Slashdot Mirror
The Peculiar World of Web Photo Sharing
theodp writes "Can't get enough pictures of dogs' noses? Circular objects framed within squares? Newsweek reports on photo-sharing sites and picture blogs, where amateur shutterbugs looking to share their passions with the world happily blast their photos out to millions of people. Fotolog CEO Adam Seifer, who posts a picture of every meal he eats on Get In My Belly!,
calls the Fotolog-Flickr-HeyPix-Smugmug phenomenon 'a million reality TV shows, only without the pain and humiliation.'" Update: 03/14 07:09 GMT by T : Reader onethumb points out an important aspect of such sites: "The new breed of photo-sharing services expose their APIs for geeks everywhere to enjoy. Both Flickr and Smugmug have growing APIs with thriving communities around them. Write your own photo-sharing application, sister web service, or software toy today!" (Here's a link to Flicker's API, and one to smugmug's.)
What's so strange about it?
You find something that you love... you share it with the world.
http://portlandground.com/
Not long, I figure, even for the CEO of the company.
a million reality TV shows, only without the pain and humiliation.
It's sad when you have to start explaining reality (and pictures thereof) to people as "kind of like reality TV."
For a lot of city dwellers, yes. Kitchens are expensive real estate, grocers are always packed, and the combination of restaurant competition and higher-than-average salaries makes prepared food relatively affordable.
this isn't up to the quality of story i'm used to from slashdot. oh wait. that ended c.2000
There's a tone of condescension in your question, but when you're cooking for one or two people, it's easier and cheaper to eat out, particularly when you factor in time of preparation. In the cities I've lived in (Oakland Chinatown, Honolulu, Tokyo, & New York), the food can be quite interesting and healthy. Most of the people who cook do it more as a fun activity or hobby than a superior way of eating.
I'm aware that in many areas, restaurants are intended for special occasions rather than everyday eating, or are fast food. So people from different areas may have different predjudices.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
Who knew when he said "in the future everybody will be famous for 15 minutes" we would use the internet to make his prediction come true and in the process discover that everybody is ugly and stupid looking for all but that 15 minutes.
In at least one category, this profligate posting of pictures that snare a huge share of traffic is hardly new. blogs like...ehem, this one "share" pictures as good[bad?] as Penthouse charges for and I hear lots of people like those pictures too. Of course its just a come-on to get you to click through to the paid content but seems like it will be a while before pictures of quilts and puppies take up more bandwidth than publicized private parts
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
You actually rtfa???
*shock and horror*
Flickr uses Flash to display the photos, so you can add notes to them. Notes are litttle squares with text underneath, that render directly on the photo. Makes for great annotating. When the mouse is over the photo you see the squares, when the mouse leaves the picture, they fade away. See this and this.
Also, there is a Linux uploader for Flickr available here.
Free Manning, jail Obama.
Since I got my first digital camera two years ago (which was on my phone) I've taken over 1200 photos (do the math!) for almost the same reason. To me, life is about living (cliched, sorry!). But human memory being what it is, when we forget what we've lived, what proof do we have that we lived it - it would be like we never did these things at all. Even the monotonous day-to-day stuff should be remembered because, as you say, it makes up 95% of our life.
Photographs and cameras can't change that of course, but they can help - just like keeping a diary, even if it's just a personal log of what you did that day. So if something happens - no matter how small - I always try and snap it so I can remember it later. And of course, sharing it with friends is a good plan - especially if half your friends live a world away (I'm a TCK, grew up abroad), and the other half were there anyway and want to download the images and show them to their friends...
But don't trust these (very valuable, IMO) fragements of your life to an anonymous web service! In 20 years, flikr could be bust, absorbed by some other company (and their free service discontinued, your photos deleted). I'd bet money they wont be around to show your great-grand-children. Add to that the time it take to upload each and every one of your photos... I don't see the point, to be honest! I run my own Apache webserver on Fedora, a custom rig that also routes traffic for my network. I've even written a PhP script that generates a gallery-listing of all images in a folder, and uses GD to create thumbnails. Comments can be submitted as well, and as the filesystem is the database, adding a new image is as easy as copying it into a directory (or creating a new directory (album) to hold it in!) Anyway, my point is that I trust online services like Xanga (blog), Geocities (Website), Flikr (photo) about as far as I can throw them. And I know that no matter weather I be running Windows Server, FreeBSD, for Fedora in 50 years time, I'd far rather be responsible for me own treasures than someone I've never even met!
My point is, yes, I completely agree with you, but dont trust some free webservice!
Daniel
Somerset, UK
DJCF.Sytes.Net, DJCF.Sytes.Net/gallery