Simon Hammond Blog

The Big Picture was officially launched a couple of days ago. I got a sneak preview at a Flickr meet some time earlier but I wanted to hold off until it was ready before I turned in some critical (and therefore useful) feedback.

So, what is it? Well, it’s ‘a project to create the biggest photo album in the West Midlands’. The benefits I immediately read: getting people sharing their ‘local place’ photos online and tagging (and geotagging) them up nicely. It’s based on Flickr, which does all this well, so this should be a cinch. In fact the goal could be restated as to get people from the West Midlands using Flickr (and using it properly). Anyway, let’s give the site a spin.

The site itself is very clean with a flash iPhone-ish preview. You can add photos without a Flickr account but it may take 24 hours to appear. However, if you are really going to make this work you need a Flickr account. Fortunately, I have one. Let’s rock.

First bump: I have to authorize the Big Picture service access to my private photos. It’s only because I know the guys behind this project are sound that I’m not bailing out right now. I expect a lot of people will. Adding a new photo is pretty straightforward since I have already tagged my photos like a good flickrite.

Cool - using Google Maps to set the location! This is the first technical enhancement to the existing Flickr interface since the Google Map is superior to the Yahoo Map that you are normally forced to use. An improvement would be to allow satellite view to help place the photo precisely and perhaps a location search too.  I add a photo.

No immediate payback but an (optional) questionaire.  First question, what have I done today? A decent logging system might tell you that but I have dim  visions of research marketing bods typing reams of feedback forms into an excel spreadsheet to produce pie-charts for presentations. Next, how was it for you? Not too painful since I was already primed but no real payback. I put average. How did I find out? Actually, someone told me and pictures of that are on already on Flickr. Defocussing somewhat, I’m asked what kind of cultural events I’ve been to in the last 12 months. It’s been an OK year and I tick 3 boxes. Where do you live? This is personal. I presume its optional and I pass. As I work through age, ethnicity and disability status I’m feeling myself shrinking to a data point for someone else’s ends.

About half an hour later I try to find my picture. There’s a red pin which is probably my photo but when I click on it the speech bubble contains only empty space. Every other pin I try comes up the same. Zero payback thus far and I’m still edgy about those permissions. I deauthorize them and move on.

In summary.  I like the motivation of promoting online sharing and tagging of location-specific photos.  I admire the technical wrapping of Flickr to make it more digestible for non-geeks (you’d be surprised how many people still don’t get tags).  There are still a few issues that are holding this super-mashup back.

The first and most important one is limited payback for my participation.  There’s the chance to Be Part Of Something, i.e. record attempt and a possible huge photo montage.  The promise is of extra exposure for my pictures but its not obvious this will be any better than just posting to a relevant Flickr group.  With some great promotion this will hopefully change.  Audiences Central is handling the admin for the project although social media might be a new game for them. They seem more geared toward herding rather than peer interaction.  The interface also needs a spot more polish.  The Google Maps locater is a good move but still has a few issues as noted above.

The site reminded me of Panoramio and I revisited that.  At this point I have to say it still tops The Big Picture by a significant margin.  Perhaps the mission or scope is different.

Tags: web by si
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I’ve clearly got too much time on my hands: the front page has had yet another sweep.

I’m fighting a geeky inclination to pile on the info and paste in every widget I can lay my hands on. I’d like to say that this is just about being open but too much me-and-mine and it starts to reek of egotism. Such stuff is rampant on Facebook but I’m hoping to make this site less introspective.

But then what’s the point of having myname.com? First and foremost, the site is a point of contact and a placeholder. On top of that, I’m not sure.

Do visitors visit my site for a snapshot of everything related to me a la Facebook? Or should it merely a dry listing or the web services I use? This hardly seems necessary when I use the same username for almost everything. Of course, it’s easy to merge this all together with something like Yahoo Pipes but who wants every damn thing? Stalkers?

Much better to let people discover and connect where they hang out. I would say it’s not so much about privacy as context. I can bear the thought that someone might see I’ve just listened to some cheesy 80s tracks but it doesn’t need to be on my front page.

I’ve put recent links, clippings and reads on the front page as well in mind of the kind of conversations which go:

Have the heard anything about the next generation iPod with touch screen?

I heard the next generation will have fingerprint recognition that locks the device to a single user.

That’s insane, impossible and immoral. Where did you read such implausible crap?

Check my delicious stream, username sixball

Your WHAT?

Go to my webpage.

Tags: self-referential by si
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Thursday night saw me at the first ever Birmingham Bloggers meet, organised by Nick Booth via a Facebook event.  I bussed in late and also missed the group on first scan (tucked away as it was in back of the Kitchen Garden Cafe) but once in the value of a face-to-face became very clear.  The discussion was hugely impassioned and informed.  Nick (of Podnosh), Jon (of Birmingham: It’s Not Shit) and many others made me wish I’d got there much earlier and made me reluctant to call it a night.  Can’t wait for the next one.

For me personally, it’s the proximity of a blogger rather than their place which is really interesting because there is an opportunity for real-life socialising and networking around something I am interested in, i.e. social media.  Dave  and Charlotte seem to feel the same.

There was another idea that, since most of us there were active bloggers and almost all were from Brum, we could promote Brum via our blogs.  This was spurred on by a recent article in the Guardian which gave a rundown of cities in the UK which are promoted by blogging communities — omitting Brum entirely.  Stef recorded a reaction in his write-up to the perception that Birmingham doesn’t have a decent blogging scene.

My own excuse for not writing about Birmingham because I’m not particularly well informed about any more that a tiny part of it, i.e. my immediate environment.  I don’t anticipate many of people who are interested in such a contribution stumbling upon it by Google-chance and it would probably be a bizarre tangent for the readers who are mostly from outside Brum.  The blogs I read from Birmingham bloggers also don’t tend to be about Birmingham.

A blog needs to have a consistent theme or at least some kind of character that defines what sort of posts are going to appear on it.  Readers return in the hope of seeing more of the same, earning the blog a following and authority over time.  Excellent blogs such as Created in Birmingham which specialises in the creative industries and Up Yer Brum which automatically aggregates (and rates!) tagged/submitted Brum-related posts concerning Brum might be the way to go rather than a nebulous cloud of (possibly) Brummie blogs.

Tags: unfiled by si
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Another tenuous analogy dreamed up during insomnia and served up during holiday dead time…

There’s a funny little phenomenon in biological evolution that makes it possible for very cool things to happen. And most people have never heard of it. I’ll introduce it using mitochondria.

Mitochondria are the power packs of your cells turning oxygen into energy. Without them, getting out of bed in the morning would be impossible. They are rather self-contained and even have their own DNA (which you only get from your mother’s side). The mitochondria enjoy the comfort and reproductive advantages of the cell while the cell gets a boost that would put Red Bull to shame. It’s a cosy arrangement but it raises the question of how it evolved, since of course it DID evolve. Current thinking suggests that rather than the mitochondria popping into existence inside the cell via mutation or crossover it actually had a previous existence outside the cell and was swallowed up at some point. It’s one example of the major transitions in evolution.

Evolution by sticking simpler things together rather than messing up complex ones.

I just installed the Firefox plugin that integrates my favourite ToDo list app with my favourite webmail app, Remember The Milk and Gmail respectively. When I say ‘integrates ‘ I mean seamlessly. If Google themselves had just added this feature they would have renewed my respect but the fact that it comes from two guys and a monkey demands awe. The juxtoposition of the ToDo list with the inbox is blastingly obvious with hindsight being as that is a major source of tasks and now I can’t see myself doing without. Clearly Google needs to extend this gift to all users (regardless of browser) but how?

Flickr shows an alternative to a straight acquisition. It has always been deficient of any photo-editing tools such as the excellent Picnik. This was until Flickr did the smart thing and integrated them. Picnik now gets a bunch of exposure to be converted into premium accounts and Flickr gets slick editing functionality without much extra work. This is a fascinating approach to building complex applications that is distinct from parasitic ‘mashups’. Two standalone applications which complement each other are brought together to major effect.

You might argue that what RTM manages by hacking and Picnik gets from partnership is freely available on the Facebook platform. For example, the Scrabulous Facebook app — sucky though it is — is actually more usable than the mother site in my experience and so I was forced to induce my Scrabble-fiend mum onto Facebook in order get a game. The only contribution of Facebook in this case is that it forced Scrabulous to streamline its interface. It doesn’t add any actual functionality in itself. It’s an environment rather than an organism, albeit an adaptive one. I’ll avoid a huge tangent by pointing you at The Triple Helix by Richard Lewontin here…

Tags: social software, techie, web by si
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