Wednesday, June 14, 2006

Photo Sharing

The students are shaing their images from the trip with friends and family through photo-sharing services. It appears that their service of choice is Webshots. I really don’t like Webshots because its primarily designed to work off its own desktop software, and I’d prefer to just work with a browser or perhaps at most a plug-in for uploading batches of files. Yet, despite my personal preferences against it, you can most certainly do a lot with it. For myself though I want to be able to work with my imagery remotely at any location without the need for any software download.

But a new version of Yahoo! Photos is online now, and it looks intriguing. I think I’ll open an account and play with it. I was surprised that they came out with such an upgrade and introduced so many features now that they’ve purchased Flickr - the forerunner in the business. But, they have, so it merits a review. My biggest curiosity revolves around what the community will be like. Thats the real selling point (aside from simple interface) for Flickr. I’ll post more regarding this later.

There are also some small players with some interesting new features that have popped up in the last year. See this article in MIT’s Technology Review for more details.

Otherwise, with the exception of Zoomr and a few other small startups, the review I posted in October holds true. I’m appending it below. Be sure to take a look at the Wired article…

Original Post (10/04/05):

I’ve been looking for a photo-sharing service for some time and thought I’d share my experiences and perhaps save others the time in research. There is a good Wired article that covers the most popular sites: flickr, Smugmug, and Buzznet. I have also found several other services to be of value and worthy of exploration. These include Fotki, PBase, 23, and Phlog.

Which service you go with depends really on what your needs are. The best all-around is probably flickr, but I’ve been avoiding it for personal reasons. You also need a Yahooo account to register for the service, and I really don’t need yet another account. However, the flickr service is a good value and the community is both strong and gregarious.

If you want convenient photo printing, Smugmug is for you. They don’t have a free service though, so you need to know what you want before committing. There is a free trial period though.

Others worth mentioning include PBase - especially if you are serious about photography. And, fotki has a great setup for albums if you want to keep your content nicely organized (but it’s community doesn’t seem particularly active). Finally, Phlog also seems interesting - particularly if you want to take a blogging approach to your photo sharing.

So, who’s the winner? For my money it was Buzznet. It has an active community, and in my mind this is the real reason for sharing photos online anyway. Technically, it handles re-sizing images very effectively (as long as you read the FAQ) and you can upload individually or in batches. And, the price is right: $36/year, although if you only upload infrequently you could easily get by with the free account. I like the features I receive for the money though including custom templates, domain name service, password protection of image galleries and the removal of advertisement. You can check out my content and the resulting commentary here. I hope to see you on Buzznet soon!

Monday, June 12, 2006

Weekend Travels

This weekend we were joined by Jess’ parents for our travels through northern NM. It was Jess’ birthday this weekend, so we took her out for dinner and a fine time was had by all - courtesy of her folks. We visited Santa Fe and Taos, hiked along the Rio Grande Gorge, and spent a day in Bandelier. No snakes were spotted this year, much to the releif of the students. Here are some photos of our time in Bandelier, the first among the cliff dwellings, and the second along Long House:

Friday, June 09, 2006

O’Keefe

Georgia O’Keefe is one of the most powerful influences on my own art. There is a fantastic museum dedicated to her and her work in Santa Fe (make sure to check out the web site). I am very excited to be taking my students there this weekend as we travel to northern New Mexico. Being one of the most influential exemplars for my own work, I am particularly glad to have some of my New Media students here to experience her art and outlook on the field. 

Thursday, June 08, 2006

Rainbow

This evening there were some storms and I saw a triple rainbow for the first time in my life. I’d seen a couple of doubles, but never three. The first two were totally complete - more than any I’d ever seen - but the third was a partial. Overall, it was a rather awe-inspiring event. The photo below doesn’t do it justice, but then again, that’s probably for the best. Some things shouldn’t be photographed…

Wednesday, June 07, 2006

Cactus

One of the cacti that Ruth left for me to tend has flowered. Really cool. It opened up only at night and only for that night. The next morning around 8:00AM it closed, and a couple days later the entire thing fell off. I was rather shocked by the whole event.

Tuesday night I was simply walking by and suddenly there was this huge flower that had opened up by my head. I thought it was going to eat me. It was like something out of Little Shop of Horrors. But, I lived to tell about it - so now it’s an adventure. I also took the opportunity to photo-document the experience. It’s hard to tell from the image below, but the flower was quite large - almost the size of my head. Thus, my fear.

Tuesday, June 06, 2006

Web Design

One of the primary projects that my students and I are working on this summer is the new Web site for Crow Canyon. So, while considering numerous web design issues, I found myself looking at some of Jakob Nielsen’s material online. For those of you that may not know, Nielsen is an authority in web design and is correct about 90% of the time - that’s saying something for a field as contentious as web design, where everyone thinks they know something about it. Here’s his list of top design mistakes for 2005.

Now a lot of folks think Nielsen is a web design guru. I’ll admit he’s good, but I still think he’s wrong in a few places. For instance: his insistence on liquid text layout (i.e. letting the browser format text widths on the fly). You can see it on all the pages of the site - change the width of your browser window and the corresponding change in text width should be readily observable. What’s the problems with this? Well, longer lines of text are increasingly difficult to read; and studies have shown that reading comprehension declines with corresponding increase in line length. Why do you think newspapers and magazines use column layouts?

Anyway, I thought it was funny that a web site listing the worst web design mistakes would make, what I consider to be, one of the worth web design mistakes! What do you think?

Addendum: That being said, I do think Nielsen’s material is quite good and usually correct. I’ve recenlty been considering his Weblog Usability content.

Sunday, June 04, 2006

Students

Several students from Washington & Jefferson College have joined me for work on new media development projects and archaeological research. Yes, these four intrepid young women (see below) have actually agreed to work and travel with me for an extended period of time. For our first day, we went to Mesa Verde and hiked the petroglyph trail that begins near Spruce Tree House. Its about four miles. For some, it was their first hiking expereince. For me, it was a lot of laughs!

Saturday, June 03, 2006

Low Rider

I’m in Albuquerque today to pick up the students and as usual, I stopped into Border’s to pick up a few things. Of course, the southwest is the land of low rider autos in the US. I always get a laugh when I come to the bathroom at Border’s though. Without a doubt, they have the lowest urinal in the world. Really. There should be a display. I’m serious - this could be Ripley’s- or Guinness-worthy. At best it’s 3 inches off the floor. Anyway, I took a picture with my camera phone to share the joy. I’m appending it below. Of course some guy walked in while I was taking the picture. Dude thought I was crazy. Ah the price one pays for one’s art…

Friday, June 02, 2006

Student Arrival

My students arrive tomorrow and one thing I’ve tried to express to them is that things move a little slower out here. I was reminded of an experience I had this winter when I got stuck in McElmo Canyon for quite some time waiting for some cattle to cross the road (see below). This wasn’t the only time its happened in the past 6 months though. In fact last week on my way to Durango I was delayed by a group of cowboys herding an entire group along the only mailn road. Like I said - things are just slower around here.