Update: D’Arcy informed me that “the flickr link was just crawled by google or technorati - no magic connection.” One can dream I guess

I just got a notification of an incoming link from a Flickr photo on my blog. I have to believe this is a new feature, am I right? Probably part of the overhaul they have been working on lately. I’ve never seen a pingback from a Flickr photo before, so when this photo (shown below) taken by D’Arcy Norman (which has a link to a post of mine in the description) showed up in the incoming links section of my blog, I was pretty excited.  Think about it, we can now cite and reference blogs from within Flickr with links in descriptions to further connect these loosely joined resources online. Now, I wonder if it works in reverse as well—can you see a linkback from this blog in your Flickr account D’Arcy?  That would be the kicker, wouldn’t it?

The image with the link to a post in the description:

The linkback notification on my blog:

And interesting development to say the least, Flickr just became a whole lot more powerful in my mind.

I’ve been geotagging many of my photos on Flickr, but it’s always bugged me that the geolocation metadata was not available in my Aperture library - geotagging only happened after posting photographs to Flickr, and that metadata was essentially lost from my library.

That just changed. Now I’m using the awesome new Aperture geotagging plugin Maperture, adding latitude and longitude data directly within Aperture before uploading to Flickr etc… That means I get to keep my metadata.

Here’s what the Maperture metadata entering screen looks like:

geotagging in Aperture with Maperture

and once posted to Flickr, the geotagging data is still available:

displaying the geotagged data from Flickr after posting

And, thankfully, the coordinates seem to match up pretty closely. I’d tried using Google Earth via the Flickr Export plugin for Aperture to add the geotag data before, and there was a mismatch when viewed on Flickr. Maperture seems to work great so far!

A couple of months back I happened upon the American Museum of the Moving Image’s Moving Image Source, which is an online publication featuring articles about film, television, video games, actors, and more. The posts are written by critics and scholars from around the world, and the wde range of writers who all bring various perspectives to the online journal captures a certain amount of wonderful unpredictability.  You never know what the next article will be about, and I like that a lot.

In fact, It has been a ton of fun reading the articles, and my only complaint is that I wish you didn’t have to login to comment; I just can’t seem to get up the inertia to fill out another sign-up form. That said, I spent an hour or two on the site tonight fling rom article to article, and while I have a bigger post brewing about Annette Insdorf’s article “Seeing Doubles,” I got quickly pulled into a series of interesting articles through simply browsing the last two months worth of articles, which amounts to 44 posts—wow! that’s an impressive amount of good content being solicited by and published through a museum site on a regular basis! Is there another museum that is doing anything half as ambitious in terms of openly publishing scholars and critics?

Well, while I’m at it, below is the tale of the tape from the two hours tonight I spent reading articles about everything from queer cinema to black exploitation cinema to avant garde and the mashup to The Wire and Balzac. Now there’s some range I can dig on.

I really enjoyed Sam Adams retrospective look at Derek Jarman’s career titled “Look Back in Anger.” Particularly the discussion of the complex poetics of the politic in his The Last of England (a film I saw back in the early 90s at a Jarman retrospective at the Nu-Art theater on Santa Monica Blvd in beautiful Los Angeles, a magical theater where I saw many a great film—I actually saw a midnight showing of Spider Baby there—but I’ll return to the Nu-Art in some other post). Adams points out the poetic ambivalence in this masterpiece beautifully with the following quote:

The Last of England, known at one point under the working title Victorian Values, was a blunt attack on Thatcher’s promise to restore the mores of an earlier time. But the movie is not reducible to a one-sided polemic. Jarman’s vision of a bombed-out Britain, a landscape of industrial wreckage and blood-red skies, is founded on an unspoken and only briefly glimpsed ideal of an unsullied past, most poignantly realized in the footage of Jarman’s grandparents, filmed before he was born. In mourning a past Jarman never knew, the movie surpasses even the party of Thatcher in its idealistic vision of a bygone time, even as it rages against the country’s rightward drift. No wonder one of his Jubliee collaborators called Jarman “a radical Tory.”

Also, Ed Halter’s “Recycle It: A look at found-footage cinema, from the silent era to Web 2.0″ is an interesting discussion of the history of re-mixing and re-using found-footage is awesome. The article has some great links to various historical footage and resources, and it even links out to the Duvet Bros. classic re-mix Blue Monday, which Halter describes as follows:

A masterwork of this postpunk moment is the Duvet Brothers’ Blue Monday (1984), which sets images from the Thatcher-era miners’ strike to the tune by New Order, turning the forlorn synth-pop love song into a lament for a people’s broken relationship with its government.

An excellent overview for thinking through the political, social, and avant-garde roots of the mashup.

Additionally, there is an entire series of articles being publishing on the Moving Image Source about The Wire. And given my marathon viewing of all five season in June and July, I indulged in the scholarly press Nelson George’s discussion “Across Racial Lines” is an interesting article that examines the art of writing race in the TV series The Wire, and argues, rightly I think, that it may very well be the single best protracted discussion of race in a mini-series since Roots.

Dana Pollan’s article “Invisible City” compares The Wire to the literary universe of a Balzac novel, a comparison that is both accurate and useful for thinking about the series. I think the discussion of Balzac and The Wire hits the mark, and gets at the de-centered, vibrant universe that characterizes that series. Unlike Pollan’s initial comparison in this article which juxtaposes the final scene of Straw Dogs and the final scene in season 1 of The Wire, a relationship that is completely lost on me–and I am a huge fan of Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs. An example which highlights some of the less impressive tone of the writing in several of these articles. They’re often trying to throw in these relations, allusions, and connections that sometimes work and sometimes fail, but rarely have a kind of animated voice behind them. A site like this is invaluable, but it also illustrates some of the key differences between blogging and critical and scholarly writing, and I can’t say the latter might benefit from some stronger opinions, zealous affectation, and a few more far out comparisons.

There’s also a series of video clips that provide a voice-over analysis of the title sequence for The Wire by Andrew Dignan, Kevin B. Lee, and Matt Zoller Seitz. The first video “Extra Credit, Part 1″ starts out kind of stilted and unimpressive for the analysis of the titles for Season 1, but get increasingly looser and more compelling by the time you hit the second and third season titles analysis. And by the fourth and fifth they’re on top of their game. You can find all of them here, and they are well worth watching. The authors hit the mark on numerous points about the show as told by the titles, and bring some fascinating readings of the various details packed int the credits that are easily overlooked. I love this example of a very close, well argued visual reading of the title sequence, great stuff.

I’m definitely not the most prolific photographer, but it only took me 4 years to publish 5,000 photos to Flickr. Not all are publicly viewable, but they are all available under a simple Creative Commons Attribution license.

Here’s #5,000 - my 2008/366photos from today, of my son Evan being a typical pyromaniac kid at the campground this morning

pyromania - evan doing what boys do: find out what burns and what doesn't.

Sounds cool, but is the 90 second limit real?

Flickr’s official stance on the time limit is this:

Video on Flickr grew out of the idea of “long photos” and as such, we’ve implemented what might seem like an arbitrary limit of playing back the first 90 seconds of a video. 90 seconds?

We’re not trying to limit your artistic freedom, we’re trying something new. Everyone has endured that wedding video, where even the bride will fast-forward to the “good bit.” In fact, even Tara at FlickrHQ hasn’t made it past the first 90 seconds of her own wedding video.

Just try it! It’s fun once you get the hang of it.

If that’s the case, why not put some kind of filter on the size of photographs? The number of photos in a set? The number of photos uploaded by an individual? There are lots of people posting photos to Flickr that could easily fall into the same category of annoying and boring wedding videos. Why treat video differently?

Yup. Only plays the first 90 seconds of an 8:24 video. Stupid.

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While text encoding is proving hellacious for me with WPMu, embedding iframes has never been easier (keep in mind there are risks involved, so think before you drink!). I found a pretty cool plugin for WPMu (there is also one for a single WP install, so don’t get confused), Google Maps Quicktag, that is specifically designed for embedding a Google Maps iframe into WPMu. But, as it happens, it works with just about any iframe making it not so Google Maps centric. For example, the bava is now running this plugin and the ability to embed Flickr photosets is once again a possibility.

I blogged this feature over at UMW Blogs here, but I’ll reproduce that post below to give you a quick how-to featuring my favorite photo set on Flickr (with thanks to Chris Lott for the link).

Did you know you can embed a Flickr Slideshow on your UMW Blog? Below is an example, along with a quick how-to:

It’s a three step process assuming you already have a set on Flickr you want to embed:

1) Copy the full URL of the photo set on Flickr and then paste it into the flickrSLiDR application found here. After that, click on the create SlideShow button and copy the code generated (which will be an iframe).

2) Then go to your UMW Blog and activate the Google Maps plugin which will allow embedding iframes on your blog.

3) Finally, create a new post, and paste the code generated by flickrSLiDR into the Code tab of the text editor (not the Visual tab) and your slideshow should appear magically

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I have been meaning to write about just how easy it was to include the eight Flickr images I used for the In Jim’s Chair post. Tan Tan Noodles’ Flickr Photo Gallery plugin for WordPress (and WPMu) is often associated with the awesome Photo Gallery it can integrate into your WordPress site, see an example of this here.

But another sick feature of this plugin that I rarely use, but now know I should, is the seamless integration it offers for bringing both your own images on Flickr, as well as everyone else’s, easily into your blog posts In order to get the eight images tagged with “jimschair” on the UMW DTLT Flickr site into the post I already mentioned, I simply added the tag “jimschair” and clicked on the everyone’s photo radio button, viola, here are the results and placing them in the post is as easy as a click, which gives you all the size options you could want.

Andy Rush has a nice tutorial that takes you through the features of this plugin in less than three minutes, because he’s a professional.




Now, add to this the slick, Creative Commons friendly plugin PhotoDropper that CogDog blogged about a little while ago, and you have a pretty compelling argument for recommending Flickr and WordPress as small pieces not too loosely joined.

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I just found this series of photos on UMW DTLT’s flickr account, took me a bit longer than I would have liked, but well worth it nonetheless. Looks to me like the folks at DTLT had a good time making fun of my unconventional working habits soon after my departure. Philistines! Well, as punishment for their sins I am returning all too soon! Ride, Reverend, ride!

Can you see a pattern emerging?

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Artwork thanks to the great Tom Woodward (I love that guy!) Image courtesy of media maven Hil Scott.

I know, I know, I know I’m a loser, which makes me all the more thankful for the visual given I really don’t know how to put my return to UMW into words. More than that, the JimQuits twitter stream suggests that there’s always room to have a bit of fun on just about any occasion. Suffice it to say (as I so often do): “You can’t live a wrong life rightly writely.”†

†Quote liberally borrowed from Roland Barthes, and pun outright stolen from Brian Lamb.

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So MSFT is trying to spend $45 BILLION dollars to buy Yahoo. Rumour has it that the borg want Yahoo’s search and advertising stuff, which would be a little odd - I can’t remember the last time I searched using Yahoo, or saw a Yahoo-powered ad. Whatever.

But, Yahoo does own two resources that I care a great deal about. del.icio.us and Flickr. It’s pretty safe to say that neither of those are worth $45 BILLION, so it’s likely that they aren’t the direct targets of the acquisition attempt.

The first reaction of a vocal group of Flickr users is “cheque please. outta here.” They’re saying that they’ll pull up and move if Redmond is able to sign on the dotted line.

Again, whatever.

Yes, I could very easily host my own photographs (using Gallery2, or even just a simple photoblog - I’ve done both) but the real value of Flickr (and also of del.icio.us) isn’t in the software or the service provided. It’s in the community. Taking my ball and going home would be the wrong thing to do. It’s not about who owns the ball, it’s about playing the game. If I dump Flickr or del.icio.us just because some company bought the company that bought the company that built the playing field, it just isn’t a rational reaction. This isn’t a religious crusade, it’s a community.

Now the risk I see is that MSFT might scare all of the cool out of Flickr and del.icio.us. That’s probably the biggest risk - engineers, designers, UI folks, etc… Will they bail because the borg is coming? If they stay, will they still be able to do cool stuff, or will they have to work on Windows Live Photo Publisher™ integration or somesuch nonsense? I’d hope not. Microsoft IS able to let effective business units keep doing their cool stuff. Bungie kept pumping out the Halo, and the MacBU keeps pumping out their version of Office, which consistently kicks the crap out of the Windows versions. I’m hoping that Balmer has the sense to run the Flickr and del.icio.us units at an arm’s length (or at least not to throw any chairs at them) so they can keep going.

My data is all safe - my photos all live happily in Aperture, and I don’t use Flickr as a repository - it’s strictly a sharing service and community for me. What concerns me most is all of the images I’ve got in the 134 posts on my blog that use Flickr for hosting - any switch will cause a LOT of grief in updating all of those.

I’m willing to wait and see. Microsoft would have to do something pretty stupid to make it worth leaving Flickr or del.icio.us.

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