Category: Travel

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!

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.

I’ve Collected some Twittering Travel Bloggers at Netvibes

Until they launched their Ginger version, I wasn’t much impressed by Netvibes. I like their new Ginger public page idea and the possibility to group feeds on one page. A bit unfortunate is that I see no possibility to make screen shots of public pages on Netvibes.

Following a Twitter conversation with Elliot NG of Uptake, which was formerly known as Kango until they changed their name into Uptake (sounds as the artist….), I put some travel bloggers that I follow on twitter together on the page Happy Hotelier | Travel Bloggers @ Twitter.

For those of you who are not yet Twitterers (or Twiterati or Tweeps or Twitnits?), it is easy to sign up with Twitter and use the feeds of my collection to start following your favorite Travel Bloggers.

Despite several attempts to build a real Travel Bloggers Community the result is not very promising. On Twitter there is at least some ongoing communication.

Again if you want to follow me on twitter: @Happy Hotelier

Netvibes new look and feel Ginger

As a matter of fact I was experimenting with Netvibes and its Ginger version already. Just before noting Travel.Alltop I had made a public page on Netvibes by the name of Happy Hotelier’s Travel Readings, which was inspired by the way Edu Williams had formed his public Turismo (En) page.

Look for yourself if this is an alternative for your rss feed reader and give me your thoughts.

Off to baking my own bread:-)

South Africa's 10 Best Travel Blogs Nominated

SA Blog Awards 2008
SA Blog Awards 2008

The Nominees for the Best South African blogs Featuring Travel Related Content:

Source: Eish

Update April 16, 2008: and the winner is capetowndailyphoto.com. Congratulations!