October 4, 2005
Send Mobile Content to Flickr
Stephen Rogers just announced a beta trial for a new Flickr app for camera phones on the Flickr API mailing list. From the email:
We’re developing ShoZu, a new mobile app for Flickr users to take the hassle out of getting photos from your cameraphone onto to your Flickr account. It’s beta stuff at present, and we’d like some people to test it out for us.
If you’re interested, follow this www.shozu.com to find out if your phone is supported and register for the beta trial.
From the website:
ShoZu is a mobile application for Flickr users. Reasons to use ShoZu include
- Uploading photos to Flickr is easier, more robust, and cheaper, than e-mail
- Data transfer does not interrupt your normal use of the phone
- You can add descriptions and tags from the phone at any time (before or after upload).
ShoZu currently supports Symbian OS handsets*, but we’re also working on other platforms, including Java.
It sounds pretty cool. If only I had a camera phone.
October 3, 2005
Flickr Tag Fight
You may have already seen this little app. It’s not exactly brand new, but it’s fun. The Flickr Tag Fight lets you compare the results of two searches and see samples of the photos to see which one will win. Here are two fights that I just tried out:
Pirates vs. Ninjas (Pirates win!)
That’s all for today, most likely. Off to celebrate my fiance’s birthday.
October 2, 2005
Flickr Blog Slacking?
The official Flickr Blog seems to have been updated in a somewhat less than daily fashion lately. The normal poster, Heather Champ, hasn’t updated the blog since 9/20/05. Come on guys, I need my fix! Maybe Heather is on vacation, or maybe they’re working on something cool that is taking up everyone’s time. Who can say? I just want the Flickr Blog to update! (Can I be any more whiny?)
October 1, 2005
How Flickr can (and does) help
One of the really cool things about Flickr is that it’s not just a big corporation devoted to selling you a service. The entity that is “Flickr” includes the community of users. Because of this, there are amazing ways that Flickr can help in a tragedy like we saw in the Gulf Area in the last month. Here are two ways that I have been involved in. If you know of any other stories, please post them as comments. I’d love to hear them.
 A few days after Katrina hit New Orleans, Flickr user “words fail” started a Katrina Relief Auction group. The idea was that people would offer prints of their photos and others could bid on them. The winners would send all donations directly to the Red Cross and forward their receipt onto the admins of the group. So far, around twenty thousand dollars have been pledged and over fourteen thousand dollars have been confirmed as donations. The response was amazing and more than anyone had expected. The second round of bidding is over now and I don’t know if there will be a third. Doesn’t mean you can’t donate to the Red Cross though. 
 A while back, I started a project called phpFlickr. It’s simply a PHP class that acts as a wrapper to the Flickr API. One day, I got an email from someone who explained that he was setting up a website for a charity in NOLA. He was using Drupal and wanted to use Flickr for photo management. The only problem was that he didn’t know much about PHP. I gladly offered my help and a friend of mine helped me port a WordPress plugin that I was working on over to Drupal so that he could display his photo galleries. The charity is called Feed the Relief and would appreciate any donations, help, or attention that you could give them.
September 30, 2005
Why I started this blog
Ever since May, I’ve been using the photo community site, Flickr. The flexibility and power of the site was immediately apparent. It really opened me up to the world of folksonomies. I got a “Pro� account almost immediately and have never looked back. When I upload pictures, I upload my full sized 6 megapixel photos from my Canon Digital Rebel. My photos, aside from existing in the Flickr community also feed my personal photo galleries.
Anyway, enough about me. The Flickr API makes it possible to develop just about any kind of app you want to create. These applications can be web-based, command-line, or even run on mobile devices. Even without these options, Flickr is an awesome site based more around sharing photos with a community than getting you to buy prints of photos (in fact, they haven’t started offering that yet, though I hear it’s upcoming).
This blog is going to be a place where I will collect all sorts of information and happenings about the site that we all love. If you don’t love it yet, go try it out, chances are it’ll grow on you. If you have any news or tips you want to share, post them as a comment and I’ll put up a post about it.
Have a nice day!
