Hahaha, I laughed out loud when I saw this photostream on flickr. The guy has managed to catch squirrels playing around with cameras and well look at the photos, you’ll get what I mean.
Here is a great example of the useful information that can be harvested from the plethora of metadata type information floating around the internet. The guys at Flagrantdisregard.com scrapped the EXIF data from photos being uploaded onto flickr and compiled a list of the top 10 camera models being used.
It is worth noting the potentials for skew that exist in this data, but overall it can be taken as representative of digital camera enthusiasts.
Of course, the data may be skewed, since some users might unknowingly be stripping off EXIF data from their photos before uploading to Flickr (say, if the photos were resized using an editor that didn’t save the
EXIF along with the resized image). Also, notice that Sony cameras are marked by “CYBERSHOT,” and not by exact model–likely, photos were taken with phone-cams.Further, you will notice that the D-SLRs dominate the list. Perhaps this is due to the sheer volume that photo enthusiasts (amateur photographers and professionals) upload on their sites, which sometimes serve as their portfolios. They’re likely the ones to have Pro accounts, too, which gives them unlimited upload capability. Casual users, on the other hand, might not be uploading so frequently, and would probably have free, limited accounts.
Complexity is everywhere. It’s a structural and organizational
principle that reaches almost every field imaginable, from genetics and
social networks to food webs and stock markets. Contemporary scientific
and technological accomplishments—including mapping the human
genome, decoding neural networks and opening up the ocean to
exploration—have seen our ability to generate and acquire
information outpace our ability to make sense of it. With a surfeit of
facts and few ways to synthesize them, “meaningful information” quickly
becomes an oxymoron.
I really was just interested in the pretty pictures part though 
They’ve got images of neural networks from a mouse brain, the interconnecting structure of trees/leaves/branches and my favourite the “The World of Music: SDP Layout of High Dimensional Data” – this comes from Yahoo! music which I’m actually a paying member of… so I guess I helped to make some of these little interconnecting lines
Just thought I’d put together a little sampler of the latest flickr photos tagged with “Brisbane” to give my out of town readers some idea of how lovely this city really is.
The zooomr site looks like it is a fairly straight forward rip of flickr (which you all know can do no wrong in my book) and from the quick look around that I’ve had I can’t see too many new and excitingfeatures which would persuade me to jump ship. You can add sound to photos, but I can’t honestly see anyone doing that more than once for the novelty factor. It does add two intersting features though, the first of which is the ability to label people who are in a photo. This feature could be one of the most incredible things for photo sharing if it is done really well, and will be a so-so affair otherwise. One of the first issues is that suffered by all community driven sites in that different people will label things differently (some of my friends call me James, I normally go by Jamie however) how then to realise that Jamie Cook in photo 782 is the same as James Cook in photo 1089? And also how to tell the difference beween James Cook (me) and say James Cook the famous captain who discovered Australia? I did see a site a while back that claimed to be able to perform face-recognition on photos to tell you who was in them which seems like an admirable task but I don’t think it’s how zooomr will be doing this.
I had an idea a little while ago while doing some work with image databasing and searching. Never really took it anywhere but then noticed that this new site had implemented the same idea in a pretty neat way. The concept is basically that each photo is tagged with geo-spatial co-ordinates as it is uploaded and then other images which were taken in the same area can be easily called up.
Pretty simple concept but I think that it will help to re-invent how we browse and search for images – well at least it will when all cameras come equipped with GPS by default anyways I’m trying not to get side tracked but it’s a pet peeve of mine when reading about “web 2.0″ and the “semantic web” (or community driven web) is that all the information required to make them useful has to come from somewhere and no one really says where it’s going to come from except “the users”. Now I think I’m a pretty dedicated and pedantic person but the thought of tagging all the photos I have in my collection makes me go cold all over. I think spatial information, such as geo-tags collected automatically via GPS, would be a great way to increase the automatically available metadata for photos.
So in summary I don’t see anything great that I don’t think flickr will be implementing shortly anyway
