Google Labeler (beta) pits you against some random other human being on the web to try and match pictures and was licensed from Luis von Ahn who created the very similar ESP Game. You’ll earn points for matching picture keywords. Some of the pictures are difficult to make out what’s there so labeling can be a bit challenging.

This is a curious way to get free labor to help tag a bunch of images. Google describes the program as:

Over a 90-second period, you and your partner will be shown the same set of images and asked to provide as many labels as possible to describe each image you see. When your label matches your partner’s label, you’ll earn some points and move on to the next image until time runs out.

To play, just enter a nickname and click the “Begin” button. As shown in the screenshot above, my first attempt yielded a score of 400 points. Can anything actually be done with these points? Anybody know? Or are they just for keeping score?

Our neighbor stopped by earlier to let us capture this moment of their cactus blooming at night. I knew cactus had a ton of water in them, but blooming at night?

Curious about other pictures of cactus, a Google search revealed the Cactus Blog (subscribe via RSS) with pictures like this one and promises “Daily news about cacti and succulents.” Didn’t see any ads either.

A list of links can look pretty dull, but that sort of summed up how del.icio.us has always looked to me. Information-wise, however, some good content bubbles to the top of the list specifically with the popular list (the most valuable part of the service to me).

Since Yahoo bought Del.icio.us there hasn’t been many changes to the look and feel of the site which I’m sure pleased its fans. As the screenshot above shows, the addition of thumbnails and encasing the number of people in a blue box with white text has some more flair than the older style shown below.

When to redesign/update a site?
This brings to mind the question of when to make design changes to your site? Some feel like it should be done every year, others say to leave it be and others make changes all the time. My feelings are to change when it makes sense, not just because everybody else is doing it or a few people say you should. A significant number of changes (new features) to a site might be a good time to redesign but I think it’s important not to alter things so much that people don’t remember the site or that you chase of regular visitors. People like to return to places that they remember and tend to resist changes. In the case of updating a design, especially if your original design sucked, this can be a positive move overall but in other cases it might be a negative.

In the case of a blog where most of the content can be read and manipulated in RSS readers, I don’t think site design updates are as critical, although I do think it’s important to have a distinct design for readers who choose to read the site in the browser. If the original design is nondescript, then hiring a professional to redesign, buying a template or reworking yourself should probably be in the plans.

What bookmarking tool(s) are you using?
As for how much I’ve used del.icio.us service for bookmarking? Only 108 times according to my del.icio.us page. Ironically, I’ve used Yahoo’s competing service MyWeb almost four times as much: 428. These days, I’m using Google Bookmarks and also trying out Diigo.

Seems like I’m still searching for the ultimate bookmarking tool. One that gives me full control over everything I bookmark, including full export capability, including the ability to make notes on cached pages. In the past, I’ve used at least a half dozen different bookmarking tools including Furl. I haven’t tried the Firefox extension from Google that shares Firefox bookmarks across computers yet but that might be the ultimate way for me to go rather than keep using these online services.

Which bookmarking tool are you primarily using? Why do you prefer it over others?

Check your website DNA, Hmm is shown above. According to the site:

WEB2DNA will take your website, analyze it, crunch it to little bits and spit it out as a graphic representation of a human DNA. The brightness of the lines is determined by the importance of the tags in terms of structure.

Default color is green, choices are: blue, red, green or black. If you want to upload and tag it on Flickr use “web2dna” [see others]. Thanks Download Squad.

It’s difficult to tell from a video if something will be as good as it looks but Live Labs is working on something called Photosynth that looks extremely useful — if it works.

The idea is that it can take a picture snapped and then form in a 3D space on your desktop other nearby, related pictures around that picture. So imagine you take a picture of the Space Needle in Seattle then Photosynth will relate and serve up photos taken by others to show you the surrounding areas in a panoramic-like view. Wow, now that would be a next generation visual search engine.

Yahoo has a trip planning feature which combines maps so you can create and share fun things to do while on vacation. Imagine Photosynth with Virtual Earth as a competing program? Talk about virtual travel agent wet dreams.

Again, all this with the caveat: if it works. If it does, watch out, this will be hot.

One of my favorite apps is Screen Calipers, but I noticed recently when downloading the new trial that the price went up over 30% (now $29.90) and they crippled the trial app further so you couldn’t make vertical pixel measurements. I guess this means there weren’t enough paid registrations? Here’s an alternative to measure pixel space using a Firefox extension for those who would like to have similar functionality for free: measure it.

Once the extension is installed it sits in the lower left of your Firefox status bar and can be invoked by clicking on the graph. Then draw with the sights a box around what you want to measure on screen. A box with the height and width in pixels will appear (shown in green above).

Kate Hudson has won an “undisclosed sum” against a UK Enquirer magazine which falsely represented her as being so skinny that her mother Goldie Hawn had said (as a headline): “Eat Something!”

Of course Hawn claims she never told her daughter any such thing. Keep in mind this is the same magazine, er tabloid, that wrongly reported Britney Spears was getting a divorce and had to apologize for that too.

I find it bizarre that anybody believes what’s printed in tabloids. I thought they were intentionally quasi-fiction, half-truth publications, yes/no? I mean, come on, some of the allegations are so out there that you have to wonder. I believe what I see in the tabloids about as much as pro wrestling.

With that understanding which I put out to readers to correct me on, Hudson’s attorney’s remarks don’t sound right to me either.

[Hudson’s] lawyer, Simon Smith, told Britain’s High Court the story and pictures implied Hudson had “recklessly and foolishly endangered her health by deliberately starving herself.”

Maybe just a little bit of hyperbole there, ya think? Maybe down on their luck attorneys can double as tabloid writers.

Caption contest, should we?
Now take a closer look at a totally different picture in the screenshot above. The headline for that picture from CNN could be from daughter to mother or mother to daughter. Do we dare have a caption contest? Should we risk stoking the fires On Goldie’s Pond?

I remember Goldie Hawn fondly as being pretty hot but the picture above doesn’t catch her best side. That’s the way it goes with that unscrupulous camera eye. Her daughter, however? Schhhwing.

[Please don’t sue, ladies, you know we love you!]

The past week or so there were a couple articles floating around about how to take pictures of fireworks and lazily I didn’t read any of them.

Fortunately I learned tonight that our camera has a special “fireworks” setting. Of the dozen or so pictures we took tonight these two were the best.

Our duke in hazard
Some bummer news yesterday. Our middle son had to come home early from his trip to the lake with friends because they were lighting off fireworks and one of those bees shot up his leg and got caught in his pants giving him second degree burns down his leg (and burned up his pants too). He was not with us at the time of this accident. He’ll be alright, but probably have a nasty scar.

There is a picture (warning: it’s not pretty) of his burned leg for chicks who dig scars (that’s what our youngest son told his brother). Only, it’s a scar in the making. We took him to the doctor, got ointment and a wrap.

Hope nobody got hurt in your family this year and that you were able to catch a few fireworks on film.

Media center and digital photography extraordinaire Thomas Hawk (pen name) is going to work for Flickr competitor Zooomr.

I was a bit surprised by this announcement as I’d always assumed Hawk was happily employed offline and merely doing the blogging and photography thing as a (passionate) hobby. His nom de plume primarily a ruse to throw off the scent of his real job (financial services, I think?), something completely unrelated. Not surprising, however, is what type of job he would be taking online. He joins Scoble, who tipped me off to Hawk’s flightpath, as leaving something established and secure for the great unknown startup.

Let’s keep it real here, neither PodTech.net or Zooomr sound like all that exciting gigs. The first isn’t even a dot com and the second is plagued with facing strong competition in the field and an extra ‘o’ in its name (misspellings and non-dotcoms are a bane for domains and users trying to remember/type them in, search, etc). I’m holding my breath and wishing both Hawk and Scoble well in their new endeavors. Great risks = great potential rewards. These moves will be seen as either brillliant or idiotic over the next 12-36 months. Hopefully neither has burned any bridges with their respective moves. Just. In. Case.

Hawk explains why Zoomr isn’t simply a Flickr clone:

And wile some might label Zooomr a mere flickr clone, Zooomr has nonetheless been busy building a whole host of features that Flickr does not have today. Photo trackbacks (to answer that perpetual question, “why is my photo getting 500 views?”), audio annotation, rich map integration and geotagging. And it’s only getting better from there. Wait until you see what they have in store for the future.

Sounds intriguing. This is what both Scoble and Hawk can do for their respective companies: tell the rest of us why we should care. Scoble is off to a promising start, even though he’s not officially working at PodTech yet (his gig starts next month) with a list of things that make PodTech boring and corporate. Go get ‘em.

How will these two companies products/services make our lives better? More enjoyable, entertaining and save us time either in addition or in exchange for what we’re currently using. If they can do these things making a change from or adding to what has become familiar is less disruptive and more sensible. The early adopter types like me are much easier to attract than mainstream America. However, I’d say we’re more dififcult to impress, please and keep.

Interestingly enough toward the end of his post Hawk labels Zooomr an “additive” to Flickr, not a replacement.

Multiple registration options
In my case, Zooomr is neither since I couldn’t get past the clumsy registration screen (pictured above). Seems like Zooomr is attempting to use some master user/pass gateway sort of like Passport does and unfortunately it works even less as well in its current state than Passport. No matter what I attemped to use it kept telling me “Unable to find openid server for identity url.” Tried various username variations with same results. Either it is broken, I am, or some combination. Before fixing the extra ‘o’ I’d recommend fixing this closed door.

But wait! If you look at the screenshot at the top of this post you’ll see that indeed I was successful in registering. And now begins part two of this post: first look.

There are alternate Zooomr login options available: Level9, LiveJournal™, Google™ or Meetro. This time, I chose Google and had Zooomr send me a Tpass (temporary pass) which it dispatched quickly to my Gmail address. From there I returned to the login screen linked in this paragraph and successfully created my account. For those with Gmail accounts, I’d strongly suggest going this route.

Once the account is created you end up at a screen that looks like the one at the top of this post, the WelcomeMat, and you can begin customizing your profile and uploading pics and creating your “once in a lifetime” permanent URL. Since I didn’t forever want to be in Zooomr as “gmail_tdavid” I chose “tdavid” instead.

What are the first pictures I uploaded? The screenshots in this post, tagged as Zooomr. Recently there was a bit of controversy around Flickr and Not In Public Site Areas (NIPSA) for non-photographic images. I’m curious if Zooomr has a similar anti-user “rule” handcuffing non-photographic images? Will find out.

Zooomr account limits
- Free Zooomr accounts receive unlimited photo storage and 50 MB upload limit. For each person you refer who successfully signs up you get an additional 1 MB. However, it’s not very clear how to actually refer people, maybe Hawk can stop by and explain this one?
- Zooomr is said to allow the following formats: .jpg, .png, .pdf, small .psd’s, and small .tiff’s but I was also able to upload .gif, so perhaps the Help/FAQ page needs updating. It also wrongly says there are only three login options (Google isn’t mentioned).
- comments on each pic are allowed, just like Flickr.
- RSS 2.0 feeds for tags and recent pictures are provided
- a feature called grids which “let you see related tags for a grid.” The example given is the tag ‘California’ would show ‘San Francisco.’ I wonder if ‘Zooomr’ shows ‘Flickr’?
- there is a picture trackback feature but just like the referral it’s kind of unclear how this works (is this automatic? Special trackback required, what?)

How does Zooomr compare to Flickr?
Since Zooomr is still in beta it seems kind of unfair to compare the two at this point, but I will say Hawk and company have significant work to do to make this service more compelling, particularly:

- The multiple-login/registration thing which is currently more confusing than convenient, especially when it defaults to openid (what readers here actually use openid for anything?).
- The help/FAQ page needs, well, help. When a brand new member can find inaccuracies and missing information that’s not good. This is probably a sign of changes being made to the service and not being updated in the help/FAQ page.
- Zooomr’s blog is formatted for PDA, not web. Great if you are on a PDA but as I write this, I’m not. Multiple stylesheets needed. If we’re on the web, don’t jam us inside some tiny width window.

It took Flickr a year or so to get out of beta [see Hmm Flickr review 7/21/2004], so Zoomr has miles to go before they sleep. I was nowhere near as impressed with Zooomr the first time as I was with Flickr, which I gave a B+. If Zooomr is truly intended to be an additive to Flickr then at least I’m not seeing where, why or how this would make much sense in its current incarnation. Hawk says there is a version 2.0 coming up (a version 2.0 before leaving beta?). Perhaps that very important question — why should we care? — and all my other questions above will be answered with this pending upgrade.

Veteran webmasters will know what I’m about to cite as the biggest problem with services like CNET’s AllYouCanUpload, but before getting to that, first the things I do like about the service:

- no registration required. Just visit the page, upload your picture, grab the code and insert on your page.
- no image size limits. Although they do couch the promise carefully with “… at this time.”
- no bandwidth limits. If your post gets a traffic surge from slashdot, digg, etc, the images won’t be broken or blocked.

Now the main reason I won’t use the service: the future. The bigger this service grows, the more bandwidth it sucks up, eventually somebody running the service says: oh man, we have to find some way to pay for this service. Nothing is free.

And then everything changes.

It’s like those alleged All You Can Eat Buffet restaurants. Go eat only the expensive items and do it for awhile and they will politely ask you not to return. There is no such thing as as all you can eat or all you can upload or all you can use or the worst offender of the bunch: “unlimited.”

There are always limits.

It’s like the great article you find and blog about and link to going away in a couple months because the online news want to break links. The success tax is great for free services and very few survive on the web. Get your pictures out now — while you can. Maybe they’ll even provide free export tools. Or maybe they’ll just go out of business.

I know, I know, it’s CNET. Where is CNET going to go, you say? No big company is immune from shutting down or modifying their services in the future. Nobody.

TechCrunch calls this service “disruptive” and I agree. It is disruptive. To its competition now which some at least have a business surrounding the pictures, and to the minions who use these picture services only to have them likely be modified (limited) or shut down in the future.

Solution: host yourself
Bandwidth isn’t hugely expensive for images. You can serve pictures 30k in size or less to thousands of people a day and not even scratch burning 50 GB a month in bandwidth. Hosting companies like 1&1 are selling virtual hosting plans with 1500 GB per month for less than $20 USD per month. So imagine for a moment what you are doing as a webmaster when you put part of your content on somebody else’s webhosting service when you could do it on your own for pennies? There are also ways to limit that the images are only being served to your own domain (htaccess).

There are sensible uses for these third party image hosting services like your personal pages and posting to public forums — why pay for that bandwidth? I get that. They make much less sense being used on any business site, however.

There might also be circumstances where some want to take advantage of these free image hosting services temporarily. Use them to survive the digg/slashdot blast and then return to hosting them yourself, for example. Assuming this didn’t violate their terms of service, we probably wouldn’t bother doing something like this, but I can see where some might.

Guess I like the idea that if my website is up, the images, the content is up too. I don’t like thinking that visitors will come to the site and see text and some broken images because some third party site is rethinking their free hosting deal that everybody on the web is using. A lot of times we host images that can be hotlinked (with permission) from third party sites for this reason. Why slow down the page loading because AllYouCanUpload servers are getting hammered?

Great idea, free hosting for images for the web and we may use it for certain projects and sites here and there, but I’ll pass on using for anything I want to still be here in five or ten years or for day to day reliability. You?