flickr

Let’s say you have an old-style Flickr photo URL like the following:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/702783_509c609f44.jpg

Now let’s say you want to find the page on Flickr for that photo? Put the photo ID in a URL like this:

https://www.flickr.com/photo.gne?id=702783

WordPress has some simple built-in support for posting by email, but that didn’t stop a couple people  from developing plugins that might do better. Postie and PostMaster both claim to support attached photos (though neither appears to use WP’s built-in media management). But if your goal is to post photos, you might consider posting through Flickr.

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.

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?

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!

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.

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?

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.

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.