Social Media? It's for the chickens

Random-but-fun:

Every year we buy a few dozen hens to add to the chicken coop back on the home farm. As we like variety - and don't mind intermingling, we go sort of crazy picking various chickens. Which brings me to this year's experiment: crowd sourcing chicken picks. 

To participate: 

Go to this catalogue of chickens. http://www.mcmurrayhatchery.com/index.html

Pick one or two chicks that you think we should add to the flock on the farm. 

We will order them in late March, and then photo document their development.

The internet (and we) will be amused.  

My poor dog, Calvin, may've been spotted near the Nippersink Creek in Genoa City. I really, really hope it was him.

Calvin, our Personal Rin Tin Tin, MIA (Lake Geneva, Wisconsin) (cc @susanorlean)

Hey @pet_amber_alert: Calvin, Lake Geneva Wisconsin, Border Collie, has gone missing. Can you help us find him?

My thoughts on the impact of Steve Jobs...

There are hundreds of pieces about the impact of Steve Jobs' vision on technology -- on objects that facilitate the consumption of interactive multimedia. They are a big part of what he, and Apple, have done for us -- and they exist quantitatively.

But what's harder to explore is his, and his company's, impact on creativity - the actual act of creation - from a technological perspective as much as a visual one. 

Apple computers, and the software that has been written for them, have shaped, created, crafted the way we work online and offline. They have changed the way we are inspired. 

Jobs' gadgets have managed to make the act of creation within technology something we can all do - something that's cool to do - freeing our ideas from technological hurdles and facilitating the act of discovery, development and creation far beyond our expectations as technologists, creatives, and digital consumers. 

Steve Jobs built computers for the people who should use them - those who need to use them to explore, create, understand and shape the world around them. It was a unique way of building a product, and the impact of his 'should' on the world of technology will be felt for generations to come. 

"Flickr is dead." Oh really? (Blog Post)

I know we (tech people) love to declare things dead. And it's fine and dandy that we're reminding ourselves that Flickr is being out-done. But there's a thing it does that Google + doesn't do: shares your photos with the public, in a big way, for licensing and reuse. Yes, it's not necessarily the most technically advanced archive of images. But it's the biggest repository of better-than-average images on the web. And it allows you to refine what you share. If it's a bit clunky design-wise, I don't think it really matters. Why? 

Because it's been here for ages - and I, like many ProAm (or better) photographers, will be tied into it for many years to come. The reason? I have an archive of almost 22,000 photos on the site. It's where I back everything up. And it's really, really cheap, given how much data that is (I shoot in RAW, each corresponding JPEG image is between 10-20MB...) 

From the first photo I had on the front page of a newspaper to the most recent images I've had published in a book in Chicago - to photos documenting more trips than I care to remember - they're all there. And I moved them there because it's easy to put them there, it's stable, and… well, extricating them, with all the metadata, and all the geolocation and… well… all the memories attached… would be physically impossible at this point. I am stuck paying $20 a year for the rest of eternity. And frankly, I don't mind. 

Every time I go into my archives at Flickr, I find something I don't remember. And that's just me - admittedly a poor maintainer who's gone out of her way to keep some organization within her galleries. I can only imagine how it is for others  who have even more information vested in the community. 

Flickr isn't dead - it is, perhaps, repurposing, to being more of a colossal photography community with an endless archive - but things like Google+ are designed for many, many other things first - before they get around to being a home for photographers who want to get their work out there, used by other people to illustrate the world around them. 

If Google can make another browser-straining image gallery in plus, I applaud them - hell, I love posting a few photos to the platform and talking about them there. It's all fine and dandy. But it's not refined enough, and the community is not specific enough, to be truly of interest to me - and generally speaking, to those of us who are interested in getting our work out, beyond our friends. 

Oh, and there's that whole Creative Commons thing, too.

I can't decide if I like Google+ - but since just about everyone I know professionally has written about it… $.02

a) I hate moving in. I mostly hate moving into + because it's not automatically ingesting my contacts fast enough. I also hate moving in because the people who've added me I then have to Google to remember (in some cases) and in others, I'm seeing long dead (socially-speaking) people come back because automatic blocks on other social networks haven't kicked in. So. There's that. 

b) I have never seen so many tech pundits so excited about a project. Everyone seems genuinely interested (and in some cases downright ecstatic) by the potential they see for these extensions of the Google into their lives. Is it because we're all still enamored of Google? Or is it because while Facebook understands the general populous better, Google's PR team truly understands how to excite the geeks? (Or is it because Google you know... HAS a PR team... and is interested in PR. 

c) Opting into brands: One of the things I like doing is monitoring various brands' Facebook pages - the like feature is incredibly efficient that way. But in my 7(?) years of Facebook tenure I've aggregated so much information it's going to be nearly impossible to hit (nevermind exceed) the same level of life-integration, no matter how much of my search history Google ingests. 

d) Incognito and I have a tight relationship: I use it to monitor multiple logins to various platforms, mostly to prevent crossover between clients and information. I don't know if that's going to work quite as well if I can only have one + login… and I've never been happy with the 'multiple signin' option. 

e) The most interesting feature to me (from a TV perspective) is the Hangout feature - because it's going to give you simultaneous feedback on a piece. I see this particularly useful in Al Jazeera's newsroom for doing piece reviews and discussing UGC. It's the best part of Wave - though it may eventually also have the same caveats for writers - if you're not writing perfectly, instantly, it's impossible to concentrate on what needs to be fixed (and it can be unnerving to be insta-edited). 

f) I'll be interested to see how people integrate their circles with Google Docs and collaborative pieces and reporting - it seems like it could be somewhere at the intersection of hellish and awesome, end-product wise. 

(This post, on Google+) 

Compilation of today's most international-oriented link (experiment)

Sean Connery v. Steve Jobs (aka the best letter. ever.) (via @whereishawkins)

.@AlexisGrant said one, I countered with the other and ... More Apps for all.

I just happened to see @AlexisGrant's post "6 Digital Tools That Keep Me Sane" (http://bit.ly/kPfYgw) and started countering her toolkit on Facebook... I'm about to embark on a mega update of all my teaching tools anyway -- so hey, why not?