philly

Renewed My Flickr

You really can't beat the deal that Flickr is. They have a free membership option which allows your most recent 200 photos to show up through 20MB of uploads a month. For a $24.95 yearly pro account, you get 2GB of uploads per month, unlimited total storage and unlimited photosets to organize your photos by event/category. That's about $2 a month for a great community photo sharing site. I love it. I renewed my pro account last night.

NYT.com Redesign

Still working out a few bugs I presume as some things don't work, but the site looks quite bloggy. A note from the paper here about the redesign a year in the works.

Our goal when we set out to redesign The Times Web site more than a year ago was to make experiencing The New York Times online simpler and more useful. We hope you conclude that we have done that on the new pages appearing for the first time this month.

We have expanded the page to take advantage of the larger monitors now used by the vast majority of our readers. We've improved the navigation throughout the site so that no matter what page you land on, you can easily dig deeper into other sections or use our multimedia.

We also wanted to give our readers a greater voice and sprinkle a little more serendipity around the site by providing prominent links to a list of most e-mailed and blogged articles, most searched for information and popular movies. A new tab at the top of the page takes you directly to all our most popular features.

I was quite intrigued by the "Most Blogged" category and I clicked over. They list all the articles, but not the blogs that link to them. What a crock of shit.

NYT.com has been the gold standard in webdesign, but times have changed quickly as they've patched things here and there, but now the Old Grey Lady has changed her clothes with the times.

I hope this editor's note ends up at the top of the "Most Blogged" list. Too bad you won't be able to see what people think of the note though. But maybe NYT.com doesn't care what they think, just that it's being linked to. Links mean traffic and traffic will drive their online ad sales. That's their ultimate concern, money.

Let Google Find You Romance!

Need a hand getting a date? Let Google Romance help you efficiently find your soulmate! Thank you Google!

Find your next date in 0.03 seconds.

Schmaps

I was contacted by Schmap!! a couple days ago about usage of some of my photos of Philadelphia. Schmap!! is a company that makes these downloadable travel/city guides that are searchable and printable complete with photos of locations. I downloaded the NYC guide and fooled around for a bit. Pretty cool.

The photos are displayed in the top right. If there is more than one shot, it continues through a looping slideshow. And if you click on the photo[s] you are taken to the flickr page where that photo resides - pretty cool. The flickr api has been getting some pretty cool uses, just like Google's. But actually, this could just simply be some hard coding of links.

No money for this, but I just think it's pretty cool. They asked for nineteen of my shots of Rittenhouse Square, 76ers games, Love Park, restaurants and other locations around town. And according to this thread on the Philadelphia flickr discussion forum, many others have been contacted as well. Cool.

The Philly guide is due out sometime in April.

Forgot Bookmarks Again

While rushing to wipe my HDD two nights ago, I forgot to save my damn bookmarks in Firefox. Grrr.

Stayed out way too late last night at Drinking Liberally and then off to Little Pete's for a milkshake and then to McGlinchy's for a Newcastle. I didn't get a chance to fiddle much with the computer other than get SP2 on the box. And tonight we're headed to the 76ers game v the Pistons. That could get ugly.

While I was running late on getting out the door last night, I didn't have the energy to trek back and forth across town to the various events I mentioned yesterday, but ACM went to one event I was aware of and another one I hadn't heard of and has recaps.

Not enough hours in the day.

Norgs: Philly IMC Video

Philly IMC just put up a post with a .mov of seven short interviews from the day. Download the file here. It's an 11.7MB file and you'll need QuickTime to view it, preferably QT7 with the H.264 codec.

The interviewees are: Jennifer Kronstain of PhillyBlog, Jonathan Tannenwald of The Daily Pennsylvanian, Greg Palmer of Keystone Politics, Paul Socolar of The Philadelphia Public Notebook, Amy Webb of Dragonfire, Susie Madrak of Suburban Guerrilla and Kevin Donahue of Philly.com.

Very much worth a watch. It's 7m 41s in length.

Norgs: Starting

Here's a shot of the start of the day.

I was immediately overwhelmed when I walked off of the elevator into the top floor classroom in the Annenberg School. About thirty or so people were already there, an additional dozen or so would come before things got underway and after the lunch break. I recognized some familiar faces. Local people like Dan Rubin, Will Bunch, Aaron Couch, Howard Hall, Karl Martino, Duncan Black, Susie Madrak and Matt Gold.

But I'd hear so many other people speak throughout the day. People from PhillyBlog, Annenberg work study studennts, Daily News interns, someone from Pew Charitable Trusts. People from the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Philadelphia Daily News, the brass from PNI, columnists, writers, editors, managers from under the PNI umbrella. Harry B. Cook from Philly1. People from Philly IMC [who shot video of the day along with short interviews], the NYC Indypendent. A sports writer from the Daily Pennsylvanian. People from Dragonfire. People from the tech side of Comcast. Paul Socolar from The Philadelphia Public School Notebook, Greg Palmer of Keystone Politics, Jeff Jarvis, from Buzz Machine among other ventures and Dean of the Annenberg School Michael X Delli Carpini.

That's just a partial list of everyone who was there. I can only begin to start digesting all of this a day later. I've put up a flickr set of the first edit of seventy-four down from 300+. And I've gone through those seventy-four and whittled it down a bit to thirty-eight shots that have been edited with a little post processing and some cropping here and there.

Stories of the day to come still...

Norgs: Photos on Flickr

The initial set is up in a flickr set. Culled down from about 300 to 74. The set will be edited down further and touched up for color in the next few days and posted directly here.

Norgs

There they are, Will Bunch, Karl Martino, Susie Madrak and Wendy Warren, the founders and organizers of the Norgs unconference

It all started with this post on Will's blog Attytood about a theoretical concept. People from PNI management, the Inky, the Daily News, the Philly blog community and well beyond. The discussion started off online and gained steam and finally a date was decided upon and there we were at 9a this morning in the Annenberg School. Dan Rubin has a nice wrap up of the day here. I'm gonna be posting more photos tonight and tomorrow.

Firefox Maglite

How much of a geek am I? Not only do I want a Mag-lite now, but a keychain Mag-lite. A Firefox Mag-lite at that. Must... Resist... Urge...

The white Firefox logo [unfortunately no fox icon] is laser engraved to add to the geek factor.

$12!

Photo via Mozilla store