So
Apparently, July 17th has been designated as Non Photography Day; a day when you are suppose to 'celebrate the moment, don't document it'.
Non- photography day is an effort on my part to revive the moment by putting down the camera. It is a day to think about how life exists, in essence and not appearance and to understand the inadequacy of the photograph in describing this essence, to bring awareness of the perils of living through the view finder or the display screen…
Of course, the real irony will be when a tag group appears on Flickr for people documenting the events of non photography day... Update — oh crap, it's already happened...
In 1996, Addi Somekh and Charlie Eckert began traveling to different places in the world to make balloon hats for people and take photos of them. The goal was to show people all over the world laughing and having fun, and to emphasize the fact that all human beings are born with the ability to experience joy. In total, they visited 34 countries and have over 10,000 pictures.
So
I have been asked quite a lot recently about hosting photos on the web. My typical response is that I am happy with my Flickr hosting and the othersites that I have looked at don't seem to do any better that Flickr. Photobucket seems to come up frequently and I have to admit that until about half and hour ago I hadn't tried it out.
So there were a couple of warning signs right out of the gate: They require a lot of personal information up front (with no privacy notice in sight), but the real warning flag was when they try to sell you something or generously offer to provide you personal information to some third party that you aren't interested in in the least. Thankfully, I am well aware of flea-bag practices like this and never sign up with actual personal information when trying out new sites (I do provide proper information if the site pans out).
The interface to the is the site is fairly juvenile and not very well thought out. My first attempt at uploading a photo was rewarded with the following error:
Fatal error: Call to a member function on a non-object in /apache/htdocs/main/uploadPanel.php on line 592
Impressive. The photo in question seemed to have been uploaded anyway. I tried two more photos and they uploaded without further issue. The facilities for tagging and otherwise organizing uploaded photos were either absent or well hidden.
It wasn't until I popped over to the 'recent image' page that the light bulb went on: most if not all of the 'recent uploads' where of women either in: tight t-shirts, in various states of inebriation, displaying multiple piercings and/or goth-ed up. The others were of male idiots sporting the Ferris-Bueler-shower-scene-soap-mohawk with a few tattoos, trying their adolescent best to look hard. A few searches quickly confirmed my suspicion that this was somehow related to the whole myspace swamp hole. The whole point of photobucket is not about showing your photos on the web, but fueling the idiocy that is myspace. And apparently photobucket is desperate enough to foster things like this.
So in summary, by experience with photobucket is avoid it at all cost.
The bad:
obnoxious banner ads
no tools to assist uploading (unless running Windows XP)
poor or absent organization tools
poor overall site design
questionable privacy and information sharing
association with myspace slime pit
The good:
Nothing really, except for the fact they have a 'delete my entire account button', which actually doesn't delete your account, but marks it to be deleted (presumably so someone can go archive for their own private use any salacious photos, etc that you might be wanted to dispose of).
So
Stumbling across the very fun asciimaps made me think about the time before 'the web' when there was just the Internet. It made be chuckle about all of the talk lately defining web 2.0 as being all about making the web read/write. The funny thing is that before the great Internet land rush brought about by the browser and HTML, the Internet was an intensely read/write place: email, usenet, telnet, gopher, ftp (all from the command line, please). It wasn't until the proliferation of brochure-ware, me-too web sites that the 'write' part of the equation started to fade.
To me, it seems like the 'web 2.0' stuff is really just an natural evolution of when web sites discovered the interactive possibilities that a web site could provide via good old CGI-BIN and others. Probably the biggest difference is that the user interface has gotten a bit more sophisticated with DHTML, CSS and Ajax versus the full-page-refresh-to-do-anything mode of initial web sites.
So
It has been a bit quiet here for the last two weeks or so because I have been on vacation. Just got back last night and still a bit jet lagged. Finally got around to uploading some of the pictures to flickr, but still need to go about the task of inserting titles, descriptions and tags.
Things should pick up this weekend (or next week) as I recover from the backlog.
So Pin In The Map is another Google Maps mashup that allows you to click on a spot in Google Maps, add some text to it and then send out the resulting link to whomever might be interested in it. This could for example be used to show someone the location of a favorite beach or restaurant. I suppose this is sort of a more personal version of the wikimapia that I mentioned previously.
Be warned though, every time that I have visited this site with Firefox for OSX it has caused Firefox to hang and/or crash. Not sure what the issue is, but be aware.
This should be a bit sobering for the pundits who think that the Internet is the conduit for reaching the world. I agree with one of the accompanying comments that much of the world not currently accessing the Internet will likely do so in the future via mobile phones. However, you couldn't tell this from current/trendy design and development trends.
So
This is an awesome combination of Google Maps and annotation capabilities of a wiki combined into wikimapia. As well as being great fun to browse, it is even more fun to annotate locations that you recognize from the air.
What a simple, but incredibly useful tool (and idea)!