I had a small break Tuesday and wandered down Swantson Street to capture an image of the impressive State Library of Victoria– which always fascniated me with the little bit of Twilight Zone sculpture in front – at least I think it is based on the Time Enough at Last episode with Burgess Meredith:

So I tried first for a shot at the front of the library, but it was right into the sun, and I locked in a really poor exposure setting, and had to tweak images individually. I tried to place myself in the image twice, but was off location, so am there just once:

http://gigapan.org/viewGigapan.php?id=6575

I then set up the rig in front of the library looking across Swantson Street where the light was better, and got this image, which weighs in at 0.47 gigapixels, not even half a gigapan though it was compiled from 112 individual photos:

http://gigapan.org/viewGigapan.php?id=6606

I’m still learning a lot about using the rig, and am thinking more about ways it might be used with the annotation features on the gigapan web site.

Looking forward to taking more photos in Cairns, Brisbane, and Sydney.

As D’Arcy notes, it is not easy, but what it does is (I think) stretches your imagination and skills of photography.

So while you can find mine as 2008/366 photo set on flickr, the above slide show below was made with SlideFlickr a free web tool that “will help you create and embed Flickr slideshows in less than 10 seconds.” Slideflickr provides extra options, such as the music track. I went to ccMixter, a fab source for free music, where I rummaged a bit and chose this electronic remix: jaspertine lab sound 3.

I was curious, since at the end of 2007, D’Arcy put a lot of time to edit a summary video of his 2007/365 photos, which to me, sounds like a lot of work. A twitter remark by Dave Cormier asked for a different appeoach that would be more like a dynamic movie generated all year long as photos were added. With my experience on my 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story, I thought there would be one in the mix, and SlideFlickr looked promising as it generates slideshows directly form flickr content.

But the question to em was- does slideflickr just grab the current photos and make a flash slide show? That was not the desired effect. So I waited an extra dat, added a new photo, and sweet goodness! SlideFlickr fetches the most current images from the set so it is a dynamic slide show generator.

But wait, there’s more. There’s a bunch of folks that like me hopped on the bandwagon for this year, and many are tagging their photos with 366photos or sharing them in a 366photo pool (22 members so far, wow!).

So what is cool is that Slideflickr could generate a dynamic slide show for either of these- here is the one for the 366photos tag:

Loving all the photos and sharing and cool net tricks!

Or as the site says, and it is true-

SlideFlickr will help you create and embed Flickr slideshows in less than 10 seconds.

Here is one generated in 4 seconds (!) from my Being There presentation / set:

The problem is the search tools on flickr are one of their less elegant designed interfaces. You first have to browser/pick via a type of license, and then search. It’s hardly efficient. For a long while, I used FlickrLilli, which provided a single search interface with some buttons/menus to narrow to the appropriate CC license types. But ohhhhhh, that Lilli just got slower and slower to load/respond. Darn popularity!

Well, here is a new kid that offers even more! flickrCC

This is from the “about” portion..

OK, so I should put more time into documentation, right?

I wrote flickrCC so I could easily find photos on flickr that were released under the creative commons license. Stuff that I could use for my experiments with the GIMP or include in my blog.

The panel on the left displays the first 36 matching photos. Click on any of these thumbnails to get a slightly larger image and the attribution details displayed in the right hand section. Right click the image and ‘save image as’ if you want to use this size, or click on the link in the attribution text to go to flickr and chose a different sized image. Don’t forget to include the attribution text in any work you produce using the picture.

To use the web app. just enter a word (or words) into the textbox. Click on ‘find’ and you’ll get all photos with a CC license that match *all* the search word(s) in the picture’s title, tags or description (sorted in order of ‘interestingness’, the photo voted most interesting first). The CC licences for a default search are: “Attribution License”, “Attribution-NoDerivs License”, “Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License”, “Attribution-NonCommercial License”, “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License” and “Attribution-ShareAlike License”

If you want to edit a photo, you’ll need to restrict the search to just those licenses that allow derivatives. Checking the ‘for editing’ box ensures that just those photos licensed: “Attribution License”, “Attribution-NonCommercial License”, “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License” and “Attribution-ShareAlike License” are returned

So let’s walk through it… Let’s say for example, I was going to bring more diversity to this weblog, I might so a search for images like…

Hey, that is really cute! Not bad for a feline. So flickrcc is a great way to just find images appropriate to your license needs, and it returns them in order of “interestingness” usually meaning better pictures first. You can tell this interface is done by someone who built it for their own use, and it makes sense, as this is the approach that takes about 5 clicks to get to in flickr.

But wait, there is more. Click the “edit this image” link, and you get thrown into a web image editor that allows you to crop, add text, put a solid color frame, draw lines, and what I think is a huge bonus– it adds the Creative Commons attribution to the image (see a larger screenshot of the entire web form). Woah, Neo!

So without launching PhotoShop or other software, I can quickly generate:

This is just insanely great.

A linktribution to Stephen Downes

I’m curious about other flickr users behaviors… When you get an email notice that someone has seleted you as a contact, do you:

* immediately accept (“I want to be friends with everybody”)
* check out their photos first (“Oh my gawd, they collect photos of ________!”)
* wait a while (“I am trying to get some work done!”)
* delete and ignore (“Eww, yuck, people!”)

I almost thought about titling this, “Are You a Contact Whore?” but that’s a bit tawdry, eh?

The reflex is usually one of “Ahh, that makes my ego feel niiiiice, ooooh, more please”, and to take action right away. If I cannot tell who it is (which is hard form flickr user names), I do check them out, but nearly always I reciprocate.

Yup, I might be a Contact ______.

But this FOAF (Friend of a Friend) concept is an underlying thread to tools I’ve gotten addicted to– not just the ego stroking, but the power that comes from making connections with people you both know and don’t know, and more so, using their network as a farther reach of your own.

And you really do not find anything like this in typical “educational” software, eh?

That’s where splashr comes in- you can give it a tag, and/or a flickr account, and then you can choose from a number of HTML or Flash “templates” to form a more elegant, or just different, interface for presenting slideshows.

So, for example, there is the simple slideshow flickr does for my photos tagged with nmv2006reg, ones from the NMC Regional Conference, but through Spashr, I can create, for example, a slideshow using the reflector filmstrip (kind of like one of the Keynote presentation templates):

Or this one is using the “Fire” Flash Frame– icons spin in around a frame, on a flamed background:

Once you preview a show, you can then have splashr generate a link you could share or post, send via e-mail, e.g.
http://splashr.com/show/fire/37996646802@N01/nmc2006reg/25

or it can generate code you can copy/paste and embed into your own web site, either as an in-page displaye (iframe code), or a link that will launch the full slideshow in a popup window.

Splashr is cool, yet keep in mind you are dependent in running flickr through a secondary web site (the splashr site)

The coolness factor is moreso for yet another model where it shows the benefit of web providers like flickr, del.icio.us, et. al. providing the “hooks” for individuals to create additional features that may go beyond what is possible in the original tool. It’s like getting free software development that drives users to to use the origination site to a greater degree. Until the web age, traditional software development was to keep it all inside the garden walls. Flickr shows the benefit of a garden with big bright 2-way windows.

And here is a linktribution to nessman for tagging this to me via a del.icio.us for:cogdog tag — my hunch for one of the most powerful, yet sublime, social networking tools.

So of course, it’s all about feeding the ego!

I did not think my scouting results would come up with 5, and of these 4 are not ones myself would say are all that interesting (and the one I do like is not the conference bag ;-)

1. Bug On The Road XP
2. Obligatory WIki Photo
3. The Home for the Conference Bag
4. Woohoo! A Ribbon!
5. Daisies

And even cooler! The flickr scout creates a graphic of your results, and uploads it directly to flickr for you:

Amazing.

And there are a lot more toys from where this one came from.

Linktribution:
Found via curious exploration of the photos link on Andy Piper’s blog after he posted a comment on a story on the NMC Campus Observer blog. Oh what a crazy web we weave!

Right now it is available only for Mac OSX and Safari, but it says a Windows version is coming soon.

So on any of these sites, PicLens availability is indicated by a special icon superimposed on an image:

which can be a single image as shown, or an entire set on flickr. Clicking it pulls up the full screen viewer, previous images are stored at the bottom, and a slide show mode is available:

Okay, I am not sure what I might use it for, but it has some potential… I have done some presentations where rather than stifling the audience with bullet points, I just use a rotating slide show; usually in iPhoto. I can see doing this even easier with PicLens.

FlickrStorm is a better search for Flickr!

It works by looking for more than what you enter to find related and more relevant images… Be suprised!

Okay, there are scads of flickr search tools, and it’s not exactly clear what this “magic is”, but they certainly have been double dipping their chips in the web 2.0 bowl.

More less, you enter a search term and get results as small icons:

Clicking the small square icon (it looks like the first set might be the ones by “interestingness”) brings a preview on the right, where you can go to the flickr page for the cute dog picture, or “add to the tray” so it gets saved to a collection on the left.

but wait, there’s more.

Clicking the “advanced” link brings a drop down menu filter that can help restrict the results by Creative Commons license, e.g. this search for ones by “freedom” as a term and “Non-Commercial & Share Alike”:

But wait, there’s more…

Clicking on your tray provides a single way to download all the images in your tray OR to make the tray available again via a public URL (can you say rip, mix, and share photo sets??):

This was just a quick jaunt done while I should have been eating lunch, but pretty exciting. Maybe it could be something rolled into flickr… their search can certainly use some more spiffing up.

What’s the business model? Who cares… probably ‘Make Something Cool so We Cn be Bought By Yahoo/Google/That other Company in Washington”

Cannot wait to see more of the promised magic.

A CogDogBlog wag to O’Reilly Radar for this site

NIPSA is all about what turns up in flickr-wide searches:

In the meantime, your photos will not show up in global search results. This is not because we hate Second Life, or hate screenshots, or hate you, or have any specific official opinion at all about philosophical questions like “What is a photograph?” or “Where is the dividing line between real and virtual worlds in our brave new digital age?” (personally, I’m sympathetic to the argument that ‘photos’ taken with ‘cameras’ in SL are actually photos).

It’s because Flickr is *for* photos. Even when we have support finer-grained distinctions in our search system, better tools for self-flagging, and allow users to choose what kind of images show up in their search results, by default we will only show photo results.

And really, I can do about 95% of what I intended to use flickr for our NMC Second Life Campus photos — what was missing is that I could not tag them with a common tag as planned “nmc-campus” that could be grouped together and syndicated with other flickr users who tag the same. But I can still achieve something similar with a shared photo pool. For everything else that flickr does, I can live with it.

But it has been interesting to push the talk about what is a photograph…. so keep on pushing.

At the same time, I will be exploring other services; such as SnapZilla, where you post images directly from your Second Life… ahem.. camera.

On a related front, Wired has just run a story Flickr Cracks Down on Screenshots – where at least you now know the magic formula- “real” photos ought to be at least 50% of your total, and I can bet they are looking more intently when a new account is started. My not so proven advice (which I did not do) would be for those that want to upload their Second Life PHOTOS (they are photos!), would to pre-load your account with a few hundred cat, baby, bird, food, car photos.

See also coverage by Eric Rice and more in the Technorati bin.

There is confusion running out there, and I am responsible for my share. Flickr is not prohibiting you for uploading these images- the NIPSA tag means your images do not come up on public tags or searches- but you can still build photo collections, sets, link there, use RSS feeds, create badges and posts to your blogs, all the groovy stuff I like about it.