B. Mann Consulting

Photos that I've marked as favourites on Flickr.

Stephanie just posted where her entry ends with the phrase that is the title of this post "a persona who is, above all things, enamoured by the future".

I love the phrase. Maybe time to swap out the tagline for this blog.

Oh, and, Steph actually posted about renewing her Flickr pro account. Related to that, I'm experimenting a bit with Photophlow -- a real time interface for chatting about Flickr photos. Which, for those of us who remember the early days of Flickr, was actually the original implementation of Flickr. Thanks to Rachael for the invite -- I've still got a few to hand out if you're interested.

Finally, great work on the blog, Steph -- I've really been enjoying reading it and enjoying your photos.

Remember the DG-100-GPS? That cheap data logger that I've been really bad at finding the time to use consistently? Jaako left a comment letting me know that he got the DG-100 working on the Mac:

Hey Boris! Wanted to drop you a line and let you know that I managed to get a pretty decent solution to the DG-100 / Mac issue. The key lies in Mirko Parthey's dg100.c script he wrote as a basis for implementation into GPSBabel. I made some tweaks to his original code and added a GPX output mode and have a pretty reliable command line interface for the DG-100. Check it out ( + the relaunch of my blog ) at Blog-Shmog.com and let me know if you have any luck!

My buddy chrys pinged me about a sponsorship opportunity in Europe. The 2007 Europe Photoblogger Meetup is happening in Berlin, September 7th to 9th, and the organizers are still looking for sponsors. Paging Yahoo Europe, or perhaps most especially the fine folks at Flickr, you might want to jump on this one.

I won't be making it to this, but I am looking forward to DrupalCon Barcelona, which takes place later in September. I have some ideas brewing on putting together an Enterprise Lounge concept to talk about Drupal...

Schmap puts together digital travel guides in website and downloadable form. They also happen to use Flickr as one of their main sources to get pictures for various items in their guides. I travel a far bit, and I have a lot of pictures on Flickr, so I've got lots of requests for various photos to be included.

One of my recent pictures that got selected as part of the San Francisco city guide was Andy Smith standing under The Stud sign. Now, the Stud happens to be "one of The City's most renowned gay clubs" and Andy Smith actually is a stud, so it was a good match :P

My dad, Horst Mann, turned 70 yesterday. He has an old Canon digital camera, my hand me down 15" Powerbook G4, and talks to his daughter and grand daughter in Italy using Skype and video.

He is an "Old Skool" Flickr member. I kicked him off my home server hosting using Gallery, and he's been a Flickr community member since about March 2004. Yep, that's '04, March. On Flickr, he's known as Opa, which means "grandpa" in German.

As of yesterday, he and my mom both have Facebook accounts. They both use NetNewsWire to keep up to date via RSS with a variety of sites, including this one. Subscribing to new sources is hard, but then clicking through every link in a blog entry and reading every resulting page takes some time, so I'm not sure they have room for more. They blog occasionally, but uploading pictures to Flickr seems the easiest way to tell a story.

If you read Lee LeFever's Common Craft website, I've been discussing a lot of things with him, as evidenced by a couple of nice "so I was talking to Boris the other day and..." links he's thrown my way.

If you're interested in or in any way intersect social software and/or online community, you should be subscribed to Common Craft.

What is it? They have a little note that says Common Craft "is a consulting practice and weblog operated by Lee and Sachi LeFever. The focus of Common Craft is Social Design for the Web." I like that phrase: Social Design for the Web. Which makes Lee and Sachi "Social Designers".

Most recently, we talked about Dell's IdeaStorm, which is a Salesforce AppExchange component made by CrispyIdeas. The big thing here is that the underlying technology of "social software" is being commoditized. Now comes the hard part: understanding and utilizing the technology in the context of engaging your community.

Before that I asked Lee if he felt he was a member of Flickr's community. I used to be a member of the Flickr community, waaay back in the old days when it was just getting started. But I don't think I can call myself that now: it's "just" a place to put pictures. I've moved out of the active 1% and in to the "just use it" 9%.

Via IM from James and posting from bopuc, it seems that Flickr is patenting "interestingness".

What?!

Are you kidding me?!

How about we do the same thing...only call it "intriguingness". Perhaps "disgustedness" would be a better term.

Reading through the patent, it seems very specific to interestingness and Flickr's implementation. So, I would kind of figure...why bother patenting? I guess this is the lawyers at Yahoo getting hinky.

I've been using ShoZu for several weeks now. It's an application for your cameraphone that will automatically upload pictures that you take to Flickr. As in, you take the picture, and seconds later, ShoZu will connect to the network (GPRS in my case) in the background, and upload to Flickr. I've got it set to fully automatic, but you can also set it to ask you each time you take a picture whether it should be uploaded to Flickr or not.

It's made me actually take more pictures with my phone, as well as actually getting them off my phone to share. You can see the pictures I've uploaded with ShoZu, as well as all pictures on Flickr tagged with ShoZu (over 4000 as I'm making this post).