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Facebook – one year on

It was a year ago today that I signed up to Facebook, so I felt I should commemorate that fact with a post like that one. At the time, I worried about the fact that a huge number of groups across the world were gaining more and more data about me – and that I was freely giving it away. Beacon, ‘stalkers’, a million new users each week, uncloseable accounts, email 2.0, evil universities down with the kids, the never-ending list goes on… Actually, that particular list ends at 233,000,000 – but my point is that Facebook’s had more than its fair share of publicity.

So with all that new information out there, companies are struggling to keep up. Poor marketing agencies across the world are inundated with too much data to cope with, and their servers are smoking with every 150,000 new users every day. My heart goes out to them.

So I’ll make it easier, with a year of Facebook in summary…

  • 127 foolish people have decided or agreed to call me their friend. 59 recognised as people from or at my current company, 9 from university, and 14 fellow college alcoholics.
  • Added 116 photos across 8 albums, 8 of which include me. A further 22 pictures of me have been added by other people.
  • I’ve developed two applications both for my own use on my own profile, one of which remarkably still maintains 58 users, 1 fan, and a total install count of 129. I can only imagine it’s even remotely usable by about 10.
  • Received 88 private messages.
  • Written 64 notes (imported and otherwise… This will make it 65).
  • Joined 18 different groups, including “that punch the slow walkers” one.
  • Updated my status 15 times in the past 3 months.
  • A total count of 27 events, 3 created by me including one that unknowingly spawned into 320 mostly unknown invitees.
  • I’ve played 20 games of scrabble on-line, completed 14 and won 11, with a top score of ‘utopias’ for 65.

So if you’re on Facebook – all that information and a whole more will be out there too (as well as all the specifics). Makes you think, doesn’t it?

Now, where’s that tin hat?

Some Blakepics caption stats

“Nothing motivates people more than celebrating achievements along the way”. I found that on the New Jersey Association of Partners in Education site (NJAPIE for short), so it must be true.

Anyway, I’ve written another of those Gallery2 modules to show some stats on how the 2008 captioning is going. It’s more for my own curiosity and to stop me copying huge reams of SQL into Query Browser. But you never know, you might look at it and say “oh” as well. So, if that sounds like fun you can click Caption Status either here or on the Blakepics left nav.

Nokia N95 as a wireless webcam

There is no end to this phones capabilities, it seems – so this evening I’ve had my trusty Nokia N95 working as a wireless bluetooth webcam and sending real-time videos across MSN.

* You have invited Alison to start viewing webcam. Please wait for a response or Cancel (Alt+Q) the pending invitation.
Alison says (22:21):
you doing something kinky?

I’m not sure where I got this undeserved reputation from, personally. But anyway, if you’d like to try this yourself, it’s compatible with all kinds of Symbian S60 phones, so head over to motvik’s web site and download wwigo. It’s free, and it’s cool – what else could you ask for?

Auto-captioning photos with CAPTCHAner

I quite often have completley unachievable ideas, that have no basis whatsoever in fact or reality. So, it’s no surprise that a conversation with Craig, down the pub on Friday has sparked another of them.

It’s become a bit of a theme this year, and after my last posts on the subject – we got to talking about captioning photos. Many of my photos exist on the basis of seeing something shiny, and then taking a picture. I often have no idea what said shiny thing was – but quite often make the effort usually on Google, or Rough Guides to discover its secrets afterwards.

I encourage any account holders to tag as many photos as they want on Blakepics. But mine is a very small community, and Flickr shadows it with even its tiniest fingernail. So, why should you have to tag your own photos? Aren’t there plenty of other people out there that would do that for you?

And I got thinking about the recaptcha project. They use scans of words to present the user with captchas that will help their digitization of old texts. These “unknowns” are combined with”known” text, and the answers compared against previous users results.

So, why not the same for photos? A known photo could be presented to the user “Dog”, “Cat”, “Llama”, or even a traditional captcha. Combine that with an unknown photo, and invite users to give it a caption. According to recaptcha, there are 60 million captchas being solved every day – it’s about time we put all that to good use.

Or perhaps CAPTCHA might just become another word for blackmail. Sure, you can login to your account – but you have to do something for me first. I just like the way Captchaner, sounds (Captcha, Captioner – see what I did there?). Maybe one day we’ll see this on all of our logins.

Meerkat on a Plinth!

Today was the unveiling of the six options for the 4th plinth in Trafalgar Sq. The winner will be chosen by a committee later in the year, and receive a quarter of a million to turn their miniature visions into reality worthy of the coveted spot.

Now, it would be rude of me to abandon Mr Gormley after loyally supporting his work and the enjoyment he’s given through his previous installations… But, I think I speak for everyone here when I say, Meerkat on a Plinth!

Your pictures … everywhere

Whilst researching Gallery 2 extensions today, I stumbled across the news that PictureSync now supports Gallery2 as an upload medium. I like having all my photos on my own site, so I can do what I like with them without having to pay through the nose to get at the originals, or worrying about migrating them when the next big thing comes along.

That said, I think I often miss out on some of the more social aspects of photography that networks like Flickr, or Facebook provide. So personally, I’m looking forward to the Windows release of this product so I can try it out for myself. Have any of you Mac users out there tried PictureSync? What did you think?

Inline captioning on Gallery2 / Blakepics.com

Approximately 20% of the 17,500 photos on Blakepics have captions of any kind. This can be attributed to a whole number of different things.

  1. I’m very lazy.
  2. I have far too many photos.
  3. I put far too many of them on-line.
  4. Captioning photos on Gallery2 is harder than it should be.

Well, one of my new years resolutions last year was “caption more photos”, and without any specific goals – I can say I succeeded tremendously. So this year I thought I’d quantify it so I can feel ever warmer, fuzzier and smug that I fulfilled an ambition for 2008. So I’m aiming to have captions on a massive 35% of them by years end (that’s a minimum of 2,500 more photos), and to help – I’ve armed Blakepics.com with a whole new module. I think I’m finally starting to get to grips with at least some of the Gallery2 API.

So if you have an account on Blakepics.com, you can help out by using this new method of adding captions to your photos. Whenever you’re viewing an album you own or have permissions for (and you’re signed-in of course), you’ll notice a new box called “Change Title” below each thumbnail. Just type your new title into that and click the icon to the right, or just hit enter. The image title will be updated without any reloading the page, or taking you to new forms. Which is especially cool if you’re just browsing the photos and want to quickly update something.

I’ve found it a huge improvement, even over bulk-edit – but please let me know your thoughts. And if you’re interested in this module for your own Gallery, please get in touch. It might not be ready for distribution, but I’m happy to hear from any willing beta testers.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Merry Christmas everyone!

Whether you’re excited about gifts, food, alcohol, friends, family or Doctor Who – I hope that your Christmas hero of choice; Santa Clause, Jesus, Scrooge or Doctor Who ensures that you all have the Christmas that you’re hoping for! 🙂

The Netherlands Photo Story

For the past week, I’ve been in The Netherlands. It was the first holiday for a very long time where I haven’t actively blogged along the way. So that might all come as a retrospective at some point.

In the meantime, I’ll sum it up extremely briefly as:

  • Coffee shops that actually sell coffee in Amsterdam, are referred to as Café‘s
  • Weed, ‘Shrooms, Prostitutes
  • The most racist of the festive holidays I’ve experienced so far
  • Singstar in Dutch- it’s the taking part that counts
  • Van Gogh, Andy Warhol and most importantly, Heringa/ Van Kalsbeek

These may form the subjects of some posts, at some point… For now, enjoy the usual photo story below. Or check out the full quality version. For Facebook users reading this – yes, you need to click through for the vid 🙂

The rest of the photos, including the ones in the video above are on Blakepics. Credit for some of these photos also goes to Chorna. The music, “Before it’s too late” by The Goo Goo Dolls.