Office and conference FlickrFans
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I don't have an office, and I'm not running a conference, so I hope to hook up with someone, hopefully in the Bay Area, with either of these, to try some experimentation with FlickrFan. First a little background... My first glimpse of how wonderful news photography and screen savers are together was when I visited Andy Rhinehart at the Spartanburg Herald-Journal on 2/15/05. He had to go to a meeting, and left me in his office to check email, update my blog using my laptop. HIs PC of course went into screen saver mode, and started showing pictures of various political leaders in meetings around the world and sporting events, people digging out of snow storms. It didn't take long before my eyes were fixed on his screen.  Later I found out that everyone at AP does this too.  If you have a folder of new pictures on your LAN it makes a fantastic source of distraction. But it's different from video because it's silent. You can have a conversation about what's on the screen without interfering with it, or try to have a conversation about something else entirely.  This is something we noticed about podcasting too, that sometimes less is more. Because there is no video you can: 1. Use your eyes for something else, like driving, walking, doing housework. 2. Use your imagination in ways you can't with video, imagine what the speakers look like, where they are, who else is there. Once your imagination is activated in one direction it goes off in others.  So photocasting or picturecatching, whatever it ends up being called, has a similar "less is more" dimension.  So then I tried an experiment, I put an early version of FlickrFan on a 46-inch screen in my den, and when people would come over to visit I'd leave it running and we'd talk about whatever we were going to talk about, and I wasn't surprised to see the attention drift over to the TV. It's captivating. So I'd like to try it in two new venues to see what happens. 1. In a reception area in an office. Imagine one of the buildings at Microsoft. Or a doctors office, or the lobby of a VC firm. Install a big flatscreen TV on the wall, with a Mac Mini behind it, with a net connection, and let it run. See if people don't gravitate to it. See if people don't want to have meetings in the lobby. (I think some might.) 2. At a conference, like Demo or Davos, scatter four screens around the main lobby (not the meeting room), with one Mac driving them all or each with its own Mac Mini. Again see how it affects the dynamic. You might want to show pictures taken at the conference for a unique recursive effect. Or just use the AP news photo feed. Either would be sufficient to learn how it works. I bet we would learn a lot. Let me know if you decide to give it a try, and by all means please blog about your experiences, share what you learn with the rest of us.
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Voice over IP, online presentations, and multiparty video conferencing under consideration.
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Photophlow enlivens the Flickr experience with photo-sharing chat rooms--and shows what the Yahoo photo-sharing could be. Next up: a new face on Facebook.
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A new camera-finding feature at Flickr may find profits, too.
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Photo organizing, editing tool emerges from beta test.
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Flickr users have posted more than 200 images that illustrate their opposition to Microsoft's bid to buy Yahoo, which owns the photo sharing site.
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If you're using FlickrFan, you should have a copy of podcatcher.root in your Tool folder. If not now, at the top of the next hour (launch the OPML app so it can do the update). I want to get started with a small group of people, develop features, and then figure out how to broaden it, if that turns out to be the right thing to do. For now, I just want a testbed to develop, and a group of interested users. I've put together a brief cheat sheet for FlickrFan users. http://codecasting.org/podcatcher/00001.html  If you have a question please post it there and we'll try to get you the answer. Hope it works, and hope you like it.
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Once you ship a product you immediately start getting feedback, and if you're paying attention you can easily find the trends.  One of the big pieces of feedback about FlickrFan relates to branding. When you download the app and mount the disk image, where's FlickrFan? It isn't until after you figure out that you need to open the folder and click on the OPML app that you see FlickrFan. (I need to add a Readme file that makes this much more obvious.) I knew this would be confusing. I could have renamed everything FlickrFan, it wouldn't have taken much work, or testing, and the chance for breakage was nil, since it was a new product. I didn't do it for a simple reason, the engine that runs FlickrFan will run other apps, and I knew I would be shipping one such app within a matter of weeks. Once there's a second app running in the same engine, it may still be confusing. But there will be more after that.  Maybe there won't be millions of users, but my goal is to bootstrap a community of networked living rooms. For that I don't need more than a couple hundred households who want to play and I already have that.  I will soon tell you more about the new app, and if you're paying attention on my Twitter feed, you'll get a pretty clear idea of where this is going. It's all about communities, social features and big media. FlickrFan is about beautiful pictures on high def TV. The next one is about... Stay tuned!
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Microsoftâs bid is shaking up the community of the photo-sharing site Flickr, which is owned by Yahoo.
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Omnivision conference call notes and forcasts.
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Wow, this is really really coooooool.  The Library of Congress is partnering with Flickr, releasing pictures that it believes are not copyrighted, through Flickr. One of the fantastic side-effects of that is that there's an RSS 2.0 feed of those pictures that connects perfectly to FlickrFan.  If you click on this link on the machine that FlickrFan is running on, you'll automatically subcribe to the Library of Congress feed on Flickr. This is one of those moments when the standards are working, really well.  PS: If for some reason it doesn't work, try clicking on this link to get the latest update (v0.42), then click on the link above again.
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Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls... It's with much anticipation that I say this. I have a new product that may be familiar to those of you who used Radio 8, and in other ways may be completely new.  The idea is simple.  There's a convergence between big screen high-definition televisions, and photography as an Internet based activity. The purpose of this product is to smooth that convergence, to make it easy to set up a connection between the Internet and your television. To allow photography to come into your living room in new, powerful and easy ways. Think of it as the networked living room and you'll understand the vision. Some of the work I've done is technical, some is user interface, and some is working with media organizations to try to create a comfort level, or at least a spirit of Let's Give This A Try. In the latter case, it's much like working with the NY Times to get their news headlines and summaries to flow through Radio's RSS aggregator in 2002. Only this time we're working with photographs, and we think, the best news photographers in the world. And the pictures are beautifully high-def, they look really great when displayed on LCD and plasma screens. I use it with my 52-inch Samsung and 46-inch Sony. Of course what looks great on a wall, also looks great on a 15-inch Macbook or 24-inch iMac.   And while we connect those pros with your TV, it's equally important that we connect your friends and families too. One of the early testers found the pictures that Doc Searls uploads to Flickr a great revelation. Me too. That's because Doc is not only a great photographer, he's also a great story-teller. I find that I can follow the lives of far more friends visually than I can through text messages (which I love to do too!). Viewing great photos on bigscreen TVs, desktops and laptops -- that's one focus, but not the only one.  I wanted to provide a complete two-way tool for people who love Flickr, as I do.  Why Flickr? Well, they've got this great thing called an API. It makes it possible for people like me to make software that runs on a desktop computer that does things like automatically backing up your new photos every night, and providing a drop-folder on your desktop for quick uploads. (It understands tags too, it's incredibly simple.) We also made it easy to post pictures you like to Twitter. Why Twitter? It's that API thing again. They made it easy for us to love them. I wish more network service developers understood how powerful this outstretched hand is.  But that's not all! Not by a long shot. The reason all this will be so familiar to Radio 8 users is that it builds on the same engine, the one that was released as open source in 2004. So I've been working on other tools to drop into this base platform and once we have a good-sized base of people using it for "really simple photos" on the desktop, there will be other tools. And because it's an open platform, other developers can do the same. Not saying they will, but they can.  Anyway, I'm in the last stages, preparing the download site, and a FAQ, and tweaking the installer. One caveat, the first beta release is Mac only. That's because I'm doing all my work on the Mac, and this is a one-man show. Later we will work it out for Windows too, and with a bit more work and a bit more luck, for Linux.  It should be ready before the sun goes down today.
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Visit the Apple booth at PhotoPlus Expo in New York City to hear professional photographers Bill Frakes, Michael Grecco, Ron Haviv, Heinz Kluetmeier, Robert Leslie, Vincent Laforet, Casey Templeton and Steve Winter discuss their work and how they use Aperture.
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New beta software supports video conferencing between Mac and PC users.
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Flickr, which is owned by Yahoo!, has increased the sizes of its photo sharing and storage accounts to unlimited space for Pro members and 100MB for free account holders. More from Flickr: &#8230;the two gigabyte monthly limit is no more (yep, pro users have no limits on how many photos they can upload)! At the same time, [...]
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In the workplace, Microsoft Office is as inevitable as drawn-out meetings and bad coffee. But Microsoft's combination of Word, Excel and PowerPoint is not the only way to write, crunch numbers or prepare slideshows. And for home users, it isn't even the best way anymore.
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Fluery still roots for JBoss...Edward Tufte mostly likes iPhone interface...mysteries of Linux's /proc files...multicore compression...Actually *using* mammoth telephotos