Corin and I headed into the Boston area yesterday to catch up with our friend Anna. The primary mission was to find me a suit (we failed… again). Later I somehow convinced Corin to go see the Stata Center at MIT. Unfortunately, a section of the red line T is out of service so we decided just to walk. Some photos are in the gallery.
Flickr has come up in several of my recent posts, so it probably isn’t a surprise that I’m being sucked into the warm glow. The community and numerous features are really intriguing to me. RSS feeds everywhere, extensive use of tags, public API’s, starting to use AJAX instead of Flash, Creative Commons license integration, and many more nice touches make it a great product. I was just about ready to plunk down the $25 for a one year pro account. But first I started looking at the details and have decided to continue hosting my own photos using Gallery. Perhaps OurMedia.org or Google will make things a bit more competative.
My Flickr issues:
The Terms of Use are mostly benign… for now. However, they right up front say they can change the Terms at any time, in any way, with no notification. This is pretty standard these days, but I sort of expect better of Flickr. The most annoying piece of the Terms of Use for me is:
The Flickr service makes it possible to post images hosted on Flickr to outside websites. This use is accepted (and even encouraged!). However, pages on other websites which display images hosted on flickr.com must provide a link back to Flickr from each photo to its photo page on Flickr.
I would really like to take advantage of the public API to suck my pictures into my site so that people wouldn’t even necessarly know that they came from Flickr. I wouldn’t mind having a single link to flickr.com on my external page, but making every single photo link directly to the Flickr photo page is way over the top. I’m not sure I really understand their motivitation for this requirement. It they want to motiviate people to come to and use Flick, why not just require a Flickr graphic that links to Flickr.com. (Sourceforge does this.)
Another downside, is that subscription services have a way of rising prices, and when you no longer feel like paying up every year, you are left with nothing. It isn’t quite as dramatic with Flickr, but things do sort of erode over time. If you stop paying for a Pro account, your photos won’t be deleted, however, your account will become a normal free account which limits your photostream to the 200 most recent photos. Within Flickr, your older photos will effectively disappear. Also, if you don’t log-in with a free account for 90 days, the account will be completely deleted.
Then of course are Ads and the role that they’ll play in the future. Flickr states that, due to “large surges in bandwidth can be very expensive”, they reserve the right to display ads to non-members when they view your photos, “in extreme cases”. Extreme cases is undefined.
None of these issues alone are show stoppers, but I had to search over several pages to find these details and together it just feels to early to move my 12,000 photos over.
The terms “troops” and “barrels of oil” are used quite a bit in the news all the time. First… troops. Why is a single soldier referred to as a troop? A troop is, “a group of soldiers”. Yet if you search Google news for troops you see articles that say, “160,000 troops in the US-led multinational force”, “More than 1,000 US troops on Wednesday swept into this city on the road to Syria”. They do it on NPR all the time. I’m curious where this came from.
The media is at least accurate with the use of the term “barrel of oil”, but how many people know how much is in a barrel of crude oil and how a barrel of crude oil is used? And why the heck do we use the “barrel” as a unit of measure? As far as I know, crude oil is not transported or stored in barrels anymore. A quick search turns up this handy graphic which shows that a barrel of crude oil is 42 gallons and that 45% of it is used to produce 19.5 gallons of gasoline. This morning I think they said that a barrel of oil was going for $51. That means crude oil is going for $1.21 a gallon. According to the Dept. of Energy, the average price for a gallon of gasoline for the US on 05/23/2005 was $2.125. So one barrel of crude oil, produces $41.44 of gasoline.
I was getting really annoyed at the mess that my podcast playlist in iTunes had become. I then realized that one of the columns you can have in the playlist window is “Date Added”. Select “View Options…” from the Edit menu and check the “Date Added” checkbox. Sort by this column and you can then see your podcasts chronologically.
This may become even better once iTunes 4.9 is released. I don’t typically listen to Adam Curry’s podcast. I don’t know why, but he just gives me the willies. But I did tune in today to see if he spilled any beans about his visit with Apple. Yesterday he met with Apple to look at and talk about the podcasting integration. I’ll spare you the willies. He rambles about it, but gives no specifics. All he really says is, “As it comes to iTunes as a podcatcher… an ipodder… yeah, they got it fuckin’ right, totally.”
From my last post, the O’Reilly Radio article states that Jobs dismisses podcasting as “Wayne’s World” for radio. I can’t help but laugh at the irony. Wayne’s World and Wayne’s World 2 grossed over 200 million dollars worldwide according to IMDb. Not every Podcast is going to be interesting, but the beauty is there is no longer a limited number of channels for content. And not every podcast has to have a million listeners or make millions of dollars.
Well Podcasting is about to grow some legs and become easily accessible to a Mom near you. O’Reilly Radar reports that Steve Jobs himself stated that iTunes would have Podcasting capabilities built-in within the next 60 days.
This is really the critical move to bring Podcasting to the next evolutionary step. I’m personally pretty happy with NetNewsWire’s implementation. Because I have a slow connection with limited bandwidth at home, I’m able to go through podcasts like news items and only download the ones I’ll actually listen to. But I was totally uninspired by iPodder and iPodderX.
A new radio program called, “Open Source“, hosted by Christopher Lydon is about to be syndicated by Public Radio International. They’ve posted pilot shows on the show website. I just finished listening to Pilot #3 about Wikipedia. Jimbo (wikipedia founder) is along for the entire show. They also talk with a couple of librarians that make we want to hit myself in the head with a sock full of nickels.
They are critical of Wikipedia because:
These same arguments come up in every Wikipedia story and it just drives me crazy. Rewind a few years and this same exact argument came up with the Internet. If you want to feel like you’re living in the dot com boom again, just replace Wikipedia with Internet when the librarians talk. I guess you could replace Wikipedia with any messenger of information.
Librarians, your argument doesn’t change anything. Wikipedia and the Internet are growing and here to stay . Why are you wasting your time complaining when you could be educating your patrons how to think critically. Teach them the difference between an encyclopedia and a primary source. Teach them to check their sources. They themselves bring this up in the interview, and then go right back to dissing the Wikipedia.
The root of their argument is of course their fear that their jobs are obsolete. Well wake the heck up, your job is obsolete. It doesn’t mean you are out of a job, it just means you need to update your job description and the role a library plays in a community. Libraries in many ways are great (I love libraries), but in many other ways they are also inconvenient. The Lisa Simpsons of the world may continue to visit, but for the Bart Simpsons of the world, the library is nerdville and might as well not even exist.
What hurts my head more than being hit with a sock full of nickels, is that I think the librarians agree with me, but because Wikipedia is not in fact the holy gospel of all human knowledge, instead of saying, “it is really cool and helpful, but should be used critically just like any other source”, they seem to suggest that it is just a toy that shouldn’t be used at all. The same could be said for books. There are really crappy books out there. Ones with factual errors, ones with information not appropriate for children, ones that don’t have sources listed. Books are a fun project for its authors and readers, but the reality is the only reality is multiple reality. The only neutral point of view is as many points of view as are available.
Update: I meant to point out that one of the comments on the radio open source website points out the excellent: Wikipedia:Researching with Wikipedia page.
I spent some time this afternoon watching the video of yesterday’s “Google Factory Tour“, a day of Google talking about their projects to the press. It is pretty long, and both Windows Media Player and Real Player were being tempermental so I haven’t watched the whole thing.
The picture above is of a robotic page turner that an intern created. According to the presenter, they are NOT using it for their digitization project. Still sounds like a pretty cool internship. Sure beats making copies and coffee.
Something else exciting is that according to this post on O’Reilly Radar, a publically accessible API may be made available for Google Maps in the future.
Using numbers of Creative Commons Flickr photos from my post on April 29th, here is a table showing the number of photos being added per hour under a Creative Commons license. I didn’t originally record numbers for the “Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs” license. I either missed it or it wasn’t on the page.
If the submission rate of Creative Commons licensed photo submissions were to continue at current rate over 3 million CC photos will be added every year.
I haven’t come across a page that lists Flickr’s total number of hosted photos, but they must be adding hard drives at a furious pace.
| License | 2005-04-29 21:04:00 | 2005-05-20 09:50:00 | Difference | added/hour |
| Attribution License | 116825 | 139518 | 22693 | 46.03 |
| Attribution-NoDerivs License | 38641 | 50055 | 11414 | 23.15 |
| Attribution- NonCommercial- NoDerivs License | n/a | 475334 | n/a | n/a |
| Attribution- NonCommercial License | 203232 | 240488 | 37256 | 75.57 |
| Attribution- NonCommercial- ShareAlike License | 548480 | 632480 | 84000 | 170.39 |
| Attribution-ShareAlike License | 110426 | 132569 | 22143 | 44.91 |
| Elapsed time: 493 hours | total added/hour | 360 | ||
| total added/day | 8,640 | |||
| total added/year | 3,153,600 | |||
Update 2005-05-22 10:30: I just was at the Flickr creative commons page and noticed that the page has not been updated since I checked it two days ago. The photos and the number of photos under each license is identical (I made sure to refresh). So I don’t know if it is broken or they only update at some weird interval.
Yesterday I got to spend the afternoon hanging out with Seth, a friend from college. He’s got a cool job working at the Public Radio Exchange. They’ve got a nice office tucked away in Cambridge, MA. A few photos are available in the gallery.
As mentioned on Morning Edition yesterday, the StoryCorps project is hitting the road with two Airstreams containing recording equipment. It is a really great project. They originally set up a recording booth in Grand Central Station and everyday people talk to each other. Unfortunately, their US tour doesn’t include a single stop in New England. They are posting pictures of the adventure on Flickr.
After playing a little with Photoshop CS2, I’ve now spent a couple minutes checking out Illustrator CS2 to see what is new. A pretty cool new feature, is “Live Trace”. It converts images into vector objects and does a pretty good job of it. I seem to recall a really old Adobe product that use to do this many years ago. I remember trying it out and ending up with pathetic results. I went to flickr and found a random image to use as a test. (original here. I used the largest original version.) I cropped out the drawing thingy out of the photo, imported into Illustrator and simply clicked the “Live Trace” button. Here is the result. The image on the left is just a bitmap image, the one on the right is vector based. You can do all sort of tweaks and adjust the number of colors that are used to generate the vector version. Click the image for the larger version.
Ads have been popping up in more and more of my RSS feeds lately. And now Google is getting in on the action, so it is officially time to come up with some filtering solution. NetNewsWire developer, Brent Simmons commented a while back that he didn’t think ad-blocking would be a requested feature and that alternative methods could/would be used. I agree in a sense. I don’t need ad-blocking specifically, but I would really like a powerful filtering system (ie. with regular expressions) to not only filter ads, but other uninteresting items in my feeds.
Until such a feature is added, I’m wondering how difficult it would be to have an intermediate server that grabbed all my feeds, filtered them, and then have my feed reader subscribe to the filtered feeds residing on my server. Seems a few existing tools could very easily be glued together to make it work… In fact, I’d be a little surprised if something didn’t already exist. The bright side is that feeds are all in XML which should make filtering a lot less painful than scraping nasty HTML.
With the recent release of a stamp and his adopted daughter releasing a book of his personal letters, Richard Feynman has been in the news quite a bit.
I first was introduced to Feynman when I was given Surely You’re Joking as a high school graduation gift. A must read.
I’m on the search for the most dense commonly used acronym (or SFTMDCUA for short). The other night during class we covered some particularly dense acronyms and it made me wonder just how dense they could get. By “dense” acronym, I mean a small acronym that expands to other acronyms, which expand to words. Who knows how many levels it could go. Two that spring to mind from class are:
I’ve been using Adobe Photoshop 9.0 (or CS2 for the cool-aid drinkers) for 4 minutes now. Unlike previous upgrades of Photoshop, new features are apparent immediately. Take for instance the most exciting new feature pictured here. Adobe has spent hundreds of man hours horizontally flipping the feather on the Photoshop icon.
I’ve actually been playing with the new Bridge application. They’ve moved the file browser into a completely separate application called “Bridge” that seems like it might actually be useful. One interesting feature it provides… that I’ll probably never use… is the ability to search for stock photography and buy it from within the application. It simultaneously searches photodisc, comstock images, digitalvision, imageshop, and amana. It would be slick if it could search Free photos from places like Flickr and wikipedia commons.
Radio related quickies:
WireTap for 2005-05-14 is, “Solving Quebec’s Problems”. Archived here (10 MB mp3) for your listening pleasure.
Contributors this week: (I don’t know how to spell most of these names)