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Netflix "instant" is so amazing, why haven't I used this before? Canceled cable TV and Blockbuster.

July 19 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Haggis (Sean Loyless), Nicholas Kreidberg, James Furlo and 32 other people liked this

I love it - Robert Burgin

secret: I've spent yesterday and today catching up on NCIS, Numb3rs, and a couple movies. I may need an intervention...oooh...wonder if they have Intervention online, too :) - Robert J Taylor

I'm about to cancel my Netflix. I thought the selection on the instant list was very lean. I did get to catch up on Dexter, but that was about it. I hope they improve the selection soon. - Rich Puskarich

Rich, difference may be that I'm not a connoisseur of TV and Movies and so am pleased with the selection. - Robert J Taylor

i love it too, but they do need to beef up the selection - Josh Haley from iPhone

Maybe someone from @Netflix could comment on their plans to increase the selection for "Watch Instantly"? #Netflix - Robert J Taylor

Hope your willing to waste your Bandwith, Netflix Instant shot up mine, haven't used it since. - Matt Ruiz

Matt, I'm using TimeWarner (and SATX/AUS is known as the best part of their network) and, being a Linux guy don't use my BW for much besides chat, Terminal.app, anyway :). (The info on TW's network came from a friend who was a direct competitor, BTW) - Robert J Taylor

The selection is deep, if you can't find more things you want to watch on watch instantly as it is than you have time to watch, then your taste is horrible. - Richard Lawler

Well, Richard, I like the selection enough that I killed Cable TV and Blockbuster, but I'm also aware that people have different tastes than mine, so I won't go quite there :) - Robert J Taylor

I will, people go looking for a specific thing on watch instantly, then when it's not there "the selection is horrible." But if you go looking for a particular genre or style you're into, or maybe something you haven't gotten into yet, you'll definitely find it well represented. That's the great thing, there's no cost or time investment, if you don't like a flick, just watch something else. Netflix's recommendations work well, but anyone who hasn't should try www.instantwatcher.com - Richard Lawler

Cool! thanks for the link to http://www.instantwatcher.com ; I love sites that make other sites better - Robert J Taylor

If you want to get things done faster in style, buy a Mac. - David Chartier from iPhone

I love it but you WILL couch surf more. I gained 10 pounds this winter, partly due to the Instant Downloads on Netflix. It's heaven...and hell. - michelle lamar

I am now officially addicted to CSI too. - michelle lamar

The Starz! partnership really increases the available items on a limited basis. Add a movie to your regular queue and it may likely show up in the instant queue for a month. - Rob Haas

To keep up with upcoming streaming releases on #Netflix: http://www.streamingsoon.com - Matthew

The Fifth Element party of 8/7!!! Let's all get dressed up in character like they do for Rocky Horror Picture Show! ;) - Josh Haley

Great link, Matthew! Thanks! - Jandy, ConcertMaven of FF

omg fantastic - Richard Lawler

Canceled mine a few months back the streaming is great. Have my computer hooked up to the tv so I can watch Hulu as well - Gary Prechtel

Maybe not the place to ask but does netflix have parental controls on streaming? - David

I don't know, I don't think so. - Richard Lawler

Netflix doesn't have parental controls that i could tell, but my xbox360 does, and that's how my kids watch the streaming media. I've canceled cable, and we watch hulu/netflix now. - John Fogarty from twhirl

I wonder if the Roku box has parental controls? That's what I would be using. - David

Just found out it does not:( - David

(jeff)isageek

Giordano's, Chicagos World Famous Stuffed Pizza - http://likaholix.com/jeffisa...

June 24 from Likaholix - Comment - Like - Share

Michael Hart, Lars Clausen, Bluesun 2600 and 25 other people liked this

enjoyed this when i was in chicago. yummy! - (jeff)isageek from Likaholix

19 more comments

man that looks delicious!!! - (jeff)isageek

That stuff was so incredibly bland when I had it. It made me sad. - Admiral Anika

Anika well that sucks...when we had it...it was delicious!1 - (jeff)isageek

I like Chicago pizza but NY is still my fav. Just looking at Chicago style makes me full. - ronin

That can't be good for you! WANT! - BEX

YUM! Mpls needs that - Eric James

Looks good but that is not pizza. - Dan McFarland

Dan if you are in Chicago it is :) - (jeff)isageek

Wow, that brings back memories of my former life in Chicago. - Martha

Love it! - RAPatton

DAMN. Do they do mail order? EDIT: They do!!! - Derrick

That makes me hungry for some Pizza Chicago in the Bay Area - Alex Scoble

what kind of pizza is!!! yummy!!! - ѕнαнιη from BuddyFeed

This is just awful. I'm in Washington State. I have no place to get some!!! ;-) - Sheryl

Had me some of this last time I was in Chicago... if that was a "small", I'd hate to see a "large!" - Gregg Le Blanc

Looks incredible!! It makes me miss Chicago. - David Finch

My wife raved about it and made sure we had some when we were in Chicago in 2005. - John E. Bredehoft from fftogo

I keep looking at this and it is making me hungry :) - (jeff)isageek

My absolute favorite was the spinach stuffed with extra garlic! - Martha

reminds of Zachary's in the Bay Area :) Nom! - Anna Lynn M.

Anthony Citrano

Flickr Founder Calls Nuked User 'A Dick' | Gawker - http://gawker.com/5288759...

June 12 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

TheHenry, Davis Freeberg, Michael Hart and 64 other people liked this

Look, I think flickR should be able to control their network and its content however they wish. But this policy is ridiculous and evil (wiping out all user data and not letting them get it back) and they deserve all the negative press that comes with it, especially when they act like dismissive assholes. - Anthony Citrano from Bookmarklet

104 more comments

Is he the guy that wrote that hilarious exit letter re: silver mining? - anna sauce

Same dude anna. - vijay

god, I love Stuart (finally read post) nice way to stand behind your colleague. - anna sauce

exactly. : ) Title is misleading. - vijay

I'm not a fan of Flickr but it's hard for me to summon any outrage on behalf of that dick. - Chester

Check this out.. last line from Johnson- "Ask Heather to fill you in". lol! Credit to Stewart for showing the level of restraint he did. - vijay

flickr is a great service but their terms of use and the ways they enforce them makes them much bigger dicks than any justifiably irate user. And I am not trying to compliment them. But it's typical corporate internet arrogance. - Rick Powell

What a great chance to respond to a CR issue without having to represent the company admirably... given a chance to say what he actually felt, I think Stewart's response was maybe not totally called for, but totally funny and he has the right. Way to back up your former peeps too. - SAM

Well, whatever. I think Stewart is a dick, but far fewer people will read that than have read and will read his e-mail and will make their own minds up. - Rick Powell

So, if somebody emailed me to ask me to mediate a problem they were having with my former employer, I suspect that my response would both be ruder and shorter. - Wirehead

I completely agree Anthony, it is unbelievable and I have a Pro account :-| - Luca Conti

@Wirehead Well, in that case, you, just like Stewart, would be going out of your way to be a dick yourself. All he really needed to write was the first sentence, or not respond at all. But flickr's policy of deleting a user's photos without warning and without appeal, pretty much sums up corporate assholism for me. - Rick Powell

My capital rules of staying on the internet: 1. be nice. 2. if you can't be nice, be civil. 3. if you can't be civil, be offline. They served me well in the last 15 years. (and - honestly - I trust Heather's judgement in managing communities a wee bit more than a random guy trolling comment threads, being nuked from existence and throwing a tantrum about it) - dario

There is usually little difference between a nice person enforcing bad corporate policy and a bad person doing it, except for the style in which it's done. Apologies to "Heather," I'm sure, since I don't know her personally. [insert eye rolls here.] - Rick Powell

this is why i stopped using flikr. They dont CARE. - Jim Hague

As somebody who manages online communities for a living, I'm going to have to say that the response here was probably the right one (granted I haven't seen the original threads, and he could have afforded to be a little more civil with his language). Trolls live for this shit. And most of them are dicks. - mike fabio

Troll is a dismissive word, used ubiquitously and uncritically. It's been MY experience that while there are genuine trolls, the word is not infrequently used to dismiss someone who brings up an uncomfortable political issue. No excuse for being a dick, of course. - Rick Powell

What concerns me in this issue is that if someone at Yahoo decides that they disagree with something I said or the way I said it, they are willing to completely remove my account. It makes me distrustful of the cloud as a place to store my data. With that said, Yahoo was perfectly within their rights to make this move. It just seems like they don't care to engender confidence in the integrity of the data on their servers. - Scott Ohlemacher

I have wondered if flickr so easily deletes paying customers photos because they have never provided an easy way for anyone to download all of their collection once it's in the cloud. I guess they think, why would anyone want to do that? - Rick Powell

@Rick Powell: You're right that there is no excuse for being a dick, but dickery is subjective. - Scott Ohlemacher

And I think deleting a paying customer's photos, even if he violated terms of service, and not the law, for instance, is simply bad corporate policy. That is really being a dick, in my opinion. - Rick Powell

Amen, Rick, Amen. Perhaps the real issue was that flickr was afraid of losing the White House photostream? - Scott Ohlemacher

Wow, just wow. Just goes to show you that money (or talent for that matter) and class don't always go hand in hand. - Alex Scoble

Finally Flickr's actions as Judge, Jury and Executioner in deleting unwanted members is getting some mainstream coverage due to the political angle. Even if some disagree whether it was the correct forum to air his grievances on the WH's detainee photo policy, it appears to have been measured and civil. Certainly not grounds for a non-appealable deletion. So exactly how does Flickr safeguard our photos (i.e. backups), if deleted members cannot be retrieved? Cloud-computing, or merely dust? - Nils Sandin

Yeah- seems like a draconian move by Yahoo. - anna sauce

another Community Manager from a different site chiming in... Flickr was totally within their rights to toast this guy *and* his account. The TOS on any site is not just an agreement between a single user and the company with regard to their own content, but also between the community at large and the company that OTHER users will be subjected to the TOS. This guy was spamming and... more... - Edubya

Spam? What exactly was he selling? If I read the accounts right, every American needs to have those pictures shoved under their noses until they wake the frak up. Really, the vagueness in rhetoric that everyone just accepts here is amazing. They were pictures of torture. It was a political protest. Yahoo was certainly within their "rights," although the idea of assigning rights to a corporation makes me queasy, but that doesn't mean I think the world is better off because Yahoo gets to do what it wants. - Rick Powell

@Edubya They have a right and obligation to uphold their TOS. However, asymmetrical responses like this are not a good way to keep up a good image. - Scott Ohlemacher

Yeah, this definitely falls under the definition of protected speech in my opinion. Yahoo isn't looking good over this. - Alex Scoble

"protected speech"? I don't think the constitution said you were guaranteed the right be able to post on flickr. The constitution doesn't mean everyone has to put up with your shit. A political protest in flickr comments is a pretty lazy freedom fighter anyway. That said, wiping out a paying customers stored images without a warning is really messed up, and it seems like they do that quite frequently. - Richard Lawler

It may not be constitutionally protected speech in this context, but in another it would be. That should at least make Yahoo pause and handle the situation carefully and diplomatically just to avoid the backlash. - Scott Ohlemacher

The constitution says that political speech is protected. It doesn't specify forum. - Alex Scoble

I think that Anthony's first comment here sums up the situation admirably. Flickr did something legal that was morally ambiguous. - Scott Ohlemacher

Just because speech is protect by the constitution doesn't mean that a private service has to allow unfettered expression of it. - Kevin Pedraja

No, it's not protected speech but it just points out why we can't trust corporations with our data, with anything. They don't give a shit and they don't have to. - Rick Powell

Ah, I love it when people speak up to defend the rights of corporations! Give them exemptions to all moral obligations! So encouraging for our democracy. Whether or not they have the legal right is irrelevant if we are talking about ethics. This is, however, the kind of culture we have. - Rick Powell

A rule against spamming comments != a law prohibiting free speech. How is a corporation morally obligated to put up with spammers, no matter what the content is they're spamming? - Richard Lawler

This may not hold up to scrutiny, but as a publicly traded company reliant on their image to maintain a user base and therefore profits, don't they have an obligation to shareholders to handle situations like this in the most diplomatic way possible? - Scott Ohlemacher

Sometimes the truth hurts and hearing it from someone you hope will help you hurts even more. I've seen Johnson's trolling and he deserved this treatment, plain and simple. - Rene Wirtz

Corporations are not morally obligated to do anything. That's the point. That is why they cannot be trusted. Further, I didn't make that equivalency between spam and free speech. You did. Not to mention which the word "spam" is debatable in this case, not least because corporate policies disdain politics, by default, a position which, of course, always favors the powerful. - Rick Powell

debating whether this is a free speech issue or not is moot. Flickr (or pretty much anywhere else different from your own site) is private property, they have community guidelines which are designed for "the greater good" (which translates nicely to: having the largest number of satisfied users/customers possible). Flickr community guidelines basically boil down to "Behave. If you don't, it may very well be one strike, you're out". - dario

Rick, not to defend Flickr because I think they've handled this poorly (from a PR point of view if nothing else). But if you sign up to use a service and agree to the TOS, you are voluntarily agreeing to a certain code of conduct. If you violate the TOS, you are subject to the penalties of doing so. Johnson is free to take his protest to another venue. That said, Flickr could be a bit more accommodating and give the guy his images back. - Kevin Pedraja

and yes, losing your stuff sucks bad, and yes, they probably should implement some sort of "pre-ban" which lets you download your content back on - say - a two weeks notice before the termination of your account. - dario

Is it an appropriate solution for us to "vote with our eyeballs" and boycott the service until they change some of these policies in a public way? - Scott Ohlemacher

Peeps, the First Amendment protects you against government action. You have no constitutional right to a flickR account. There's a difference between saying "flickR sucks for doing this" and "flickR has no right to do this." They certainly do have a right to do it, and I have a right to think they're assholes because of it. But I guess that's what I said initially (sorry.) - Anthony Citrano

@Kevin Have you read the TOS lately? Do you know what NIPSA means? I certainly don't know, after reading it a dozen times. Their TOS is not as arcane, opaque and just plain retarded as ebay's, which must set some sort of record in the history of incomprehensible corporate jargon, but it's not exactly transparent. I think they can ban me if they want. But after accepting my money and... more... - Rick Powell

also, on the "morally reprehensible" issue: this has nothing to do with ethics. Turning over your users' personal data to the chinese government IS unethical, and still, as a publicly shared company, you have to answer to your shareholders first, which might -or might not- be interested in your moral high ground - dario

@dario What you described is why, in my youth, I believed in economic democracy, which, I think, only the Zapatistas actually advocate now. - Rick Powell

I think you people are confusing how the flickr software is presently implemented with an arbitrary policy decision. This is common with people who don't know what they are talking about but like to sound like they do. I twittered this on Tuesday... unless you've actually hacked big software that runs on large server farms, STFU about how you'd change how a large website that runs on large server farms would work. - Wirehead

Oh, I love that one! Technological barriers, the last refuge of the nihilist. Give me a frakin break. This thread has seen it all, right? First-name dropping, specious arguments about the rights of corporations, equating speech with spam, and now claiming the high ground for those who "have hacked big software." I believe I'll have another beer and thank the gods I have never been anywhere near large server farms. Big cow farms, yes. - Rick Powell

Anthony...I agree. Chalk it up to another Festivus miracle, my friend! lol - Carlton Hackett

@Wirehead That was needlessly vitriolic. Couldn't be civil and say something like "There are technological limitations related to policy implementation in communities of this size" rather than making assumptions about the skills and experiences of the people in the discussion and then disparaging them? You didn't contribute to this conversation at all, you detracted from it. @everyone else: sorry for feeding the troll. - Scott Ohlemacher

Dude, I'm just stating an unpleasant truth. But it's very popular amongst people with a little grain of knowledge to assume that they can apply this everywhere. Do I sit here and make suggestions for how cattle ranchers might improve production? No, because I recognize that I don't know a damn thing about cattle ranching and would probably suggest something really stupid. - Wirehead

On that note, I'm going to go have a beer and watch the hockey game. - Scott Ohlemacher

I'm a bit sad that Mr. Johnson lost all his pictures. (Rule 1: always make backups!) But the more I hear about his one-man crusade, the more I agree with Stewart Butterfield's assessment. There are right ways to get one's message out, and wrong ways. Mr. Johnson thought his cause was so noble, his message so urgent, that the normal rules didn't apply to him. Alas for his 1200 pictures, he was wrong. - Pat Rice

@Pat I would guess that a large percentage of the world's dissidents would say that the normal rules don't apply to them, and they would be right, else they would not be dissidents. As for your comment, your rhetoric is precious (alas? a bit sad?) and your argument, if I can call it that, empty. Anyone else? - Rick Powell

Alex: The constitution defines how government must act. The speech is protected from the government squelching it. No private company is obligated to allow anyone to speak in any way other than the way it wants. Period. The constitution does not give you the right to make the New York Times print anything and everything you want, nor does it give you the right to make flickr do it either. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Most law, and most particularly, the Constitution points back to principles that Dick Cheney, among others, refers to as "quaint," but that doesn't mean they're not valued or have no value, or don't constitute, get that word, the basis for understanding moral behavior. Most citizens understand this. Corporations, unique in history we will eventually realize, are somehow allowed to opt... more... - Rick Powell

Big, scary, god-like (it's a technology, Captain, but none like we've ever seen) server farm or not, I expect backups have to be available. Maybe only for a week (I think that's how long I was told Sprint's picture mail server kept backups), but for some period of time. - MiniMage TKDteacher of FF

See, you are just proving my point, BoringMage. There is a difference between backups and restoring deleted accounts. Given the expected failure rate of disk drives, if flickr didn't keep backups, you'd know. :) - Wirehead

Flickr could disable the account and prevent harmful activity without deletion of customer data, and that is what they should be doing in these cases. This is more about consumer rights than freedom of speech. - Mike Chelen

I'm afraid it cannot be "protected speech" if you spam the same comment 10, 20 more times on individual pictures. Then it becomes heckling. These are the flickr terms: "Don’t vent your frustrations, rant, or bore the brains out of other members. Flickr is not a venue for you to harass, abuse, impersonate, or intimidate others. If we receive a valid complaint about your conduct, we’ll... more... - Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)

If they did warn him and he kept spamming, then he deserved what happened. If he didn't back up his own data after being warned and continued doing the same thing, who can he blame? - Richard Lawler

Jeez, I keep commenting, since so many people find so many creative or not-so-creative ways of avoiding the real points. There is no easy way to back up one's flickr collection, which in some cases involves clicking twice for each photo - which can run into thousands of clicks. If you knew what you were talking about, then you would already know this. flickr's API does not allow... more... - Rick Powell

Yes, we've heard your opinion Rick. That's great. It still doesn't justify the guy's behavior. It doesn't entirely pardon flickr, and I don't think anyone is, but he made his choice. - Richard Lawler

Well, Richard, if anyone had actually heard my opinion then they would comment as if they understood the contents of my opinion, which you clearly haven't. I have not made justifications about his behavior, mostly because I really don't fully know the extent and content of his behavior. Do you? Perhaps you can fill us all in? It seems clear he was obnoxious, as many people are who want... more... - Rick Powell

Rick, I am not sure about your point - in order to upload to Flickr you need to have the image in the first place, so the assumption is you still have the originals and could re-upload to a new account (I certainly have my images on 2 drives here plus several places online). If you somehow lose the originals you should take copies back out of Flickr immediately, not rely on Flickr (or anything) as your sole copy. PS: have you tried http://www.ghacks.net/2009... - Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)

Congratulations, Joelle, your life is a lot more stable than mine was. I started uploading to flickr when I was homeless and had no computer of my own. Borrowed cameras, with personal images, and gift memberships from readers of my blog. This year will be the first time I have to decide whether to flip the bird to flickr or pay up. 4 years of connections, not to mention photos. Not an... more... - Rick Powell

Just for the purpose of backup perhaps you can switch the images from private to public (but w. adult warning to avoid people being offended) - run the backup, then change it back? Just circumvent the system temporarily so you have your images at least! I totally agree with you that the feeling that the plug can be pulled under you is an uneasy one, but the cases where flickr has done... more... - Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)

You have totally disarmed me. ;-) I will think about trying that, and any indie, open, distributed options you have would be welcome. - Rick Powell

I have a lot of thoughts on this as some might expect. May have to break them down into a few posts. I saw this letter from Stewart well before it appeared in Valleywag. It first appeared in the DeleteMe Uncensored group that I admin on Flickr. My first problem with the letter is that I don't think Shepherd should have posted it there or anywhere at all. It was private correspondence... more... - Thomas Hawk

Had Shepherd asked Stewart for permission to post it and Stewart said yes I think that'd probably be ok then. But I don't think Shepherd did that and I don't think Stewart gave permission for it to be published. While I support Shepard's fight against Flickr, I did tell him that I didn't think it was right that he published this email. I know that I personally won't publish emails... more... - Thomas Hawk

Stewart and Heather are friends so I'd think it fair to assume that he'd stick up for Heather in this case without admittedly knowing many of the specific details. I think a lot of us might as our first reaction stick up for our friends. Unfortunately, I think Stewart's response turns this debate more into a personality thing than it should be. I think there are three problems with the way that Flickr handled the Shepherd Johnson case. - Thomas Hawk

1. Obama campaigned on a platform of transparency in Govt. Deleting critical comments is not transparency. Obama is using social media to enhance his transparency. Deleting critical comments doesn't add much to his credibility in that department. This is not an Obama campaign photostream. It's the official Whitehouse photostream produced by your and my tax dollars. The Obama... more... - Thomas Hawk

2. Shepherd Johnson should not have had his account deleted over the comments that he posted. He linked to a photo (not his but from another photostream as allowed by flickr that was also nuked) depicting detainee prison abuse with a message protesting Obama's support of a new law to suppress additional photos from being released. Of all speech political speech should be given the... more... - Thomas Hawk

3. Flickr should not be deleting *any* accounts permanently and irrevocably. To be so arrogant that they would assume that they will never make a mistake in an account deletion is mind numbing. The fact that they refuse to address this issue and simply dismiss anyone who suggests otherwise is an equally horrible position of arrogance. Instead Flickr should change their policy with... more... - Thomas Hawk

+++ @TH - Nils Sandin

Scott, this is not just about a Flickr account deletion. According to Shepherd, Heather was not aware of some of the comments that were deleted on the President's stream. The only way those comments could have been deleted (if not by flickr) would have been by Shepherd himself or someone who controls the President's stream. I've personally written to the White House on it and posted a... more... - Thomas Hawk

And there is no political bias on my part in this one. I voted for Obama and support him as my President even if I might not vote for him again. I'm a Democrat who believes strongly that censorship is wrong, even if it's done by a popular Democratic President. - Thomas Hawk

Political speech does not and should not deserve a wider berth if the guy was breaking the rules. That should be entirely content agnostic. - Richard Lawler

When are you going to realize that Obama and Bush policy wise are one and the same? - John Blanton from twhirl

Richard, the problem with that position is that the "rules" at flickr are very, very subjective. According to Shepherd, Heather told him his account was deleted because he posted a link to a detainee abuse photo and because he was "spamming" flickr, and yet Heather refused to define what "spamming" was and there is definitely no specific rule about not linking to detainee abuse photos.... more... - Thomas Hawk

so in Flickr's subjective implementation of their rules? Yes, I do think that political speech should be given a wider berth. Not directly relevant, but U.S. Courts have consistently given political speech a wider berth when dealing with First Amendment issues. - Thomas Hawk

If you think flickrs rules are bad then thats great, but its not censorship for them to have and enforce rules on their own website.This is not a first amendment issue and flickr shouldn't treat it as one, that amendment does not give you the rights being implied here. If your Dad sent a complaint to flickr about you posting his photo and you continued to repost it, then sure your stream should be deleted. - Richard Lawler

Richard it is actually censorship if Flickr deletes an account. It might not be Govt. censorship (which also may or may not have taken place in this case). Censorship doesn't have to be Govt sponsored to be considered censorship. It may be *justifiable* censorship to you but it is still censorship. - Thomas Hawk

No, it's censorship if they remove it because of the content, which is exactly why whether it is political speech or not should never come into play. - Richard Lawler

Moral of the story: Don't be a dick. - © b e e n s w a n k

Richard, Flickr did remove Shepherds account because of content. That's exactly why his account was deleted. Content of an image (detainee torture abuse) and content of his words (protesting the Obama administration) that they called spam but would not define. - Thomas Hawk

You've decided it was the content based on their lack of a hard definition for spam, but that doesn't make it so. What he was doing doesn't serve for justification for how he went about doing it. - Richard Lawler

Not sure anyone in this long thread has corrected the assumption that this is "censorship." Censorship is inherently a government act. If it's not an act of government, by definition, it isn't censorship. - Jon Lebkowsky

At least, if you folow the strict, original defnition of the term. There's a huge issue here, but I don't see it as an issue of censorship. - Jon Lebkowsky

Censorship by any definition is anyone preventing anyone else from fully using our right to free speech. .this is censorship of the worst kind. - John Blanton from twhirl

Jon: Censorship is not limited to government accts. Your confusing "censorship" with "government censorship," a common mistake that people make. Since you mention the definition of the term, check out the definition in the dictionary. Richard, according to Shepherd, his account was deleted in part for the photo and in part for what they call spamming (without any notice or warning I... more... - Thomas Hawk

Again, you have a right to free speech in /public/ - Flickr is a /private/ place. Just as you can dictate the speech that goes on in your own home, so can Flickr in their message boards. It may be censorship, but it is not infringing on your right to free speech We are all free to bitch about Flickr in public. So's the guy they dumped. Flickr is free to censor any damn thing they like... more... - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

It is censorship, but it's perfectly legal and "fine" for them to do, however offensive and inadvisable it may be - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Rob, I've never said his speech on Flickr is protected. I've never said that what Flickr did her was illegal. Flickr can censor me for wearing a green shirt if they want to. Nobody's disputing that. I'm saying it's bad policy and as one of the most active community members who has put thousands of hours into the site and thousands of pieces of content into the site, I think their... more... - Thomas Hawk

I do wish actually though that the White House would in fact address the question of whether or not they censor comments on their own Flickrstream. I think it's a fair question in light of Obama's oft promised new "transparency" in Govt. - Thomas Hawk

Thomas: no you never said any of those things. And i have to agree that it's bad policy. I think in general censorship sucks no matter who does it. And definitely I think you're correct that the Obama Administration should address that question. It's a fair question regardless of promised "transparency" - it's a fair question because it is OUR government. (of, for, and BY the people, right?)But, we've sen on several occasions already that the Obama White House cannot & will not live up to it's promises. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

If this is just a debate over corporate policy, then perhaps we ought to stop slinging around emotionally-charged & easily-misconstrued words like 'censorship'. Calling it censorship implies that it's a First Amendment, freedom-of-speech issue. It isn't. P.S. To Rick Powell: nice ad hominem there. - Pat Rice

Thanks Pat :) Well said. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Pat, calling it *government* censorship (which in fact may or may not have taken place here) implies that it's a First Amendment freedom-of-speech issue. Calling it censorship is simply stating what it is. If FriendFeed decided to delete a user's account for posting images of prison detainee abuse that would also be censorship. Fortunately for all of us, Friendfeed doesn't seem to be... more... - Thomas Hawk

It does suck, but we do have to remember that this type of censorship is also an exercise of freedom as well. No matter how much it sucks, it is Flickr's right to do it. (no matter how bad it is for their users, or their own company it's still their right -we are all free to engage in our own stupidity) "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." -Voltaire - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

If I paint my message on the side of the Washington Monument, and the National Park Service sends somebody to wash it off, is that censorship? - Pat Rice

"I will defend your right to say it" indeed - but I won't defend your right to yell it, say it over and over right in someone's face, or heckle in a public space. And I wont defend your right to say it by force to people who dont want to hear it. None of these are free speech - As soon as your speech infringes on the free speech or freedom of others, it's no longer free speech. If... more... - Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)

Sorry, Joelle, I can only say you've never encountered an issue where your passion and your politics overrode your sense of propriety, (I have) because that is what you are talking about now. Unless you have suddenly become a public figure at the level of the President of the United States. Free speech as a right protects us against the government, not against corporate assholes, which... more... - Rick Powell

LANjackal to LANjackal's feed, Movie Reviews, TheNextWeb Forum

The Official Netflix Blog: New Ways to Enjoy Netflix on your Xbox 360 - http://blog.netflix.com/2009...

June 1 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Michael Hart and Mathew™ one of a kind liked this

"If you are an Xbox Gold LIVE member, you will be able to browse and add movies and TV episodes to your instant Queue directly from your Xbox 360 – you don’t have to go to your computer. And with the announcement of Xbox LIVE Party, you will be able to simultaneously watch movies on your Xbox 360 with up to seven friends – bantering back and forth about what you are watching. More than one million Xbox LIVE Gold members have already enjoyed more than 1.5 billion minutes of movies and TV episodes via Netflix since November 2008" - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

OAuth

Official Google Data APIs Blog: OAuth Playground: Open-sourced - http://googledataapis.blogspot.com/2009...

May 20 from Delicious/tag/oauth - Comment - Like - Share

Michael Hart liked this

Thomas Hawk

Netflix Watch Now on Your Microsoft Media Center PC, But No Extender Support - http://thomashawk.com/2009...

May 20 from Thomas Hawk Digital Connection - Comment - Like - Share

Mrsth, Michael Hart, Craig Eddy and Lars Clausen liked this

An empty announcement from Microsoft as far as I'm concerned. Without the extender support or at least the promise of extender support in the future, this new feature is basically worthless -- unfortunately, because Netflix Watch Now is pretty damn cool. - Thomas Hawk

Mona Nomura

September 27, 2008 - Comment - Like - Share

alexxandra, Snipergirl, Mitchell Tsai and 318 other people liked this

HAHAHAHA - Johnny Worthington

34 more comments

You guys, this image is SO huge! HAHA - Mona Nomura

Lol - Farzad

Ignore! :D - MissSaghar

ترابلشوتینگ: to solve your problem you must shut down your computer and fuck yourself immedately! - M∂hmood

eAHAoeuhAEOUAEhoaehoueaH - MustaBR

رافائل هنگ کرد! :)))))))))))))) - M∂hmood

Like for saghar :D viva MicroSoft :D :D - Farzad

They have those on Gilligan's Island. - Trish R

amazing - Marcos Vicente

This is one of my new favorites. - Kevin Bondelli

i wonder what mona is like at a flea market - she probably finds the rare gems! - Allen Stern

Too bad there isn't a StumbleUpon for flea markets. - Kevin Bondelli

Allen: Will work for free food! ;) - Mona Nomura

I want to randomly deploy this into a piece of software as an easter egg. - Kevin Bondelli

aaaahhhh, windows.... hahahahha - Melissa Maskevich

I made a Mac error pop-up to keep this one company. http://friendfeed.com/e... - Kevin Bondelli

This *still* makes me laugh out loud lollll!! - Mona Nomura

wow september? nice to see this again hehe - Alfredo

As Carlos said, I am "crate digging" . . . my feed used to be so visual. I am finding ALL sorts of posts. - Mona Nomura from IM

Oh shit that's funny! - BEX

just laughed at this one again :) - (jeff)isageek

Hehehe - Jon, the Chilled Beartato from fftogo

lol! - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Fly, little butterfly, Fly! - Martha

oh this must be at least thirty-seven years old. but still funny! - Kirill Bolgarov

It can't be THAT old; it's done in XP look-and-feel... - Karl Knechtel

Love it! - Marcos Vicente

nice! I've never seen this one before. - Phil Maxwell

- the f word - Monique

Karl, that was a joke - Kirill Bolgarov

XA x333 - Dobromir Hadzhiev

Classy. \p/ - ElijahBailey-Zu of FF <0,

Had me LOL ... Literally. - Charlie Anzman

:D:D - Orçun the Nucro

Lol - yasin ghasemi

Thomas Hawk

My Photography Workflow 2009 - http://thomashawk.com/2009...

May 7 from Thomas Hawk Digital Connection - Comment - Like - Share

Jérôme Flipo, Tristan Seligmann, graywolf and 175 other people liked this

Thanks for sharing! - Scott Loftesness

43 more comments

Awesome, thank you Thomas! - Holger Eilhard

Interesting differences on how I use to do it. I usually copy the photos of the CF card to my desktop, geotag them (either automatically using an Amod GPS logger and GPSPhotoLinker or - just like you - manually with Geotagger - thanks to @craigstanton for that btw) then import them using Lightroom and apply some keywords during that step. From there it's pick, edit, output, upload. - Holger Eilhard

Nice thank you for sharing, cool read. - Dan Morrill AKA Techwag

Thanks for sharing. I didn't know about Pro Photo Tools - I'll have to look into it. - John (a.k.a. dendroica)

Holger, I don't geotag first because 85% of my photos or so I never finish or publish. It would be too much unnecessary work to geotag everything for me. I suppose if the entire shoot was at one location this might be preferable, but frequently I'm walking around a lot and don't want to do any more keywording and geotagging than I have to. - Thomas Hawk

Thomas, have you ever considered getting a logger that you carry around to ease that process? Or using the - well, pretty expensive - automatic Canon solution in form of that WFT battery grip? - Holger Eilhard

Holger, I have thought about that and will probably end up doing that in the end. I'm not crazy about having to use the battery grip with my 5D M2, which is already very heavy and bulky and I'm also not crazy about having to synch up software and my images later with an external unit. Most likely though I'd expect to begin using the Canon solution (probably within the next year) on walks where I'm moving around alot and not using it for single location shoots which are easier to mass geotag. - Thomas Hawk

I know there are GPS units for Nikons that sit on the flash shoe and are pretty low profile. That might work better than a battery grip. Excellent post, by the way. - Ken Davidson

I hope Canon will release a cheaper solution to solve that problem. Getting an 700 Euro BG + 100 Euro GPS receiver isn't really the way I like... The Nikon thing is just ~200 Euro and gets the job done. - Holger Eilhard

Ken, for Canon there's only the battery grip (wireless file transmitter, not the regular BG) which allows you to plug in a GPS receiver... - Holger Eilhard

Thanks for sharing this. Was wondering why you don't keyword before you export the .jpgs. Also, since you don't mention DNG, I'm assuming you don't use it. Was wondering what your thoughts were on DNG. - Andy Roth

Andy, I suppose I could keyword before I export. I'm not sure what I really gain from that though. I suppose I like keywording later because I can get my developing done faster on individual images and export them out --that way I can begin seeing processed photos on my screensaver faster. This way if there blemishes I can still fix them. - Thomas Hawk

The advantage is, if you keyword before you export, both the RAW files and the .jpgs will contain the keywords. - Andy Roth

As far as DNG, I've never felt like I get much from that over RAW. As the photos are already RAW it seems unnecessary to do an additional conversion to DNG when I don't really understand the value of that format other than it is a more open format than Canon's proprietary RAW format. Personally I think that I'll always have a way to access those Canon files or at least have access to a... more... - Thomas Hawk

In terms of keywording RAW files, I guess I haven't really seen the value there when the exact same image is keyworded in JPG. It's pretty simple for me to search for a JPG file either on my hard drive or on Flickr/Zooomr and simply refer to the date in the metadata if I need to find the original RAW file, but I suppose whether you keyword before export or after export really is simply a matter of personal preference. - Thomas Hawk

Interesting that you use the Canon Camera Window for downloading. You may be the first pro I've run into who depends on it, but it makes sense. - Nick Savides

Nick, it's just super easy and reliable and gets the job done. There may in fact be better ways of doing it but it's probably one of those things that because it's not broke, why fix it. If I saw tangible evidence towards a better way to offload photos I'd certainly consider it. For a while I was annoyed that Camera Window would auto start Canon's processing software after it finished transferring the files, but then I just deleted that software and it stopped autoloading. - Thomas Hawk

the other thing about Camera Window is that it's lighter than Lightroom and takes less memory/resources. So if I'm out on a shoot and take a coffee break for a few minutes to offload files I don't need to boot up Lightroom necessarily. Normally under that scenario I just want to get the images off my card as quick and fast as possible. It does mean that later I need to synch the folders with Lightroom but that's not really a big deal for me. - Thomas Hawk

I liked your thoughts on using A and B folders to order your uploads. I've been doing that for a while, but in general I got tired of the manual upload process. I figured time could be saved by automating this, so I wrote a script that runs each day and chooses random A and B pictures to upload via the Flickr API. Once they're up. they are removed from the A and B folders. I never miss a day uploading, and it keeps me motivated to replenish those upload queues. - Tom Harrison

Great TH! More stuff for me to change. In the process I realized how out of date my workflow posts are. Time to update them methinks! http://www.phillprice.com/index... - Phill Price

Tom that sounds like an excellent way to automate thing and establishes your geek cred at a much higher level than mine. ;) I'd have no idea how to do a script for that. I actually like the manual process though as I can determine the exact order that they are to be uploaded in while looking at them. - Thomas Hawk

Haha, yeah Computer Science nerd here. I might publish the script at some point. - Tom Harrison

10 TB of photos is a _LOT_. I hope to one day get there but I my D40 doesn't make big enough RAW files. :) How do you search across all those images? Is there software reliable and powerful enough to not choke on that much data? I wish I could buy some sort of white label Flickr for this purpose. - EricaJoy

(I just use pixelpipe to upload from LR or if a delayed post I send a delayed email (through pixelpipe) - it posts to phillprice.com automatically (through my own WP plugin) when there's a new photos with the same title in all four places (smugmug, ipernity, zooomr, flickr) then th fave and comment grabbing comes in too; bliss! - Phill Price

Nice write up TH and well explained. Your process is almost identical to my current process except for a few minor things such as your geo tagging processes. - Justin Korn

Thomas - thanks for sharing; both your workflow and your photos. We mere photographic mortals can only aspire to your throughput, but sharing elements of the workflow lets us feel just a bit closer to the bar you're setting. - Rob Kramer

As a side note - fiddling w/ LR means it now rather handily imports photos off the memory card, and drops into folders organised and named by date, which works great for organising. Also, Jeffrey Friedl's got a great series of plugins that export to Flickr (and Facebook, among others) with the bonus that a metadata field for 'uploaded to' either service is marked yes or no - another option for keeping track of what's been published. - Rob Kramer

Yes thanks for sharing. This technical stuff is always very intriguing. Here's an interesting question - how much awareness do you have of what's in your photo library and where it is? I'm thinking about my own library of about 13,000 images of which 4,300 have been processed and I can still usually see a photo and know when and where it was taken. I'm wondering at what point that starts to become more difficult. Or does one never lose track much? - Tom Harrison

I don't know how he did it, but it's amazing - Daniele Di Gregorio

...great share @THawk! - .LAG liked that

You shoot so many photos I'm surprised you're manually geo-tagging photos the way you are. I would recommend a more automated method. I run a little app on my iPhone 3G called Trails which records my movements as I do a photowalk. It records a number of way points along the way and in the end you end up with a GPX file. Jeff Friedl has a cool little plugin for Lightroom... more... - Kenny Louie

Simple, yet effective. Inspiring for me to get up to speed - Bruno Raymond

Thanks for doing this Thomas. Always useful to share and understand workflows regardless of the topic. - Mark Krynsky

Thank you for sharing. How do you carry your stuff all day? Backpack? Bags? I know that having the camera with you full time it's the rule no. 1 but I believe it must be really tiring. When I go shooting I always try to limit as much as possible the extra lenses I take with me, just to be more free and comfortable. - ialla

Interesting article about your workflow. About DNG there is one huge advantage in my opinion. You keep all your metadata in one single file and get rid of the sidecars. The main disadvantage is the time it takes to convert the RAW-files to DNG. Otherwise I work very much like you except that I use Lightroom for import and HoudahGeo for geotagging. - Håkan Dahlström

Thanks for sharing this Thomas, I am actually thinking of implementing part of your workflow in mine. I think I have really come to a point now wehere I have to start thinking about my own personal workflow very seriously. One question: Do you delete all unflagged photos afetr your LR Session? - Alexander Kesselaar

thawk, great post. and some great comments. 1) you should consider releasing your lightroom development presets (like Matt does http://www.lightroomkillertips.com/archive... ) 2) in order to get the flickr pics onto my blog (using BlogEngine.net), i wrote a little extension that grabs the latest, formats them in a "lightbox". AutoFlickr. that saves me lots of copy&pasting. http://autoflickr.codeplex.com/ demo--> http://webguide.hopto.org/autofli... - big luzer

ialia, I use a Lowepro camera backpack (the CompuDayPak) that goes with me everywhere every day. Erica, I often will use Flickr or Zooomr to search for photos by tags and then look at the date of the image and go to that folder when need be. Sometimes I'll use desktop search if I can't find an image, but it seems to be slower. - Thomas Hawk

As for geotagging: Wouldn't it be nice if I could correlate my 'date + time taken' data in my picture with my iPhone GPS information? How close would you have to synchronize the clocks to get a reasonably accurate stamp...? - Charlie Owen

Crap. Kenny Louie said above you can already do this. Amazing. - Charlie Owen

Thomas, great, same backpack as I have. Still weighs I lot though... - ialla

And behind the scenes...All this takes a very very long time so it is peppered with brief gasps for air, hugs & kisses for his wife whenever he comes w/in 3 ft, playing hoops with the 2 boys, reading to all 4 children, providing guidance on homework & conflict resolution, pouring his wife a glass of wine nightly followed by a foot rub & netflix to coax her to sleep so he can continue... more... - Mrsth

@Mrsth: I can totally imagine that whole scene in my head. Incredible. :) - Bryan Villarin

Thomas, I would love to know your secrets on time management...I honestly don't see how you can do it all and still have a full time job to boot! Whew! @Mrsth I am impressed! - Susan Dennis

Anthony Baker

The AP Finds Surging Demand for Online Video News - http://www.beet.tv/2009...

April 30 from Google Reader - Comment - Like - Share

Michael Hart liked this

jr conlin

Death Is In the Air - http://blog.unitedheroes.net/archive...

April 28 from jr conlin's ink stained banana - Comment - Like - Share

Michael Hart liked this

Anthony Baker

Will Ferrell's going to be in an episode of Man vs. Wild in June. Urine-drunk, no less. Cannot wait. http://www.people.com/people...

April 24 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Michael Hart liked this

Dare Obasanjo

Ambulance Fail - http://www.youtube.com/watch...

April 9 from Digg - Comment - Like - Share

Michael Hart and Travis Koger liked this

Simon

Google uncloaks once-secret server | CNET News - http://news.cnet.com/8301-10...

April 1 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Nick Mutton, Rob Boek, deakaz and 69 other people liked this

"Google's big surprise: each server has its own 12-volt battery to supply power if there's a problem with the main source of electricity. The company also revealed for the first time that since 2005, its data centers have been composed of standard shipping containers--each with 1,160 servers and a power consumption that can reach 250 kilowatts. [...] It may sound geeky, but a number of attendees--the kind of folks who run data centers packed with thousands of servers for a living--were surprised not only by Google's built-in battery approach, but by the fact that the company has kept it secret for years." - Simon from Bookmarklet

24 more comments

Hmm, I was in a Google data center two years ago (not one of their big ones) and it didn't have individual power supplies and didn't have machines in shipping containers. Seems to me that the shipping container would impede heat transfer and would add unnecessary expense. I'm sure they dont use them everywhere. - Robert Scoble

Has CNet been "Scobled"? Site's pretty much toast. - Kenton

Hey Robert, Sun has been doing the shipping containers. Check out http://www.sun.com/product... - Paul Wade

That's pretty darn cool. Hope it's not an April fools joke. - Alex Scoble

Alex: I wonder. The servers I saw inside Google had Seagate drives. These are Hitachis. But I know that Google refreshes all its machines quite often. This looks real and makes sense. - Robert Scoble

Paul: I know Sun was doing the shipping container thing, but that only makes sense when you need one small data center on premises, or something like that. Building a whole warehouse/data center like that doesn't make any sense. - Robert Scoble

Plus I know they don't just use one brand of drives. - Alex Scoble

Google has lots of data centers all over the place, though, and I could see Google using a shipping container in some weird location. Just not in its big datacenter up in Oregon. - Robert Scoble

Scoble, MSFT has data centers that are silos for containers. Makes a lot of sense if you think of having to swap in and out huge numbers of machines every 18-24 months. - Aaron deMello

Aaron: wild. I'd love to visit one of those huge data centers and see how they do airflow management. - Robert Scoble

By the way, CNET is down right now (all of CNET, not just the one this article points to). - Robert Scoble

Yeah, I wonder if it's more efficient in the long run to have separate air and power handling for each container. Probably makes it a lot quicker to build up large server farms. Just connect the modules and download the software. - Alex Scoble

The shipping container thing could make sense if they were stuffed into a shelving system - open the one end to allow for cooling, plug the whole box full of boxes in, and go. There was one company that was doing prefab hotels in this kind of fashion. build shell, and stuff pre-fab rooms in the slots. Do the datacenter the same way. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Yeah, CNET is having problems but it seems to be intermittent. - Alex Scoble

Like giant Drobos :-) - Tim Ostler

The most interesting thing to me is the shipping container concept. That's the future model of efficiency. Portable data centers that you can drop anywhere you need 'em. - Brian Daniel Eisenberg

Robert, each of the large vendors has their own solution to airflow management. Take a look at what Rackable and Verari are doing, quite interesting. Verari's are actually portable and designed to work outdoors. - Aaron deMello

With these sorts of cooling requirements you'd think they'd bury the shipping containers 20 feet underground or in old coal mines or something. - Andrew Leyden

The one thing I can tell you is that no Google employee will go near commenting on something like this. It is made *very* clear that anything touching datacenters is super-uber confidential. - Joe Beda ()

I think it's a very smart design on Google's part. Years ago, when I worked in the Sprint's Central Offices the telecom battery backups were hideously large and only used when the diesel generators failed. Matter of fact, I think many of those beer keg size batteries were decades old. - Donna Payne

This "secret server" was revealed in 2006 (http://www.webhostingtalk.com/archive...). I personally looked at the power cable coming out the back of the power supply, being routed back *in* the case, *under* the mobo and out through the front, and had a Luke Skywalker reaction: "What a piece of junk!" Which I suppose is the cue for Han Solo to walk out of the... more... - Karim

my favorite quote from that 2006 article: " he said that in his first week working [at Google] they flew anyone who wanted to go, to denver to go skiing.... during the work week too ahaha" soooo it's like "super-efficient data centers, scrimping and saving every penny OMG DID SOMEONE SAY SKIING? FIRE UP THE PARTY PLANE!!!" :-D - Karim

Ok, so how many of you are now trying to build one of these at home? That would be a good MAKE episode. - Andrew Leyden

I bet all those $15 batteries would be a maintenance nightmare in a typical datacenter. - Gabe

The article has been updated with additional photos and details: "Google's PUE [Power Usage Effectiveness] scores are enviably low, but the company is working to lower them further. [...] "[From] early on, there was an emphasis on the dollar per (search) query," Hoelzle said. "We were forced to focus. Revenue per query is very low."" - Simon

Jinni

RT @OrenMichels @clippi gives a great demonstration of @mashery powered #oauth linking the #netflix #api to #jinni http://www.screencast.com/users...

March 30 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Michael Hart liked this

Robert Scoble

Oh, my, http://www.cloudcontacts.com/ totally rocks. They scanned 1,100+ business cards in just a couple of days and WOW does this make them more useful!

March 24 - Comment - Like - Share

Benoit Cazenave, Steve Boerner, Ian and 90 other people liked this

Each contact has a picture of the scanned card. Plus a file I can import into Outlook or Gmail. Plus a link to all the social networks that the service can find for that person. I totally want to follow everyone here on friendfeed. - Robert Scoble

35 more comments

This is Allen Stern's company and it rocks. Yo, Allen, you are onto something here. You can build a real social network: made up of people I've actually met (and I can prove it). - Robert Scoble

used the service myself, love it! go allen! - sean percival

Thanks Robert! Glad you like the service. - Allen Stern

Robert, would this replace Facebook as your Rolodex? https://friendfeed.com/e... - LogEx

CloudContacts is very cool. So is Allen. :) - Louis Gray

Logical: no, the two are different. But I would LOVE for them to be more connected. - Robert Scoble

Louis: I agree. - Robert Scoble

That's cool Robert! Dynamically build a socnet based on your collection of biz cards. Wow. Allen you rock. I've got a pile of biz cards from the past 15 years sitting around doing nothing. Would be interesting to see what kind of patterns might be extracted in such a system. - Brian Daniel Eisenberg

Not to be cynical, but I couldn't find anything in their FAQ, or their Privacy Policy that prevents them from using the information from your business cards in the same way JigSaw does. That seems like a pretty significant oversight of disclosure. Are they creating a master database from all the cards they collect, with names, contact and job titles? - Chris Kenton from twhirl

Chris: interesting question! I'm sure Allen will answer that soon. I don't care, really, because I've noticed that business cards go out of date very quickly. That's why I want them hooked up with LinkedIn and Facebook because those are kept up to date much more often than business card databases are. - Robert Scoble

From the Terms and Conditions page: "CloudContacts may, now or in the future, use the submitted card data to market to you, and provide you with information about, our products and services, including but not limited to our Service. In addition, the card database may be opened to the public at which time all customers will have the option to opt-out or at any point in the future. All... more... - Brian Daniel Eisenberg

all right I will have to try too - Loic Le Meur

Brian-- Thanks for pointing me to that. Not sure, though. "The card database may be opened to the public at which time all customers will have the option to opt-out or at any point in the future. All public contacts may also opt-out at any time." Does that mean that when you submit your cards, your submission opts your contacts in to a public database, to which they have to then opt out... more... - Chris Kenton from twhirl

Cool service. Yo Allen, will it ever be available for non US citizens? - Nir Ben Yona

mmmmm, Amazon's mechanical turk is a more efficient way to do it. 100 cards for $ 29.95 is $ .29 each, very expensive. - Sebastian Wain

Thanks everyone for the feedback. Let me answer your q's... @Nir - we have processed many orders from other countries - as long as the cards use latin/roman characters, we can process them (no Japanese/Hebrew/Russian yet..) @Loic - sure, we can handle your cards including the ones in French - and we will not be selling your data to any 3rd party or anything like that. Thanks! - Allen Stern

Pics or it didn't happen. - Daniel J. Pritchett

@Allen. I appreciate the follow up on not selling data. Can you shed a little more light on the opt out policy for non-customers whose cards are uploaded? When and if the database goes public, is the policy that card data will be public unless someone asks specifically to opt-out? Or is the policy that uploaded card information will not be public unless a non-customer opts-in to have their information public? Thanks. - Chris Kenton from twhirl

So we all get them, but do we use them? If we want to know something about someone don't we simply google them? Probably too simplistic. - Sheryl

I really like Cloud Contacts, think it's a really nifty and useful service. Louis Gray introduced me to Allen at SXSW and we had a great chat, turns out we're both from New York (originally in my case). - Eric Berlin

Thanks Eric - was great meeting you as well. - Allen Stern

I'm confused, we have a card scanner at work where we slide in business cards and it imports them into excel, word, pdf, and makes them into address labels which feeds into the label maker. It's just a thing we bought at the local office store, does this do something different? - Steve C

Allen- I'm still hoping for some light to be shed on the opt-out policy for non-customers whose cards are scanned. If I hand my card to someone who eventually uses your service, and you take the database public, all of my contact information will be publicly published until i ask for it to be removed? I think this is a really fundamental issue, and it's only scratching the surface. Will... more... - Chris Kenton from twhirl

Seriously business cards in a cloud? Talk about tenuous links to a hot industry. What's next Buggy Whips as a Service (BWAAS). - James Ketchell

i think i would like to use your service Allen, but this question about pissing off people ala Jigsaw is the one thing that stops me. also, i'd love it if the URLs on the cards were followed and semantically analyzed for tagging the person by topic - Marshall Kirkpatrick

@steve - we save you the time of the scan, the accuracy of the scan and provide contact pages for each person with tons more information than what's on the card. @chris - not sure how much better i can answer the question - I am not publishing your specific information (or the information from your cards) - i hope that helps answer your question - looking forward to your order! - Allen Stern

@marshall - i like that idea and have added it to the idea list - I am coding as quick as i can -- first up are connections to the web email services via api and categorization. - Allen Stern

what would make it really valuable on the "find social links for the people scanned" would be if it regularly rechecked. After all, that is the bit of the job I dont get around to doing, searching old contacts to see if they have joined anything - they might not have been on twitter, facebook etc. then but perhaps they joined last week? That kind of search is already hard work to do manually when entering the cards in the first place, but it is just not something you can do manually every 3 months. - Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)

OK. I've posted 4 times here asking for a basic answer to a fundamental question about the logical extension of your service, and you won't address the question. I don't want to draw conclusions, but I can only assume you're creating what you hope will be a viral service to get people to not only provide you with a mountain of business card data, but to actually *pay you* to upload it... more... - Chris Kenton from twhirl

Thats cool... I am way to lazy/false_busy to ever get all the business cards together, but very cool. - Cody Heitschmidt

I like the cut of your jib, Chris. - Daniel J. Pritchett

sounds like Chris is on to something there :) - Marshall Kirkpatrick

Chris - I believe I have answered your question already but let me try again. I would/will never do anything that I don't want done to myself - I am not posting (and do not plan to post) any personal information from any of the cards to the public. I have revised the terms page accordingly. - Allen Stern

Totally agree!! It's awesome - Sarah Perez

Allen, I don't believe you ever answered Chris' question. Even your last post says "do not plan to" rather than "will not" - I won't even bother to go check out your revised terms page - I don't see how it could settle anything when you avoid the issue in open discussion. For one hypothetical: you sell the venture and there is no restraint on the buyer just because you said trust me for I'm a good guy and I've told you thrice "I have no plan" - David HC Soul

Allen--Thanks for following up. Look. I run my own business. I'm not into going around throwing stones when I'm sure someone will find some stones to throw at me. What ever you do is between you and your customers. I'm just pointing out what I know will trip some people's wires. - Chris Kenton from twhirl

jr conlin

Netflix on Facebook - The slow revolution of recommendation engines - http://www.thinksketchdesign.com/2009...

March 25 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Michael Hart liked this

Interesting discussion on what one person thinks Netflix should do with the new facebook data. Pros and cons to it, particularly if you know what all actually is possible, but interesting none the less. - jr conlin from Bookmarklet

Dave Winer

Me, Amazon, Scoble - http://www.scripting.com/stories...

March 25 from Scripting News - Comment - Like - Share

Daniel Rowley, Thomas Power, Vishy and 23 other people liked this

I was about to say Amazon needs it's own "friending" ability, but then I saw that they already do. Who knew? - Daniel Sims

Very astute point, as usual, Mr. Winer. Tangent: and how good are some comments on Amazon? that good: http://bit.ly/bcfTb - jacek

Dave, you're describing an evolved, enlightened Beacon here. Amazon had that Grapevine offering, but looks like that's been scrapped. BTW - I've previously thought this would be something FriendFeed could do as well: http://bhc3.wordpress.com/2008... - Hutch Carpenter

jr conlin

Extra Bits About the Netflix/Facebook Thing - http://blog.unitedheroes.net/archive...

March 24 from jr conlin's ink stained banana - Comment - Like - Share

Michael Hart liked this

Chris Messina

Bring Down IE 6: a campaign by .net magazine - http://www.bringdownie6.com/

March 20 from Mento - Comment - Like - Share

Fabian Neumann, Michael Hart and Arnaud Fischer liked this

"The premise is simple: Internet Explorer 6 is antiquated, doesn’t support key web standards, and should be phased out. This isn’t about being anti-Microsoft, it’s about Microsoft’s lack of development in the browser market. With IE7/8 not available for Windows 2000, IE6 accounts for up to 20% of web usage, primarily via business users. Clients pressure designers to ‘force’ sites to work in IE6, and designers, not wanting to lose business, comply, using hacks and workarounds. This wastes time and money. Microsoft needs to fix this, designers need to unite, and we all need to move on." - Chris Messina from Mento

Thomas Hawk

Mass Hysteria Over AIG Obscures Simple Truths: Michael Lewis - Bloomberg.com - http://www.bloomberg.com/apps...

March 20 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Ryan Waldron, Michael Hart, John Flynn and 23 other people liked this

"From this episode we can observe several general truths about the financial crisis, and the attempt to end it: 1) To the political process all big numbers look alike; above a certain number the money becomes purely symbolic. The general public has no ability to feel the relative weight of 173 billion and 165 million. You can generate as much political action and public anger over millions as you can over billions. Maybe more: the larger the number the more abstract it becomes and, therefore, the easier to ignore. (The trillions we owe foreigners, for example.) 2) As the financial crisis has evolved its moral has been simplified, grotesquely. In the beginning this crisis was messy. Wall Street financiers behaved horribly but so did ordinary Americans. Millions of people borrowed money they shouldn’t have borrowed and, not, typically, because they were duped or defrauded but because they were covetous and greedy: they wanted to own stuff they hadn’t earned the right to buy." - Thomas Hawk from Bookmarklet

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I constantly find myself wishing my initial reaction to stuff was more rational. $165million is a drop in the bucket compared to the $173billion, so of course it's silly to get all upset about the cost of the bonuses to the taxpayers. However... I the outrage isn't about wasting money, it's about handing insane amounts of money to these people that are partially to blame for this mess. The anger isn't about dollars, it's about rewarding the people who ran the companies into the ground. I'm mad about that - Blake Caldwell

If their contracts were structured in such a way as they are entitled to the bonuses, they should get them. - Ian Betteridge

Ian - well, yeah. As much as I'd love them to be taxed at 90%, I have to oppose it because it seems unconstitutional. I didn't like the stuff Bush did because it was unconstitutional, I have to stay consistent and oppose stuff I'd like too. I agree with your use of 'should' as far as legality goes, but not in terms of what's deserved to these people. The deal should have been structured such that the company is now bankrupt and starting over, nullifying bonuses they wouldn't be able to afford while bankrupt - Blake Caldwell

Words to remember: "Millions of people borrowed money they shouldn’t have borrowed and, not, typically, because they were duped or defrauded but because they were covetous and greedy: they wanted to own stuff they hadn’t earned the right to buy". - Russellreno

Blake - Yes, that's my reasoning too. I'm not saying they deserve the money - and without knowing each individual case, who can tell? Maybe one guy's trading made big, real profits. Should that guy get his bonus? You don't, and shouldn't, measure the performance of an individual soley by the performance of the whole company. - Ian Betteridge

The anger over the bonuses is being ginned up by the Government. Congress knew about the bonuses months ago. They will use their false outrage to push more bad laws upon us. - Robert Hafer

Yes there has been greed on both sides. But you are dealing with a system that rewards greed, massively. A system that tempts those whom we would point the finger at and say:"You will work the same amount of hours I do, get just as exhausted, face the same hardships and difficulties (and perhaps more) and get paid less than I do because I think I am worth more than you. You will do it more ethically than I and always spend money more frugally than I. Why? Because I can make you." - Melanie Reed

That is capitalism as it is practiced today in a nutshell. What person who is put on the lower financial rung wouldn't go for that?! - Melanie Reed

very good points in the article - Shey, Jamaican of FF

Maybe the issue is semantics. To me, a 'bonus' is, if the company does well, you do too. A token of appreciation for a job well done. If the company is not doing well, then there are no bonuses. If a company is getting subsidized by the government because it is failing horribly, then there CERTAINLY are no bonuses. If AIG is contractually obligated to pay a bonus, it isn't a bonus. It... more... - stretta from twhirl

Thomas Hawk

Cops Reel In Phish Fans - March 11, 2009 - http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive...

March 11 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

prophead, Morgan Haley, John Flynn and 10 other people liked this

"MARCH 11--The return of Phish to the concert stage has been a welcome development for both fans of the jam band and police. During a series of concerts last weekend in Hampton, Virginia, authorities arrested nearly 200 Phish fans, most for possession or distribution of narcotics (cops reported seizing $68,000 and illegal drugs with a purported street value of--exactly!--$1,213,882.80). On the following pages you'll find a mug shot sampler of the Phish fans nabbed during the March 6-8 "multi-jurisdictional operation" overseen by the Hampton Police Division. (25 pages)" - Thomas Hawk from Bookmarklet

11 more comments

drugs? at a Phish concert? No f***ing way! - Thomas Hawk

I'm guessing dreadlocks/long hair is de-riguer attire for these concerts? ;-) - Carlos Granier-Phelps

We like the music but we fear the comb. - Christopher Harley

Are the police allowed to re-sell illegal drugs in countries where they're legal to make a profit on the confiscations? - Matthew DeVries

@Matthew "Why don't you donate them to charity?" http://tinyurl.com/dgb7x3 - Chris Lasher

it's seems pretty dumb to me that some kid could get pinched smoking pot at a Phish concert. I don't ever remember the cops doing this kind of thing when I'd see an occasional Grateful Dead show back in college. - Thomas Hawk

Kids smoking dope at a Phish concert? I'm SHOCKED! - Mike Hussein Cohen

Yes, this was the COVER STORY on yesterday's Virginian Pilot. - Ladybug Heather

HA! God, I hate that band. - Anna Lynn M.

I do love that one song they do where it's this hyper-simple repetitive bass/rhythm line, an even more simple melody, and Tre doing tiny string arpeggios for 45 minutes. Which song is that? Anyone know? - Matthew DeVries

"Arresting pot smokers at a Phish concert" is the new "Shooting fish in a barrel". - Ginger Makela Riker

It's either that or giving out DUI's outside the NASCAR track - Morgan Haley

Dave Winer

Yesterday DeWitt asked why designers of web services reinvent serialization formats instead of reusing existing ones. This is the advantage of XML-RPC. A simple set of types, structs and lists, and a huge set of libraries for all languages. You can write cross network apps at a *very* high level. - http://www.xmlrpc.com/spec

March 5 - Comment - Like - Share

carl morris, Mark Stahl, Anand Sharma and 15 other people liked this

REST could take advantage of this work and still keep its purity, by using the serialization format. I've been saying that for a very long time. Anyway, now I'm thinking about coming up with a successor to XML-RPC, that takes into account all that we now know, and perhaps integrating with OAuth. When I first wrote about this I got back a note from the WordPress XML-RPC team saying they were planning on doing this. - Dave Winer

28 more comments

I know some people don't like XML-RPC, never really heard a good reason why (emphasize "good"), but it's fairly popular and a deep part of the culture in at least a few corners of network development. So just wanted to add this to the mix, so people can think about it. I may work on this, may not -- we'll see how it goes. XML-RPC is now 11 years old, it might be time to think about what comes next. :-) - Dave Winer

In my Java framework on top of Spring, I use JAXB to serialize/deserialize objects. Extremely simple, convenient, and concise. I find XML-RPC a little bit verbose and not necessary in my case (since I have JAXB on the server). If I wanted to expose services to other application, I would just publish the XML. The param/array/value XML notations is just a unnecessary level of indirection (IMO). I might be missing your point though. - Jeremy Chone

If I had to do it over again I would have argued against that extra level in there, but it's all handled in the low-level code, written once then forgotten, so it hardly matters. If I do a new serialization format that's one of the things I'll change, probably. - Dave Winer

Don't look at me. I'm using a 50-year-old serialization format. - Bruce Lewis from fftogo

CORBA? - Dave Winer

S-expressions - Bruce Lewis from fftogo

Add a JSON serialization of XML-RPC (maybe something like http://bitworking.org/news... because JSON is trendy and all), and I agree this covers the 80% case well. - DeWitt Clinton

ASN-1? - Todd Hoff

To me, XML just seems wrong for serialization. It sits in the perfect nexus of simultaneously being less human readable than JSON, S-Expressions, or YML, and less efficient than ASN.1 DER, ProtocolBuffers, CORBA, etc. It hit a sweet spot of dev activity in the late 90s/early 00s when the future looked like XML for everything, but now JSON looks like the sweet spot. In my own case, My apps need to deserialize on mobiles, consume the least battery power with lowest network latency, so I prefer efficiency - Ray Cromwell

Not likely that I'm going to do work in JSON, since I have highly optimized XML parser built into my dev environment. Debugged, no memory leaks, crashes, etc. Don't want to go through all that again. However, there's nothing to say that a parallel project couldn't do the exact equiv in JSON, if it makes some people happy. :-) - Dave Winer

BTW, I didn't want to do XML. It was exactly like this mood people are in about JSON, just do this and everything will be cool forever they promised. I said Yeah sure, until a new group of yunguns comes along and wants to rip it all up -- again. And again. It'll happen again, no doubt. - Dave Winer

"All this has happened before, and it will happen again." - Ray Cromwell

So say we all Ray :-) - Todd Hoff

"REST could take advantage of this work" - REST has more or less designed out remote procedures calls in favour of state transfer. How can REST take advantage? - Bill de hÓra

"My apps need to deserialize on mobiles". Ray, interesting then there aren't any (I think) json or asn.1 libs for mobile, it's all XML. I was surprised that Android didn't ship with a protobufs library. - Bill de hÓra

Android does ship with the org.json library included. I currently use ProtoBufs for Android, but the format is still less than ideal for my uses compared with ASN.1 due to its inefficiency in coding arrays of primitives, as well as ASN.1's better representation of variable length numbers. - Ray Cromwell

Serialization and deserilization is a complete waste anyway. Keep the data encoded in a serialized buffer. Decode it on reads and encode on writes. This is vastly more efficient. - Todd Hoff

This is exactly what I do right now. When data is updated, I encode to ProtocolBuffer and JSON and write both to disk in a way that can be served by nginx or a CDN. REST requests then become simple redirects if the data is valid. For mobile, the coding efficiency and we are decoding performance as importance, because they affect battery life (burn CPU and radio), as well as increase subjective latency in the UI. - Ray Cromwell

ProtocolBuffer doesn't keep a serialized format though. It's serialized and deserializes. I traced the code at one time so I'm sure that's what it does. The BER is space efficient, not CPU efficient, so I'm not sure that would work out. Keeping a serialized buffer means only skipping through memory and incurring costs for what you use. That's very efficient. - Todd Hoff

"How can REST take advantage?" REST apps still have to pass data back and forth, and most of what XML-RPC is is a format for serialization of the kinds of data apps pass back and forth. Rather than create a new format every time and write code every time. I don't particularly mind this work, it's like doing a crossword puzzle but not as interesting. If I could pass off the serialization to a library I'd be done that much sooner. And I wouldn't have to read docs (not that there ever are very many). - Dave Winer

Dave, agree with all of that - what you're talking about re formats I call "precious snowflake syndrome" . Would you agree that we know enough about REST now that the XMLRPC methods can be lifted into HTTP with the it-just-doesn't-fit ones going to POST? One thing I didn't enjoy about XMLRPC was doing fetches, updates and deletes over POST (fetches don't cache, deletes have a security impact). Where I think a son of XMLRPC is valuable is for partial updates (eg updating just the status of a profile field) - Bill de hÓra

You can use whatever you want from XML-RPC for whatever you want, just be careful what you call it so it's not confused with the package of functionality that is XML-RPC. A few years ago, Jeremy Allaire and I proposed something we called RSS-Data that broke apart XML-RPC from the transport. Didn't go very far back then. Maybe worth another look. http://radio.weblogs.com/0113297... - Dave Winer

@Todd, I'm not sure what you mean by PB's not keeping a serialized format. You take a PB, you write it to disk, the disk format is a a serialized representation of the object. BER and DER might not be CPU efficient, but parsing ASCII to Integer a few thousand times to deal with XML or JSON formatted numbers is a whole heck of a low more inefficient. - Ray Cromwell

Ray, I mean that serialization and deserialization are needed to access attributes. It's that process that's inefficient and every hop that touches the data pays the penalty. - Todd Hoff

True, unfortunately, most of the languages out there lack the ability to just mmap() a file and cast it to a (Foo*). Java has "DirectBuffer"s, but reading doubles, longs, ints, still involves bit shifting operations. - Ray Cromwell

I disliked the default XMLRPC model as it was dependent on param ordering and thus more fragile than the HTML forms name+value passing, making default values and adding new named parameters hard. JSON is a better match to dynamic languages natural structures (being valid JS and Python), and much terser. - Kevin Marks

There's also JSON-RPC, though I don't know if anyone uses it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... The advantage of JSON is that it's relatively compact, easy to parse, very popular (many libraries), and maps directly to native data-structures (because that's all it is). It's not great for binary data though. XML-RPC structs are very similar to JSON, except that the layers of wrapping make them harder to read in my opinion (and of course larger). - Paul Buchheit

@Paul, I believe if you look at Apache Shindig, or some OpenSocial container implementations, they are using JSON-RPC underneath to make OpenSocial API requests. I know the PHP Apache Shindig/Partuza does this. - Ray Cromwell

"There's also JSON-RPC" Given my reference points with Atom/REST, I think I'd like a JSON Publishing Protocol - JsonPub ;) The thing with json-rpc is that you seem to be able to get 80% of it with forms posting (altho' sending lists are messy). Then again the way couchdb slings data is cool http://tinyurl.com/2dfy69 - Bill de hÓra

don loeb

Facebook Connect + Facebook Ads = A Social Ad Network - http://www.techcrunch.com/2009...

March 3 from Google Reader - Comment - Like - Share

Michael Hart liked this

Chris Messina

NYTimes getting open wrong: TimesPeople API bastardizes PoCo, ActivityStreams & Twitter API. Whyfore?!

February 23 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Michael Hart, Igor Poltavskiy, Robert Scoble and Karoli liked this

good question, Chris - Steve Gillmor

Jinni

The giant grows larger: New York Times and Rotten Tomatoes add Netflix "Add" & "Watch" links http://www.hackingnetflix.com/2009...

February 22 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Michael Hart liked this

don loeb

can i just say how revolutionary roku is? can't wait for amazon and other services to come on board.

February 20 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Michael Hart liked this

OAuth

i like netflix's implementation of #oauth and #REST in their API. Little uneasy with returning status in the body, but I get why they did it - http://twitter.com/nickflo...

February 20 from oauth - Twitter Search - Comment - Like - Share

Michael Hart liked this

Robert Scoble

Hung out with Ansel Adams grandson and Facebook's Bubba Murarka today. Lots of interesting ideas popping in my head.

February 17 - Comment - Like - Share

Kol Tregaskes, Daniel Errante, Thomas Hawk and 10 other people liked this

Interesting how when you hang out with smart people they challenge you to be smarter too. - Robert Scoble

10 more comments

Judy: fun? My life passed the fun line a long time ago. Surreal is more like it. - Robert Scoble

My goal is to live a foocamp or a TED life every day. Today definitely got way above that bar and there's still a lot of hours left in it. :-) - Robert Scoble

If you manage that Robert, I'm going to start following you around - need an intern? - Chris Saad

That must have been interesting to say the least... inspiring would be more like it. - Tim Bergman

Care to share those interesting ideas? - Rob Schieber

It certainly sounds like you are hanging with some smart ones. I for one had the chance to hang with my friend Vee and exchange ideas on paper, on guitar, and on the Kawai Grand piano. - Rob Schieber

Was it Matt Adams? - Sunshine

I'm just reading - "the Camera" now - It's amazing how the fundamentals of photography don't change with the technology. You just need to come up with a way for people to pay you for all that Rob! - Ed Dale

Rob: even better, I did a video with Matt Adams, but need to hold it a couple of weeks cause we discussed some secret stuff. - Robert Scoble

Robert: You have a cool job, you know that right?! :) wow, what a neat day - Susan Beebe

it was a blast hanging with you Robert. Can't wait to see what happens with some of the stuff we discussed. Thanks for making time for lunch! - Bubba Murarka

Joseph Smarr

Implementing OAuth is still too hard… but it doesn’t have to be - http://josephsmarr.com/2009...

February 17 from Joseph Smarr - Comment - Like - Share

Matthias Pfefferle, Michael Hart and David Recordon liked this

Robert Scoble

Apple is applying love where it matters to third party developers: making them rich. Look at Apple store advertising. Right now it's ALLdevs

February 17 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Daniel Rowley, Michael Hart, Susan Beebe and 5 other people liked this

Building a successful iphone / touch app is starting to take the place of starting a successful startup in media coverage of emerging biz. - Christian Anderson

Just like Bush described Obgyns, who can't practise their love on women :) - Prolific Programmer

Michael Hart › Likes