I don’t usually read Gizmodo, because, well, it sucks. But this article is very good: How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet.
“That is the reason we bought Flickr—not the community. We didn’t give a shit about that. The theory behind buying Flickr was not to increase social connections, it was to monetize the image index. It was totally not about social communities or social networking. It was certainly nothing to do with the users.”
That right there is the telling quote. I still use Flickr as a CDN for all my photos, but I’ve considered moving them all in-house (something I’m, frankly, dreading) just in case they decide to pull the plug one day.
Update: Equally interesting is the response in this comment thread on Metafilter. As a community who identifies strongly with the old-school internet, the pro/con mixture seems split roughly down the middle.
One of the things I unpacked from my carpenter’s chest was a cache of 620-related photo equipment, including three spare spools I’d forgotten I had. Conventional wisdom has always been that one needs to respool 120 film onto 620 spools, as per the instructions here. I did, in my brief searching this morning, find an alternate method, which includes a pair of sharp cuticle scissors and some sandpaper. Basically, the idea is to remove the raised edge around the spool to make the whole thing fit inside a 620 housing. So, I’m going to order some more 120 film and try both methods out.
Flickr Can’t Go Back To What It Once Was.
In late March, users will notice significant changes to the photo uploading process.
I use (and always have) Flickr for nothing more than a glorified CDN. Let’s see how their changes affect things.
This is a riveting, heartbreaking bit of photojournalism: The Julie Project by Darcy Padilla follows a homeless 18-year-old with a newborn baby all the way from 1993 to the present day in pictures and words. I will go home and hug my daughter very tightly tonight.
This forum post about a 102 year old lens on a modern Canon 5D is cool for several reasons. The first is that the idea and execution are amazing, as are the resulting photos. The second is in the 4th picture down… notice a familiar sign?
So Cisco bought Flip back in March (makers of our awesome little video camera) and recently decided to completely fuck up the bundled editing software. In short, FlipShare 5.0 strongly encourages forces users to use their editing software exclusively and hides any videos you the user have edited—from what I can tell, they’re probably just writing some kind of XML file to indicate where you’ve made edits, and don’t actually save a new file anywhere that I can find, which is unacceptable to me. How do I back up those edited files? They pretty much force users to use their software to upload edited files to a list of popular sharing sites—what happens if I use a different service? Worse, there’s no way to step the software backwards to a previous version once you’ve “upgraded” the original software. Cisco, you lose.
Jen’s recently gotten some fantastic footage of Finn beginning to walk, and wanted to post it to her Vimeo account. After struggling to understand the new FlipShare software, I did some sleuthing to find a better way of encoding video out of Quicktime and found this tutorial called Flip Video: Codecs and you!. I followed the instructions there (using the H264 codec) and exported a beautiful edit to her hard drive, and she uploaded it to Vimeo with no loss in quality. Score!
After about four months of suffering through a faulty email setup, I got tired of manually marking and deleting junk mail every half an hour. So today at lunch I finally nuked my main account and set it up from scratch. The way mail.app handles IMAP accounts is confusing, to say the least, and Apple’s explanation of how it interacts is pretty thin on details. (Most searches, predictably, focus on setting up Gmail for IMAP on mail.app). I’m still having some hiccups here and there but all seems to be better in my email world now.
Finding a decent video encoding scheme for Flickr has been a huge nightmare. I’ve found that the default encoding from our Canon SD900 (AVI format) works flawlessly, while almost every encoding schema for Flip video footage processed through Quicktime Pro looks like garbage. I’ve got a ton of footage that gets pixellated and blocky as soon as it hits Flickr (or, alternately, bonks out with a yellow “This video cannot be processed” message). I’m going to keep working on this and hopefully find a solution I like.
The heat has returned to Baltimore, and with it, our peculiar pattern of hot, muggy sunshine in the morning, cloudy afternoons, short, violent thunderstorms towards the evening commute, and unbearably humid evenings. I may have to put the full soft top back on the Scout in order to drive it to work once a week; nothing sucks more than driving home in the rain.
This next clip is sheer genius. I was confused, at first; I hadn’t realized Sarah Palin’s “Speech” was so disjointed and illogical until I read the actual transcript.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
Improbably, there is a field of bright red poppies next to the beltway offramp to my street.
