BigShinyThing

Photos from Scott Haefner’s Flickr. Via Gawker.

Flickr is the news — particularly its long, spikey tail. Here, Flickr user johndoe40 records the recent attack on the US embassy in Belgrade. Also note the Belgrade protestors staging a televised ‘fuck you’ by mooning at the mainstream media’s cameras. How long before we dispense with embedded news reporters altogether? Or are we just replacing the mass media’s agenda with that of the individual citizen journalist?

Source (typically): a blog (namely, Jezebel). We filter our news through our interests now; not the other way around.

UPDATE: more citizen journalism from Belgrade — two female looters are currently featured on YouTube.

Many news outlets are currently reporting on the breaking story today that a cruise ship is sinking in Antarctica after hitting an iceberg. Thankfully, this is no modern day Titanic: Susan Hayes, of Gap Adventures, which owns the ship, told the BBC, that 91 passengers and nine crew members have been evacuated to lifeboats and then to another ship.

But what is extraordinary is that either someone onboard the ship, or involved in the rescue, has already managed to upload some photos of the wreck to Flickr. For traditional news outlets this represents somewhat of a problem: users don’t need their platform anymore. We’ve certainly got our RSS feed fastened to Flickr user Keep Left and not the BBC for developments on this story. And yes, we are ambulance chasers - we admit it.

A brief (highly subjective) list of internet milestones:

• 1980s: newsgroups and email & packet-switched internetworking
• 1990s: multi-user virtuality, streaming media, dotcom 1.0
• 2000s: people (finally) embracing social media

Anyway, you get the idea. Fast forward through Web 2.0 to get to 2007, and this — Microsoft’s PhotoSynth.

A bit of perspective: when I studied computational approaches to vision in the 80s, ’state-of-the-art’ meant software that could get a cruise missile somewhere near Red Square, given a decent topographic map. PhotoSynth can build 3D models of Red Square (or anywhere else on the planet) from snapshots on Flickr, aggregate and process tags & other metadata to build a semantic web describing what’s there, then navigate the whole kaboodle in real time on any recentish networked PC. Google Earth: roll over and play dead. At least for the next few weeks, Microsoft owns the coolest tech on the block, bar none: some important part of the future looks like this. The original post and other options for viewing are here: just watch the video all the way through. You can see what the BBC have been doing with this tech over at their How We Built Britain site.

Paranthetically, note the presence of the 90’s poster child of infinite zoom — a Mandelbrot set — at the top-left of the SeaDragon demo image used in the video. Does the demo go anywhere near it? No way. In 2007 we no longer use trippy fractals to show off the bewildering wonderfulness of our tech. Instead, we are taken on a zoom into a car ad to show how it’s possible to embed tech specs in a teeny corner of the image without pop-ups. How times change. Wasn’t there a moment there when we were dreaming of more than a better car ad? Maybe not at Microsoft. Sigh.

[via Tim, who sent me a link to the early Java proof-of-concept last year, and a link to this video yesterday]

We’ve talked before about how much we love Flickr (despite that little falling out a while back). Mainly we love it because we think it knows us — Flickr presents our life in a tag cloud. And so it should — what we photograph says a lot about who we are (shiny shoes!).

Cunning brands out there should be looking into how their brand is defined through Flickr’s folksonomy… here’s Abercrombie & Fitch’s. And here’s how Abercrombie & Fitch describes itself:

The highest quality, casual, All-American lifestyle clothing for aspirational men and women.

We’d argue that Flickr’s suggested description — “try a search for af, model, abercrombiefitch, newyork or gay instead?” — is right on the nail. Where the brand sits within Flickr is the consumer perception regardless of how the brand sees itself. In world defined by folksonomies and not taxonomies what matter is not what we’re told about a brand but how we feel about it.

Why do big companies like to stifle little ones? You’d have thought that in the brave new Web 2.0 world, big brands would have a better way to deal with mergers and acquisitions but apparently not. Example: we are currently witnessing a major user-generated riot as long-term Flickr users are informed by Yahoo! that they will soon have to use a Yahoo! id to access and use the photo-sharing site.

We’re with the rioters.

Yahoo! bought Flickr a while back. Since then it’s grown hugely and doubtless benefited from Yahoo!’s grown-upness and corporate clout. As for us users, the folk who actually populate Flickr with our stuff, Yahoo!’s presence has until now been pretty benign. We’ve also been patted on the back for being ‘old skool’ by Flickr when we sign in — i.e. a user from before the buyout. This makes us feel kind of with it and proud in a very ‘get me i’m an early adopter’ type way. We’re also the biggest marketing tool Flickr has. Only yesterday we were earnestly telling colleages that ‘Flickr changed my life’. And it has.

Here’s an email that one of us sent on receiving the mail saying that I would soon need a Yahoo! id to sign in — the petulant tone is particularly important:

I don’t want a sucky Yahoo! account.

I hate Yahoo!

I like being an old skool user.

Pooooh.

I guess that Flickr/Yahoo! are betting they can afford to lose the old-timers for the sake of more joined-upness and the ability to flog Yahoo! products to the Flickr users who are left. We’re just left feeling that something brilliant has now been tainted and that — much like when Google took over YouTube — the party is somewhat over. And — more worrying for Flickr — I don’t know if I’m going to be envangelising about Flickr for much longer — not if it involves becoming a Yahoo! user. Urgh.

Washington or Toyko, take your pic(k).

How long ago it seems, the dotcom bubble and bust. To our eyes, there are two real differences-which-make-a-difference between the first dotcoms and what’s going on at the moment:

• There’s a touch of the vaudeville magician about the current crop of dotcoms: while distracting their consumers (and the markets) with simplicity and openness, they make their money (and are betting their futures) on plans for media empires to rival anything we’ve seen before.

  While punters are having fun with these new toys — uploading their photos, posting to their blogs, gawping at the bigshinything — those same consumers are themselves building, click by click, from the online terra nulla, new media territories where tomorrow the future of marketing and sales will be decided through products and services sold back to them via the channels they themselves have created. Brilliant!

  As evidence, we offer the following:

  • Google is still viewed as a search engine, but its revenue (and future) depends on its footprint as a media owner: every Google brand extension gives it more media surface on which to plant its ads — and as for targetting, who knows what you want better than Google?
  • The must-have iPod probably only really exists to get iTunes onto people’s desktops, and to thus give Steve Job’s growing media empire an early mover advantage in owning media delivery in the next decade — leveraging both brand loyalty with consumers and his success in getting traditional content owners to actually sign up for online delivery — a major triumph given their conservatism.
  • Skype wants ‘the world to call for free’, but still makes its margin from the extras it offers which allow Skypers to interact with the world of traditional telephony.

  For these magicians, a little prestidigitation to keep the brand simple also makes it easier to expand or change the real business plan without having to worry whether its on-brand or not, and without really letting consumers into the secret that they’ve been charmed into doing all the hard work of building the market for them.

• It’s not just consumers being roped in to create the very markets in which the dotcoms wish to sell. The most savvy of these businesses offer out their services for others to innovate with.

  Got a clever idea for a location-based service? Use Google Maps for the interface, and concentrate on the bit of your business that’s unique. Want to add voice chat to your dating site? You don’t need to spend millions on infrastructure, just build it using Skype. Google, Skype, Flickr and the rest make it easy for other people’s clever ideas to come to market: each business using their services increases their media surface and earns them some incremental revenue. Individual bloggers might add a few new pages for Google ads — a startup using Google Maps might just kick-start a whole new category of media in its own right. Lowering the bar for other clever businesses is a low-risk investment in the 99.9999% of innovation that happens outside the established dotcoms themselves.

  These then are what the volume businesses for the 21st century look like — billion-dollar enterprises with cuddly, fun brands and friend-get-friend appeal, which offer access to their core services ‘for free’ to other innovators in return for new media opportunities in the ecosystems they encourage to flourish around them. And so far, it works: not only are these upstarts making obscene amounts of money, they’ve jump-started a new wave of creative systems and services. Look on their works ye traditional media giants, and despair.

We’re forever banging on about wonderful, world-changing photo-sharing site Flickr. And now people are tinkering with it to create exciting new applications — like this. Go play.

We’ve written before about the power of open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), whereby anyone with a modicum of programming ability can hook into API-enabled online resources (Technorati, Skype, Google Maps, Flickr etc) to build their own tools and toys, but we’re still amazed what people come up with.

Link courtesy of Wired.

The featured lovely is from Flickr user icethesite’s photostream.

Search [engines] will ultimately be as good as having 1,000 human experts who know your tastes scanning billions of documents within a split second. It will model the human brain. - Gary Flake, one of the seven Distinguished Engineers at Microsoft.

This week, Time Magazine writes about the future of search. According to the article, the battle is on for the next generation of search - one that can successfully harvest the projected $22bn worldwide that search-engine advertising is expected to be worth by 2010.

Google remains the market leader in search handling 36.5% of queries. Yahoo! is surprisingly close behind, with 30.5% and MSN has 15.5%, according to comScore Media Metrix. The Big Three, as they are termed, are investing aggressively in search technology - Google alone earmarked $4bn earlier this year for growth. But Time identifies a group of start ups, all of course acquisition targets for the Big Three, that may also hold the key to the future of search.

Some of them, like photo sharing site Flickr, have already been pounced on - it was bought by Yahoo! earlier this year. Yahoo! was responding quickly to the growing phenomena of tagging - a simple device whereby users label websites with descriptive tags, building a folksonomy- a taxonomy of knowledge organised by ordinary people. Flickr is organised with a communal tagging model and Yahoo! have already developed a tagline to market tags across all of its user-created content: “Better search through people.”

Open source stuff like Flickr is already being used to enhance functionality for community sites. This week street art collective Wooster launched Streetsy, essentially a graffiti photo library which is on Flickr and is catalogued using its tags (see BST article ‘Coming up from the streets’), . The commercial world has also become wise to the potential of enhanced search: ABC now invites users to view news locations via Google Earth. The news site knows a competitor when it sees one: Google Earth is currently compiling an overview of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation - it is likely to be the definitive source of images of the catastophe.

Meanwhile, A9.com, Amazon’s search subsidiary has sent trucks around 22 US cities with digital cameras linked to laptops to photograph every street. So far it has 35 million pictures, which will be overlaid on maps. Microsoft is combining the approaches from the air - its Virtual Earth project is flying planes over cities to take pictures. The aim is to have views from all directions so users can circle buildings onscreen. The aim, according to MSN, is to create “a fully immersive virtual-reality experience.”

BST has already covered one of the most touchy feely new search facilities: Blinkx.TV which can find video clips based on dialogue searches. Speech recognition technology is now improving so rapidly that the company can capture the audio tracks of videos and turn them into searchable text - making any recorded spoken word searchable.

The next step for plain old word search is semantic search - looking for meaning, not just text. Oren Etzioni, a University of Washington computer scientist, uses language-analysis programs to power KnowItAll, which scans documents for facts. So far, KnowItAll has extracted 900 million facts - enabling it to answer questions. Nosa Omoigui, a former Microsoft researcher, has founded Bellevue-based Nervana, which analyses language by linking word patterns contextually to answer questions in defined subject areas, such as medical research literature. In short, the net is soon going to be able to read and research for us.

The marketing press also reported this week that Google has moved into offline advertising, buying up print ad space in tech titles such as PC Magazine and Maximum PC. The print ads are labelled as “Ads by Google.” Joshua Stylman, managing partner at search marketing firm Reprise Media, says of the move: “Inevitable is my gut reaction. Search marketing works because of the whole relevancy factor. The model is transcendent, and clearly, the model is scalable. It was a matter of time for it to start to migrate offline.”

Maybe the vision of an utterly converged future - where Amazon, Google and Microsoft become the all powerful ‘Googlezon‘ and swallow all offline media - isn’t that far off.

70 and counting photos on Flickr following Friday’s deluge… related words ‘festival’, ‘mud’ and ‘tor’. My boyfriend and I were sitting smugly in the pub last night showing everybody photos from the scene sent by friends. This is one event that is being mainly documented by people themselves rather than the media.

White Stripes rocked!

More diy photojournalism - the BBC invites readers to send in their own photographs of Live 8.

See the rest here

Full story is here

Link to Flickr