Photografica » internet

flickrSLiDR

djaef — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 05:59:40 +0000

I have been playing with my new iPhone all weekend, and digging around on the net for useful apps and the like. During my travels I came across this very useful little slide show app, not necessarily for the iPhone, but it’s getting to the point where automated galleries for web sites and blogs are the only way to go. I’m sure if I researched this area some more, I’d find a wealth of this sort of app out there. Sure beats building a gallery by yourself.

Twitter

djaef — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 06:41:47 +0000

I’ve finally joined Twitter.

I thought I’d be an eternal hold out, as I’ve never been a fan of Facebook, and figured Twitter was much the same. but after using it for a few days, I’m just beginning to see it’s quite different from Facebook, and has an awful amount of potential, both privately and in the business realm.

I read recently a persuasive blog post that valued Twitter in the 5-10 Billion $ range. That’s pretty staggering. Of course, to be that valuable, business has to be involved pretty heavily, and anytime business gets involved things tend to lose a lot of shall we say quality, and end up being a lot more like tarts on the street corner flirting their wares.

So it will no doubt be with Twitter. Every company under the sun now tweets, and for the life of me I can’t quite see where the interest is going to come from. I follow a few photographers and friends and even interesting celebrities and popstars. But why on earth who I want to follow a corporation? Follow Coca Cola and find out when the next Diet Diet Diet Coke is released. Yawn… I followed Dell to see what it was all about, and in that case it had a purpose in that it was a factory outlet and there were good deals to be had. Ahhhh he thinks.. that’s where corporations will get us all hooked. The instant deal. “Greetings followers, For the next ten minutes get a 1.245% discount on Dell monitors….”

For the time being, I promise not to sell you anything, but I will practice a few tweets and see what it’s all about. Check out my Twitter page and Follow Me for my mind-blowing musings ;0

Oh, and I still don’t get Facebook. I’ve been a member for a few years and I’m sooo not using it. Chase Jarvis might, but he’s just a media whore

Update: Several months later, and I now find Twitter more useful than ever. I now have a hundred or so followers and I’m following around the same number of people myself. It’ll be interesting to see where it goes from here…

Net Neutrality

djaef — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 04:00:32 +0000

Net neutrality is on the agenda. BIG TIME!

ISPs are already making decisions in their daily practices that completely go against the principle of net neutrality. For a couple of years now they have been throttling torrent and other P2P traffic. And I can almost understand their point of view. Internet piracy is rampant, and the amount of traffic from P2P apps must be very large indeed and overloading their networks. But ISPs generally charge people for a fixed amount of data per month, and why should they interfere in how we as use that data? Why do they think they have a right to control our use of the Internet. It’s not really their job is it…

The basis principle of net neutrality is that ‘Internet users should be in control of what content they view and what applications they use on the Internet.’ It’s the one thing that makes the Internet free. We can choose our own content. It’s the only antidote to the corporatisation of the Internet. And it’s a free choice. As it is, Surfer A can hang out at MSN, Facebook and eBay, while surfer B can visit torrent sites, alternative media sites and blogs. If someone wants to expose themselves to corporate sites and mass advertising, well go for it. Personally I’m more interested in what Joe Blog has to say, as opposed to what the corporate world is trying to sell me, but that’s my perogative and freedom.

But now they’re planning on going further. This is war. This is potentially the end of the Internet as we know it. Now, this is a very complex issue, and I’m not an expert on this at all. But I do feel very passionately about freedom of expression and freedom from the “corporate world” as I put it. Now it seems that Virgin Media in the UK has declared net neutrality to be ‘a load of bollocks‘ and is determined to change the way we use the net. Their idea is that content providers will pay them to be on the ‘fast’ internet, otherwise they will be relegated to the ‘bus lane’. Now from the content provider’s perspective, the way I see it, it’s close to blackmail. Either you pay us or we’ll make it difficult for our 150,000 users to access your content. But to the end user, it’s clearly breaking the principle of net neutrality. ISPs have NO PLACE actively interfering in what content the end users access. It is so clearly an abuse of their market position. My estimation of Richard Branson just took a huge nosedive.

But the thing with the net is that we have POWER. It has already been shown that united, the millions of internet users have more power than ANY corporation in the entire world. It’s logical. And the way the internet is now facilitates the communication necessary to harness that power. Blogs, forums, web sites, emails, whatever. Spreading the word is what it’s all about. So get to it. Read up about it. Spread this word.

http://www.savetheinternet.com/

http://www.google.com/help/netneutrality.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_neutrality

http://stopvirgin.movielol.org/

Joomla

djaef — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 06:55:03 +0000

Joomla is a CMS (Content Management System) that I’ve known about for over a year but never really explored. Until the weekend. I downloaded the latest version (1.5) and within an hour or so had installed all the neccesary components for an offline installation and got my first web site up and running. Cool. Configuring the design seems to be the part that’s not straight forward, but I’m sure I’ll get my head around it in time. I love the basic idea, although coming from a guy whose first introduction to web design was hand coding a html document, this is taking things a long way from home. But productivity is king, and this collection of technologies (Joomla, MySQL, Php etc) serves up one amazing little database driven website in a hurry. AND it’s open source!

It’s not for absolute amateurs, but for anyone with a grounding in web design, wanting to take the next step, this is likely to be it. Check it out!

Stumble Upon

djaef — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 12:42:43 +0000

In the last two days I have discovered more cool web sites than I have in the previous six months. If you haven’t already stumbled upon it, stumble upon is a great way to discover new sites. I am a regular net user, and I spend a lot of time trawling the web, but it’s easy to get bogged down in habit and routine. Stumble Upon breaks the habit, and throws you out into the universe to discover sites that fit with your specified interests. User rankings also strengthen the system. Of course you also get sent to some sites that are less than amazing, but with a few hours of stumbling, you’ll have enough interesting sites bookmarked to spend the next month looking at. Truly inspiring stuff.

Photoblog Awards

djaef — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 22:37:31 +0000

Not that I have any chance at all, but if you stumble across this post and have a kind heart, could you consider voting for me at the current Photoblog Awards? You need to register, but as long as you are not a total technophobe, it takes about 1 minute. Recognition of having a good blog is one thing, but more importantly for me at this stage is the encouragement to keep it going. I get lots of visits, but hardly any comments on my blog, which is at times quite discouraging. I could have used Flickr instead I suppose if comments was everything for me, but if you know my opinion of Flickr, you understand why. The idea that people are keeping an eye on my work is something that motivates me. SO any publicity is good isn’t it. It gets more bums on seats and hopefully more comments.

Anyway, if you have time, give me a vote!

Lightbox 2

djaef — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 07:25:16 +0000

I just came across this little script called Lightbox 2. It looks dead simple to use and there are clearly a few possibilities when it comes to implementation if you are a photographer looking for interesting ways to present your work on your site. Check out Brisbane’s Powerhouse website for an interesting example of the script in action (click the picture, obviously). It’s simple, but it looks very good, no?

Look out for it in action on my site soon

The aptly named Flickr

djaef — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 11:29:01 +0000

I sniffed around the edges of Flickr for several years. At first I didn’t really get how it operated, then I didn’t feel I had a need for it, and I found it overly large (and that was several years ago). Maybe it was a small thing like the design as well. There are so many sites, and for some reason Flickr just didn’t appeal to me.

Then a friend recently commented to me that they had put a lot of their pictures up and was getting good feedback. This intrigued me a little, as community and interaction are always two things I chase on the net. Information I look for when I need it – it’s there already in absolutely overwhelming amounts. But a good community of people interested in photography on a deep level is somewhat harder to find.

So I tried it out. By that I mean I posted a bunch of my images to see how the site functioned, and I looked around a lot at the various groups and how people commented on images. My investigations lasted only a half dozen visits or so before I started to get a bad taste in my mouth. I started to notice the preponderance of “Awards” given to photographs. You know – like “Your photo is so freaking cool, you can join our exclusive group for Too Cool photographers”. My overwhelming impression was that it was a great big back patting fest. So I just stopped visiting the site. (On the internet you simply vote with your mouse. My pictures are still there, alone, unvisited and uncommented. I suppose I should go delete them…)

Don’t get me wrong. I like good feedback on my photographs. I am not immune to praise at all. I have a photoblog, and I greatly welcome all and sundry positive comments. But I had no desire to join this back slapping party. It all seemed so inanely superficial, and maybe worse, it seemed to cheapen the photographs themselves.

After reading Richard Tugwell’s blog I think I am realising why. I want a deeper critique of images. I want people to go past the initial 5 second appraisal and look at what the photographer is trying to say, and to look at how well they said it. The overwhelming amount of images on Flickr, and the overwhelming amount of images added each day, doesn’t promote that sort of photographic critique. Instead it promotes “flick’ing” through them, giving them the five second thumbs up or down. It promotes superficial praise and ego stroking. Now I know some people need that a lot. It’s very nice. In fact it’s fabulous to know that other people think you are a really good photographer. But nonetheless it’s not the sort of site I want to spend my time on. I want to learn. I like useful positive critique, from people who have clearly taken the time to absorb, ponder and analyse the meanings hidden in my images. In this bustling world, it’s probably asking too much, but I want them to care, not just summarily dismiss the image as crap, or praise it as a masterpiece (or lump it somewhere in the middle, which is a good tactic I suppose, because that’s where most naturally fall).

There are a lot of fantastic images on Flickr. My argument has nothing to do with the quality of the images. There are also loads of really bad ones. My argument is about the framework a website sets up in which we appreciate photography. In some ways it’s not really Flickr’s fault. They set up a great service, and that’s the way it has developed. Other sites have gone in different directions, like one I recently discovered called onexposure.net, which goes the other way and has moderated content (more on this in a later post). And there are a million other photography forums on the Internet, some of them clearly better than others.

I wonder if what I’m looking for exists at all. Or is it a change in the way people view photography I am really after? I want to explore this idea further, and I will also follow Richard’s lead, who is also discussing closely related topics on his blog. Let’s see where it goes.

Technorati Tags: photo critique, photo criticism, Flickr, photography forums

:: Birth Connection ::

djaef — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 05:36:35 +0000

I have finally finished the initial site for my Doula / Childbirth Educator wife. It’s Birth Connection. I really like the design, and I’m finally getting my head around CSS. Originally I had an image rollover nav bar, but the site kept growing and growing (nothing like a freeloading customer to create more work), and I realised I needed a dhtml nav bar to facilitate future growth. And if you don’t like the colours, blame my wife. It took over a month of painful drafts to get her to make her mind up, and on some screens and resolutions it looks too dark, but I’m not going to change it now. If I was charging for this site, it would already be 50% over budget. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Technorati Tags: doula, childbirth, birth attendant, pregnancy, web design, Sunshine Coast, Birth Connection