What is this place?
Polytechnic is the online home of Garrett Coakley.
It tends to focus on such geekery as web development, technology, music, film, and photography.
A proud member of Oxfordbloggers.com.
Elsewhere
Other places I can be found on the web.
- Follow me on twitter
- See my photography on flickr
- Current listening on last.fm
- What I’m linking to on del.icio.us
- My tumblr powered scrapbook of miscellanea
Tag Archives: flickr
Dumb solutions
Kellan Elliott-McCrea on his response whenever he’s asked “How does Flickr do XYZ?”. We generally try do the dumbest thing that will work first. And that’s usually as far as we get. There’s an elegance to dumb solutions.
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Interview about the Oxford Flickr Exhibition
Last night the Oxford Flickr Group launched our own exhibition in local gallery The Jam Factory (I'll blog about this later, once I've caught up on sleep and things have settled down a bit).
This morning I was interviewed by Phil Mercer on BBC Radio Oxford about the exhibition. My first ever radio interview.
For your pleasure (and my cringing) here I am in all my stumbling glory (flash embed):
I blame the fact that it was just after 8am and there was a lot of coffee kicking around my system.
At least I remembered not to swear!
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Flickr and neighbourhood
Have you ever wondered what Flickr does with all that geolocation data it gathers from our pictures (apart from pinning them to a map and working out the ratio of kittens to sunsets in a given area)? Well one of the things it does is is generate shapefiles of regional neighbourhoods to better work out where your picture was taken.
Now Tom Taylor has built a tool which allows you to visualise the boundaries of these neighbourhoods and see how Flickr views your part of the world.
Cool stuff.
The Flickr Commons project
Flickr have just announced a fantastic new project called The Commons. The idea behind which is to harness the collective power of the Flickr community by allowing us to tag reference collections of images from institutions around the world.
The Commons kicks off with a pilot scheme involving the U.S. Library of Congress. From their photo catalogue of over a million photos the Library team has chosen around 1,500 photos each from two of their more popular collections, 1930s-40s in Color and News in the 1910s.
As well as being a historical treasure trove for us to pour over, absorb and catalogue, these images are also under a “no known copyright restrictions” license. It doesn't mean they're Public Domain, but it should allow for all sorts of interesting re-use possibilities.
It's very addictive once you get involved and reminds me a lot of Galaxy Zoo in a way. There's an aspect of “…just one more picture…” to it, which is bad for me as you really don't want to know how many hours I've lost to Galaxy Zoo.
For more commentary on the project, pop over to Adactio where Jeremy Keith has posted some thoughtful insight.
Volumes of data