Roland Tanglao's Weblog

[Disclaimer: I am a friend of Kinzin honcho Michael Fergusson and Kinzin social media marketer Megan Cole]

I love Kinzin's aka "These are my Kids"'s new (well not so new my blog post is late!) "Print Pack" feature. This feature allows you to ship 10 prints for $US 2.50 plus shipping anywhere in the world!

I use it to send 10 photos per month to my family in Belgium and Ontario and also to us. Great idea (which I and probably others suggested to them!)

Digital photos are great but having hard copies is also great. And finally through the Print Pack Feature I have an easy way to do it from flickr (or from your local drive or facebook but I don't store my photos on local drives or facebook).

Feature Request: do the same thing for videos i.e. how about a DVD from my flickr videos shipped once a month for say $5 / month plus shipping?

Feedback on These are my kids:

1. Could we please have it as an independent website? There's no value for me having it as a facebook app (but I can see why it is a facebook app; the community is there, still I'd rather use it using my kinzin login rather than my facebook login)
2. The default privacy settings are to make everything visible in your Facebook feed. I'd prefer the default to be that everything is NOT visible but I concede I am over zealous about the privacy of our child.
3. Adding a photo to my print pack is not intuitive. You can't add all 10 at once, why not? Also I would prefer to have to be able to add photos via a tag e.g. kinzinprintjuly08 to my print pack.

I am fascinated by JavaScript and its rise in Drupal and the web in general and I am looking for a system to do some visual hacking with my 30000 or so public photos on flickr.

So I spent a couple of hours with the Lively Kernel which is JavaScript all the way down instead of turtles! It might not be what I am looking for but it sure is clever.

Here are my notes (I attempted to pick out the nuggets of gold from the mailing list and forum (now closed, bring on the wiki please!)):

Lively Kernel Mailing List Notes

1. http://livelykernel.sunlabs.com/pipermail/general/20080406/000058.html - console.log(<string expression>) print output of some methods to console window
2. http://livelykernel.sunlabs.com/pipermail/general/20080521/000061.html - Roadmap May 21st, 2008
   
3. 0.8.5 beta http://livelykernel.sunlabs.com/0.8.5/index.xhtml http://livelykernel.sunlaLKbs.com/pipermail/general/20080528/000062.html
4. alt xml studio supports lively kernel: http://web.mac.com/altmobile/altmobile_blog/ALT_Mobile_Blog/Entries/2008/3/21_Announcing_XML_Studio_v7.3.html
5. set rgb value has no effect instead this.setFill(new Color(1, 0, 0)); // We use 0..1 instead of 0..255 http://livelykernel.sunlabs.com/pipermail/general/20080324/000054.html
6. how to run LK without using any other software other than apache on localhost: http://livelykernel.sunlabs.com/pipermail/general/20080301/000042.html - "the gestalt I am working toward is that each time you make a change, it becomes a new web page that you or anyone else can share and experiment with ."
7. "SquiggleMorph (also 3 short methods -- it's just a sketch (get it?)) to let you make very basic freehand drawings. " - http://livelykernel.sunlabs.com/pipermail/general/20080208/000034.html
8. needs of community and a history of LK - http://livelykernel.sunlabs.com/pipermail/general/20080201/000024.html
9. first announcement of ALT mobile toolkit for LK i.e. HTML layout and rendering engine http://livelykernel.sunlabs.com/pipermail/general/20080127/000004.html

LK Forum Notes

1. turn LK widgets into Leopard dashboard widgets aka Web Clips - https://research.sun.com/projects/lively/forums/viewtopic.php?t=13
2. zip file to run from local (i think this is obsolete since it's from october 07, use sun zip file instead?) https://research.sun.com/projects/lively/forums/viewtopic.php?t=8

Phillip Jeffrey presented on Facebook and Flickr tagging at the UBC Magic Workshop on taging on June 6, 2007. As always Phillip was engaging and articulate! Phillip is becoming quite the Facebook poster boy as he was recently on CBC Radio as well. Go Phillip go!

 

I've had many requests for the Hugin and Mugin source code (Java midlet to take pictures and upload them to flickr) written by my friend and super developer Simon and tested and evangelized by me  but unfortunately the links to the old code are broken. So download Hugin and Mugin here!

Are you a busy parent and don't have time to correct each of your photos in Lightroom? Then just use Lightroom's cataloguing and culling features and upload to flickr using Mac OS X's built in RAW to JPEG converters.

I do this for kids pics to get them up on the net as soon as possible. Obviously you'd want to crop and develop using the Develop module if you want to print your pictures or have total control over the JPEGS but this works for fast and dirty, get 'em up on the web so your worldwide family can see them !

1. Import the photos into Lightroom
2. Remove blurry and non keepers
3. Add keywords
4. In LIbrary mode, select all the keepers and then Metadata->XMP->Export Metadata to Files
5. Drag the photos into PictureSync and then upload to flickr
6. Done!

For me, ShoZu is still the best way to flickr photos. I can't imagine not using it in spite of the bugs that Ken, Alec and others have observed. When it works, it is fast and easy and requires 0 clicks (or 2 if you don't automagically upload the photos as they are taken).

I have tried LifeBlog (hate the Windows and PC centric world view (it's about the cloud not the PC!) and the fact that you can only upload 6 photos at a time and the many clicks and how it's quite easy to upload the same photo twice since there's no UI cues for which photos have been uploaded) and the Gallery App on the N93 (again only 6 photos at at time and way too many clicks!)

ShoZu worked much better for me on the Nokia N70 (2237 photos uploaded to flickr via ShoZu) and 7610 (814 photos dating back to October 2005) i.e. S60v2 I think! I have had the same issues as Ken and Alec on all my S60v3 phones i.e. N80i (701 photos; which unfortunately seems to have memory issues in general even with the latest firmware), N73 (178 photos) and N93 (152). The N93 with the latest firmware runs ShoZu better I think.

As a former software developer who currently tests software (Drupal), who as well writes software documentation for Drupal, it annoys me that I can't seem to definitively pin down the reason for the instability of ShoZu on S60v3 nor can I reproduce it a will.

Some guesses (I would call them theories but I am unencumbered by S60 developer knowledge!):

1. Symbian memory allocation/deallocation/leaks
2. S60 memory allocation/deallocation/leaks
3. ShoZu memory allocation/deallocation/leaks
4. Clash with the phone's thumbnail creation code (I have noticed that if you go into the gallery, the thumbnails can take many many seconds to appear and when they don't appear ShoZu doesn't work. Coincidence? Maybe!)
5. The auto upload code hogs the CPU?!?

I am trying to test #5 by turning off auto upload. Currently have 98 photos on my N93. We'll see if the instability starts up again after 120 or so photos as seems to be the pattern. Any help or clues would be appreciated

FROM ShoZu. Not ready for prime-time. -- Alec Saunders .LOG:

QUOTE

Ken Camp has a love / hate relationship with Shozu. I have to say that I concur. It's unbelievably promising, and purports to solve a problem that I have — that Nokia's LifeBlog software doesn't target Wordpress. However, it took hours last night to remove it from the phone. Once installed, it takes over the phone entirely. Hopefully they can solve the problems quickly.

END QUOTE

A lot of conferences have free WiFi these days and I have used my N Series phones with WiFi that I received free from Nokia (thanks! In particular the N80i, N91 and N93) to live photoblog over WiFi to ShoZu and then to flickr at these conferences.

So, don't forget to set up your wireless Access point with ShoZu if you have an N series phone with WiFi:

First set up the access point (this assumes that it's an open access point, if not you have to add the password in by hand in the Tools->Settings App->Connections which is cumbersome but doable):

1. App Key -> Connectivity -> Connection Mgr -> Available WLAN - > Scroll down to the free WiFi for the conference -> Options -> Define Access Point
2. Define the Conference WiFi access point as usual

In ShoZu, add the access point:

1. Options->Transfer Status->Options->Advanced->Click on Access Points-> Add the Conference WiFi access point you just added

Finally, follow the excellent How To I quoted below.

I most recently did this at Saskatchewan Interactive and and it worked really well,

FROM How To: Automatic Upload Photos With Your Nseries Phone at the Nokia blog:

QUOTE

I’ll show you how you can take pictures and skip the steps of uploading. Your Nokia Nseries phone will do all the uploading in the background while you do what’s more important: taking pictures. This will be very useful if you are going to conventions or events, but I wrote this because of the upcoming Evening with the S60 that I will be attending. I will be using this “live photoblogging

Thomas Hawk does a review of 2006 predictions and writes:

QUOTE

10. Roland Tanglao: No Flickr of video emerges. There was this little site called YouTube.

UNQUOTE

I guess it depends on what you mean by "flickr of video". For me (and I wasn't clear of course :-) !) it means innovation, the flickr API and that "wabi sabi" that the flickr team and community has that none of the video sharing services have including YouTube.

All YouTube did well was their flash interface to video.

In my opinion, YouTube is the "Yahoo photos of video" not the flickr of video. No disrespect to the team at YouTube intended! What the YouTube did was amazing but it doesn't compare to what flickr did. YMMV, etc!

Ivan, the S60 Lifeblog development manager, pushes back on the Lifeblog backlash (and the first quote below is mine, ha ha!). Ivan: I agree with you, organization, search and context are important and I need that for all the stuff I create on my mobile phone or elsewhere. What we disagree about is whether Lifeblog is "good enough" for this when compared to other systems.

I want the search, context and timeline functionality of Lifeblog. I just don't want it on my PC or Mac (when will there be a Mac version?) which is what Lifeblog does. I want it on a cloud that I can access anywhere and that I can backup and post to via open protocols like Atom and things like the flickr API. Lifeblog doesn't do this. It seems to be a proprietary single device PC centric hub in a multi-device non PC centric mobile world.

For me, for now ShoZu + flickr (especially if it were to add support for mobile phones videos) is more than "good enough" and much better fits my needs (I can browse flickr by time and date uploaded, search, search by tag and most importantly many of my friends use flickr unlike lifeblog and it's partner TypePad). I am sure that another competitor designed to contextualize, and organize people's multimedia (mobile or otherwise) will emerge and I doubt it will look like:
"mobile app called Lifeblog"
+
"PC app called Lifeblog" with proprietary and undocumented interfaces and APIs (e.g. Lifeblog 'sort of' works with non TypePad blogs and it doesn't have a rich API for uploading, backing up and manipulating content from it) ; it'll probably look a lot like the ShoZu + flickr combo

But hey I could be wrong :-) ! Viva la competition and I look forward to running whatever the best system turns out to be on my Nokia Series 60 phones (like the N93 which sounds fantastic for early adopter cameraphone fanatics like me).

FROM Ivan Kuznetsov: Lifeblog is not a blogging application!:

QUOTE

When Lifeblog 2.0 has been launched most of the moblie-related web sites and blogs spread the news and a few discussions sparkled on various forums. Unfortunately focus of the most of the posts was on moblogging with Lifeblog rather than on the main functionality of the application.

Here are a few quotes to illustrate it:

"I have stopped using Lifeblog and will now upload my pictures using Shozu?"

"ive never seen the point of blogs, i odnt think anyone wants to read my life story and im not sure i want to tell everyone"

"please can somebody tell me for what is this good for?
lifeblog: you upload pics and everybody can see it?
why should I do that?"

"I dont use the PC software at all, seems useless."

While as Lifeblog definitely has blogging capabilities, it doesn't make it a solely blogging application. Blogging is just a part of Lifeblog functionality, and I dare to say not the most important one, even if the name suggests otherwise.

Having said that, I should mention that moblogging is still important for Nokia. In new Nokia Nseries multimedia computers - N72, N73, and N93, that were launched two weeks ago in Berlin, you will find yet another Nokia solution for moblogging (in addition to Lifeblog) that enables posting images to Flickr right from Camera and Gallery applications.

So what is Lifeblog good for besides moblogging? Three things mainly:

END QUOTE

Instead of regurgitating material from big companies like Yahoo who are doing "Web 2.0 by acquisition", why not profile Canadian Web 2.0 startups like eqo, sxip and Dabble DB (at this rate the Globe and Mail will write about them in late 2007!) where the true innovation is happening? And also why do none of these Globe and Mail magazines ever talk about open source? Without open source there would be no flickr, in fact there would be almost no Web 2.0 companies. Finally, it's not right to preach at organizations that they "better wrap their heads around Web 2.0 or they will find themselves stuck in a 1999 frame of mind" when the same author advocated an 1999 style SEO strategy in the Globe's TQ just a couple of weeks of ago. The "authority" of the Globe and Mail is seriously undermined by flawed articles like this one.

FROM Backbone Magazine business technology news consumer technologies e-marketing news online.:

QUOTE

In short, Web 2.0 may be a coined phrase, but it is also a way of using online tools in a creative and collaborative manner. Software and hardware developers, researchers and scientists, businesses -- especially those with an online customer base -- not-for-profit groups, and even political organizations had better wrap their heads around Web 2.0, or they will find themselves stuck in a 1999 frame of mind.

END QUOTE