Awesome advanced uses of flickr

My friend Christian of Mjukvara.se ("Software.se") recently wrote a very nice, simple introduction in Swedish to safely storing your photos on flickr (and a second one about the flickr community). As somewhat of a flickr power user, this just made my fingers itch too much not to write a blog post about some advanced uses of flickr. There already exists a very nice blog of flickr specifically, but it tends to focus more on the (also awesome) content of flickr, not it's features - so hold on to your hats, here comes my favourites!

• Geotagging is one of the undervalued features of flickr. Just go to Organize > Your map, drag and drop the pictures in the bottom row onto the map, the pictures with blue dots are the ones already geotagged, and you can browse your photos by where they were taken! Here are for example my pictures taken in Stockholm.
  
  This is however only the superficial benefits of geotagging your photos - what happens when several users geotag their pictures? To begin with, you can browse any place on earth which may have geotagged pictures just to see how that place looks like! It's a sort of virtual tourism, my favourite place is always to see the beautiful environment of Lake Baikal. Most convenient is to add the flickr layer to Google Earth (notice also the other options under "Geographic Web":
  
  
  If you can't be bothered to spot exactly where some pictures were taken, just go ahead and throw them out somewhere in the general region, you can always adjust them later, for example with the help of hitta.se gatubild or Google Street View.
  
  Did you like a particular place? Then the least you can do is to geotag your pictures so that others can find it! Unless there is any privacy aspects of your pictures (a majority of my pictures are just fine to show to the world), rather than joining wikipedia, typing articles and all that fuss (which you of course should do too if you want to) this is such a simple way to give your contribution to the global community.
  
  Finally, geotagging can give other interesting information to locations, like what this café looked like before the sign fell down, who others have taken pictures in your little village and whether your anonymous neighbours in that huge apartment buildings maybe are on flickr too.
  
  
• Tagging (and notes) are a great way to give structure and value to your photo collection. Your tag cloud is a great way for visitors to see what you photograph the most and for you to find your pictures no matter how many tags you have. Flickr like on del.icio.us and blogger, I usually type some sort of sentence descriptive of the picture, and that's gonna be great keywords.
  
  Recently, as I wanted to put some of my book collection into Virtual Bookshelf, I took a picture of our real bookshelf and in the process, went ahead and tagged the most interesting parts of the it:
  
  
  
• Linking, along the thoughts that "blogging is like putting URLs on your thoughts" and "the link is the 2008 Christmas gift of the year", is essential to participating in the social web.
  
  Like when I attended the SIME08 blogger meetup, and I found a video from the event - of course I will link to it so that people seeing my pictures can also see the video! Similarly, it's a good idea to agree on a tag for everyone on an event to use, and like an immediate virtual community, everyone can find each other:
  
  
  
• If you go to concerts, and you enjoy music, do sign up to last.fm and check out their events. I have written about it before (and it's gotten minimal coverage elsewhere), but it's worth mentioning again. Even if it's just cellphone pictures, it is so nice to tag your flickr pictures with the "machine tag" of the specific flickr event, so people who are interested in the event can see your perspective of it. Actually, a sizeable part of my flickr visitors come through last.fm, and then I haven't even tagged particularly many events.
  
  
  R.E.M. are probably the firsts artists I've seen live which are beginning to understand proper ways to interact with their fans, as they include concert pictures from flickr, tweets and stuff on their tour headquarters. People love to see their own pictures in official sites and it will make them spend endless attention on those sites which include them (I should know, my pictures are somewhere on that page as well).
  
  
• So should you pay for flickr? I say yes - but that's only because I am a freak. For the longest time actually, I didn't have a homepage but used my profile page to tie my web together, I didn't pay for my flickr account, and it was fine. I reached the threshold of some 200 pictures and the old ones were starting to be shifted out (n.b., only not displayed anymore, they weren't deleted) and I still didn't pay. Finally though, because when you have 200 items on a site, you're probably pretty hooked, so I decided to pay the bargain to get myself a pro account. I don't use flickr as a complete backup of my original pictures, but it feels fine and obviously worth the money to have paid for my account.

That's pretty much it, I have some more opinions about what site to use for what, more cool mashups and whatever, but they can wait until some other time. Enjoy! See also my other blog posts about flickr.

Young Scientists in the news - and I want to hear more about it!

Today, except for playing around some with a camera flash to see if I do want to buy one (do you have one to sell?!), I have been thinking some about locality and microblogging.

It just so happens that my good friends the Young Scientists were in the editorial debate page of NyTeknik (in Swedish). That's really cool, and I think they should be heard more in the education debate. But my point right now is that I didn't know about it, because as it happens, FUF's news feed is broken and I am not really in touch with any active members anymore (except now I've found one, but he's in the board like everyone else...). We've been trying to tempt people to join the IRC chat, with little success, and I'm just craving communication with the sort of cool kids which FUF members usually are.


Back in the day, we used to communicate with people through IRC - you chose one or a few rooms of like-minded, and that's where you'd stay, sometimes for years and it was tricky to find new places where you'd want to hang out. Lately, in microblogging platforms like Jaiku I've become excited by the "virtual rooms" continuously created as your friends participate in interesting discussions with their friends, and you may choose to follow the posts of a new acquaintance. No-one expects you to listen to all the conversations, but you end up shaping your "flow" of conversations towards what people and topics you are interested in.

Actually, currently this shaping of the flow is pretty blunt. You can select people (which by the way are few of my IRL friends so far) and channels (which are infrequently used), but not keywords, or most importantly, location. By combining keyword and location, my motorbike-riding brother could get all messages on the topic of "co-biking" in the Småland area if he'd feel like it, and myself, like a child playing with the walkie-talkie, I would just love to be able to watch the "buzz" of people in my own city. Somewhere dwells also the dream of resurrecting the concept of local communities and villages - if you could select to listen to the (public) messages of your neighbours, maybe they could start to matter to you again...

twitter, bloggy.se, FriendFeed and Voolife - except for Jaiku, Twinkle for iPhone is the only such service which currently truly excites me. Do you disagree? Tell me why!

I'll end this blog post with the thought that "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog", and the social internet version of it which now reads "If you as much as touch a keyboard, everybody kows you're a dog". It's extraordinary to compose an impression about someone from all the tracks he leaves online, somewhat like the guy who has gathered an amazing collection of material on Pink Floyd and Syd Barrett which I watched today...

Now I would buy an iPhone! If only it had buttons...

Yesterday the lesser of two annual events in the Apple world took place - the Apple WWDC - World Wide Developers Conference keynote (the more significant one being the January Macworld Expo).

Apple are really amazing about being able to create a buzz about every little thing they are doing. They used to broadcast the conference keynote live, but nowadays (apparently not for technical reasons) they keep them for a while but bloggers provide both live text and commentary. The day afterward, the event is available over QuickTime.

Of course, yesterday's event was focused on the iPhone (and is of course in both DN.se and NyTeknik). Some have complained that the keynote provided little juicy news for developers in terms of hardware or development tools, but the biggest thing for me is the new 3G iPhone, with GPS capability and roughly half the price of the old iPhone. The deal is: 8GB 3G iPhone with GPS at $199 ^* ≈ 1990 EEK ≈ 1190 SEK ≈ 127 € ≈ "Twice as fast, half the price" (with significant coolness added). I am very very tempted at getting one now.

Still, the major hurdle I've learnt of the iPhone remains - it has no buttons... It was the most revolutionary thing with the iPhone, to use as much as possible of the device surface for adaptable buttons and display, great. Though, it also requires way too much attention to input, it gives no feedback to touch so it may be the worst example but - how can you SMS while drivingwalking for example?! I have inherited a Sony Ericsson Walkman phone, and it may be subtle, but it has a lot of features you require of your phone! Finding contacts, forwarding SMSs or texting, it is really fast when you don't have to pay attention to what you're doing and can just let your fingers type away. So Apple, it's great that you have been trying to cater to enterprise users, now please figure out a way to work with the iPhone even with minimal attention, and it will really start selling.

The second most interesting bang from the WWDC is the wealth and variety of applications which seem to be coming for the iPhone. Sure, games are fun, but I am really keeping a keen eye on location aware and social mobile applications like Loopt or for that matter, my friend Peter's social picture messaging application MoYuMe (I recently found him in a video by some Latvian blogger). If you think the GSM phone, IM and SMS have changed the way people live and what they do, the scale of the mobile social revolution is breathtaking. Reactionaries object that who cares about all that social and mobile silliness, but remember they said the same about mobile phones and SMS. You heard it here first (well, unless you heard it somewhere else before), and for a head start of understanding the revolution, head over to our friends CommonCraft explaining Twitter in plain English:

(Update: In Sweden Telia and in Estonia EMT will be selling the iPhone 3G, and at least in Estonia you can pre-sign up already. I think EMT's ad is much cooler than Telia's press release at least)

(Update 2: Teliasonera has released it's price plans for the iPhone 3G:

price plan	traffic included	monthly fee	iPhone 3G 8 GB, tied 24 months	iPhone 3G 16 GB, tied 18 months
iMini	100 minutes, 100 SMS, 100 MB	299 SEK	1695+24·299 = 8871 SEK	3295+18·299 = 8677 SEK
iMidi	250 minutes, 250 SMS, 250 MB	489 SEK	995+24·489 = 12731 SEK	2695+18·489 = 11497 SEK
iMaxi	1000 minutes, 1000 SMS, 1000 MB	859 SEK	1+24·859 = 20617 SEK	2195+18·859 = 17657 SEK

No surprise really, after the initial pretty useless buzz Apple released, $199^* has the asterisk so to say - the subscriptions you this time probably will be tied to in the store are pretty horrendous. I think a "3G-soap" as they are called in Stockholm, a 3G USB modem for the laptop costs roughly 500 SEK per month, and that's still less limited and a lot more versatile than what you can do with an iPhone and 250 MB.

Swedish wireless access prices are generally ridiculous compared to Estonian and I hope to see that EMT will be less scotch. Also, count on me writing a piece on how to forever get rid of the despited "high speed extreme use"-clauses in broadband contracts, also discussed in Swedish here)

(Update 3: Estonian EMT has released the iPhone 3G too now. If I understand the newsletter correctly the contracts are all 24 months, so it's not comparable to the 18 months column above. I was saying that I think traffic should be cheaper in Estonia, but instead it seems they simply do not provide any "maxi" plan, and charge a bit more than Telia does in Sweden.)

price plan	traffic included	monthly fee	iPhone 3G 8 GB, tied 24 months	iPhone 3G 16 GB, tied 24 months
i550	100 minutes, 100 SMS, 100 MB	550 EEK (= 329 SEK)	2670+24·550 = 15870 EEK (= 9486 SEK)	3960+24·550 = 17160 EEK (= 10257 SEK)
i890	250 minutes, 250 SMS, 250 MB	890 EEK (= 532 SEK)	1490+24·890 = 22850 EEK (= 13658 SEK)	2780+24·890 = 24140 (= 14429 SEK)