Just now I finally finished tagging the last few photos taken in Venice. The whole set of Lieke’s and my vacation in Italy is now online. Total number of photos we ended up selecting is a whopping 411. You can start at the first new one since the previous update over here.
Plenty of pretty shots in this update, my favourite is probably this one:
Enjoy!
Sometimes you learn something strange while tagging vacation shots. At least that was the case with this photo I took in Venice:
Looking for some proper tags I Googled “K-141” and found a Wikipedia article on the Russian submarine Kursk. I pulled out the proper Russian text to use as tags but was puzzled about the reason behind the stencil.
I decided to let my direct colleagues in on the mystery and mailed it around at the office. Soon after, Peter pointed out that the same stencil art was blogged at zombizi zero-six and Wooster Collective.
Quite entertaining, but it gets even weirder. He pointed out this link, which apparently proves the stencil spree was part of Russia’s presence at the 51st Venice Biennale…
Bart rightly pointed out that it’s strange they didn’t get caught doing it. I mean: wouldn’t it be easy for the police to hold the Russians at the Biennale responsible for this blatant act of “vandalism”?
Anyway. You learn something new every day, don’t you?
Dan Saffer of Adaptive Path wrote an introductory piece for budding interaction designers. Five years ago, Robert Reimann of Cooper did the same. Both are nice overviews for novices and especially the parts on a designer’s temperament are entertaining to read.
Saffer fails to mention any good IxD schools outside of the US and UK. Which is a shame for all of us European designers. Reimann mentioned Ivrea’s now defunct IxD institute.
I’d like to start by pointing to my courageous little country’s Utrecht School of Arts, which has been teaching IxD for 15 years now (!) and today offers both BA and MA programs. They’ve recently branched off into game design, which has been quite successful.
Full disclosure: I was a student at the same school from 1998 – 2001 (BA IxD, MA Game Design) and am now teaching a course in mobile game design.
Any other good IxD schools in Europe that you know of?
Update: discussions on Saffer’s post on the IxDA’s maling list here and here; overview of IxD education (mostly in the US) here.
“Nederlandse online marketing lijkt steeds meer open source marketing te worden. Lezend online en werkend in meatspace kom ik steeds meer marketeers tegen die de idealen van de open source beweging (al dan niet bewust) omarmen. Dat maakt deze open standaarden aanhanger blij natuurlijk.
Info.nl staat volgende week met een stand en een workshop op eDay. Hoe zit het met dit marketingevenement? In hoeverre onderschrijft het de ontwikkeling naar open source marketing? eDay werpt een blik op de trends “voor de komende twee jaar” en belicht het thema ‘creativiteit’ als “strategisch bedrijfsinstrument” en “consumer trend”.”
Street art hero Banksy strikes again: he’s spread 500 mashed up copies of Paris Hilton’s new album through 48 record stores in the UK. This excellent video shows how he goes about Photoshopping and pasting up the booklet, inserting a new CD and sneaking it into an HMV shop. The music on the spoof album was created by hip-hop producer Danger Mouse.
Guys like him make life in the 21st century slightly more bearable; Banksy proves ordinary citizens can provide some counterweight to mass media with well-executed and highly targeted actions. HMV doesn’t agree: “It’s not the type of behaviour you’d want to see happening very often”
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Thanks to Bart for the heads-up.
A while ago, my friend Hessel posted this excellent photo to Flickr. I’ve noticed this insanely cool performance around the interweb earlier. Now, just as back then I really wish that giant elephant and the accompanying girl will frequent one of my country’s small cities even though that doesn’t seem likely. Please Sultan’s Elephant, come to the Netherlands, I’ll give you some peanuts when you do!
Flickr launched its geotagging feauture a few days ago. Today I came across a few raving posts on TechnCrunch, so I decided to give it a go.
I’ve been geotagging my photos using Plazes for a while now (has it been more than a year already? This photo seems to prove as much.) I enjoyed doing that but it was always a bit involved. Also, geotagging becomes really useful and fun once lots of people start doing it. That wasn’t really happening yet so I’m excited about Flickr integrating it.
My first impression of their map-driven interface was positive. It’s tucked away in the organize section though; I wonder whether they’ll include some bits in the individual photo pages soon. For instance: a little map showing the location where the shot was taken and an easy way to add geotags (maybe even allow others to do it for me?) I’d like this mostly because now the map isn’t really social (in the sense that it shows an aggregation of geotagged shots, just my own.) Update: I found the social flavored map here; a bit underwhelming, but fun.
However: although Flickr proudly sports “gamma” at the top of its logo, the technology still lags behind. It’s beta quality at best. Newly tagged photos don’t appear on the map after a reload; perhaps Flickr doesn’t like me changing the tags outside of the map interface? Update: editting geoprivacy settings on batches gives back strange results too, these photos should show up on the map somewhere near Baarn, but they don’t. Weird…
Also, I think not being able to “snap” a batch of photos to a city I found through the search interface is a usability issue. Adding photos to locations I haven’t identified in Plazes (and thus don’t show up as hotspots on the map yet) becomes arbitrarily. Call me a metadata nut, but I really want to add my photos of Jurjen’s pretty street Zwartehandspoort in Leiden to the exact street, not drop them somewhere in the vicinity of the city Leiden.
Conclusion: a promising addition to everyone‘s favourite social photo sharing site, poised to make geotagging ready for the big time, but not exactly there yet due to some technical and design issues.
Another update: after rummaging through the help forums, I learnt that indeed, Flickr doesn’t automagically pick up on newly geotagged photos from other services (such as Plazes.) You need to re-import them (as described in this post). This sucks big time, Flickr seems to think that only photos that have been tagged inside the system matter. Think again! (Of course all this is probably simply due to technical limitations, which is no excuse, but still…)
The last few shots from Florence are up. Here’s the first new one in the set. Now it’s on to Venice, almost done!
Fun fact: Florentine police use Segways to get around the station!
Despite the heat and humidity this evening I got around sorting through a few more photos taken in Florence. Around 50 new ones have been added to the set. You can start at the first new one here.
I’d like to treat you to a nice example of serendipity. Here’s a photo I took of some stained glass windows depicting the agnus dei:
Now check out this photo by Rich Nurcombe… Weird.
