Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen | solitude.dk

In December a guy called Tristan O'Tierney created a wonderful application called flickbooth. It adds a button to Apple's Photo Booth application so you can send your photos directly from Photo Booth to your Flickr account.

I use 23 and not flickr, but I know 23 has implemented the flickr API. I inquired if he would add 23 support to flickrbooth, but he couldn't promise anything. Fortunately someone else figured it out and it turns out to be a very simple procedure. You have to substitute one folder inside the flickbooth bundle and then you can post photos directly from Photo Booth to your 23 account. I've only done one, but I'll be tagging them 23booth and so should you.

I've been using 23 for a couple of months now and I figure it's time for an update to my initial review. First things first, Anders and Raymond have both put up photos from our workshop on 23:

• Anders' photos
• Raymond's photos

I have to admit that I'm becoming a real fanboy. My personal favourites are the Subscription viewer and the Conversations page. On Flickr I can also view a page with my contacts' photos. It's all fine, but 23 gets the feature right. Here photos aren't mashed together in one big pile, they are seperated by each contact for an easy overview. Furthermore 23 remembers which photos I have already seen so I don't have to view something twice. Flickr also only shows the 5 latest photos from each contact. What's up with that? I've missed good photos more than once on Flickr because I thought I could stay up-to-date by viewing the contacts page. There is no such sillyness on 23.

The Conversations page is where 23 really shines. It serves as an great overview for… well, conversations. Here I can view:

• Latest comments to my photos
• Latest comments on photos I've commented on
• Latest comments from my contacts (on any photo)

The last item is pure genius. I have found so many great shots and new people by having my contacts work for me. Whoever came up with that feature needs a serious raise. I'm really addicted to the Conversations page. One thing I wish is that fotonotes would show up on the Conversations page along with regular comments. They are used as comments, so they should be treated like comments. Less than 24 hours later fotonotes now show up on the Conversations page. 23 kicks ass and Steffen is my new best friend..

One final thing I've come to enjoy is the way you upload photos. When I go to upload a handful of photos there's usually a lot of waiting involved (photos are big files), but on 23 it's not so bad. When I've uploaded the first photo in a batch I can immediately write a description and add tags to it while I wait for the next photo to finish uploading. That way I don't have to wait five minutes for all photos to upload and then spend additional time writing descriptions for each one afterwards. Clever thinking.

If you take photos I recommend checking out 23. My username is andreas and I'd like to subscribe to your photos.

This afternoon I returned from a three day stint in Stockholm in the company of Anders and Raymond. As the last time it involved a good amount of talking about videoblogging and general hilariousness. Along with Raymond I did a two-hour open lecture on Wednesday about videoblogging in general, and Thursday the three of us did a full-day workshop on the practicalities of videoblogging — both at Medieteknik at Södertörns University College. This combination worked really well as we could paint broad strokes at the lecture and get nitty-gritty the following day.

I didn't record any video there — that was the students' job, not mine. You can find links to the student blogs and other randomness (like videoblog examples) on the workshop blog. I have also put up some photos on 23 and I'm sure Raymond and/or Anders will put up photos and/or video later.

I did learn a lot at the workshop myself. After seeing the students run around with their own digital cameras (and playing with the Ixus 750 that both Anders and Raymond use), I'm convinced digital still cameras are the way to go for videoblogging. Those are awesome tools, the quality is good enough and the ease-of-use beats anything else. I was also surprised at how fast the students all grasped how editing in Quicktime Pro works. I was prepared to spend much time explaning the logic behind Quicktime's editing interface, but it was intuitive to all of them immediately.

Finally it warmed my little, interactive heart to have two students create a credits page for their movie and without any encouragement ask Anders how they could make their links clickable. Sadly, there is not a really easy way to do this yet (we didn't have time to explain eZedia and similar). It was great to see that they had gotten that videoblogging is video crafted for the web and not traditional video.

Thanks to Anne and Hannes who took care of us, and to the rest of the faculty for dealing with us during lunches and dinner Thursday. It was great talking with everyone and I learned much about media education in Sweden.

In this age of blogging feedback is public, so it's fantastic to see Annika write:

Idag har vi haft en videobloggworkshop. Det var kul och lärorikt, det var inte så krångligt som jag trodde att det skulle vara, en bra workshop! Jag får väl skaffa mig en kamera som jag kan filma med så det blir fart på mitt videobloggande.

It is also great to see how verbs are conjugated in Swedish!

To subscribe to a random guys photo on Flickr when viewing one of his photos:

1. Click on “XX's photostream”
2. Click on “Add him/her as a contact”
3. Click “Ok” button

To subscribe to a random guys photo on 23 when viewing one of his photos:

1. Click on “Subscribe”

I took a walk around campus today to take photos (and return books to the library). This is my test of the Badge feature at 23. It looks like a really easy way to link to multiple photos. I especially like that 23 provides an unstyled version so you can make the design yourself. Not that I've done more than create some spacing. There are notes on the format available.

My photos from Bloggforum are online. Raymond beat me to it, but I have more photos than him. I was delayed partly because the Swedish winter made me sick, partly because I wanted to take the opportunity to check out the photosharing service 23. I first noticed 23 in Jonas' sidebar and when I met Thomas Madsen-Mygdal — one of the creators of 23 — at Bloggforum I figured it was time to try it out.

23 has some really nice features — it's especially in the small details that the service shines. Uploading a batch of photos was easy. 23 accepts zip files, so I could create a zip file on my desktop and drop photo files into the zip archive. The downside seems to be that there is no way to control the order of the photos. Right now my Bloggforum photos appear in random order and not reverse chronological order, that's too bad because the zip upload was really nice.

The limitation on the free account is 20MB/month, otherwise it's identical to the plus account (€29/year; no upload limit). This gets rid of my main problem with Flickr where free users are only allowed 200 photos total making the free account next to useless. A 20MB/month limit seems reasonable, bandwidth is after all not free. Flickr also has a limit on the amount of photosets (albums) for free accounts. Photosets are virtually free for Flickr to maintain. 23 has no such artificial limits on the free accounts, so you can actually share a large amount of photos with 23 for free (provided you scale them down prior to upload).

But like I said the value is in the details. For example the tag pages (e.g. snow) contain links to tag pages at other services like Technorati, Flickr and Del.icio.us. This is great because the tag page on 23 can serve as a hub. It's what Technorati could have been, but chose not to be. Another nice feature are stories where you can mix photos and text (example). 23 seems to really have thought about different ways to present photos — you also have a calendar to browse photos. It's nice to see some real thinking being done in that area.

Other random small items:

• 16 photos on each page is nice.
• No easy way to go from your own tag page to the global one is not nice. I just didn't see the link
• Likewise not being able to go to a global tag page from any photo is not nice.
• Links to other users on tag pages is nice.
• Having contacts and subscriptions seperated is nice.
• Pages written in Danish is nice.
• Half-translated pages are not nice (especially the FAQ is lacking).
• “Can't read” is a bad error message. It should've said “You've reached your monthly bandwidth limit, pay up”.
• Being able to see “more properties” without a page reload is nice for a guy like me who's trying to learn how to take pictures.

Update

I've posted additional thoughts on 23.