I’ve had the good fortune to travel a lot over the last years (mostly for fun, not business, though that’s shifting) and also am blessed with many fun and photogenic friends.
With no further ado, here’s a sample of photos I’ve recently uploaded:
Talented Tjapukais
Watery wires
Korean combo
Gregarious Greeks
A fab flower
Here’s the entire list of my photo sets on Flickr.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/thatadamguy/sets/
Enjoy, and comment away! 😀
I have an envelope on my desk from the American Cancer Society. A very, very worthy organization, and one that I do indeed plan to support financially. But—being the strange bird that I am—I’d like to do so creatively, selfishly, and, well, with your help 😀
No, I’m not going to ask you to send me money… at least not until I’m masochistically running some 42K fundraiser race or whatever where I have to raise [$x] and [x] is some relatively high number. Instead, I’m going to ask you to do work for me. Let me explain…
You see, I have thousands of photos. Tens of thousands of photos. Lots of them are pretty darn cool (if I say so myself) and many of them I’ve actually bothered to put online via Flickr or Fotki.
But—and here’s where you come in—lots of the photos are sadly unannotated. Heck, except for the country of origin, I probably don’t even remember anything about the people, the sculptures, the castles, the lakes… anything at all, really, and that’s rather regrettable IMHO.
Why not, as my boss has so aptly done in the past, invoke teh lazyweb! You, oh sundry and smart and good looking BLADAM readers from Amsterdam and Berlin and Cairns and every other letter of the alphabet… you probably can easily identify what goofy and beautiful people places and things I’ve taken photos of!
So here’s the deal: If there’s enough of a response, I’m prepared to write a check for up to $500 to the American Cancer Society which—when matched by my generous employer—will become 1,000 donated smackeroos… based upon how many of my photos y’all annotate. [x] cents per reasonable (and typically brief) annotation per photo.
In the end, it’s win-win-win.
– I get to remember and learn more about the places I’ve visited.
– My photo pages may get better indexed and more frequently viewed… and they’ll be more interesting and informative for everyone, too!
– You get warm fuzzies and certainly recognition and thanks on my blog at a later date :-D.
– The American Cancer Society gets up to $1,000! Plus more if I decide to do this on a yearly basis or others decide to responsibly copy-cat the idea.
* * *
I don’t yet have a timeline for this (though “by Thanksgiving this year” seems reasonable, no?). First, I have to upload a bunch more of my photos from around the world! Also, I’d love to hear (either privately or in the comments below):
1) Where you’re from and what you think about this idea.
2) Whether you’d personally enjoy participating by annotating my photos online.
3) Any particular restrictions or guidelines you think I should set / anything else to consider logistically or policywise.
4) Whether you’ve ever seen this sort of fundraising idea implemented 😀
Thanks in advance for your comments and, ultimately, your support! Remember, speak out—I’m only going to do this if I get a sufficient number of volunteers!
* * *
Update just a few minutes after I posted this:
Here’s a very non-comprehensive list of where I’ve been and taken photos (I hope to make a more comprehensive list someday!)
In no particular order…
EUROPE:
NORTH AMERICA:
ASIA AND PACIFIC
LATIN AMERICA
* I’ve visited here, but I don’t think I have pictures from this city.
Earlier this month I had the pleasure of taking a river cruise of sorts through Berlin… including both the former East and West parts.
I shot the photos with my new Canon SD700 camera (which I’m generally pleased but not thrilled with) and posted them on various services.
See my Berlin boat tour photos on…
– Flickr [ set | slideshow ] (strong community, many features, good privacy protection)
– Fotki [ set | slideshow not directly linkable ] (handy admin features, nice hierarchical options)
– Picasa Web Albums [ set | slideshow ] (smart pre-caching, great Picasa integration)
You may note a few funky/overly-general tags (e.g., “Places” and “Geography” and such). This is because I’m having problems debugging a hierarchical-categories-to-IPTC-script. If that doesn’t mean anything to you, no worries; it’s only a minor annoyance and doesn’t affect the photos themselves :-D.
I did slight editing (brightness, contrast, cropping, etc.) using Corel’s Paint Shop Pro X (trial version; I’m a paid user of version 8… and God what awful URLs!!!) and organized/tagged the photos using the incomparable and very affordable software called IMatch by Photools.
My thoughts on my new Canon SD700 camera:
– Startup time is wonderfully fast.
– Very easy to use.
– Feels comfortable, solid in my hands.
– Outdoor photos are consistently good, even in lower light.
– Zoom is great, even with movies.
– Movies can be taken even in quite low light!
– Battery life is amazing! I literally shot for hours a day always using the LCD, never once got a low battery warning!
But…
– The image stabilizer helps quite a bit, but still doesn’t allow for very-low-light photos.
– Photos — even at the highest quality setting — aren’t as sharp as I’d like. This is my biggest complaint.
– Battery/SD card door feels flimsy.
– The damn thing is pricey (as “low” as $449 at reputable places).
– I still envy the much thinner/lighter ultra-compacts that my friends have (even though they don’t take near-as-nice photos).
* * *
Anyway, I hope you enjoy the pics, and I’d love your feedback and shoutouts and such either here in my blog comments and/or in the comments in the galleries themselves. 😀
WARNING: Mishmash ahead.
Haven’t yet packed, which means this is the perfect time to procrastinate with a blog entry. Or something like that.
I’m leaving tomorrow morning for a two-week work-related trip. See details of that trip, plus enjoy some of my phone, camera, T-Mobile, and other musings below.
My upcoming travels for May 29 through June 11
My losing streak continues, sadly. In the last few months, I’ve had TWO cameras and TWO expensive phones stolen. It’s almost enough to make me either become a luddite or hire a personal assistant to thwack me on the head when I’m being particularly absent-minded.
Luckily, insurance will (at least in theory) be covering most of the cost of everything but one of the phones… and in an almost unbelievably example of “the kindness of strangers”… a colleague in the Atlanta Google office learned of my pathetic plight and IM’d me, “Hey, I don’t really use my Treo much, would you like it?” I said, sure, I’d consider it… what did she think would be a fair price? But no, she said, she was happy to just give it to me. And Fed-ex it to me next-day, just in time for my trip. Wow!
But alas, it didn’t quite make it here in time, and (understandably) none of my local friends just happened to have a spare tri-band phone to loan me. So in desperation, I went to a T-Mobile store and, after learning they only had dual-band loaners, decided to just bite the bullet and buy a phone. The salesman recommended a quad-band Motorola V188; it seemed pleasantly basic and small enough, and I figured $100—even with a required 1-year contract renewal—seemed fair.
Upon arriving back home, though, I noticed that Amazon is selling the same Motorola V188 with the same 1-year contract for… negative $145! That’s right, after the $35 new account fee, you get $110 cash back. So I basically got gypped out of $210! I’m pretty pissed. So I decided to call T-Mobile and I got—as usual—a delightfully friendly and helpful rep (this is part of the reason why I generally do love T-Mobile and didn’t mind renewing my contract). Alas, she said that the Amazon promo is, as it states, only for new customers. I expressed to her that I felt this was sort of a slap in the face for existing customers (especially those loyal ones way past their required contract term). After much time on hold, she offered to give me 30 free text messages (a value of $3). I thought this was pretty laughable, but at this stage in the game (leaving tomorrow), I just didn’t have the time to argue. The uber-moral of the story: if you’re looking to get a new phone, especially one more pricey than the entry-level one I bought today, you’re likely better off going through Amazon.com and just porting over your number.
Oh, and a few opening thoughts about this Motorola, compared to my Treo 650…
– It doesn’t cradle as nicely between my neck and shoulder.
– The speakerphone is decent.
– I don’t like the non-recessed volume buttons… worried about them getting pressed when in my pocket.
– There’s no “are you sure?” when writing a long SMS and accidentally hitting the cancel button. Blegh.
– It feels okay in my pocket. Really light. But I’d probably be more comfortable having a long and thin phone in my pocket.
– It’s so weird to not have a qwerty keyboard for texting or Web surfing. I already miss my Treo and can’t wait to get my replacement!
* * *
I also got a new camera today, the Canon SD700. It is, admittedly, rather a splurge, but I don’t feel too guilty; I tend to spend money on the arts (music, theatre) and photography, and I guess everyone’s entitled to some guilty pleasures. 😀
Online, on the low-end (but still from trustable companies) it tends to go for about $470 (with no sales taxes due up-front). At retail stores near me, it’s going for, well, retail: $499 (plus tax). Ouch. I found out that Frys (Tech Gadget Mecca for Geeks) in San Jose had it for $449, and while I’d normally never drive down to San Jose (about 90 miles round trip from my apartment) just to save $50… in this case, I already had plans to go to a BBQ at my friend Merry’s house in Mountain View, so it all worked out. They also had a reasonably decent 2gb SD card for $49, which I also snagged.
Of course, the real cost of photography is in time. I still haven’t gotten around to processing the 1,800 or so photos from my recent trip to Australia and Singapore; at about a conservative one minute per cropping/fixing/tagging/titling/describing, that’s 30 hours out of my life just to post a bunch of photos. Even if I pick the top one-third to post, that’s still 10 hours of photofussing just for this one trip. Ack! Seriously, because of this (I know, it’s a little silly), I seriously considered whether I wanted the hassle of schlepping, protecting, using, and dealing with a camera + its byproducts. Nostalgia won out, though.
* * *
Anyway, I probably better get packing. I’ll try to blog some stuff while I’m away, but it may be a few weeks ’til I’m bloggily back.
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Anyone have any idea what this animal is? I saw him in a park in St. Louis, Missouri, and I’ve been wondering ever since. And since his home sort of complements my new blog colors, I figured it was high time to feature him here. 😀 |
I tried out the Slide photo sharing service this afternoon. I understand it’s a beta, but as we’ve seen from many other services… beta doesn’t have to be unusable.
Here’s why I didn’t like Slide:
– It requires a download. Hey, my Grandpa isn’t going to download and install something. In contrast, with Flickr, I can just point him to a Web page, and voila, he sees my photos.
– It didn’t find any of my photos. Okay, they’re in c:pics, but I’ve redefined that folder as the place where my pictures are and other apps have had no problems finding it.
– It’s slow. Even on my Pentium 4 3.0ghz machine with 2 gigs of RAM.
– It’s unintuitive. Some operations you do from the panel, some from the app settings page, some from the Web page. Blech.
– It doesn’t even seem to work very well. I tried adding both an RSS and an Atom feed from Flickr and didn’t get any photos shown at all.
– The UI is just lousy. Mouseovers, selections, it’s all mished together making it too easy to select something when you’re just moving the mouse and too difficult to close a Slide window.
* * *
I look forward to the day when someone (Flickr / Flickr-devs? 🙂 makes an Ajaxian app that allows one to easily add photos to groups, share them with different sets of friends, complete with a neat scroll-y thing across the top of their screen.
Okay, so I’m kidding about the Fotoogle name (yuck!), but — mark my un-insider words — Google is going to buy community photo service Flickr or perhaps Fotki early next year and integrate it tightly with the upcoming Picasa 2.0.
What problems would this solve?
1) Bridge the offline – online photo gap.
Right now, via Google’s Picasa software and similar products, people can easily catalog, browse, and search for photos on their hard drive. But, one-at-a-time postings to blogger.com notwithstanding, there’s no point-and-click-easy ways for folks to get their photo catalogs online.
2) Enrich the Google Images database with a plethora of (IPTC-based) metadata.
The vast majority of amateur photographers (and probably the bulk of professional photographers) have neither the know-how nor the availability of non-geek tools to add IPTC title, description, and category information to their photo files. This, then, makes it extremely hard for Google to return useful hits in its Image search, since it relies on fuzzy contextual clues like jpeg alt-text, general surrounding text, and so on. By making it rewarding and easy for people to enter metadata for their photos and have them uploaded to a site online, Google will reap a humungous windfall of annotated photo data… greatly improving its Image search database. And such annotations will also provide a monumentally stronger hook for effective AdWords advertising on the Image pages ;-).
Why Flickr?
– It’s already well-respected and well-liked by bloggers, including at least one prominent Blogger.com team member.
– Open API!
– Small, smart, dedicated team behind the service.
– Flickr already uses AdWords 🙂
– It’s not evil; Flickr strongly considers member concerns and interests.
– Flickr uses tags, very similar in concept to Gmail’s labels.
– Strong focus on community: groups, live chats, etc.
– It’s based in Vancouver, not all that far from Google’s new Washington office.
– Flickr’s often-Flash-based UI is creative, useful, fun. And — while lately inexplicably deemphasized — their Flash-based chat is especially brilliant. Maybe something to integrate into Blogger or Google Groups? (“Chat live about this [blog | topic]!”)
Why Fotki?
– Offers photo printing.
– Already reads and works with IPTC info.
– Seemingly strong backend in terms of computational power, storage, and bandwidth.
– Also focused on community: blogs, contests, even a personal Image server for sharing photos from one’s hard drive.
– Based in New York City, relatively near Google’s NY office.
Why not a ‘major’ player like Ofoto or Shutterfly?
– Too big. Google likes smaller, more nimble firms.
– They’re focused on printing and commerce far more than photo sharing and discovery.
– They have minimal community aspects.
Why not a wildly popular site like fotolog?
– Rudimentary permissions structure.
– Focuses more on skin than art.
– Large non-English-speaking audience (which — no xenophobia intended! — merely presents an early hurdle in terms of documentation, community building, and so on).
– Very little community underpinnings.
* * *
So here are my bottom line guesses:
1) Picasa 2.0 will be out in beta by February 15, 2005.
2) Google will announce a partnership with or — more likely — an acquisition of Flickr simultaneous with Picasa 2.0, or alternately about 45 days later.
3) Soon after the Flickr deal, Yahoo will acquire or partner with Fotki.
4) Microsoft will be steadily working on making MSN Spaces photos integrated with its current software tools and MSN Search. I expect an announcement in this context around May 2005.
You read it here first ;-).
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Related links:
Added 12/19/04 8:54pm
– Salon.com article on Flickr (free daypass or paid subscription required)
– Conversation on Flickr
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Edited on 1/2/05 to add:
I’m honored that my prediction has been written up a bit in the blogosphere; however, I’d like to reiterate one word from this entry to make sure things are clear: “un-insider.” My speculation is based upon my broad understanding of the areas of blogging, digital photography, Google’s past acquisition behavior, etc. If you haven’t already done so, you may wish to read my disclaimer.
Edited on 3/20/05 to add:
Well, well, well… so I was wrong about Google (it ended up being Yahoo!), but I was only 10 days off in my estimate. Not too shabby, eh? BTW, nice poker face, Jeremy 😉
You know, this used to be such a nice feathery neighborhood. But now it’s populated by a bunch of fat, loud, belching slobs, hogging up all the sunny deck spots. And Doris wonders why I’m suggesting we fly further South for the Winter…”
I don’t know quite what to say about this! Your idea for captions?
