New flickr Slideshows
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I’m a big fan of flickr and I was pleased to see they have updated their slideshows. Embed features and full screen and they seem much faster too, so good job!
Here’s a slideshow of a recent wedding I shot – a great couple and lovely venue (for those of you who don’t know, as well as Marketing Consultancy, I am also a photographer!).
Misc Friday
Good morning all!
Happy Friday and hope you all have a great weekend planned 
A few things have caught my eye so far today so, lets have a look!
Recommended iPhone 3G case
I had the iSkin Revo case for my first iPhone and their new version for the iPhone 3G goes on sale in the US today – should be available from Apple stores soon I guess. I liked it because it really did offer some good protection and the screen protector works well if you are chucking it in your bag.
Blow Up flickr
If you like browsing flickr, then check out this site – pop in your username or someone else’s and bingo! Full screen pics!
12secondsTV
Check it out here – twitter for video basically – you have 12 seconds to record a video comment, or anything! Currently in private alpha at the moment…
twittercounter
All you twitterers out there may have seen some cranky follow figures a couple of days ago – seems fine now. You can follow me on twitter here. twittercounter looks cool too!
Google Knol
Now this is interesting – Google always said they were not in the creating information / data game, just making it more searchable. Now they have released a Wikipedia competitor – Google Knol.
The key principle behind Knol is authorship. Every knol will have an author (or group of authors) who put their name behind their content. It’s their knol, their voice, their opinion. We expect that there will be multiple knols on the same subject, and we think that is good.
Readwriteweb has a great post showing some screenshots and talking about the features – for example, Knol authors can actually run adsense on their pages too. It will be interesting to see how the Knol pages rank in Google search…..
flickr Slideshow -slick!
Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.
Many thanks to Richard for putting me onto this great service with flickr photos! You can do your photos here too.
Piclens – you need to check this out
It’s not often that I say ‘wow’ out loud, but I did yesterday when my friend Anand told me about Piclens and went to check it out.
I had heard about it last year and had taken a look, forgotten about it and that was that. The good news is that they have been working hard on making it better. Much better. How about getting a full screen 3D display of photos like this below?
Put simply, you can get a PicLens plugin / browser add on for a number of the most popular browsers as shown here:
(I’ve installed the FireFox one which was a doddle). Once you have done that and restarted your browser, you then see a PicLens logo appear top right in the browser, and if it is illuminated blue, it is a site that supports PicLens. Here you go:
When you see this, you can click on the logo and PicLens launches giving an amazing 3D scrolling media experience! There are many sites that now support it, so have a look! (flickr pictures look incredible when you activate PicLens – easily the best way to see your photostream!).
There’s one more great feature ……..
Wordpress Plugin! – You should see a small PicLens prompt under this post, so if you click on this, you should launch PicLens Lite and see the photos within the post in a slick slideshow. Your readers will need to have Adobe Flash Player 9 or the PicLens browser add on.
So, what are you waiting for, click below and check it out!
flickr tag cloud + flickr for web presence
I am very impressed with this – very clever indeed! If you use flickr regularly, it’s fun to see what you’re most popular tags are. Have a look here to see how to do it. (Thanks to Rev Dan for this, and Thomas Hawk for leading me to it!).
If you are not using flickr, you should be! It is a great site with some even better communities. It’s fun to search for places you know, and you can even use their map to search for photos in specific areas, perhaps a place you fancy going on holiday.
If you are a business and want to make yourself more open, a flickr account may help. It is another way, someone, a potential customer perhaps, can find you online. With the appropriate tagging, it makes you instantly findable. You could:
- Put pictures of staff up (as long as they aren’t shy!)
- Put pictures of your products up
- Upload pictures of a social event (makes your business feel more friendly and human)… (make sure everyone is behaving, I would not recommend uploading anything compromising!)
- Perhaps even put up a few photos of something you are thinking about doing, changing a logo, a new brochure, and get some feedback
Whatever you choose to do, flickr.com is a great way to see the world, meet like minded people and also get a huge amount of information via the community discussions. You can see my photos here!
flickr video
Yep, I am well behind posting about this, but thought I needed to mention it as it is a big step for them, not only in their infrastructure but also for their user base. There have been protests already about videos diluting the brand value of flickr, i.e. photos only, but I’m not too sure now. The big reason for them to do it is that video is growing massively on the web, and video recorders are getting better and better and HD is now available to the masses. flickr have a couple of simple rules: under 90 seconds and not more than 150mb per video. They are specifically not wanting people to upload huge videos, they want the videos to compliment the photos.
I’ve just bought the Aiptek HD recorder from Amazon (you seriously need one of these – I’ve set up a little banner for you to click on the right hand side of the blog which will give me a kick back from Amazon) 
and the quality is amazing. Check out a client video podcast here, and also my Gumball video here.
Here’s my first flickr video for reference!
