Monthly Archives: October 2004

Flickr possibilities

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By now everyone and their mom has heard of Flickr, that handy photo sharing website that is so awesome.

Well I had this little idea for a cool new feature they could add:

Right now they have a handy ‘tag’ system that works like keywords. This is cool when you want to see all the photos that are of ‘cats,’ but what if I wanted to see pictures of current events? When Brandon started up photoblogs.org, he had the top 100 photoblogs listed there, and that’s cool and all, but it starts to suck when time goes on, and the list is always roughly the same. So I said “Hey, you should put a ‘recent popular sites’ on there.” So he added this nifty little section called Top newcomers and it works like this:

These are the top 10 registered photoblogs that have been added to Photoblogs.org within the last 4 months. Rankings are derived from the favorites lists of our users. In case of a tie, older sites are ranked higher.

Flickr could benifit from something similar to this: limit the time to one week or maybe even just a few days, and then list which tags are the most popular for that time period. The information may already be there if they store a timestamp with when a photo was tagged, but even if they don’t, it might be pretty easy to add in.

The reason I started thinking about this was on my way home from the coffee shop tonight I saw some people staring up at the moon. Now I consider my self a pretty connected person, and take breaks from work all day to read the goings on in the world and a bunch of blogs too, but for some reason I didn’t hear one peep about this lunar eclipse that happened.

Anyway, imagine that you just read something in the paper about a big protest, or about some huge natural disaster, or a lunar eclipse… and you go to Flickr and look at the recent ‘hot tags’ and get to see tons of images all of the things going on in the world right now (or last week as it may be). Or maybe, you completely miss a lunar eclipse because nobody tells you about it, but you still get to see all the pictures people took because you visit the Flickr ‘hot tags’ page every morning.

Howling at the moon

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If you are reading this right now, stop and go outside to look at the moon.

Quoth the random group of people on my roof:

“It looks like a not quite ripe red wine grape.”

“It looks like a ping pong ball in front of a light bulb.”

“It looks like an angry testicle!” (said with a funny voice that must be used when repeating this quote)

OS X + Flash player tip of the day

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Since buying my first Mac about a year ago, the biggest thing I’ve missed is being able to run as many Flash movies as I want in my open browser windows and not have to put up with choppy playback. Anyone who has used a Mac has probably noticed this behavior: open more than one Flash movie at a time (although sometimes it only takes one) and they get very very choppy and slow.

Well, until we get that long awaited update to the Netscape plugin architecture, you can try this: When you see a Flash movie start to slow down or get choppy, try clicking and holding your mouse down somewhere inside the movie. It should play at normal speed as long as you hold down the mouse button.

UPDATE: Of course, the same day I post this, Colin Moock posts a video from a Flash conference in Tokyo with a demo of the next version of the Flash player.

UPDATE (11-30-2005): With the release of Firefox 1.5 they have fixed a bug that has been in Firefox since 2001, so the ‘hold your mouse button down to get good performance’ trick is no longer neccesary.