flickr
Stuttgart Flickr Meetup
On Friday 26th October there is going to be a Flickr meetup here in Stuttgart. We'll be meeting at 6pm in the Calwer Eck pub in downtown Stuttgart. All are welcome to come along, just leave a comment or add yourself to the event on upcoming.org if you're interested.
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Am Freitag 26. Oktober kommt ein Flickr treffen in Stuttgart. Treffen wir uns um 18h in Calwer Eck. Jeder ist wilkommen! Kommst du auch? Bitte hier Kommentar einlegen oder unter upcoming.org anmelden.
Flickr adds support for geocoding
The popular photo sharing website Flickr introduced native support for geotagging photos on Monday.
Because of the flexibility of the system, there have been a number of options around for a while that have allowed users to geotag their photos. None of them have been quite as simple as Flickr have just made it though. And it's great to see that the guy that built the first geotagging mashup of Flickr and Google Maps - Rev Dan Catt - was actually the person that Yahoo recruited to build up the geotagging functionality within the site itself.
The new geotagging system is really easy to use, it's functional and it's pretty at the same time. It also has a geotagging API that developers can plug into if they wish.
The thing that surprises me is the lack of support for GeoRSS in their feeds. With all this location information flying around (1.2 million photos geotagged within the first day) it would make sense to include that geodata in the RSS feeds from the site. I'd really like to be able to pull geotagged photos from my Flickr stream into my geoblog and photos section over at geodan.org and have their location information automatically assigned based on the information stored against them in Flickr.
You can also see my map of photos on Flickr.
Photography in the world of Web 2.0
In a world where it has become utterly painless to share photos with the world, it has been difficult to justify suffering the time-consuming process of manually processing images, uploading them and then adding them into a database to be proudly presented in the place I've been sharing my photos since 2000.
The photography section of my site started first with just a few of my favourite photos but quickly expanded into a fully fledged, custom-built, gallery system where I could share all of the photos I was taking using both film and - increasingly over the years - digital formats. Putting them into a database allowed more flexibility than hard coding them into pages and simplified the process of sharing them. Unfortunately, I never spent enough time developing the admin interface that runs it all, so it doesn't do anywhere near as much as it could to help me out.
Then, just over a year ago, I tried a photo sharing community out of curiosity. It was getting some great reviews and the community was growing pretty quickly. My usage of Flickr was patchy at first as I experimented and didn't fully see what all the fuss was about. Soon winter started to fade into to spring and I started taking more photos. Tagging the photos with relevant topics and sharing them with groups of like-minded people, strangers started to come in to my corner of Flickr and leave comments as they flicked through my photo book. I was hooked.
Since that point I've added very few new photos to the hundreds on this site, and instead have added over 1,000 photos to my Flickr photo stream.
Hopefully before too long I'll start to pull some of those back into this site, but I'll have to make a decision of either updating my site to talk to Flickr and pull in some photos that way, or completely redesigning the way the galleries work. If I do the latter I'll almost certainly use the Drupal system as a framework to build the new site on top of. That would give me the ability to let people comment on photos, subscribe to latest updates and all sorts of good stuff. Then I'd just need to add the ability to pull in selected photosets from my Flickr account, and I'm set.
Tagging
Just a random thought in a break from revision, provoked probably by spending too much time enjoying surfing the Flickr website for brilliant (and fun) photos...
I've wondered for a while why I've not come across any articles that compare the relatively new phenomenon of tagging things on the internet with the similar - and now largely defunct - concept of using keyword meta tags to categorise web pages. Well, I hadn't read anything until I started writing this, at which point I tryed searching again because I was certain somebody must have compared them at some point. I soon realised that Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineWatch had mentioned it before along with others. There must be some in this long list of related readings that I simply don't have time to read at the moment.
Anyway, I do find it odd that I hadn't come across it before, with most of the things out there being a very positive look at the world of tagging. So far tagging seems to have worked pretty well, though that's how keyword meta tags started out, and look where they are now. I think probably one of the main reasons that tagging is working where meta tags have failed is that tags are in the view of everyone. Meta tags aren't in the public eye, they are hidden away, which meant that web page authors could stuff them with all sorts of irrelevant keywords just to drive up their traffic. If you were to spam the tagspace with irrelevant words, visitors would write the page from the start and find somewhere else.
While Danny Sullivan doesn't see the idea of tags helping searching on the internet, I believe it can and will. For a start, they are the main way of navigating sites like Flickr and del.icio.us, and without tagging these sites would not have grown to the size they are today. They have brought in a new way of navigating the vast amount of information which can soon be generated by a large userbase - but instead of searching, they concentrate on browsing.
Applying tags to the rest of the internet won't work in the same way because it hasn't grown up with these concepts, but I believe they can learn from the information gathered by sites that have employed tags from the start. By learning what tags are relevant to each other (see for example, the related tags list for 'blue' on Flickr: clouds, water, yellow, white, tree, orange, flower, pink, flowers, trees, reflection, window), a search company can start to group sites which are talking about certain subjects. The web page author wouldn't have to do any work at all because the search engines already know what the topic of the page is - this is what search engines specialise in already.
Hmm, conveying that random thought took more of my time than I'd thought, but I should get back to doing some work now. With only one exam down there are two left, but I'm starting to feel a little happier about them now that I've had some of the coursework back from the Easter break and appear to have done quite well.
