Another very cool project on Flickr: Implementation, a novel by Nick Montfort and Scott Rettberg that you can read as a slideshow. It is a novel told in stickers that have been posted from New Jersey to Norway.
One of the things I love about Flickr is its openness. We are open as a company, participating in discussions with our members on public message boards about our future plans, our (ever dwindling list of) bugs, and just about any other Flickr-related topic people want to talk about. It's really very nice to work on a project where feature requests are public, complaints are heard, and new features are critiqued and appreciated in real time. The conversation is almost as much fun as the coding!
But more even exciting (at least to geeky me) is our openness to other software developers. The Flickr API, in case you don't know, lets programmers build new applications that interface with Flickr. That means that anybody with an itch, a desire to build some photo-related functionaily that Flickr does not provide, can fire up their text editor and code something up, release it to the world, and we all profit!
Here's a short list of some great apps and plugins that people have built with the Flickr API lately:
• A Windows screen saver by Sam Judson turns your computer into a slideshow of Flickr photos when you're not using it. You can configure it to display photos from a particular person, from a particular group, photos with a certain tag, and more.
• Since we last wrote about it, Adriaan Tijsseling added a screen saver to the great Mac OS X app 1001.
• Flickr Gallery is a Word Press plugin by Ramon Darrow that lets you integrate your Flickr photos with your Word Press blog. (Complete with support for notes and sets!)
• Flickr Photosets is a Movable Type plugin by Jim Flanagan that'll help you list your Flickr photo sets on your Moveable Type blog.
And for those of you just looking for some great photography and enough with all the geek talk, Ellen1970's photostream features some great wildlife photography:
Cory Doctorow:
Firefox, the finest, most secure Web browser ever created for average-user applications, went 1.0 today. You can download it below, toss out Internet Explorer, and be relatively assured that you computer won't be compromised due to Microsoft's bad design decisions and lax security maintenance.
Link, Direct link to FTP server [Boing Boing]
Cell phones, adult playgrounds, daily banking, etc. [kottke.org remaindered links]
Firefox has the best design solution I've seen for clearly but unobtrusively showing the user when a site is secure or not [kottke.org remaindered links]
I'm prepping for a two-day workshop on the read/write web for Ed. D. candidates at Seton Hall this weekend and I've found a few pretty interesting education related Weblog sites to add to the list.
If you know of any more worth checking out, let me know. It's cool to see more and more teachers kicking the tires these days. [Weblogg-ed News]
Ok...so this has been one of those linky mornings where something starts me off and I get about 20 clicks down a random path when all of a sudden I land on some pretty cool stuff. Like this concept of "flicktion" where you post pictures to flickr and then write a few fictitious paragraphs to go with it. What a great concept, and I'm sure creative writing teachers will think so too. Students take a picture, write the story, post it, have people comment back about it, add to it... Or, have the teacher post the picture and then have students start a collaborative narrative about it, one paragraph at a time. Or...
And talk about another example of the read/write Web expanding. Perfect for my workshop this weekend. I absolutely love this stuff...have I mentioned that before???
(I found this via Foe Romeo by the way, who along with Josie Fraser have been added to my roll at Bloglines.) [Weblogg-ed News]
It didn't work for Jabba in keeping Han from walking away. (Oh wait, that was carbonite...) [kottke.org remaindered links]
This is just such coolness I don't know what to do with myself. Some ingenious programmer wrote an online Flash program called the Rasterbator where you upload any image and it turns it into "raster art" that prints out on invidual 8.5 x 11 pieces of paper. Then ... [craftster.org blog]
I'm sure there are dozens of cross-stitch software programs out there but I just did a quick search for one that runs on Mac OSX and I found this company called Ursa Software who makes three different programs: X-Stitch Studio, Mac Stitch, and Stitch Simplicity. So amazing! You ... [craftster.org blog]