Some whine about movies on Flickr, others about the switch to Yahoo IDs, I simply want better rendering of transparent PNGs as JPGs.

I asked for it in 2004, before YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler, or Revver appeared on the scene, and before MySpace and Facebook added video sharing as a feature. Four years later they finally added it. Neil Rickards should get credit for creating the theme of “long photos” (Neil called them “moving photos”). And anybody who was around then isn’t the least surprised at how angry some are now about the new feature (see sarcastic response to that).

The short story is that you simply put “tags:” in the subject or body and anything that follows becomes a tag. It’s worth remembering that the Subject of the email becomes the title and the body becomes the description. The longer story is at Flickr.

tagging, flickr, uploading

So once again, my husband called on my assistance with a Friday Food Fiesta challenge. This week’s theme was cookies and biscuits. I scoured my pantry, but alas, like Old Mother Hubbard, my cupboards were practically bare. The one interesting thing I did have was a bag of Hershey’s white chocolate chips. So, between my meager rations and a quick trip to our town’s tiny market for butter, I cobbled together the ingredients needed to make the chocolate, white chocolate chip cookies on the Hershey wrapper. The only alteration I made to the recipe was to substitute my favorite Ghiradelli cocoa powder for the Hershey’s that they suggested.

However, at MaisonBisson we are not satisfied with mere cookies. When I called Casey to let him know I made the cookies he responded with those three little words: “ice cream sandwiches!” Sometimes that man can be an absolute genius! I e-mailed a list of ingredients for him to pick up on his way home and let my cookies cool.

When Casey came home he brought with him a gallon of Bryer’s Vanilla Bean ice cream, chocolate sprinkles, and mini chocolate chips. We stirred up the ice cream to soften it, placed a nice scoopful on a cookie, pressed another cookie on top, and rolled the edges in the sprinkles or the chips. We wrapped each sandwich in a square of aluminum foil and let them rest in the freezer. We ended up with about twenty sandwiches. Friends stopped by and helped us polish off some of them but the others remain in my freezer taunting me. They are really very delicious and very easy to make.

chocolate chip cookie, chocolate chip cookies, cookie, flickr, freezer, ghiradelli, hershey, ice cream, ice cream sandwiches, mini chocolate chips, old mother hubbard, sprinkles, vanilla bean, white chocolate, Sweets, Homemade, Summer

My computer geek husband, who I do adore, joined a Flickr photo group called Friday Food Fiesta. A new theme is announced every Friday, and everyone contributes a single photo that illustrates that theme. The first themes he contributed to were burgers and pizza, but when salads came up, he needed help. Luckily for him, I love making salads. So Casey, my husband, asked me to be his partner in crime and create a salad for him to photograph and submit.

Well, it was a gorgeous spring day to I decided we’d grill and make a little party out of it. I wanted to create an original salad and I decided it would be a surf and turf salad. I tossed a big bag of spring mix greens in a lime vinaigrette and l spread them out a large serving tray. Then I grilled up a bunch of jerk marinated beef and some pineapple slices. If you’ve never grilled pineapple you must try it! It gets a wonderful caramel crust. (Would also be fabulous with some vanilla ice cream!) I sliced the beef in thin strips and arranged it on the tray with the grilled pineapple. Then I added some mandarin oranges and large handfuls of lobster meat. I garnished the platter with the top of the pineapple and served the salad with the extra vinaigrette on the side.

The resulting salad was a visual and taste delight. We invited over some friends and had an impromptu party. I whipped up some cocktails with pureed frozen raspberries, dark rum, and seltzer. And we mellowed out in the back yard with some good cocktail tunes. (I recommend the Zumanity soundtrack by Cirque du Soleil and anything by Pink Martini.)

flickr, gorgeous spring, grilled pineapple, lobster, mandarin orange, photo group, pineapple, pink martini, salad, salads, spring, spring mix, steak, surf n turf, vinaigrette, zumanity, Homemade, Meals, Spring, Dinner

Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir is one of my favorite photographers on Flickr. Her photos are amazing, and it’s clear a lot of people agree. That’s the easy part. Then two problems arose: First Rebekka discovered that somebody was selling her photos for profit, and she posted about it. The community was shocked, and angry. And then, and this is the second thing, Flickr removed her post about it.

And then the storm got worse.

More than a few cried “Censorship!” And the troubled spilled into the support forums, where 312 comments flooded in in almost no time at all. Finally, Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield wrote in.

I’ve gotten the whole back story from the team and have read the forums, various Flickr groups topics and blog posts on this topic (as of a few hours ago), so I have a pretty good idea that we screwed up for which I take full responsibility.

He was on vacation when the news got to him, writing from a Treo in the desert, but he still managed to write the sort of message that a company dealing with a crisis dreams of.

The problem turned out to be that people were posting threats and home addresses and such, the kind of thing that can be real trouble (and serious legal and moral responsibility). Nobody really knows how to deal with that, I mean, communities have argued about that sort of thing for ages.

But in this case, Flickr closed the doors and removed the post and all its comments.

The photo was deleted — again, mistakenly — because of the direction the comments had gone, which included posting the personal information of the infringing company’s owner and suggestions for how best to exact revenge. It is an emotional issue and most people were there to support Rebekka in a positive way, but some of the angry mob behavior crossed the line.

Flickr is not a venue that we will allow to be used to harass, intimidate, threaten incite hatred against people — even if those people have done something wrong. We strive to be free and open, but just like laws against crying “fire!” in a crowded theater, a desire to promote free speech has it’s limits.

We get challenging situations on Flickr all the time: ex-boyfriends/girlfriends, ex-husbands and wives, disputes between business partners or landlords and tenants, posting photos and text with the intent of hurting someone else. These can be quite tricky to deal with morally and legally, and almost all of the time we make the right choice.

Having said that, this time, we made the wrong choice. The person who made the call is not, as has been suggested, stupid, incompetent, underpaid, under qualified, inexperienced or mean. They just made a big mistake (and feel inconsolably awful about it, by the way). We also did not have the right policies in place to prevent it from happening or rectifying it afterward. And that’s entirely the responsibility of the Flickr leadership team, and myself in particular.

flickr, customer relations, censorship, community, community standards, Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir

delicious = Endoeavor’s course content integrator
OpenSearch = metasearch
Flickr = digital collections management

It’s old news (Boing Boing and Slashdot covered it a month ago), but Flickr’s patent application is a bit troublesome. It’s not that they’re trying to patent tagging (they’re not), it’s that they’re trying to patent the things library folks have been wanting to do (and in some cases actually doing) for some time.

Media objects, such as images or soundtracks, may be ranked according to a new class of metrics known as ”interestingness.“ These rankings may be based at least in part on the quantity of user-entered metadata concerning the media object, the number of users who have assigned metadata to the media object, access patterns related to the media object, and/or a lapse of time related to the media object.

See, interestingness is what you get when you link two or more metrics — think $interestingness = ($circulation * $comments * $rating); — together to get a number you can rank items by. I’d been playing with that sort of thing with bsuite, does that mean I might be subject to a lawsuit?

flickr, interestingness, ip, patent, ranking

When Dan Cat gets cagey, and people are talking about mysterious map buttons in Flickr a guy has to wonder…is this why the lines between Dan’s hobby and day job are so blurry?

update: Ryan Eby points out that the map is live!

Dan Cat, flickr, geobloggers, geotag, geotagged, photos

Quite a while ago now, stepinrazor asked people to do some self-censorhip in a post in the Flickr Ideas forum. FlyButtafly quickly joined the discussion, noting that she’d encountered some material she found offensive in pictures from other Flickr members: “as I’m going through the pictures, one shows up of a protestor holding a sign with a vulgar statement on it.” Though she refused to identify what she saw that was offensive, she did note in a later post that she “would never take my child to a pro-abortion rally.”

Striatic was quick to point out that “it probably wasn’t a pro-abortion rally, it was a likely a pro-choice rally.” Adding:

it’s easy to respect your opinion .. and i’ll try not to mislable your morality .. but even if you think that pro-choice is a corrupt morality {it isn’t beyond debate}, could you please not mis-represent it?

Meanwhile, in a somewhat different thread of the same conversation, GustavoG asked:

But was it offensive? To whom? To what culture? To what subculture within what culture?

Are you aware of the fact that your own icon would be offensive in the Muslim world? Your face can be seen, without any attempt to cover it. Shouldn’t you be forced to label your icon as “may offend”, and therefore be made invisible to the public?

I’ve been trying to synthesize the resulting discussion into a short, meaningful post for over a year now, but what appeared in the Flickr forum was so rich that I’ve now simply decided to quote the best bits of it and let them stand on their own.

FlyButtafly, who had started the thread with a specific question shot back at GustavoG’s expansion of the issue:

your comment about the muslim culture was completely extraneous. It has nothing to do with the issue at hand. We aren’t talking about inane issues that have to do with specific religions, otherwise we could go on to say that you can’t post pictures of pigs because of Jews and muslims and seventh-day adventists, etc., or that we couldn’t show a steak because of hindus. C’mon, let’s please stay on topic.

Quas responded:

I think that was exactly Gustavo’s point, and I think it’s a good one. Obviously Flickr isn’t going to censor pig/steak photos, yet these could be considered offensive to some.

Any photo could be potentially offensive to any viewer [OK, an exaggeration, but bear with me] — it’s just a matter of drawing the line somewhere. And since everyone will draw the line at a slightly different place, it’s going to be very hard (or impossible) to please everyone.

FlyButtafly narrowed the question:

I don’t think anyone disagrees with what is pornographic. Or why don’t we just say “nudity” that way there’s no confusion? Is it offensive to state what is in the picture? And to be able to shield myself from that type of image?

fallsroad re-expanded it:

That statement has been the center of court cases, debates, and regulation since the beginning of the Republic, and will be until long after we are all dust.

Again, FlyButtafly:

It is asking if we could have an explicit “nudity/pornography” and “obscenity/vulgarity” flag. There’s not any ambiguousness about those flags. At least not for the pornography one. Here, if anyone doesn’t understand what that word means: Someone with little or no clothes on.

To which ///Alex leapt:

Someone with little or no clothes on… != Pornography

Is this a pornographic photo?

…And GustavoG added:

you’re asking for the built-in ability to filter the world according to what offends you, and even by one or two of the things that offend you. Let’s assume this is done — and then someone requests another set of flags and buttons and whatnot, this time to filter out some other kind content that you would not find to be objectionable. For example, a steak. (I’m assuming you don’t object to steaks.) What would you say then — “yes, the system should support filtering steaks out”? Or “”o, there is no need for that functionality because I don’t think steaks are objectionable“?

If the steak filter is implemented, next time someone will require yet another filter — e.g. ”I’m offended by improper punctuation, photos with title, comment or notes with improper punctuation should be filtered out“.

Once everybody is happy seeing the three or four remaining non-objectionable photos, how many flags, filters and buttons will be there?

Accusing people of bigotry is easy – one just has to type the words. Please consider what it means, if you think that what offends you should be implemented globally, but what offends others needn’t.

Finally, FlyButtafly:

Maybe I should have stated it this way: In the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA we have certain laws that have been approved by the majority for centuries about what should be allowed in the public square. If this were not true, then we would not have such things as indecency laws, we wouldn’t have a ratings system, and anyone could pretty much get away with anything.

Fallsroad quickly pointed out FlyButtafly’s concerns are matter of great public debate. For my part, I took issue with the suggestion that morality laws of any sort “have been approved by the majority for centuries” in the US.

Censorship became a matter of federal interest in the late 1800s as a result of agitating by Anthony Comstock who burned 15 tons of books in his crusade against perceived obscenity and immorality. Richard Zacks’ An Underground Education reports that Comstock’s furor was a result of his compulsive feelings of desire and self stimulation that accompanied the sight of such materials.

J. Edgar Hoover followed Comstock as America’s top obscenity cop, ordering his agents to deliver confiscated materials directly to his office where it would be placed in a vault accessible only to Hoover and a close friend (also from Zacks). But Hoover and the FBI found themselves on the losing side of a number of First Amendment decisions when the government tried to shut down Reuben Sturman’s publishing enterprise — a story well told in Eric Schlosser’s Reefer Madness.

It’s worth remembering that Last Tango in Paris, with Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider, was rated X when first released in 1973, the same year the popular press coined the term “porno chic” and Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door were playing in mainstream theaters.

The current state of obscenity laws is best credited to (failed banker and convicted felon) Charles Keating, who agitated tirelessly for the government to thoroughly regulate the publishing industry while turning a blind eye toward banking. His 1965 film, Perversion for Profit, attempted to link pornography to Communism and the decline of western civilization. The perils of other people’s moral bankruptcy, it would seem, outweighed the risk of Keating’s own business bankruptcy. Though many argue that it was a moral bankruptcy of a different sort, the latter resulted multiyear depression in large part brought on by the savings and loan scandal and precipitated by Keating’s felonious financial fraud.

The Reagan administration tried to strike out obscenity, but failed to establish the case that the state’s interest (however conflicted) in preventing adults from viewing their own choice of materials was superior to the First Amendment’s constitutional prohibition of state censorship.

In short, we Americans have never been unanimous in our feelings about obscenity. Indeed, the only decision that has withstood the test of time has been the our insistence on free speech.

Anthony Comstock, argument, Charles Keating, civil liberties, community standards, cultural imperialism, first amendment, flickr, free speech, freedom, J. Edgar Hoover, may offend, moral superiority, obscenity, porn, pornography

It’s hard to be angry with Flickr about unexpected downtime when they post funny things like this.

For my part, this is more than just an excuse to link to DJ Ted Stevens’ Internet Song (yeah, “the internet is a series of tubes”), it’s an excuse to point out how Flickr apparently knows how to speak to their customers in language they we understand. I dare a library to do the same next time the opportunity permits.

challenge, downtime, error message, flickr, funny, language, libraries, ted stevens, the internet is a series of tubes, tubes

Just when we started wondering how much longer flickr would be beta, they announced gamma.

The new design had me scratching my head for a bit, but I’m coming to like the changes. The menu/toolbar in the header has direct links to a lot more stuff, while the stuff in the footer has many fewer links. I can’t really tell if there are any links missing there, or if they’re just organized better, as I really only used one or two of them anyway.

Searching is improved, and now there’s a fancy menu that pops up when you mouse over a buddy icon. Go take a look at it all.

Overall, it’s a nice improvement to my favorite online application.

beta, flickr, gamma, improved, redesigned, web application design, web applications, web design

The FlickrBlog reports this message from Gale:

People have been submitting good humpback whale fluke shots to a group called Humpback whale flukes. I volunteer at Allied Whale which holds the North Atlantic Humpback Whale Catalog and I was able to make a very exciting match with one of the whales that was posted on the group by GeorgeK.

George saw this whale in Newfoundland in the summer of 2005. It matched with HWC#2943 in the North Atlantic Humpback Whale Catolog ….. this whale was seen only once before in March 1984!!! on Silver Bank (the breeding grounds North of the Dominican Republic).

This is what flickr has the power to do.

update: Gale sent me a link to this photoset of her 1987 encounter with a two-year old humpback wale. Flickr wasn’t designed for naturalists or marine biologists, but it allowed her to share those photos, richly annotated with notes and descriptions, with the world. And because it creates opportunities for communication, it connected somebody who may not have been aware of how his photos contributed to the body of knowledge of whales with another passionate user who could piece it together.

The Allied Whale database doesn’t appear to be searchable online, but maybe whale watchers in Flickr should take advantage of the tagging feature to create a searchable database there?

connections, North Atlantic Humpback Whale Catalog, allied whale, collaborative database, connections, flickr, flukes, humpback whales, serendipity, social networks, social software, whale flukes, whale watch, whales

Flickr does tags better than any other, so far as I can tell.

We love tag folksonomies for way they allow us all to organize our world, for the way they allow patterns to emerge from chaos, and for their easy flexibility. But that flexibility, if poorly implemented in our software, can interrupt the very patterns we hope to find in our tag networks.

Take “road trip” as an example. What one tagger thinks is two words might be just “roadtrip” to another. This is where Flickr’s tag indexing does it right: we still have to pick the right words (and spelling), but we don’t have to worry about spaces or punctuation.

So, when I tag a photo “Mt. Moosilauke,” Flickr stores the both text I enter as well as a version in all lower-case, without spaces or punctuation: “mtmoosilauke.” And when you search for “Mt. Moosilauke,” you get the same results as your neighbor searching for “mt moosilauke.”

Well, that’s how I think tags should work, anyway. And you’ll notice it’s how they’re working here now. The text of the tags at the bottom of this post and all others here displays as I entered it, but they resolve to a tag URL without spaces or punctuation, just as Flickr’s do.

Um…update: okay, Matty and I agree and disagree about a few things, but he just re-wrote the core-tagging function in bsuite, so I’ve gotta give him his way on a thing or two for a moment. So…tags are back to the broken Technorati standards. That is, somebody searching for “roadtrip” won’t find posts tagged “road trip,” but we’ll fix that in time.

folksonomy, folksonomies, tag, tags, Flickr, tagging, doing it right, Best Practice

For those people still using Gallery, here’s the last straw: Rasmus Lerdorf got to playing with the Flickr API and quickly wrote up a script to migrate his photos from Gallery to Flickr. He’s didn’t post a script or anything, he’s just saying it’s easy to do.

A lot of things are easy to do, of course, but that doesn’t mean they get done. So it’s probably a great relief to somebody that Paul Baron got on the job. Paul didn’t do any coding, but he posted a rewarding challenge to a Flickr forum, a Flickr member responded (and took home 200 bones for his trouble), and now Paul is sharing the solution with you.

So what’s the holdup now?

flickr, flickr api, challenge, prize, gallery, photo management

Ignore the politics for a moment. MoveOn’s CTO, Patrick Michael Kane, remarked that the organization’s membership to Flickr, the photo sharing site, has paid off: “Flickr has got to be the best $24.95 we’ve ever spent.”

Why?

Micah Sifry explains in a story at AlterNet that MoveOn had been soliciting photos of events from members for some time, but their ability to move those photos through the process and make them available to the public was limited. The irony, for an organization built on grass roots participation, is that they couldn’t deal with the photos people were submitting from events and actions. So they started looking at Flickr, which now hosts over 80 million photos.

The group started using the service in April 2005, and now hosts almost 9000 photos at Flickr. MoveOn allows members to submit photos via email, then then uses a review application based on the Flickr API that allows other members to vote for photos to be posted on the public site. Those reviewers can also push some photos to the top of the pile by tagging them “great”.

As it turns out, tags (folksonomies) are among the most valuable features for MoveOn. Kane explains: “one of our campaigners wanted a slideshow of photos from a recent action and was able to put it together himself, just by selecting the tags he was interested in and using the Flickr slideshow app.”

Again, ignore the politics. Look at this carefully and tell me if there’s any better application to meet their needs. Now tell me how social software can better meet your organizations needs.

Need help? Here’s Sifry’s conclusion:

The larger lesson for other organizations is this: As social networking sites like Flickr, del.icio.us (also just bought by Yahoo!), and MySpace attract millions of users, it may make sense to go where the people already are and start playing with the same tools, not only because those tools may offer all kinds of benefits to the organization, but also to see what unexpected benefits may engage people. What MoveOn is doing with Flickr is just a beginning.

social software, flickr, moveon, social applications, tags, tag, tagging, social software for politics, leveraging social software

Regarding nudity in photographs posted to Flickr, dancharvey says:

Honestly, I’m more concerned about all the cats and flowers. Cliche is more damaging than breasts. Your opinion may vary.

nudity, censorship, flickr, photo, photography, top-v, argument, cliche, reason

No, I don’t mean that they’re disrupting it, I mean they’re getting it. And in saying that, I don’t mean they’re figured it our first, but they they’re making some damn good acquisitions to get it right.

Mostly, I’m speaking of they’re purchase of Flickr last year and their acquisition of del.icio.us Friday. But in a somewhat lesser way I’m also speaking of their announcement Monday that they’ll be offering blogs as well.

Yeah, Google rocked this picture a good long while ago with their purchase of Blogger long before most people could understand what value it offered, and even Microsoft beat Yahoo! to this. But the better way to read this is as the final piece to a rather impressive array of social software.

And where perhaps only ten percent of internet users will likely ever be regular bloggers, it’s a safe assumption that nearly 100 percent of internet users will create bookmarks and almost as many will have reason to post a photo online. And with Yahoo! controlling the leading services for both, it sort of rearranges the picture.

flickr, delicious, del.icio.us, yahoo!, social software, social web, web 2.0 web20, yahoo, internet, social network, social networks

Memepool introduced me to camera tossing at Flickr, where there’s even a group for those who are willing to risk their camera for a chance at a shot of streaky lights. But not everybody tosses in the dark, it’s turned out to be a a new fad in self-portraiture.

Click through for credits and more info on the photos above.

tags: blur, blurry picture, blurry pictures, camera, camera killer, camera toss, camera tossing, cameratoss, cameratossing, dangerous (to your camera), fad, flickr, memepool, photo, photos

Browsing Flickr the other day I found la_femme’s poison. Other good photos in her photostream.

tags: danger, evonimina, flickr, la femme, orange, photo, poison, red, veneno, yellow

The developers describe Flock as

[T]he world’s most innovative social browsing experience. We call it the two-way web.

Which is a good enough sales pitch to make me try the free demo, but it’s all still a private beta. Perhaps they’re trying to prove the point that nothing builds buzz better than unavailability. Osakasteve gushes:

A browser that is designed around social software like blogs and flickr

And Roland Tanglao overflowed:

I was blown away! Drag and drop blogging – drag text from a blog post and it automatically creates a cite tag with a link to the original post and the quoted text is indented using a blockquote tag. Drag and drop Flickr photos. And Chris teased me with some more future features like having del.icio.us as your bookmarks (goodbye to useless local bookmarks).

Extra: it’s based on Firefox and will fully love Mac, Win, and Linux. Interesting ideas…where’s my beta invite?

tags: blogging, blogs, drag and drop, firefox, flickr, flock, mac win linux, private beta, sales pitch, social bookmarking, social bookmarks, social browser, social browsing, social networking, social software, social web browser, web browser

There’s an interesting discussion going at LibDev about what our ILSs are. It all started with a discussion of what role XML and webservices could/should play with ILS/catalogs, but a comment reminded us that Vendor’s decisions about adding new features to products that have been around for 20 or 30 years sometimes edge towards lock-in. I replied offering Flickr as an example of a vendor that’s been successful in part because of their open APIs.

Then David Walker made the point that most ILS were built as inventory systems in the days long before Google showed us that search and retrieval was a separate issue.

The problem is that we have long mistaken these systems for a search and retrieval tool. That is really only a secondary (at best) feature of any ILS, and so it should come as no surprise to us that [they leave] much, much to be desired in that area.

David’s point is almost inarguable. Entirely inarguable, except that electronic sources represent a growing region of our information landscape while the relative number of non-electronic resources inventoried in the ILS shrinks. Unless the ILS evolves, the only items we’ll need to inventory are our preserved resources and archives, and ILSs aren’t very good at that either.

tags: david walker, electronic resources, electronic sources, flickr, google, ils, integrated library system, inventory system, libdev, library system, search and retrieval, search help