UKSnow February 2012 http://www.flickr.com/photos/aroberts/sets/72157629230156965/
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
UKSnow February 2012 http www flickr com photos…
http://distributedresearch.net/status/uksnow-february-2012-http-www-flickr-com-photos/
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February 9 2012, 4:16am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
St Pauls Cathedral Views Flickr set http www…
http://distributedresearch.net/status/st-pauls-cathedral-views-flickr-set-http-www/
St Pauls Cathedral Views Flickr set http://www.flickr.com/photos/aroberts/sets/72157628923972595/
January 19 2012, 2:52am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Greenwich Cutty Sark set on Flickr http www…
http://distributedresearch.net/status/greenwich-cutty-sark-set-on-flickr-http-www/
Greenwich Cutty Sark set on Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/aroberts/sets/72157628637994451/
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January 1 2012, 2:52am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Woodford woodland lake flickr set http www flickr…
http://distributedresearch.net/status/woodford-woodland-lake-flickr-set-http-www-flickr/
Woodford, woodland lake flickr set http://www.flickr.com/photos/aroberts/sets/72157627993743807/
November 14 2011, 4:03am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Kew Gardens
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/10/11/kew-gardens
There are many folly buildings at Kew Gardens and yesterday I learned that the person who instigated them had a swivel chair installed inside the little domed colonade at the top of the hill near the lake next to the Palm House. From that vantage point she could survey the results of the gardeners’ labour. The view would have been much different in those days but I thought I’d make a mock swivel chair video of the view from yesterday at Kew Gardens.
Many more Kew Gardens photos are amongst my photosets on Flickr such as : Kew Gardens October 2011 Kew Gardens Collection of Kew Gardens Photosets Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogKew Gardens
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October 11 2011, 9:04am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Cooking Monkfish with Cider in Galicia
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/09/28/cooking-monkfish-with-cider-in-galicia
Hello, I’m cooking fresh fish with cider over a trangia camping stove in sunny Galicia, northern Spain. With videography by Evan Roberts, this youTube is pretty self explanatory.
The actual location is a campsite at Camping Moreiras, O Grove, Pontevedra, Galicia. The fish, a whole monkfish, came from the fish market on the harbour at O Grove itself, as did the vegetables and the cider is an Asturian Sidra Natural obtaine en route from one of many Eroski supermarkets. Just a bit of fun really, but it captures one of many happy mealtimes from a memorable holiday touring Asturias and Galicia in September 2011. There are loads of photos online at both my collection and Linda’s Flickr photostreams. Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogCooking Monkfish with Cider in Galicia
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September 28 2011, 7:13am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
time capsule June 8th to June 22nd, 2010
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/06/15/time-capsule-june-8th-to-june-22nd-2010
Duck House Duck HouseTaken June 9, 2010 at 4:17 pm Canal Boat Isabella Kennet & Avon Canal Canal Boat Isabella Kennet & Avon CanalTaken June 10, 2010 at 2:24 pm Pumping Station Pumping StationTaken June 11, 2010 at 12:56 pm Hungerford Fete Hungerford FeteTaken June 12, 2010 at 1:00 pm Small Pond Lilly Small Pond LillyTaken June 18, 2010 at 3:53 pm via posterousThanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogtime capsule June 8th to June 22nd, 2010Related posts:Photo time capsule from May 8th to May 22nd 2010time capsule from May 25th to June 8th, 2010Canal Boat Holidays
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June 15 2011, 5:01am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Red Breasted Goose
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/27/red-breasted-goose
Red Breasted Goose, a photo by AndyRob on Flickr.This Red Breasted Goose appeared on Alexandra Lake in Wanstead Flats today, having a rest on its way home to Siberia.Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogRed Breasted GooseRelated posts:Bar Head Goose at Wanstead FlatsWhat Easter Is All AboutWalk in the woods
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May 27 2011, 11:53am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Orbit Tower in progress
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/21/orbit-tower-in-progress
Orbit Tower (ArcelorMittal Orbit) #2 a photo by George Rex on Flickr. Orbit Tower (ArcelorMittal Orbit) #2 20110302 work-in-progress. The Orbit Tower will be one of the attractions in the London 2012 Olympic Park. There will be two viewing platforms accessible by elevator. Sculptor: Anish Kapoor, Structural Designer: Cecil Balmond. Design and Engineering: Ove Arup. The controversial red tubular steel tower will be 115m tall and completion is due in spring 2012. London Borough of Newham. Image: George Rex Photography) Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogOrbit Tower in progress
Related posts:The Orbit Tower, Olympic Park Stratford East London 2012 London Orbit Tower Rises at Olympic Park Olympics Anish Kapoor tower hopes to attract 1m visitors a year
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March 21 2011, 12:21pm | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
SXSW 2011: Can Facebook photos be used commercially?
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/14/sxsw-2011-can-facebook-photos-be-used-commercially
Facebook is asked whether businesses and advertisers could make use of the equivalent to one Flickr‘s worth of photos being uploaded each month. SXSW report
This article titled “SXSW 2011: Can Facebook photos be used commercially?” was written by Jemima Kiss, for guardian.co.uk on Saturday 12th March 2011 16.41 UTC Much of the focus of this discussion was inevitably focused on Facebook’s photos product manager, Sam Odio, who disappointingly played the “not my remit’ card when asked the most interested and pertinent questions about Facebook’s use of users’ photos, including facial recognition and how images might be co-opted by advertisers. • Facebook sees “a Flickr’s worth of photos uploaded every month”, said Odio. But it’s worth considering the different values of those two services: Flickr includes some high-quality, well edited photography, while Facebook focuses on storytelling over quality. It doesn’t matter, said Odio, if that first photo of your newborn nephew is blurry: it’s the social context behind the photo. • Odio fielded a question by one delegate about how businesses and advertisers might start appropriating photos for commercial use. “We’re not in the business of selling ads through people’s photos and we want to prevent businesses having free rein over users,” he said. “But businesses are users,” pushed the delegate. Odio said Facebook would want the people in the photos to be telling the story – which means advertising would be there but more subtly, and directed by users. • As for ownership of photos, Odio said that comes down to the need to build the API in such a way that it can access your friends’ photos. If each of those users retained ownership, that would become very complicated. “There are worries we are going to use photos in advertising but it doesn’t really benefit us that much given how sensitive the subject is.” • Yan-David Erlick, a serial entrepreneur who founded Mophot.to, predicted that social photos will become even more integrated with our lives through different sorts of tagging. “Timelines between items will mean that over time, these entities are not viewed as individual pieces of media but will have contextual attributes tying them to other pieces.” • Odio explained how after struggling to keep his startup photo site Divvyshot going in 2009, ploughing in all his own savings, he got a random email one Sunday night. It was from Blake Ross, who later turned out to be co-creator of Firefox, at an address at Facebook. “He said ‘Sam – your site looks interesting. You should come here.’ I was living with six developers at the time and they were all looking over my shoulder to figure out if the email was fake or not.” It was, and Facebook acquired Divvyshot in April 2010. • Feature requests aren’t always the best way to develop a product. Odio said nobody asked for Instagram, which just raised $7m in funding, but now it is taking off. Facebook’s engineers also have a monthly hackathon where they can work on whatever they like; that doesn’t determine product direction but features such as drag-and-drop organisation have come out of that. • On facial recognition, all Odio would say is that Facebook “hasn’t been able to move quickly on it given how sensitive it is”, which does seem to imply it would have liked to do plenty if it could have got away with it. • Odio said a startup should make the product extremely simple; he had got distracted when trying to add too many features and functions. “Focus on one thing and do it extremely well. In early days the product needs to be explained to users in 10 seconds or less.” • One delegate said he was concerned that Facebook is becoming such an important repository for his life, and that photos are the most easily accessible part of that archive compared to status updates or messages. Erlich described the web being used as an external memory for us all, from photos to phone numbers; this ties in with Clay Shirky’s idea of cognitive surplus – if machines can take over the mechanical parts of our brain function, what can we do with the space and energy that frees up?
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.
Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogSXSW 2011: Can Facebook photos be used commercially?
Related posts:Opinion: Facebook is killing personal blogging Facebook is the platform Interfacing blogs and Facebook
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March 14 2011, 6:33am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Open Plaques Open Day
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2010/09/26/open-plaques-open-day
No breakfast before going out on a Saturday!? The reason why I was in a hurry to leave the house early yesterday was to get to the Open Plaques Open Day at the Centre for Creative Collaboration near Kings Cross Station.
I know the venue from the Tuttle club, which I have attended once or twice there. The Open Day was due to kick off at 09.50 with a presentation by Frankie Roberto about “How We Got To Where We Are” which I didn’t want to miss. Well, I did manage to get there in time, despite the fact there were no trains at all on the Circle, Hammersmith and City, and District Lines in that direction. (Weekends are a bad time to get about in London, midweek breaks are better). So Frankie talked a bit about how he sent out a tweet once wondering if there was a database somewhere of Blue Plaques, and how the answers came in suggesting things, none of which were at all adequate. The best resource available was a single page on one of the plaque erecting organisation sites. So he scraped the list into a database and started trying to parse it into meaningful data, using his linguistics abilities.
Lenin by Simon Harriyott - Plaque #2210 Another useful source of information would be the pictures on Flickr, and these could be geotagged which then provided a link into the new Open Plaques database. Once the people at Flickr had made a blog post about the Open Plaques group and integrated the special tag ging into Flickr itself, then there was no turning back. Open Plaques could not be switched off, it was now more than just an experiment. The provision of an api to send the data out again meant that satellite applications could be built by creative people and these would find new and unthought of uses for the growing system. There was also a graph which showed the steady growth in numbers of plaques added during the lifetime of the project. This graph could be expected to turn dramatically upwards once there is an easy way to add new plaques, which at present requires somebody from the “core team” to do it! Morning Agenda 09:50 – 10:05 – Frankie Roberto, ‘The Story So Far’ 10:05 – 10:20 – Ian Ozsvald, ‘The OCR Challenge’ 10:20 – 10:35 – Richard Vahrman, ‘Games based on Open Plaques data’ 10:35 – 10:50 – Emily Toop, ‘Open Plaques the iPhone app’ Next up we had Ian Ozsvald using a subset of the pictures of plaques as an AI research project to see how well they could get OCR software to recognise the writing in the plaques. This makes a nice real world example dataset which can help to advance the science of artificial intelligence and character recognition in the real world. The vision is that one day soon you will be able to simply wave your phone camera about in a room and it will automatically detect any faces present, take a picture of each of them and store it with their names and the geolocation of the place on a map, as well as read any text that is being displayed in the room, on the walls or from a projector for example, and stare that as well with the date, time, place and list of attendees etc. It can’t be done yet, but this will be mainstream in just a few years, he said. Is that scary? Then an iPhone app which is being built to show all the plaques nearby as pins on a map which you can get information about. The future is mobile, and anybody who isn’t intending to get a smart phone within the next twelve months might as well just go and live in a cave somewhere, cut off from all of technical society. And a mobile app that turns it into a game, which has gone through some transitions. Based on a treasure trail type model, the app ended up giving out directions for how to get to the next plaque, so that was just too easy and not fun. The clever idea was to take a picture with your back to the plaque, of the view from the plaque as it were, which can then be used in a “Guess where Plaque” game, with the numbers on the plaques adding up to link references which tells you where the pub is. Some of the people just wanted to take a short cut to the pub though, which is fair enough. So then we broke up into groups to try and further the project from different angles. One team discussed the future direction from from the developers point of view, one looked at design I think, and the group I joined discussed content. We brainstormed about “who are the different types of users” who may have an interest in Open Plaques, both current and potential, came out with some wistful ideas for addons and expansion, hammered out the concept of what a plaque is, looked at the different page types, the additional information that could be included within the database or on a specific page, and suggested new functions and concepts. If it came down to just one new facility that would make the biggest difference that would be the ability to Nominate a New Plaque which would then sit alongside the existing plaques as a ‘virtual plaque’. I chose this as the most important because it’s a disruptive move which takes the initiative out of the hands of the few organisations who very slowly make the decisions as to which locations or historical figures are worthy of a plaque, and puts it into the hands of the ordinary person, or the ordinary Open Plaques user. It was interesting to note that most of the small group of people present, some of whom admitted to being mildly obsessed with plaques, one who described herself as being a “plaques widow” and half of whom seemed to come from Brighton, all had a clear idea that somewhere out there would be the “ordinary Open plaques user” for whom the grand service is being refined and must be orientated. What the ordinary user, should such a group of people come into being at some point, will make out of of all this, of course has yet to be seen. I found the whole topic a lot more interesting than I had originally anticipated to be honest, and far from feeling that I wouldn’t have anything to contribute, did my best to add in and highlight what I felt to be the most pertinent ideas. Using the theory of Social Objects it seems fairly clear that the principal page type and the url at which the casual visitor arrives should be the plaque itself rather than the person or place. The verbs then need to encourage contributions in order to help build out the community around plaques in general, and perhaps temporarily around individual plaques, probably asynchronously. “Add a Plaque” “Edit this Page” or even “check in here” are contenders for prominent verbs on the page, but you have to remember that this is a small and in some ways unlikely project, that just happens to have gained enough momentum to become sustainable, but is unlikely to attract enormous resources for development and maintenance. Definitely something to keep an eye on though.
Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogOpen Plaques Open Day
Related posts:Open: LinkedIn to open up. MySpace next? Open Social Objects? Flickr Ideas
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September 26 2010, 11:43am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
What does this sign mean?
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2010/09/11/what-does-this-sign-mean
Eurostar Breaks to Lille
Originally uploaded by AndyRob
You can treat this as a caption competition if you like, as I was genuinely baffled as to what exactly was being forbidden here.
Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogWhat does this sign mean?
Related posts:12 months ago Asylum Seeker Contact Point Harley Dudes
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September 11 2010, 9:19am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Weather Photography Competition
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2010/08/04/weather-photography-competition
I've just heard about the British weather photographer of the year competition and decided to enter myself. This provided me with a nice opportunity to look back through my photographs of the summer on Flickr to see if I could find something appropriate. I browsed through my pictures of rain and a few summer seaside scenes and then lost a bit of confidence. I have pictures of light, pictures of scenes affected by weather but nothing I could really call specifically "weather photography". My thoughts turned to extreme weather – tornadoes, floods, ice storms etc but I don't seem to have witnessed many of those recently, not with a handy camera ready anyway. Then it occurred to me I was being far too literal in my interpretation of the competition requirements:
…to find the best amateur photographer of the British elements. Judged by top professionals and experts in the field of photography and weather, 12 finalists will be chosen for the flair, technique and originality they use in capturing British weather.
I've got it down to two photographs that might fit the bill here, the first is a picture of sunlight shining through gaps in the clouds over the sea near the Worms Head, Gower, South Wales. If you click through and look at the large or original sized photo I think it looks quite stunning, and it was quite an unusual weather pattern to observe for me, even if it might happen in such places more regularly than I imagine.
The second picture I'm considering is one of the dried up lake bed during an extended period of drought.
The patterns made by the drying out process in the mud make interesting shapes, and this one looks a bit like a map of Australia, a country where drought is a more familiar problem than southern Britain.
Whichever I decide, (suggestions?) or maybe I can submit both, you can have a chance to vote for me if you feel like it there, but probably more likely and preferable anyway, would be to enter one of your own weather photographs in which case do please leave your link in the comments below.
Disclaimers:
British Weather Photographer of the Year competition is sponsored by Lloyds TSB
This is an evaluation Sponsored Post. Share hosted by Wikio
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Related posts:How to Photograph a Ghost
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August 4 2010, 6:17am | Comments »
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I posted to delicious.com
Flickr: Your Photostream
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aroberts/
Flickr: Your Photostream Flickr photostream andyroberts andyrob
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November 28 2009, 5:48pm | Comments »
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