web 2.0 is cool

So, this is cool. I was playing around with Flickr last night and somehow found my way to this tool (http://netomer.de/flickrtools/inspector), created by Nils K. Windisch and is a part of his flickrtools collection.

After you’ve waded through the many cool ego flattering statistical things that the tool provides, you come to a bunch of search options which automatically searches through other people’s blogs linking to your images using Google.

This led me to:

  1. Fanboys at Australian Nintendo Wii Launch, Moore Park, SydneyNick and Curtis, “a bunch of people who love games and gaming”, who have a blog, You NEWB (http://www.younewb.com), with an article about the success of the Nintendo Wii launch in Australia. I don’t think they were there on the night, but as it turned out, I was, and I took a bunch of photos of the crowd as they waited for the doors to open at midnight. Nick and Curtis have used one of my images for their article.
  2. lego kitchen renovation plansGeorge Wood has a blog, Notes from Sweden, (http://radiowood.com/) which appears to be a commentary by George funnily enough about all things Sweedish. He has a post where he links to a CBS 5 video talking about some new construction technique using a Lego like technology. In it he uses a photo I took of a Lego creation my partner Shi made of the kitchen we’d like to build when we have a large sum of cash lying around looking for a purpose.

Anyways, I’m not complaining, far from it. I’m very happy that my images are being used in this way, and I’m even happier that both of the examples above are honouring the Creative Commons license that’s implied with my images, i.e. non commercial use, don’t mess with the image, and attribute them to me.

The traditional media outlets are pretty pissed about this kind of blogging (publishing) which I guess you could call meta publishing, i.e. taking a bunch of information that someone else has produced, commenting on it, sourcing an image that someone else has taken and posting it as new content, but let’s face it, this is what most traditional media outlets (aka old dirty media) do themselves, i.e. take a Reuters or an AP feed, source some images, slap a slant in the form of some commentary around it and then publish it. That’s news!

Quite frankly, I don’t see a whole lot of difference between the two, except perhaps that most blogging sites don’t require a login before they let you see “their” content. Sure, there’s probably a whole lot more crap being published, but I tend to believe that Google can cut through the signal to noise and find me what I want to see. So, web 2.0 – meta publishing – is cool. I guess this post is meta meta publishing, maybe since I included a trackback with this post Nick, Curtis, and or George will notice this post and make a comment on it – meta meta meta publishing in action…

Shi’s pretty happy that other people around the world may also be imagining the kitchen we’d like to have. Hopefully the more people who think about it with us the more likely it is to happen. :-)