was streamed into, Reuters’ auditorium in Second Life.
These services in itself are nothing new in the tech community. But the fact that a conference like Davos – with the biggest players in the world – chooses to embrace these social media services seems like a major step. Plus, every soul with a camera and access to YouTube now has a shot at joining the lads and birds in the Alps!
Answer one of these questions and you’re in:
Is this finally Politics & International Relations 2.0.1?
You don’t need to be a big news corporation like CNN or BBC to cover breaking news. Dutch journalism students Loek Essers and Peter van der Ploeg proved that last night. The two used live blogging tool CoverItLive to cover the terrorist attack in India.
Loek and Peter started their live blog by adding some breaking news Twitter feeds. They added CNN, BBC and BreakingNewsOn. To enrich the coverage they posted some news themselves and added tweets of Twitter users in Mumbai. Later on the students found out that Indian news channel IBN was the source of most off the coverage news corporations like CNN used. IBN posted photo’s and video’s on their website which Loek and Peter embedded on their live blog. Photo’s posted on Flickr were shown on the live blog too.
Journalism students Loek and Peter showed how easy the web and (live) blogging made it to cover breaking news. And although the two started their live blog as an experiment they got rewarded. Dutch free newspaper De Pers used the live blog on their website.
Startup tarpipe is aiming to simplify the workflow of posting on social media sites. Their API enables users to do progressive things with their content in single actions. You can upload a photo from an email, have it post to a few such as uploading a photo, announcing this action with a tweet, sending an IM to a friend and send an email (and can do so at the same time). It does this without forcing the user to install a desktop or mobile application.
Their blog highlights some of the interesting projects their product is leading to, such as extending battery life while using location based service and make EverNote do some cool things.
The big question for me is in how it will be used, and how it will differ from just creating a social media power user megaphone. I can see some people setting it up so that their Twitter, Pownce, away message, Jaiku, Flickr, Friend Feed, Tumblr and Plurk update every time they see fit, which would create an almost embarrassing echo chamber.
They are strong advocates for open source, and with their API can imagine some creative uses. Currently, I see uses that are neat (use IM to update your twitter) to useful (uploading your photos to several places) but don’t see a use of their API that absolutely shines. Yet.
According to Fast Company these are the most influential women in Web 2.0. From left to right: Leah Culver (Pownce), Rashmi Sinha (Slideshare), Dina Kaplin (blip.tv), Marissa Mayer (Google), Cyan Banister (Zivity), Lisa Stone, Jory Des Jardins, and Elisa Camahort Page (BlogHer), Caterina Fake (Flickr), Gina Bianchini (Ning), Kaliya Hamlin (OpenID), Mena Trott (Six Apart) and Arianna Huffington (The Huffington Post).
The article is definitely worth reading and explains “What she’s done”, “How she got there” and “What to learn from her” for every woman on the list. It is hard to measure influence of course but there is no doubt these are the 13 most ‘famous’ female online entrepreneurs.
Who do you think is worth their title most? Who is REALLY the most influential? Let us know:
[poll id="10"]
Arianna Huffington, blip.tv, BlogHer, Caterina Fake, Cyan Banister, Dina Kaplin, Elisa Camahort Page, flickr, Gina Bianchini, google, Influential, Jory Des Jardins, Kaliya Hamlin, Leah Culver, Lisa Stone, Marissa Mayer, Mena Trott, ning, openid, Pownce, Rashmi Sinha, Six Apart, slideshare, The Huffington Post, Zivity
Isn’t it incredible? Today someone a guy named Garrett Ryan Smith uploaded the 3 billionth photo to Flickr. Not bad for a little photo sharing site that grew out of a Flash games project andofficially launched in 2004.
Congratulations Flickr!
An congratulations to us too as we happened to upload photo number 3.000.000.001!
I read the Flickr blog pretty soon after it was posted and am very quick when it comes to Photoshop and uploaded my photo within minutes after reading the Flickr blog so I’m pretty sure this is photo number 3.000.000.001:
Flickr has over 90 million geotagged photos right now. With all the smartphones (we need a new word for that!) with GPS and cameras on the market more and more photos are automatically geotagged.
So what would the world look like if you took these geotagged
photos and tried to figure out what countries look like based on just the Geotagged information? The smart people at Flickr did just that and plotted cities, countries and continents around the world. From the Flickr Blog:
“If we plotted all the geotagged photos associated with a particular WOE ID, would we have enough data to generate a mostly accurate contour of that place? Not a perfect representation, perhaps, but something more fine-grained than a bounding box. It turns out we can”
The Flickr DevBlog also explains how to use their API to build your own geoTagged applications. Check it our for the images or to copy/paste the code samples to build your own cool stuff.
Five weeks ago I wrote about the home improvement going on at Flickr HQ. The Yahoo-owned photo service presented the design in a sneak peak fashion. After clicking on a button on the homepage, going through the Flickr balloons and a MIDI version of Sinatra’s Strangers in the Night, the new homepage appeared.
Those of the 31 million Flickr members who could resist the temptation of clicking on the “Psssssst! Want a sneak peak at your new homepage?” will now see the new homepage as well.
Flickr wanted to show its users more of the social interaction of the service, hence the homepage now consists of all kinds of “check out these things in your social circle” elements. The page shows more pictures from your contacts, introduces the latest pics from your groups, and pushes the blog plus your personal stats to the front.
Check out the announcement on Flickr and don’t forget to watch the fancy screencast.
Facebook engineer Doug Beaver published a company blog post today about the fact that users of the wildly popular social networting site have now uploaded over 10 billion photos to the site. And since they apparently actually store four image sizes for each uploaded photo, that’s over 40 billion files.
Huge numbers indeed, if you consider the fact that it’s only one aspect of Facebook, as it’s not a photo sharing site per se. Caroline McCarthy from CNET’s The Social writes:
To compare, the News Corp.-owned Photobucket, which has a real-time ticker of photos uploaded, stood at slightly less than 6.2 billion photos on Wednesday morning. Flickr, which is owned by Yahoo, hit 2 billion photos just less than a year ago.
On a sidenote, Webshots isn’t talked about in this comparison, and probably for good reason: CNET sold the photo-sharing site to American Greetings for $45 million, having spent about $70 million on acquiring three years ago.
Some more interesting stats released by Beaver:
No wonder they had to borrow an extra $100 million earlier this year to keep up with the staggering growth.
Do you like looking at photos? Who doesn’t? Especially when they are beautifully made! So far, browsing photos has been quite boring, no matter which photo website you chose. Most of them have a linear browsing style which isn’t fun if you just want to look at pictures (if you browse for other purposes, like finding pictures for your website or buying, then the linear style is more appropriate).
I’m guessing that many readers use StumbleUpon. It lets you browse websites in a random manner and leaves room for plenty of surprises. Last.fm offers the same type of service. People like surprises, right?
Now the same concept is applied to photos by a service called Photoree. The Romanian service was launched in December 2007 and founded by serial entrepreneur Daniel Racovitan (other services he established: Colegi.ro – the Romanian version of Classmates.com sold to Neogen.ro, Ghidoo.ro – a social bookmarking service like Reddit, Cafeneaua.com – an online discussion community). He’s one of the Romanian Internet pioneers creating several other services which were among the first in Romania at that time.
The service is bootstrapping so far and has several thousands users a day. But if it takes off more clearly then probably they should look for financing to grow it.
Photoree has a recommendation engine based upon your personal settings. Once you are registered you start rating pictures and the engine starts to learn your taste. It needs about 100 ratings before figuring what you like and don’t like and displays pictures accordingly.
At the time of this writing, it has over 1,000,000 pictures indexed in its database and most of them come from Flickr (using the Flickr API). Almost all are under a Creative Commons license so you could use them if you want. The owner plans to add other images repository sites like Zooomr, PicassaWeb, Devianart and maybe others as long as those sites offers an API.
One drawback of the service is that you can’t do anything unless you are registered. It would be better if they opened up a bit and let people explore without the need to register. They could also implement a cookie or session based recommendation system, which would eliminate the need for registration for that session. This could give a boost to their number of visitors. You know, it’s nice to get a sample of what you might buy..
The selected pictures are very beautiful (most seem to be HDR pictures which not everyone will like). I don’t know why, but during the period of time I had to rate 100 photos (you can’t escape that) only landscapes and women pictures were recommended to me. Is this a universal behavior of the service or the engine just guessed my taste :)? A look at the online forum proves that I was not the only one who was getting this selection.
Nudity can be turned off if you desire and I think they could serve more diversified genres, besides just landscapes and women (could become boring after a while).
During the learning period the engine keeps notifying you about how many times you have voted (you can skip some photos but the pop-up notifier will show up after a while). After you vote 100 times these notifications hopefully will go away (Oops! Even after 100 votes that pop-up still didn’t go away ot at least to come less often).
I tried to turn off the nudes but it seemed not to work (I also unsuccessfully tried to change the Current Method of showing pictures). Maybe I still have to make up those 100 ratings so I can do whatever I want after that…this rating it’s a bit of a burden, I should be able to browse pictures without any conditions if I want that. After all, it should be fun to get surprises, right? They could have a Surprise Me! page with totally random pictures being shown. Another idea is to display the number of votes I have done in real time on the browsing page so I don’t have to view the Stats page or wait for the notifier to tell me. Now, I’m just thinking about usability. Other than that, the layout is simple and clean. You don’t get lost in tons of options.
The service has very crude social networking options (no profile pics, no personal details, no sharing with friends, no messaging). You can only add a user as a contact. Sometimes the loading can be slow (I don’t know if they use some kind of caching system but if not then they should – caching the next 5 images for example and that requires some kind of prediction calculation based on what the user voted so far).
Overall, Photoree could be a good service, but it still need some more work to reach the status of StumbleUpon. I hope the developers will improve the site and make it more viral (send a picture or a bunch of pictures to a friend, send emails invites to friends using the address books from Yahoo, Gmail, AOL, Hotmail, make it more social, etc). Otherwise, if they don’t move fast enough, somebody else with a better and faster execution could take their place.
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