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.

Daemon by Zeraus - complimentary books and friendly marketing

 

I got a package today! The stamp collection on the envelope was truly impressive, death and misery to Posten, and many thanks and lunch or a couple of beers to my friend Henrik of Internet Video Advisory Group who sent me the book!

The deal was that Henrik had received some complimentary copies of Leinad Zeraus' "Daemon" (do read his story, it's an interesting one about friendly marketing). Since I had already several months ago put the book on my wishlist after reading a very positive review by my idol Joi Ito, I pretty much begged Henrik to send one of his copies to me.

Frankly, I don't know too much about the book yet, but if Joi considers it inspiring, it's usually something cool, considering his extraordinary understanding of social media.

In other news, my girlfriend recently returned from her too long trip to the US (yes, I was lonely), and in her handluggage was a bunch of books for me, and a Canon Speedlite 430EX flash, I'm so excited about that one, finally flash pictures which don't look like crap! The books she got me are:

• "The light of other days" by Arthur C. Clarke
  
• "Light - Science & Magic" as suggested by Erik Starck
  
• "Made to stick" by Chip Heath and Dan Heath as suggested also by Erik and Jonas Hombert

Slo-mo goodness, Discovery Time Warp

New digital cameras can really do wonders, as shown in this extremely smooth beautiful skate-video shot with the 120 fps RED camera:

Björn Falkevik alerted me to that there's a new program on Discovery Channel - Time Warp (download it here):

Also, Renee told me there's another cool show - Prototype This (download it here) which recently started airing. Enjoy!

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...

My Last.fm event + flickr mashup bargain and revolutionizing your Internet citizenship

When I was in Gothenburg I attended a concert with my friend Jolta's band Tongångarne and made a sweet bargain out of it. Since I was anyway lugging my camera around I elected myself the event photographer and sold the pictures for a signed copy of the album being released (and a good release party it was, for a charming album!). This is all nice and good, but I also put the nicest of the pictures (which are pretty red-tinted, I know and am sorry...) on my flickr account, registered an event on the band's last.fm page and tagged the pictures with the proper event tag, and voila, the event has photos attached!

Now this sounds very complicated, but the thing is that it goes along the lines of everything else related to web2.0 and the social web - it's really easy to actually do, the complex thing to understand is what you can do and how it benefits other. Creating the event was just a matter of clicking a button on the band page, typing in the name of the event, the venue and the date. Someone had already registered info for the venue "Musikens hus", so I just selected that and clicked confirm. However, the accumulated effect of having people registering events on last.fm, connecting them to cities, venues and dates, discussing them and photographing them, it becomes an amazing crowd thing!

The one to recently really succeed in explaining all this is definitely CommonCraft's Lee and Sachi LeFever with their cute animated videos on youtube, check it out below. In plain English. Also on the Young Scientists' new forum, Gustav Johansson recently wrote a post (in plain Swedish) about TED - ideas worth spreading, that's worth checking out too.