Month: June 2008

I haven’t listened to these podcasts yet but I just got an email telling me about new podcasts out with Magnum photographers Thomas Hoepker and Jonas Bendiksen. The podcasts were done recently by HP at drupa 2008 in Dusseldorf, Germany.

Flickr Faves Compatibility Index – The StatBot – Fun stats. Visualizations. Leaderboards.

Yuvi Sense, who is doing some of the best statistical analysis with APIs on the internet today, has a new post out on something he is calling the Flickr Faves Compatibility Index — it’s awesome for the stats junkie like me.

He got the idea for it from Hutch Carpenter who did a similar project with FriendFeed.

Basically Yuvi’s Flickr Faves Compatibility Index analyzes all of your faves to show you the top 25 people who have faved the same photos as you have. If you’d like to have your faves analyzed be sure to drop Yuvi a line in the comments on his thread post as it looks like he’s willing to do this analysis for others as well.

I’ve also asked Yuvi to look at who the top 100 people are that I’ve faved photos from their stream and who the top 100 people are who have faved my photos. He is going to work on this as well when he’s got some more time.

This is interesting analysis that would be great to see included in Flickr’s default stats section on their site.

By pointing out people on Flickr whose taste is similar to your own, Flickr might better suggest photographers that you’d be interested in following on the site.

I favorite *alot* of photos on Flickr. The screenshot above are the most recent 36 shots I’ve faved on Flickr, but I’ve faved almost 40,000 photos in the 3 and a half years I’ve been active on the site. Mostly I’m getting my faves these days from FriendFeed. You can see all of my favorites on Flickr here.

Earlier this week I decided that I was going to start a new project. I’m calling the project $2 portraits and the project works like this. From this week going forward until the day that I die I am going to offer $2 to anyone who asks me for money in exchange for their portrait. While I’m taking their portrait I’m going to ask their name and try to learn a little bit about them. I plan on doing this for the rest of my life — assuming that I can afford to.

To make things easier I’m putting $2 in reserve money in a special place in my wallet so that even if I don’t have change I will always have the $2 to hand over.

In part I’m undertaking this project because I realize that I’ve been avoiding people asking me for money. My biggest motivation behind this project however is simply that I think human interaction is a good thing. I’m not doing this to exploit homeless people or show how hard and bad life can be. I’m doing this because I want to celebrate other human beings as human beings and I think that this commercial transaction gives us an opportunity to engage and interact on a more human level… and I also think that I can take a pretty decent portrait.

After deciding to do this earlier this week I came across the first person asking me for money earlier today. His name is Christopher and that is his portrait at the top of this post.

Christopher has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for about 10 years. He’s originally from Illinois. He’s 35 years old. Christopher is a father and he has three teenage kids who also live in the Bay Area.

I offered Christopher $2 but he asked me for $2.15. He said that a Deluxe Bacon cheeseburger at Jack in the Box was $4.15 and he already had $2. So I gave him $2.15.

Christopher seemed pleased to have his portrait taken and as soon as we were done took off towards Jack in the Box.

Update: Some people have asked me if it would be ok if they start their own version of this project as well. I think that is great and believe that frequently the best projects become collaborative. With that in mind I’ve created a new $2 Portraits group on Flickr. If you’d to feel free to join the group and post your own $2 portraits there.

Wordle – Flickr Tag Clouds 2.0 on Flickr – Photo Sharing! Rev Dan Catt, who works on the Flickr team, came out with a really cool little hack that allows you to analyze all of your photo tags on Flickr and then paste them into Wordle and generate a tag cloud sort of thing showing your most commonly used tags. Mine is above.

Rev Dan gives instructions on how to get your Flickr tags here.

Very cool.

Slowly getting some of my Vegas shots from my trip last weekend uploaded.

FriendFeed is an amazing new service that is both a content aggregator as well as a social network. At its core you add feeds to the various places you post social media online (your blog, your RSS reader, your Flickr or Zooomr account, your Netflix queue, etc.) and then people can follow all of your media in one place.

The more interesting aspect to FriendFeed though are the likes (endorsements) and comments (conversations) that take place around the social media that you publish — valuable user created metadata. FriendFeed has quickly eclipsed blogs as one of the most active place for the best conversations on the web.

But the real power of FriendFeed is still coming. Steve Rubel blogged today about the potential for FriendFeed to empower search. Steve hits the nail on the head here:

“Social contextual search addresses Google’s Achilles Heel – superfluous content. Right now when users scour the web they can’t easily separate content they trust – i.e. what’s been created by their friends – from everything else. It all gets piled into pages of indiscernible blue links that all compete for attention. However, if you can just search just what your friends think and prioritize it over everything else, you have a very powerful recommendation engine.

As an early Friendfeed enthusiast I find myself increasingly turning to its terrific search engine when I need product and service information. You can give this a try yourself here. However, it works best when you have added a bunch of people whose opinions you trust. Advertisers will soon be tripping over themselves to make sure their ads show up at the precise moment when such searches are executed”

And who better to finally capitalize on social search than a couple of old Pros from Google (i.e. the Founders of FriendFeed).

Yahoo made it’s first run at social search when it bought Flickr unbeknown to most. Most people thought Yahoo bought Flickr as a photo sharing content property. Really Yahoo bought Flickr first and foremost as search. It was the search team not the photos team (which originally passed on Flickr) that bought Flickr. The earliest application for social search can be seen in Flickr’s patent for interestingness. A patent that I personally feel is a patent example of patent abuse. By the way if anyone has an update on the status of this patent application I’d love to get more information on it. Yahoo largely has not capitalized on social search however.

So the question becomes how ought FriendFeed improve itself to enhance search and discovery for relevance. One of the problems at FriendFeed is noise. Noise = content by the most active FriendFeeders (myself included) that dominate the site. For some this is not a problem but for others it is.

Think about discovery and search this way. On the one hand you have a blogger that you kind of like and follow but don’t know personally who publishes 100 bits of media a day and you subscribe because every so often one of those 100 bits is a gem — maybe you put up with 19 twits about Obama to get that one gem about photography for instance. On the other hand you have that girl who you really, really, really like who nobody follows and who puts up 3 bits of media content a day. Now you are vastly more interested in that special girl that you like’s social media than the windbag blogger — especially since one of her three bits every day is a self portrait on Flickr.

Now on FriendFeed today, that blogger is seen all over your stream. Because he/she is popular and has lots of fans and followers his/her content is bumped a lot. That special girl posts and nobody likes or comments and so her media quickly gets buried in the sea of the worldwide talk show (as Scoble calls it).

Because we can’t be on and monitor FriendFeed 24/7 (unless your name is Louis Gray or Robert Scoble) we miss important conversations. Friendfeed has started to address this problem by presenting “the best of” FriendFeed each day, week, month. The problem is that this feed still pulls in the windbag bloggers and not necessarily that very hot and very fine girl that you have that big crush on.

So what’s the solution? Allowing users to rank their contacts. So I might rank the girl that I like (in my case my wife mrsth) as a 100 score out of 100 possible. I might rank my brother who I kind of like as well as a 90. I might rank Robert Scoble who is a popular blogger and also a good personal friend as a 75. And I might rank a blog like Engadget, or Gizmodo, or TechCrunch, that I don’t always need to follow but enjoy reading from time to time as a 10.

Now what FriendFeed could do is offer me the “best of” FriendFeed for *me* personally. Everybody’s best of would be unique, reflecting not only the comments and likes that media gets, but also their subjective ratings. So if my wife posts a photo on Flickr and it gets 2 likes, this would be shown to me ahead of a post on Engadget with 30 comments and 10 likes.

Give people the ability to score their contacts and you better empower both their search and discovery of content based on their trusted social contacts. This could be the ever ellusive king of all search, social search, that people have been talking about for the past 5 years but that has never quite yet arrived.

You can find me on FriendFeed here.

You can follow a conversation on this post on FriendFeed here.