Some industry bodies recently held the first international Photo Metatdata Conference and the IPTC have released a Photo Metadata White Paper (PDF). These are their conclusions to which I'm interjecting my own thoughts. I'm starting with their last point first, as to me this is the most important... → Read more

I am now in Manhattan, since 10 days. Although I've not yet settled into longer-term digs, I am more or less acclimatised to the change of environment, even appreciating it, if not pace. I'm pretty clear on what I'll be doing for the next 2+ months, still being on track with the plans I laid out in Blore, before ascertaining the next stage... → Read more

Svetlana at Profy has posted about profile aggregators, and I was going to comment but got sufficiently carried away that I opted for a blog post… Profile aggregation is a bit of a misnomer, really they're presence/activity aggregators that are exposing your actions from across many services, from which profiles and identity are built... → Read more

I'll admit it, although I'll happily take what I'm given and probably appreciate it, I'm a desperate cynic and hard to please when choice is available—especially for something I'm passionate about (basically design, and aesthetics—both in look and feel, which includes interaction and usability)... → Read more

Now is typically a good time to reflect on what's happened in the past year, however my year currently ends in the spring when I leave Blore, and will start again after a bit of a break in France. I have two posts written about this time last year that clearly show how much my plan at that time changed, leading to my coming out here... → Read more

I've previously mentioned how Apple have sagely gone about developing an API, not least by hiring an external developer to supplement their team, and by getting a bunch of service providers on board for its launch. We were recently approached to develop an Aperture plug-in and as ever being up for a new challenge... → Read more

This blog has been down for a short while due to an unusually intense attack by HTTP referrer spammers that resulted in many hundreds of thousands of hits. Normally this wouldn't be a problem for a server, but I actually have code to track referrers incorporated into my blog CMS, and it has some experimental routines to try and filter out referrer spam which basically took the whole server down due to the load... → Read more

Bundling Nokia did it with Flickr and now Pure Digital have announced that they're including semi-automated software that allows users of their digital camcorders to easily upload to video sharing sites—Grouper and Google video... → Read more