Into the Known

Last week I started trying out a new open source social web style platform, unlike most other social web offering it is designed to be owned (and controlled by you the owner). I haven’t got a far as setting up my own platform on my own website (just yet) but I can see the benefits of the POSSE (Publish [on your] Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere).This is a much better model for any creative type tat is interested in preserving their IP (Intellectual Porperty) rights but still share across the net. Theb place you firt published is owned by you (not by a social media service) and the syndication is under your control
Right at the moment the free WithKnown service, is available if you don’t want to use, or haven’t access to your own web space, so you can create you own site. It offers simple ways to also syndicate your post and status updates to a few selected services (Twitter, Flickr, Facebook & Soundcloud). I’m not a facebook person so I’m just experimenting with twitter & flickr. I’d probably like a similar connection into blogger but the service now is very similar to tumblr and with the same feel as a microblogging platform like twitter. In other words it easy to use and perhaps most suited to putting together a few words and perhaps a picture or two. So for the time being I will use it to make a few notes on my artistic (sketch & painting pursuits) a kind of provenance bank (archive).

My website is imageo.withknown.com

Sharing DSLR Photos on the Net via Low-Fi

You actually don't need a lot of extra hardware, or fancy WiFi Cards to be able to upload your photos from existing DLSRs or compact cameras. If you have a smart phone that uses Mirco SD cards, and perhaps a healthy bandwidth/data upload limit for it. Here is a very simple and inexpensive (providing your on a good data plan), albeit not so high tech, way to do it.

• Make sure you have an SD adaptor that your mirco SD card slots into (reputable brands are generally sold this way)

• Use the micro SD card inside its adaptor in your camera (the camera will treat this as an normal SD card)

• After your have taken the photos, take the SD card & holder from your camera and remove the micro SD card
• Insert The micro SD card in your Phone.

• Upload the photo to the Social Web, Flickr, FaceBook, Google+ etc.

find your photos, find your camera

I’m sure you have heard the stories about stolen camera and phones being traced by photos posted on facebook or twitter. They all have the element of a luck discovery in their stories, something that might be very hard to rely on when its your camera that has gone missing. Now there is a service called stolencamerafinder, which tackles the problem in a little more analytical fashion. They look for the embedded serial number of your camera within the EXIF metadata header of jpeg files. Unfortunately cameraphone generally don’t embed a unique serial number and are thus not supported (but I did notice one phone in their support list is the IPhone4s). Also most version of RAW don’t fully support EXIF style metadata and are therefore not supported either. The website has a few great success stories including Xander’s Canon (shown here)

Its also an example of a good open source project to I hope it is totally legit and wish the project well. You can even help out their data collection with a chrome extension and/or running a flickr scraper.

The important step, if your camera is lost or stolen, is to report it on their site, free membership give you one camera search, as well as using the free photo search. Professionally photographers and companies with a lot of photographic gear might see the benefit in Pro or Business membership.

Just what have you agreed to?

If you use any of these social network services you may be very surprised just what you have agreed that others may have access to or can use from your posts. Now is a good time to review just what you are allowing.
http://mypermissions.org/
originally posted by +mike elgan on google+

Sitemeter problem

This blog suddeny started crashing today, co-incidentally, by the way, just after I sent details of my blog's copy & paste plagiarist as a DCMA notice. However many other bloggers also struck the same problem and it turns out the problem is related to using the free sitemeter counter. On my site I got the error message above followed by a the bare blue on white "Internet Explorer cannot display webpage" error message, but I gather some others have experienced their browser crashing. I have temporarily removed the offending sitemeter code and set up the simpler easy counter version, just to keep tabs (until the site meter issue is fixed). Bizarely I figured out this problem after I recieved my weekly notice from sitemeter summarizing traffic and tried their site and recievd tha same error. So they may be sending out reports unaware of the havoc going on in the blogsphere.

Sorry to any regular readers that may have been distressed by their browser crashing.



LATE NEWS :: Sitemeter is back online (3rd. August)

Slideshows revisted

The old fashion slide shows can be really "sparkled up" these days with a number of photosharing sites offering fancier slideshows, like this one from photobucket, to decorate social networking sites like My Space and Facebook. Ok maybe its a bit over the top for this blog but you get the general idea.

Web Based Lighting Photofix

You don't have to have the latest and greatest photo editing software to get access to some good basic photo fix routines. After cropping, and straightening, improving lighting is probably the most desirable fix. However this is often a multi-step process.



This is a one step automatic automatic lighting correction called DxO lighting is available as a net based fix from the Fd's flickr toys site (which has a lot of other fun photo manipulation toys). Even if you don't have a flickr accont you can use this site, but it is flickr oriented. If you like the results and want to look at the commercial package check out the DxO site.