AdRants has an post about people being upset about ads on Flickr. People seem to be blaming Yahoo! for this practice.

With Yahoo's purchase of Flickr, it didn't take too long for Yahoo text ads to begin appearing next to Flickr member's pictures. Unlike Google AdWords, Yahoo text ads, at least on Flickr, appear on personal Flickr pages whether or not the member wants them. Granted, Flickr provides the service for free which negates a non-paying Flickr member's ability to completely control what appears on their photo pages but one Flickr user, tanais, doesn't like the practice, commenting on an ad placement next to an image of, we assume, his dog, "I do not like my pictures being used to advertise a specific breeder (they may be excellent they may be terrible - that's not the point)... so I shall sit down and think about how best to AdBust this." [AdRants]

IMHO the people complaining are idiots. I've been a user for ages, and Flickr has always had ads for free accounts. It's been one of the big selling points for their Pro accounts. I'm not a fan of advertising, but you can't expect to get something for nothing.

Flickr is one of the few web sites that I think does get it right. And my Pro account has been a very good deal. If it's that much of a big deal pay for the service.

I haven't posted a Boing Boing link in a while, but this one was just too cool. I'd try it, but I don't have that much interesting behind my computer.

Transparent screen illusion: set laptop's wallpaper to a photo of the wall behind it

Transparent Screens is a Flickr photoset of laptops whose deptop wallpaper has been set to a digital photo of the walls and windows behind them, so that they appear to have totally transparent displays. The effect is striking. Link (via Boing Boing) (via Waxy)

Here's another cool Flickr thing, a calendar showing when you've posted pictures in the last five weeks.:

Each day is a link that brings you a page with pictures for that day. Nothing real fancy, but it does look pretty cool I think. You can also view calendars by month.

About 2 weeks ago I received a Nikon D70 Digital SLR camera in trade for some computer work I've been doing for a neighbor. I've long wanted an SLR of any type and this has helped energize the creative side of me a bit. It also means I've been putting pictures online more and making much more use of Flickr. Which has also led to many of my friends asking "so what's so great about this Flickr thing anyways?"

Flickr is a photo hosting/sharing service from ludicorp that's been in beta for a while now. I think I first started using it around 8 months ago, but didn't really get into it until the new camera. I'd fiddled around with running my own photo gallery software a few times, tried a few other services, but nothing really jumped out at me until Flickr. Flickr is all about finding ways to organize and ways to share your photos. Like most other photo hosting services you can upload pictures, create photosets (albums), etc. It also has a bit of social networking type stuff built in so that you can choose to only share photos with your friends or family.

But where Flickr has really hooked me is with some of the other features. The biggest of which are tags. Tags are keywords you can add to a photo to provide more data about it. For instance, in this photo that I uploaded there are a bunch of tags. I can then choose to look at only pictures of mine with the tag 'squirrel', or I could see all the public photos on Flickr that have the tag 'squirrel'. You can also put notes onto a picture that show up when you mouse over a certain area. Oh yes, and they also have it set up so that you can post your pictures to your blog or LiveJournal from within Flickr and they accept photocam posts too.

One thing the tagging system has done is that some tags have a following. People will take pictures that can be tagged with a certain keyword. One of my favorites is squaredcircle, where people post pictures of circular things in a squared image. This one has enough of a following that someone has created a group for pictures like this (groups are things you can join which have their own photo collections).

The other thing that made Flickr my choice for a photo hosting service was that someone wrote a plugin for iPhoto so that you can export your pictures straight from iPhoto (instead of saving them and uploading with the web site or one of their uploading tools). When it's this easy I can't help but want to post stuff all the time.

Flickr is currently free, also also has a Pro option. With a free account you can upload 10MB of pictures a month, have 3 photosets, and people can view the 100 most recent images you have uploaded. The Pro account offers quite a bit more, you can upload 1GB per month, there's unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth use, unlimited photosets, and permanent archiving of high-res images. In the future Ad-free browsing will be added to that. You can check out their FAQ for more info.

The last thing I have to say about Flickr is that it has really inspired me to really learn more about taking pictures and to actually get out there and take them. The other day someone invited me to a group called 'sky'. For the next few days I was on the road and everywhere I went I kept looking for good shots of the sky (and I finally got one I really liked). It really ends up being quite addicting after a bit.

Oh, and no, Flickr isn't paying me to rave on and on about how I like them. I just think it's one of the cooler sites out there and want more of my friends to use it.

Since I saw the Shrek Twinkies at the store today, I just had to get some and take pictures of them. I was only able to stomach a few bites though. I'm just not a huge Twinkie fan.

I posted a bunch more pics to flickr tonight. My mom had asked me to pick up some apples so she could make some apple pies. I took the opportunity to play around with my new camera some more and try out some of the things I'd learned about it. I took a bunch of pictures of this one brook (complete with squirrel), and pictures of the first two houses I lived in.

A picture of me that I don't completely hate. My friend Brian took this while playing with my new camera.

I've been scanning in more pictures for my mom. Both of their trip to New Mexico, which was stunning, and a bunch of old family pictures she had (like ones her father took during World War II), and ran across this old school picture of me from what must have been 2nd or 3rd grade. So I figured I'd post it here.

And on the subject of scanning, I'm still amazed at how much detail the scanner pulls out of those old black and white photos. When you look at the picture itself you think there's just not much there, and then after scanning. WOW. I'll post some more as I get to them.

So that last post was from Flickr, and I'm not sure if I like how it posts. I may have to fiddle around with their template for posting. Overall though it was pretty painless. The only issue is that there aren't any categories for that post.

The wonderful folks at TRSI just delivered my copy of the LE of ROD TV. The case for the series is like an actual book with plastic 'pages' for the DVDs. It's definitely the coolest of the DVD cases I have. I took a picture with my crappy little phone cam since I can't seem to find my digital camera at the moment. Click on the image to the left for a bigger picture.