Posts tagged flickr
Weekend Links
Feb 21st
A few bits and pieces that have crossed my browser in the past couple of weeks (though mostly sifted through yesterday).
The NoSQL (or LessSQL) movement has garnered a lot of attention over the past few months, but numerous people have pointed out that MySQL can be adapted to cover many of the most common use-cases. Flickr’s Kellan kicked off a series of posts on that topic with Using, Abusing and Scaling MySQL at Flickr and Richard Crowley responded with OpenDNS MySQL abuses. On the other side of the coin, Luke Melia has a write-up of how he uses Redis to build a “who’s online now list” and Sean Cribbs’ (fairly convincing) Why Riak should power your next Rails app is worth a read even if you’re not a ruby developer.
It’s good to see that the twitter engineering team have started blogging. They’ve also extracted and released the code they use to extract key terms from tweets (links, @replies, etc).
Thanks to Ajaxian I spotted Plupload – “a generic component that allows you to create a rich upload experience on the back of a variety of transports. Whether it be HTML5, Gears, Silverlight, Flash, BrowserPlus or normal forms, you can get an upload experience with drag and drop, progress, client side image resizing and chunking.” The file upload experience is one clients are constantly asking me to improve, so this could come in very handy.
There was a flurry of posts this week about whether web designers need to know HTML, with a number of good contributions. Elliot Jay Stocks kicked things off and I principally noted contributions from Mark Boulton and Rachel Andrew. It seems that the key is that designers need to understand the capabilities and constraints of the medium, and having a basic grasp of HTML and CSS is a quick route towards that, though as Mark points out there are plenty of others.
From Mobile World Congress comes a projection that “cell phone subscriptions [are] to hit 5 billion globally” this year, and 1 billion mobile broadband subscriptions. Another MWC announcement Vodafone’s launch of the “world’s cheapest phone” puzzled me. At $15 it’s $5 more than the phone I bought during our last trip to the US.
I use god on a number of servers to monitor the various moving parts of my apps. For the most part it does a good job and recent patches that squash a memory leak have been very helpful, but it sounds as if Bluepill might be worth a look as a possible alternative. Hugo Baraúna has written up a tutorial on monitoring delayed_job using it.
Selected (belated, extended) Saturday Links
Mar 28th
The past two weeks haven’t really left time to compile my selected links, though there have been many. A few days at SxSWi (on which more, later) followed by travelling with the family and the inevitable work backlog moved blogging way down the priority list. So here’s a mammoth selection to get me caught up. Particularly interesting has been the discussion around the future of newspapers (represented here by Clay Shirky, Steven Johnson and Russell Davies), which seem to have finally pushed beyond “how t ind a good business model for papers” to looking at where the real value for society lies and how we can preserve and extend that in a changing landscape.
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Making a jQuery Plugin Truly Customizable » Learning jQuery – Tips, Techniques, Tutorials
Some nice tips for managing options, and a reminder to find _useful_ customisations not just load with customisation options without much thought about/consultation with other potential users
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iPhone Coding For Web Developers
Presentation slides from the internet's Matt Biddulph
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Rack::Test released: Simply test any Rack-compatible app — Bryan Helmkamp
There's a _lot_ to like about increased adoption of rack. "With Rack::Test, we hope to make it easy for frameworks to encourage their users to write tests by making it trivial to provide a testing environment. We’d like to foster compatibility between Ruby web app testing environments (especially important as ideas like multi-framework apps become more prominent). The philosophy is the library should stay small and extendable so frameworks can layer on additional functionality they want to offer without modifying Rack::Test’s core behavior or resorting to monkeypatching."
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Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable « Clay Shirky
"That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen …. Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify." … and a a lot more
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russell davies: newspapers and all that
"If we are going to create a new news ecosystem involving advertisers (and a lot of people would be grateful for that money) then we're going to have to do something about that institutional bifurcation between content and commerce. We're going to have to design the relationship between the two with the care of a good experience designer." – a response to Ben Hammersley asking if anyone talking about the future of newspapers had talked to anyone in advertising
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Streams, affordances, Facebook, and rounding errors – Laughing Meme
"Simon Willison asked this week about best practice for architecting activity streams. And the answer is, “It depends.” Depends on the scope, scale, access patterns, and affordances you’re building — your contract with your users.
Which is a long way of saying think hard about the promises you make to your users, implicitly or explicitly.
And, Facebook, my friend, what the HELL are you thinking? You managed to negotiate the best deal in the business, talk about a racket, and you threw it away for a piece of Twitter’s pain? Are you stupid? Well, best of luck with that."
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SXSW Interactive Videos and Podcasts | SXSW.com
Most of the sessions were recorded and this is the place to get hold of them.
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SXSWi: Location-based service is the trend at Austin, Texas |
"Predictably, location-based services were a major feature this year, with launches that included Foursquare, a social, location-based game by the Dodgeball creator, Dennis Crowley, and a new Facebook application for the location management tool Fire Eagle. While early adopters such as the SXSWers have been exploring location-based services for some time, it is inevitable that more consumer and privacy-friendly versions will start to creep into the mainstream."
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stevenberlinjohnson.com: Old Growth Media And The Future Of News
"I think it’s much more instructive to anticipate the future of investigative journalism by looking at the past of technology journalism. When ecologists go into the field to research natural ecosystems, they seek out the old-growth forests, the places where nature has had the longest amount of time to evolve and diversify and interconnect. They don’t study the Brazilian rain forest by looking at a field that was clear cut two years ago." … and …" Measured by pure audience interest, newspapers have never been more relevant. If they embrace this role as an authoritative guide to the entire ecosystem of news, if they stop paying for content that the web is already generating on its own, I suspect in the long run they will be as sustainable and as vital as they have ever been. The implied motto of every paper in the country should be: all the news that’s fit to link."
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On running a panel
A mixup over bus times meant I didn't make it to Andrew's panel at SxSW, but I heard many good things. It's really great to see this kind of debriefing-in-public going on. Hopefully it'll make for a stronger set of talks and panels next year.
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Guardian API Maps – Home
"This is a site that lets you search the Guardian's new API and add location information to articles. All the place data we collect is being made available to anyone who wants it."
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Foursquare, Hot New Phone App, Is Dodgeball on Steroids | The New York Observer
Quite a few people seemed to be playing with Foursquare at SxSW but most of the Brits were excluded as we didn't want to use that much data and it wasn't available in the UK iTunes store. One to watch, though.
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A few notes on the Guardian Open Platform
I saw Simon present the Guardian Platform at SxSW and it looks like a great achievement. Waiting to see what developers build on it, and how they roll some of the ideas back in
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Taking remote imagery offline to Nigeria :: High Earth Orbit
Andrew's notes on trying to source good map data for use in Nigeria. It's a useful overview of a variety of services and ways to use them, though highlighting the absence of really accessible, high-quality data.
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Pulse Laser: The Utility of the Unfinished
"One technique that S&W has been using recently to illustrate design work is placing sketches or wireframes in situ. Whilst wireframes themselves are incomplete artefacts, designed to be work in progress, they still suffer for being uniformly incomplete. Wireframes themselves can be almost too beautiful, and this means that it becomes all-too-easy to criticise them as only wireframes, rather than as part of a product that exists in the world. Contextualising the sketches into the photograph places the design into the world. This enables the design to be understood within the world, and also (importantly) to highlight the seams between the unfinished design and the finished world around it"
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Spike: a log file viewing & (if we’re being generous) analysis tool for Rails developers.
Looks like a handy addition to the toolkit
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Generation Open | FactoryCity
"Sharing and giving away all that you can are the best defenses against fear, obsolescence, growing old, and, even, wrinkles. It isn’t always easy, but it’s how we outlive the shackles of biology and transcend the physicality of gravity." – Perhaps an overly optimistic piece, but it connects together a number of current themes and we can hope…
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Testing Facebook with Cucumber | opensoul.org
For those faced with the unpleasant task of writing facebook apps, some people are working on making sure they can be thoroughly tested.
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scraplab : instant sinatra deployment with heroku
A lot of people seem to be excited about heroku lately, and it does look like a nice simple way to put up quick ruby apps. Must play soon.
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How to speed up gem installs 10x « The Budding Rubyist
Handy little tip, particularly for server environments: turn off ri and rdoc generation in your .gemrc file, and speed things up considerably
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Facebook in 2010: no longer a walled garden – O'Reilly Radar
A more positive spin on facebook's changes from David O'Recordon, who suspects they're going to pull down the walls around their garden and become a proper citizen of the open web.
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Facebook blinks, copies Twitter, still gets it wrong. – broadstuff
Critical commentary on facebook's recent changes. I'm not sure I entirely agree with statements like "By 2009 it was clear no one gives a sh*t about the Social Graph" but facebook really do seem to be finding that their approach is overly complex and quickly trying to shift to a more twitter-like "web of flow" (to steal Stowe Boyd's phrase)
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Acquia Search goes public beta | Acquia
Hosted solr for drupal: "Acquia Search can be installed as a module on any Drupal 6 site, and enhances a site's search experience with faceted search navigation, content recommendations, and configurable results weighting, all delivered through a redundant hosted service infrastructure.".
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Oauth using pecl/OAuth
Looks like a nice simple way to interact with oauth from a PHP app
Greenbelt Social Media: What was different this year?
Sep 3rd
Yesterday, responding to a post Steve wrote on our Social Media efforts at Greenbelt I noted that it’s important to remember that this wasn’t the first year we’d worked with social media at the festival. Flickr has been our most prominent outlet, with the festival’s tags being some of the most visible in the week following the festival for several years now. But as I’ve written about here in the past (from a fairly techie perspective), we’ve made efforts to aggregate content from multiple blogs, social bookmarking services, and the like a few times previously. So what was different this year?
As Steve points out, video is a significantly different medium to photos or text and it has its own set of hooks. This wasn’t the first festival video to be posted online—a few videos had snuck onto youtube in previous years—but it was the first time tools like qik were available to allow live streaming. As I noted a few days ago live streaming currently benefits from its novelty: “this is streaming live on the internet” is a great hook for drawing in guests and viewers. That may well not last, just as blogging has lost much of its mystique over the past six years, but this year it served us well.
The “embeddability” of the content is a very important factor. We’re all pretty used to embedded youtube videos at this point, but it’s only been in the past few months that its become the majority of media storage sites that have offered facilities along the lines of what Dan Hill dubbed ‘tear-off’ content. That’s significant in a number of ways. We didn’t have time to really develop the platform for what we were doing (we’d wondered about using Alfie‘s moblog platform but ran out of time) but we knew that if we used qik we could not only export the video later, but we could very quickly embed widgets into blogs and other sites to promote the content. That freedom from worrying too much about platform is liberating, but for achieving attention in a festival environment it’s the ease of embedding that’s key.
Twitter was, of course, a vital component of our strategy. Just as there was no time to build up a platform for aggregating the content, we didn’t have time or budget to do any real promotion, and since this was a very experimental approach we didn’t even have time to build it into the editorial content of the festival’s own website. But we’ve all got relatively large personal networks on twitter (and for some of us our twitter posts are syndicated into facebook) and we’ve been cultivating a Greenbelt twitter account and it was easy enough to post notes there. Whether posting automatically (“I’m streaming live on qik …”) or personally, we saw a very good response and were able to receive some quick feedback. Twitter works really well as a glue between pieces of content you’re generating around the web, acting as a hub for a network that will follow link and engage with content hosted in a variety of locations.
Perhaps the key non-techie reason that things felt different this year was that there was concerted effort from a team. The real turning point for our flickr presence was when we started posting the festival’s official photos there—it gave it a certain kudos for those festivalgoers who may have been reticent and meant we were promoting flickr heavily in our editorial—and similarly having a group of people establishing a body of content provided something resembling a critical mass. Since our online networks intersect fairly heavily there was some reinforcement (“oh, X and Y have both mentioned this, I should check it out…”) but there’s enough distinction that the message went wider than any one of our personal networks. As a team we were also able to exchange skills and discoveries through the weekend which helped enormously when we had so little time to get up and running.
In purely numeric terms flickr is still where the vast majority of social media attention around the festival rests, with views of the photos being an order of magnitude greater than of the videos. Much of the conversation is taking place among blogs, with many scattered posts picking up a few comments. It’ll be interesting to see whether video capture at the festival follows in the footsteps of flickr and attracts a much larger group of producers or whether it remains an activity of a fairly small group. Either way, we’re very pleased with how it worked out this year.
(photo above is by Jon McKay, from his ‘So What Do You Think?‘ project)
New look for Sarah Masen’s site
Sep 5th
Thanks to some hard design work on the part of Rob Vander Giessen-Reitsma I was able to launch a new look for the website of singer/songwriter Sarah Masen a week or so ago. Sarah’s recently released three new EPs (her first releases since 2001, and all with hand made packaging) and it was high time the site got a new lease of life.
At heart, the site is a simple rails application, and we’re still making frequent updates as we let the new design settle in and begin to hook the site together with the new web world that has sprung up since it was last given any real attention. One of the latest changes is the use of the flickraw gem to pull in photos from gigs. We’re using last.fm’s machine tags to identify events, which may not be the best route as we build out the archive but for now provides a nice way to disambiguate events on flickr, with the fringe benefit that the photos show up on last.fm too.
Flickr geotagging
Aug 30th
Back from Greenbelt last night, I spent some time this morning trying out flickr‘s new support for ‘geotagging’ by placing all my photos on a map.
The interface is nice and hopefully as the API is updated and more uses for the geodata emerge, more and more users will geotag their photos. I’m imagining a map of the Greenbelt site that lets visitors see photos based on when and where on the site they were taken, opening up all sorts of navigational possibilities.
Of course, for that imagining to become reality flickr will need much, much better UK maps. With the current maps I couldn’t even find the racecourse accurately, and Jonny, Drew and I seem to have picked slightly different spots.
Perhaps I need to find some time to work on something that uses the official festival map? In the meantime, check out the 2000 or so photos with the greenbelt2006 tag or the official festival photos.