Category: Blogging

Piclens 1.6.3 update: A Brilliant Must Have Plug In for Photo and Video Browsing

Piclens Screen 1 From ITB2008 Berlin Travel Bloggers Summit 460 pix.jpg
The opening Screen

Some time ago I came across Piclens from the company Cool Iris via a recommendation from Internet Guru Doc Searls. Doc has no search function on his Blog. A severe neglect! At first I couldn’t find his post back.

As an aside: He also recommended Flickrfan in a post Less T, More V , but that is for the Mac aficionados. I have no Mac.

Eventually my persistence did find me Doc’s: Nice Plugin.

Another aside is that a commenter to that post advised to have a look at Photo Synth. I didn’t (yet).
What is Piclens?
Piclens is available as a plug in for Firefox and some other browser flavors to view large numbers of pictures on sites like Flickr. It is an amazing quick way of browsing around a lot of photos. Much quicker than Flickr’s slideshow and also much quicker than Adobe Bridge or Adobe Lightroom of Adobe for those who work with it. Brilliant!

Piclens Screen 3 From ITB Berlin Travel Bloggers Summit 460 Pix.jpg
The Full Screen

My first impression:
Wow! Cool! but you can’t link to the photo you like. This has been fixed with version 1.6.3 and hence I believe it is ready to become a mainstream plug in.

Piclens Screen 4 From ITB Berlin Travel Bloggers Summit 460pix.jpg
The Full Screen with one photo in the centre zoomed in
and following you each time you move your mouse
Piclens Screen 5 from itb2008-berlin-travel-bloggers-summit-460-pix
A video wall alike browsing screen

For these examples I used the ITB2008 Berlin Travel Blogger Summit Flickr Pool.

Piclens Screen 2 From ITB Berlin Travel Bloggers Summit 460 PIX.jpg
A Screen with one photo zoomed in maximally

Be aware!
Today the plug in page of Firefox only offers version 1.6.2 without the tagging and linking possibilities and not yet version 1.6.3 with the tagging and linking! That you should obtain from the Piclens site.

Piclens now for Youtube!

It took me some time to find out how Piclens would work with Youtube. It is only a small indication somewhat forlorn on the site of Piclens:

Piclens screen for YouTube searching
The only way to open a Youtube video search

You always should launch Piclens first from your tool bar where it installs itself. In the Piclens screen you then open the Youtube search tool of Piclens which you find at the top of the Piclens screen.

But then you have something!

Piclens Screen with YouTube Piclens Search

The result of a Piclens search on Youtube. The video starts playing immediately!

I like this instruction video and its song best

Here is the video itself:


The song is “Technologic” by Daft Punk, also a must have:-)

Further goodies

You can download a tool to make your own site Piclens compatible.

There is a WordPress plug in: A must investigate.

Disadvantage
I see one big disadvantage of Piclens. Flickr Photos are uploaded under various licenses and cannot be copied easily. With Piclens you can make a screen dump and avoid the license protection of Flickr easily.

Rest assured: I am not trespassing copy rights here, because most photo’s I showed you are my own.

Post Alia
Today again Philippe Wolff was talking about the perfect storm he sees in the online travel world. See Kevin’s post at Travolution’s Blog. Well I would say this small plugin will definitely add to that storm!

MyBlogLog: Something Old and Something New

This is a re edited post originally dating back a year. (Yes I am trying to getting organized).

Some time ago I was inclined to kick my MyBlogLog widget from this Blog, because its server didn’t respond quick enough and caused hung pages on this Blog and several other Blogs.

My first introduction to Bloglog was by Guillaume of Hotel Blogs who had the widget already quite some time. I got curious and registered in January 2007.

Basically MyBlogLog was about counting. Counting the incoming and especially the outgoing links as a tool for the Blogger. The main reason seemingly to make it possible for the Blogger to see the clicking through in detail, as Google Adsense gives such a tiny little bit of information. Community building is also possible, but only as an afterthought I believe. The best part of MyBlogLog still is its recently revamped widget, especially because you can visualize your visitors if they also have a MybloLog account.

In January 2007 My Bloglog was acquired by Yahoo. See: The Jig is Up.

Browsing around I hit upon the Everybody Hurts post on the Blog of Mybloglog

Quickly thereafter I found The Rise and Fall of My Bloglog

and here is the other side of the story: Shoemoney is part of the problem

It all came down to the fact that a lot of people were using MyBlogLog to spam. Shoemoney pointed it out and the result was he was banned from MyBlogLog. An example of killing the messenger. MyblogLog cured the problem and apologized to Shoemoney and case closed.

In their recent revamp they are trying to make MyBlogLog a sort of center of your community building. It is not bad, but BlogCatalog does it a bit better. I don’t like it that MyBlogLog apparently allows non Blog authors to join and seemingly to incorporate non claimed blogs as well. The advantage of the also recently revamped BlogCatalog is that you can unfollow feeds of “friends” in you dashboard. But both are worthwhile to pursue.

Getting Organized: Backpack it, Samurize it or Springnote it?

Getting organized is high on my wish list. Sometimes I see ideas from the corner of my eyes: I found some ideas, but are curious whether my readers have thoughts on the following gadgets:

Any thoughts?

Are Bloggers the Slaves of the 21nd Century?

A couple of recent articles drew my attention:

Just remembering that GTD (Getting Things Done) author and organizing yourself guru David Allen stopped blogging even before I started this Blog….

High Five (1) The one and Only

T-List Group on Twitter: Finally a Talking Community?

T_List Group on Twitter
Thank You, Claude

After my previous post there was some more discussion on Twittter and in the meantime an unrelated Twitterer, The Carol of the Chines language Blog 太妃糖憂鬱狂歡節│Carol's Carnival mentioned the the possibility of Group Twittering via Group Tweet. That ticked us off.

In the meantime Elliot NG of the Uptake blog posted about the Travel Bloggers on Twitter in his post The T-List does Twitter: Join the Twitterati and gave a list of Twittering Travel Bloggers.

At the same time Elliot took it one step further and formed together with me Twitter | T-List as a Twitter Group.

It is very simple to use. If you want to join you simply follow Tlist. For the time being everybody is welcome. As a sort of group e-mail you can send a private message to the Tlist either via the update screen as “d Tlist” with your message. Alternatively you can send a Direct Message via the sidebar of your homepage on Twitter. The third possibility is to message in the homepage of Tlist (provided you are a follower). If things get hairy it may be necessary to close some possibilities in order to make the group more private.

Before I even knew how it worked The LA Times Travel Blog took notice and posted about it in their Daily Post

.

TravelTwit.Com
TravelTwit.com

Chris of Vacant Ready, formerly located in Vancouver but now in Cairo, took it another step further and created a mini Blog that is fed by the RSS feed of Twitter | T-List at TravelTwit. On TravelTwit you can get an impression of the discussions. This is also a great way to follow our conference tigers like Kevin or William.

A real Mish Mash!

This all is going really fast and is really exiting. I hope the travel community and travel blog sphere adopt this tool as a great and easy way to connect and communicate.