bitdepth

Weaving a Web

One thing that I’ve noticed is that I’m increasing my presence online. I don’t know if the quality is increasing or if it is just more stuff, but I think that one of the reasons that I’m more prolific now is that is easier. I love using Blosxom to blog because I can create the entries with any text editor, but I always use BBEdit to write for bitdepth. But the bitdepth entries aren’t as frequent as I wanted them to be, but now with my increased use of Blogger for Screen Arts and now bitdepth digest, I blog more often using Blogger. The other things that I use often are Flickr and, increasingly, 43 Things. One thing that all these sites have in common are their fairly flexible and open APIs, which allows the information and the sites to interact with other applications and sites. What it means practically is that I now am able to blog using Flickr and 43 Things and to have Flickr images automatically show up on my 43things page as well as here on bitdepth.
Very exciting things are also happening with Technorati adding watchlists where you can follow discussions in the blogosphere based on keywords. I keep track of just about all of this stuff using NetNewsWire as if there isn’t an RSS feed, I’m not as interested in it as I don’t want to spend the time looking around to see if anything has changed. While Flickr and 43things are very fun and aren’t technically oriented, Technorati is a geeky data-rich backend that is starting to have some very cool applications built on their API.
So the exciting thing now is that we’re moving away from needing to use one application to view and share and just find and create and share. It’s exciting when you don’t have to code or understand how to code to use things (but if you can, it’s even more exciting now as you have a lot more to play with).

January 8, 2005 43things, bbedit, bitdepth, blogger, blosxom, flickr, netnewswire, screenarts, technorati

What Happened and What’s Next

The online world was very exciting for me in 2004. Blogging kept plugging away and I rediscovered Blogger which Google purchased. The great thing with the evolution of the Web is that finally CSS started to be embraced. With Blogger there was some great Javascript that made blogging even easier and faster. They also removed the ads on the Blogspot hosting, but opened the possibility of revenue from Google ads if you want.
The other cool Google-related discovery for me was Gmail, which has changed the way that I look at email. I try to keep everything organized and I’ve been using email for a long time and I don’t easily switch email programs. While I use Apple’s Mail a lot, I find that I’m using and loving Gmail a lot now and I think that I’m starting to use Gmail more than Apple’s Mail program. The Gmail beta is fascinating as it is viral. You can’t really sign up, you have to be invited by someone who has it. It’s an interesting way to beta test something like a mail service as you want to have people who use it and the alpha geeks who are testing it will tell other alpha geeks about how cool it is.
The biggest chunk of my time online recently has been spent in the completely addictive Flickr. When I started it was just to share a few pictures with family and friends, but when some of the public photos that I posted received comments I started to get more of a sense of the community that was there. I didn’t think that I would like the social component of it, but I started to realize that I shared a lot in common with the people who were looking at my photos. It’s a great way to communicate visually and I notice that the community is more international than many communities that depend on language as the primary means of communication. The response to the photos that I post shape what I now choose as a subject. While I only joined Flickr in August, I posted 1424 pictures last year. My posting (and photography) increased dramatically as the year went on to the point where I posted 700 photos in December. I don’t think that I’ll continue at that rate, but I will probably post over 2000 images in 2005 I gladly paid for a Pro account which gives me a gigabyte of uploads every month (and my 700 photos last month got close to 50% of the capacity). I just realized some of how Flickr works thanks to the antenna blog which points out the Flickr is based on online gaming code. It’s like a game where the object is the share your photos. You have quests with fellow group members and share your triumphs. It’s great to be part of the community.
The tags on Flickr enable lots of connections between the images that you have uploaded and the images that others have classified in the same way. The tagging on Flickr is based on the tagging that takes place on del.icio.us where you create your own tags to classify links. It’s been called a folksonomy and now I store a lot of my bookmarks in my del.icio.us space to keep track of things. The next step for me is to use my del.icio.us bookmarks with some of the other stuff I’m doing on my blog.
Viewing the web and keeping track of what’s happening on sites and especially blogs has been made much easier with NetNewsWire, which continues to evolve and is the other program other than Mail that I constantly run. Now if I site doesn’t have an RSS feed, it isn’t as interesting to me. While there are many options for RSS readers, I love how NetNewsWire works and as MarsEdit (a weblog editor) evolves I think that I’ll use it more and more as well.
The combination of RSS with audio enclosures caused podcasting to burst out onto the world. It’s an exciting development that is really only months old, but is evolving incredibly rapidly with Adam Curry at the forefront with his Daily Source Code podcast setting the pace for what a podcast is, as well as highlighting what is happening in the podcasting world which is a close cousin to the blogging world. It’s changed things so fast that the latest beta of NetNewsWire supports podcasting and now I’m using it to download podcasts. Podcasting will be very big in 2005.
Yesterday I began to explore 43things, which I looked at before, but now it really clicked as I became a member. 43things is like Flickr for to-do lists. You share your list of things to-do and things you have done as well as leave messages and comments about what you want to do and what others have done. With gentle prompting and an understated interface, I realized right away that I’d be spending a lot of time there. It connects you with people through tasks and tags and collaboration seems to be built into the DNA of the site. While I just started yesterday, I’ve already connected with strangers and realized that the whole thing is a way that people who may not blog or want to blog will be blogging without knowing it. I’ll write more about 43things later, but I think it will be another big thing in 2005. Exciting times ahead online as we focus less on the technology and more on the people and community.

January 1, 2005 43things, adamcurry, blogger, del.icio.us, flickr, folksonomy, gmail, google, mail, marsedit, netnewswire, podcasting, tags

One Thousand Photos

I just uploaded a photo to Flickr that brings the size of my archive to one thousand photos. That’s a lot and it confirms my belief that Flickr is a killer app. It’s actually changed the way that I think about photos and I’m taking a lot more. There are many ways to upload and share photos, but what makes Flickr great is the social component. When I started uploading pictures I was thinking that it was a great way to share photos with my family as it just didn’t make any more sense to keep emailing the same photos around all of the time. The other thing is that I didn’t want to upload photos of the kids and family events for the world. Sharing pictures with the family worked great, but it wasn’t until I started getting comments on my public photos and started participating in groups that I really started to get more heavily addicted.
What is wonderful about Flickr is that you can connect with people from around the world and communicate visually. You find people who have a similar visual sensibility to you. Now if someone adds me as a contact I look at their photos to try and figure out why. Usually it only takes a few images to figure out what you share in common, whether it is an interest in things that are rusting, similar framing or topics. I look forward to seeing the images that my contacts have uploaded and I want to share more.
The other thing that this sharing has encouraged me to do is more fully embrace Creative Commons licensing as all of my public photos have an “attribution-NonCommercial” license. I love being part of a community that communicates through images.

December 18, 2004 creativecommons, flickr, photos

Community

I’ve been lucky to be part of many different communities in my life. At the time you don’t necessarily think of them as communities as they just seem to be the cool people that you are hang out with. One of the first communities that I was involved with (and I’m still connected to) was the NB Filmmakers’ Co-operative in Fredericton. I was born and grew up in Fredericton and when I found the coop I felt like I belonged. There wasn’t a lot that I had to explain why I was there and we shared a lot in common. We also made films and that becomes addictive. Filmmaking and community are closely connected.
Technology has seemed to also play a role in the communities that I’ve been involved with. Film is built around cameras and tape recorders and it is filled with specialized terminology like the NPR, the Bolex, the Nagra, and the Steenbeck. I love those things and for members of the filmmaking community they mean something. But filmmaking isn’t (or shouldn’t be) about the equipment. It’s about the stories and the people. That’s what keeps you there.
With my use of email via the universities where I studied I was able to connect with other communities thanks to that technology. As with many new communication media a lot of time and space was taken up with discussions of the technology itself and what it meant. Email was more complex then and numbers played a far bigger part in what you did online. I still have the black notebook where I wrote down the addresses that I used to connect to other systems. But what was amazing and fun and addictive were the connections that I could make with other people. I could be in touch with people from all over the world and we could discuss things and share our interests. Another place where I didn’t have to explain why I thought that this was so amazing.
But as a new technology becomes more widely dispersed we grow accustomed to it and take it for granted. I don’t have to think about using email now, I just use it. That’s how I stay in touch with people and keep track of things. This blog is one extension of that. With bitdepth I try to keep it fairly original and think a bit more and not just post collections of links. I’m part of the blogging community, but I like reading and watching others more than putting a lot of stuff out. So while I’ve been part of this blogging thing for a while (bitdepth has been up for 2 1/2 years now!) and with the new Screen Arts site I’m over 100 posts, which is quite amazing.
One of the things that has prompted this more reflective post is the recent US election and the IRC chats that I’ve participated in with some bloggers that I’ve been reading for a while. Kevin Marks combined the log of one of the chats that David Weinberger set up with QuickTime and an MP3 of the debate and then I felt a bit more connected. Then on election night I was able to chat again and it was still snarky, but not as much fun (most of us in there would tend to the left side of the political spectrum) since things weren’t going the way that we had hoped. During that chat Halley mentioned about posting that day and I checked out her posts and they changed my perspective a bit as a bit more of the personal side started in to my consciousness. She had a health scare which is the big shift, but a smaller thing is that I realized that we both do the same yoga routine. It made me realize again that it wasn’t just technology or topics, but humanity that connected us. More cool people who were human and good and sharing part of themselves.
So we commiserated and the evening got a bit more depressing and many people had colds and everyone started drifting away. But even though I wasn’t in the best mood I was happy that I shared the experience with other people and I felt that I was part of a community and that made me feel pretty good.
Yesterday was a great day at work as well. I get to work with a very talented and committed person every day in teaching a group of very cool people who share our interest in film so I love going in every day. What made yesterday great was that I was able to have two guests in to speak about filmmaking. One of them was one of my oldest friends and the other was one of my newest friends. But both love making films and the day reminded me of why I love this stuff and why I do it. It’s about people and stories.
The other thing that prompted this is my latest obsession, which is Flickr! and how my use of that has meant that I haven’t been doing much in this space. I noticed today that I’ve uploaded 500 pictures since I’ve started, which I didn’t think that I’d do. The reason I’ve been there so much is the sense of community that is there. It’s not sharing the photos, but it’s a way to communicate visually and get another perspective as you get to see how people see the world and the people around them. So it was appropriate that some of the first images that I uploaded to Flickr! were from a workshop that I took at the Film Coop in NB recently. The more recent pictures are from where I’m working now in Halifax. I was wondering if there were many other people taking pictures in Halifax and then one of those strange connections happened as I found through the tags that AKMA, who I occasionally read and who was in the election chats had been in Halifax a few months ago and had taken pictures there. So my communities had connected again and that made me think about how great it is that we can connect and share no matter what is happening in the world. We’re part of a virtual community, but there are real, live humans at the other end of these electronic connections. It’s about people and sharing and that’s why I love making films and why I’m glad that I have this space to share this.
I think that I’ve made up for the lack of recent posts… thanks for sticking with me!

November 5, 2004 community, filmmaking, flickr, fredericton, halifax, irc, nbfilmmakerscoop, screenarts, technology

Flickr

I like to think that I’m an alpha geek. I try as much stuff out as I can and I like to be able to see things that are coming or things that I want to see develop. There were some rumblings about Flickr and I noticed it and looked at the site and the photos there a few times and read about it, but never signed up. Finally I did and I was hooked fairly quickly. Flickr is a way to share photos which isn’t really that revolutionary, but it’s how they do it that is remarkable. There are a bunch of ways to put galleries together to share images, but they can be a bit of a pain. If you want to have more personal photos you can set up rules and passwords, but that’s not a lot of fun. Flickr really clicked for me when I realized that I was emailing the same photos to different people. It would make more sense to have the photos in one place and let them go there. Then it clicked even more when I made the connection between RSS and Flickr. In the same way that I don’t need to go to a different site to see if it has been updated, it’s easier to check the feed. With Flickr you have an imagestream, which consists of the photos that you upload. You can also view streams by how they are tagged or who uploads them. When this is combined with the ability to share certain images with contacts or friends or family or everyone it moves into the killer app territory. It’s in beta now and all of the details aren’t worked out, but I’m hooked. It’s easier to understand once you use it though. The interesting thing is not that you have a limited amount of space, but it is how the space is limited. You have limits on how much you upload each month. So the bias of the system is to post stuff every month (or day or hour if you start to use it a lot). If you have a cell phone with a camera you can send images directly to Flickr. If you have a blog you can blog directly from Flickr. Technologically it’s great, but the social component is what will make it stick… that and the well-documented Flickr API that lets you make other cool new things out of it and of course they have a blog. They also have Creative Commons licensing built-in as well! Hopefully as it develops and the pricing scheme is worked out it will take off. This is going to be very big I think. In some ways I think that Flickr and the RSS and Atom feeds that it generates will also help a lot of people understand why they would want to use feeds. Outside of the more tech-savvy blogging world there are a lot of people who use the Web and don’t use feeds. NetNewsWire has changed the way that I view the Web because of how it lets me use the feeds and I think that Flickr is dramatically changing the way that I see sharing images. You can go to my Flickr page and you’ll only see the photos that you’re allowed to see… if you’re a contact you’ll see more, if you’re not you’ll only see the public photos. It’s simple, functional and addictive!

September 6, 2004 blog, community, creativecommons, flickr, netnewswire, photography, photos, rss

Blogger

I’ve been using Blogger to create a new Screen Arts blog and I really like it. I tried out Blogger when it first started and had a bit of the usual, “that’s too simple for a geek like me” attitude, but it was an important step in the development of the blogosphere. I found In the Beginning: A Video on Weblogs History by Alberto Gonzales that takes us back to 1999 when Pyra was making Blogger and other cool stuff. Google bought Pyra last year and they’ve been revamping and developing Blogger. I was looking for an alternative to Movable Type since the pricing structure changed and I wasn’t sure if I could get all of the pieces in place to continue having the site hosted at work. So I tried out Blogger again and I was very pleasantly surprised. It’s simple and it works well. But the neat thing is how it is evolving. I can audioblog or blog by mail (which I haven’t done yet) and you can also work with Flickr to add photos to the free Blogspot hosting. They also removed the ads from Blogspot and added a toolbar at the top. It’s a good thing to be with Google and I’m hoping that somehow I’ll be able to get a Gmail account soon as well to play with that too. It’s all part of the evolution of a lot of this stuff where it doesn’t really matter where you are or what particular device you are using. Tim O’Reilly talks about it in the IT Conversations interview with Doug Kaye called The Software Paradigm Shift.

August 20, 2004 blogger, flickr, gmail, history, movabletype, pyra, screenarts

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