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  • Dave 10:20 pm on February 29, 2008 Permalink
    Tags:   

    Geotag Icon 

    geotag_128In my recent post about geotagging blog posts, I used a work in progress icon. The final version of that icon is now available from geotagicons.com and I have updated my old copy as a result. That web site contains a lot of background information about why the icon exists and usage examples. You might recognise the photo used on the example page – it’s one of the snowy ones from my Kinder Scout walk in January. It was picked because it has co-ordinates embedded in it’s EXIF data, thanks to using the Gisteq PhotoTrackr, recording my position while I walked and took pictures.

    For my part, at the moment, the icon appears on any blog post I have here that is geo-specific with a link to my blog post map. I did actually go back and tag anything that needed tagging, so the map contains all of the geo-specific posts since 2005. That job wasn’t as hard or painful as I thought it’d be, but I am glad it’s out of the way!

    As for my photos, about 350 of my Flickr photos are geotagged and they can be seen on my Flickr Map. I have over 3000 photos on Flickr at the moment, but going forward, more and more of the new photos will be geotagged – it’s much easier using a GPS tracking device compared to doing it all manually. Hopefully GPS trackers will become standard in cameras in the near future. At the recent PMA show, GE unveiled a compact camera with built in GPS. It’s certainly going to be interesting to see how all this evolves.

     

    • Bruce 10:56 pm on March 1, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      That job wasn’t as hard or painful as I thought it’d be

      I did the same. I was surprised at how effective Geo Mashup was in finding the locations quickly via the built-in Google Map that appears in the post edit page.

      And another public thanks for the use of your photo on geotagicons.com; I’m looking into geotagging more photos myself now that I’ve got the blog posts geographically sorted!

  • Dave 7:43 pm on February 27, 2008 Permalink
    Tags: appraisal,   

    I don’t talk about work much 

    I don't talk about work much [131/365]

    There’s not really much worth adding to that!

     

  • Dave 10:43 pm on February 24, 2008 Permalink
    Tags: class,   

    Class struggle 

    I look up to him because he is upper-class

    I saw this sight in Nottingham today and all I could think of was "I look up to him because he is upper-class"

    I can’t find the original sketch in full, but this video is reminder enough.

     

  • Dave 10:02 pm on February 23, 2008 Permalink
    Tags: ,   

    Geotagging blog posts 

    Geotagged blog posts

    I’d been thinking about geotagging blog posts for some time but there never seemed to be nice easy way of doing it, and everything I could find seemed hard work and there was no easy way to see the benefit of doing it. It was a coincidence today that I was just playing with a WordPress plugin for geotagging posts and displaying them when I was sent an email from Bruce at bioneural.net alerting me to his campaign to get a standard geotagging icon recognised in the same style as the feed icon that is so popular everywhere. His post, as well as highlighting the background to the icon, went in to detail about implementing it in a wordpress blog using the plugin I had been just looking at. I had been about to give it up prior to reading that post, under the impression that it was still early days and it wasn’t worth doing. However, my problems were tiny really, and once I’d tagged a few posts and could see them on a map, and have the link appear in my posts, it all seemed straight forward.

    So, if any of my future posts are geo-specific, you’ll more than likely see a link like this one at the end of it…

    Geotagged at 53.07509122405637, -0.8168667554855347 (View on map)

    Note the icon used. I’d read more about this on bioneural.net: A web standard icon for geotagging

    You can see my blog post map here

    There is scope for all sorts of things as a result of doing this – subscribe to a location feed like you can do with Flickr, list blog posts ‘near here’. It’s fairly early days but there is enough interest in these things these days to keep it growing.

     

  • Dave 10:27 pm on February 22, 2008 Permalink
    Tags: shadow   

    The Photographers Shadow 

    At some point in the past, somebody noticed that sometimes photos were ruined because the shadow of the photographer was visible. Sometimes when I’m taking shots I notice my shadow and reframe to avoid it, other times though I spot my shadow and think I like that and take a photo of it instead.

    MEK 

    The thing is, doing something you’re not supposed to do is good fun. I remember many many years ago I did a writing course at one of the Nottingham colleges, which was nice enough in itself, but one week, the woman who was running the course read a very short story which was supposed to illustrate bad writing. Unfortunately, and much to her dismay, I found it hilarious and much more entertaining that most of the other toot we had to read or listen to. Done deliberately wrong and for comic effect, it really was funny. Done badly unintentionally is far less entertaining. 

    Stanton Moor

    Keep Out 

    You can find more of these types of photos here

     

  • Dave 1:06 am on February 22, 2008 Permalink
    Tags: stripes   

    Stripes 

    Stripes

    Why aren’t there more stripy things in this world?

     

    • brendadada 9:33 pm on February 22, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      Fab!! I love that.

      What plugin are you using for your related posts thingummy? Mine throws up completely unrelated posts, and sticks them in the sidebar, which is a bit rubbish, really.

    • publicenergy 9:49 pm on February 22, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      Cheers!

      The plugin is called http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-tags“ rel=”nofollow”>Simple Tags. It does a load of stuff including the related posts thing. In order for it to work, you have to really have relevent tags on things, but luckily, it comes with a screen for bulk editing the tags on your posts and also retrospectively tagging posts based on keyword searches if need be.

  • Dave 3:05 pm on February 20, 2008 Permalink
    Tags: , ,   

    Microsoft Yahoo Flickr 

    The video below has been around for nearly a year. It has some very impressive technology on show for browsing and viewing images. All of it acquired my Microsoft.

    Currently there are people worrying on Flickr that if Microsoft buy Yahoo, Flickr will be doomed. That doesn’t seem at all likely. Flickr is already owned by one large corporation, changing ownership to another will probably make no difference to the average Flickr user at all.

    What excites me about the possible marriage is that Microsoft have the resources to move things forward. Yeah, it’s nice when small companies do well and manage to keep their independence and if possible I’d use an underdog rather than a big corporate beast. But, being small in the photo sharing world gives you things like Zooomr which has looked like a building site for the last year, or Smugmug that makes you feel like the Omega Man when you wander around in there, not meeting anyone else. For all it’s faults, Flickr is vibrant, there is lots of interaction and it actually works very well.

    I think a lot of the Flickr users who are objecting to Microsoft ownership, just hate Microsoft and probably can’t even remember the reason why they’re supposed to do it. It’s fashionable to hate the big guys. It’s funny that a lot of the so called little guys are really quite big themselves and have no moral highground to look across at Microsoft from (*cough* Apple *cough*).

    So, I hope it happens.

    PS. If Flickr looks like hotmail does in a few years time, I reserve the right to delete this post and pretend I never posted it ;)

     

    • Nick P 4:54 pm on February 20, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      I’d agree with the comments you raise. I was aware of the Group set up against a potential take-over of Flickr by Microsoft through an acquisition of Yahoo! but its difficult to see from the comments and images posted what real issue those people have with that scenario apart from the fact its Microsoft.

      Flickr has stagnated for a while now. There have been a few small additions and developments but pretty much since the Yahoo! take-over there’s been no real features added. There’s been a continual rumour, often confirmed by Yahoo! that it plans to add video upload to Flickr, but thankfully that’s not come to light (yet).

      I would hope that if Flickr did come under the control of Microsoft that some of the technology shown in the video above gets integrated. I’d far rather see Photosynth features in Flickr than the ability to upload videos. There’s already enough YouTube clones out there.

    • publicenergy 6:51 pm on February 20, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      Well, regarding Flickr adding video, I don’t really mind that. Currently there are millions of photos uploaded every day and I see a very small proportion of them. People seem to arrange themselves in to sub-communities and make more of an effort keeping track of the efforts of those people rather than just random Flickr users in general.

      I think if video was added, you’d know which of your contacts will use it sensibly, and in the same way that I ignore hundreds of thousands of photographs every day, I can ignore a lot of the video too. Sometimes though, a contact or a friend could use it to upload something worth sharing.

      Having said that, I’ve lived without it up to now so I’m in no rush for the feature, but I could see it being useful if you want to keep all of your stuff in one place. If the feature is added, I’d like to see viewing preferences, options for separating feeds and either have video restricted to pro users or a new higher-priced user category in order to put off casual use like YouTube.

      SmugMug supports video on their more expensive account types, and I’ve not seen many SmugMug happy slapping videos doing the rounds!

    • Nils Geylen 7:54 pm on February 20, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      Last weekend, in the pub, a friend of mine had one of his friends over who… turned out to work for MS. Right in the lion’s den, wretched Richmond, at that! When I told one of my colleagues on Monday, they were half-expecting me to say I’d at least beaten up the guy or something — being known as somewhat of an Apple fan. Nothing of the kind happened. I even liked the guy.

      This has little to do with Flickr perhaps, but I guess what I want to say is I understand what you’re aiming at. I don’t “hate” MS. I prefer working on another OS and with other software, that’s all. And I suppose Flickr will stay okay. If not, feel free to delete my comment too of course ;)

  • Dave 8:01 pm on February 19, 2008 Permalink
    Tags: , wheel   

    Nottingham Eye 

    Nottingham Eye [123/365]

    I took a few photos of the Nottingham Eye when I visited Nottingham for Light Night. Those first photos were taken at night and I’ve been meaning to get back to Nottingham to take some in the day time. I was there today but it was freezing cold and a bit foggy. Nevertheless, I did take a few photos including this fisheye photo above. Hopefully I’ll be in Nottingham on a clear sunny day before it disappears next month.

    Don't look down

    More photos taken of the eye, or from it

     

  • Dave 7:01 pm on February 19, 2008 Permalink
    Tags: , ,   

    Sherwood to Worksop 

    Burnout 1

    Most of the walks I do are circular, just out of convenience. There isn’t really a good reason not to do linear walks if you can easily join the circle with another mode of transport. I have done this a few times in the Peak District -typically getting a bus or a train out of Edale. Yesterday I walked from Sherwood Forest to Worksop, then got the bus back to complete the loop. Sometimes, walks are circular and in order to make that circle, you may have to include bits that aren’t really that nice. I’ve been on lots of walks where sections just feel like they’re there to join up the good parts! I’m certainly going to think about linear options more.

    The walk from Sherwood to Worksop wasn’t a direct one really. I did meander in Sherwood Forest and Clumber Park on the way. I measured the route I took and it was about 13 miles, but that could be extended significantly. My path through Clumber Park was more or less in one end and out of the other. That place is big enough to add a fairly sizable distance on to a route like this.

    History Repeating

    The shot above was taken in Sherwood Forest near the beginning of my walk – and is far more pleasant than the burnt out car pictured at top. I do like the photos of the car, even if I don’t like the fact that it’s been stolen,torched and dumped in the forest.

    More photos from the walk

    I was travelling light again, and just took the Ricoh GX100 with me. I love that camera much more than I expected to. I thought it’d be a good camera to have, but I didn’t expect to love it so much. It’s just so nice to use. I can’t believe I’ve only had it 10 days or so. It feels so familiar and comfortable. I remembered this Gadget Show video I watched before deciding to buy the camera (after much deliberation and eliminating possible candidates from a list) in which the host appears to love the camera as much as I do. I’ll make a proper post about that after the ‘honeymoon period’ though!

     

  • Dave 6:34 pm on February 19, 2008 Permalink
    Tags: bamfordedge, , ,   

    Bamford Edge 

    Bamford Edge [120/365]

    On Saturday I went for walk in the Peak District with friends. We started at the foot of Stanage Edge, walked along Bamford Edge and then back along the length of Stanage. You can see a map I knocked up using Google Maps (it’s hand drawn so don’t expect deadly accuracy!)

    Considering it’s February, it was another lovely day. A little bit cooler than last weekend, but that just made it nice and comfortable for walking. I’d never been along Bamford Edge before and I really enjoyed the route up there from Stanage Edge and the rest of the walk along that section before getting to Cut Throat Bridge on the A57. I’ll definitely have to go back there in summer I think. It was very hazy on Saturday and it would be nice to take some photos with blue skies and fluffy clouds for a change!

    Full set of photos here

     

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