One of my favourite artists has released a new music video, and it’s a bit creepy! - Röyksopp: The Drug
I Finally Understand Flickr
Ok I get it now. You upload your photos then share them around with people with similar interests to you. It’s not just a portfolio site, it’s all about connecting and exchanging.

Why isn’t Flickr used by more people? It’s fantastic!
Here are my reasons why:
- Very easy to find images you were looking for
- A good group function that gives creators a high level of control
- Open-to-all ‘pools’ of images to bundle related photos together
- A great search tool that sorts results by ‘interestingness’
- Well-adopted API which links and syncs with other sites
(not Facebook of course) - A large community of helpful and insightful photographers/commenters
- Uploading is a dream and meta-data from photos are autoprocessed
(ie. it knows images were shot with an N95) - Digital rights management to give users true ownership
- Geotagging support linked with Yahoo! Maps
- Highly secure login through Yahoo! authorisation
(ok – tenuous but important) - A great visual identity, history and brand currency etc etc…
The point is, I’m sold. Gush over.
One other thing though is that once photos are up there, you can share them in all sorts of ways. My favourite is through the slideshow, which lets you grab an embed code to place elsewhere – how cool is that?
Here’s an example, taken from the lifesforsharing group pool being used by photographers who were in Trafalgar Square last night, best watched fullscreen:
Cool right? I’m going to be taking my camera out more often, so expect a spot of photo-blogging very soon. Now then, where’s my memory stick…
Pixar – Up
New feature film from Pixar is announced -
As always the trailer looks gorgeous, but I can’t help but feel that since Disney bought Pixar some of the magic has been lost.
This looks like a really fun kids film, but I see none of the clever humour or subtle tones of their past successes. Wall-E was a particular favourite of mine in 2008.
What really strikes me though is those balloons. Just like the PS2 / PS3 demonstrations of rendering power (video here) using rubber ducks, I can easily believe that some animator just said “we can make thousands of helium balloons look really cool, really easily”, and a plotline was born.
Technology should be applied to showcase great content, not to drive the content’s existence in the first place.
Come on Pixar, release a new trailer and blow my mind!
***EDIT***
Just found this image, which to be fair sums up Pixar pretty well I thought:
Introducing… Ubiquity
Very exciting semantic technology for Firefox, that susses out what you are trying to do, and does it for you!
The below video, though highly stylised, is a great indication of our next steps towards Web 3.0, and onwards towards ubiquitous computing in the academic sense, that of interrelating processor-equipped devices/clothing/pens/kitchens etc that share and translate information to improve or simplify our lives.
We’ll need years of research to teach your jacket to stream your favourite album when it notices you’ve been sad lately, but Mozilla have at least made small steps towards mind/machine connectedness by removing a few of those quirks from the internet’s core product – email.
Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.
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