Posts tagged “photos”

Japan pictures – part 2 of 3

I’ve uploaded nearly 1300 of my Japan pictures to Flickr. For reasons I’m sure you’ll understand, I haven’t added titles or tags or descriptions proactively, but please add comments or questions on flickr and I’ll gladly offer a story or explanation.

Meanwhile, I’m including some of my faves here, as well as part 1 and part 3.

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Japan pictures – part 1 of 3

I’ve uploaded nearly 1300 of my Japan pictures to Flickr. For reasons I’m sure you’ll understand, I haven’t added titles or tags or descriptions proactively, but please add comments or questions on flickr and I’ll gladly offer a story or explanation.

Meanwhile, I’m including some of my faves here, as well as part 2 and part 3.

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Stories, lost forever

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The way things used to be

As I’ve already blogged, I was the victim of a phishing scam and my flickr account was deleted.

According to some flickr forum discussions (where others are reporting similar occurrences) Yahoo/flickr has known about this particular culprit for a year or so. And they’ve failed to implement sufficient countermeasures, technical or otherwise.

Phishing typically targets banking and PayPal information, obviously for financial gain. In my case, someone left a comment on a photo, with a link. And clicking on that link led me to this sad situation. Why did Yahoo let someone post a link that was harmful?

Sure, the forums are also filled with smug posts (not from the flickr staff; they have been instructed to use a soothing tone, while not providing any resolution) from people who insist that the victims of these scams are to blame for not knowing better. I would have thought I did know better, actually.

This miscreant deleted my account, just for fun. And Yahoo can’t restore it. We all know there are backup copies all over the place, but they can only recreate my account, blank.

That means that my 5000 photos are gone. Those I can upload. But all the people I’ve linked to are gone (I’ve spent a few hours trying to reconnect with those I can remember). Anyone who watched my photos via their contacts has lost me (and I’ve lost much of my audience). All the photos that were marked by others are gone. All the groups which I participated in by contributing illustrative images are gone. All the titles, tags, geotags, view counts and comments are gone. All the descriptions and stories and dialog with others is gone.

My document, my story, my part of the community, is gone.

But the whole social media movement that we can’t ever stop hearing about is asking us to contribute content to their websites; we’re building the value for them. YouTube wouldn’t sell for $1.65 billion without our videos. Flickr has our photos. LiveJournal has our stories and pictures.

But is it ours? Do we know who owns it? If the data is on our hard drive, we know where it is, we may even take the trouble to back it up (I’ve got an external backup at work, at home, and online). But if the data is on someone else’s site, how can I keep a copy of it? It may be against the site rules for you to do that, in fact, as the high profile Scoble story demonstrated.

flickrbackup is a tool that lets you save the photos, but how does one download all the metadata? Flickr should have an export feature that creates a .flk file on your PC with all the good stuff. LinkedIn lets you export all your contacts in a variety of standard formats (and if you are nervous, maybe you should go do that right now: LinkedIn->My Contacts tab->Export Connections button near bottom), Google Reader (and any of the other RSS readers I know of) exports an OPML file (Google Reader->Manage Subscriptions ->Import/Export).

DataPortability is a movement to create these tools where they don’t exist. I hope someone creates something for flickr soon.

As for me, I don’t know how to proceed. I was just beginning my Tokyo story, which reached about 1500 pictures (not all worth posting, of course). I’ve got several hundred from Taipei (November/December) and I had a lot of Bali pictures and stories – the cool cultural stuff, the signs, all that great stuff – still unposted. But I’ve also use flickr as a storage for images that I’ve referenced in bios, conference presentations, this blog, other blogs, etc. It’s overwhelming and I don’t know what to do first. Or if I should even do anything. I can’t imagine going to the trouble of writing stuff only to have it disappear again. Maybe one should see it as ephemeral, but I am not there yet.

Sad update: ChittahChattah Flickies

  • As of this writing, flickr has decided my account is not active. After uploading 5000 pictures and while in the midst of a big trip? Let’s see how long it takes them to restore things (as this seems to be some sort of known problem that is happening with some accounts)
  • Update:

    We took a look into the issue with this account. It appears your “steve.portigal” account was deleted by someone who had access to your Yahoo! ID and password. Investigating, we think there is a possibility your account was phished.

    In short, in most cases when someone’s account has been phished, a link to a fake Flickr page was left on a photo. Often it is a link that was left for a bogus award. These are usually fake login pages that send the ID and password to the person who has posted this fake page. In a small number of cases, invasive software has been installed that logs keystrokes on the Windows operating system. We have no way to know how you were affected, we do want to make this clear.

    Unfortunately the content from the account cannot be restored. When accounts are deleted by someone who has access to the ID and password, we presume it to be the person who created that ID and is acting upon their wishes and then the data is deleted. We can restore the account itself which will restore it’s pro status.

    We are definitely sorry this has happened. We know this is disruptive to your experience on Flickr and work you have created is lost. We don’t like seeing this affect our community.

Hey what’s with all those shots of dog butts?

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CatCam was making the rounds recently. It’s nice to see this finally realized as a product, even with a good measure of humor. At my old firm, we delivered a concept that was very similar to this. It seemed like a “good” idea but in hindsight it’s not clear how it really connected to any of our research or was appropriate for the client. Ah, youth.

The pet-mounted camera would randomly snap pics throughout the day, when you got to the images, you’d see what s/he had been up to while you were at work. We called it Dog Day Afternoon and we were quite proud of that.

I’ve been holding this post til I dug up the drawing I did (something I was quite proud of, with my lack of training in illustration) but it’s not in my archives. But seeing that Nicolas Nova blogged about another pet camera (Wonderful Shot) I guess this will have to do.

In Memoriam

In 2003, a nightclub fire in Rhode Island killed 100 people. I recently visited the site of the club, now a somewhat makeshift memorial.

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There were several of these, enough to prompt a web search. One can buy the same stone here.

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The pictures now strike me as interesting, but experience of visiting was very touching, very moving. There’s a lot of detail everywhere, something that even a whole pile of pictures don’t capture. Each of those details evokes a pungent sense of loss and pain.

You can see all my photos from the site here.

Also, see IN LOVING MEMORY: Artifacts of Remembrance, by RISD grad student (or recent graduate) Chelsea Green. The site “investigates commemoration with the intention to create artifacts + experiences of remembrance that support healing.”

Trawna

During last week’s seminar, I had that awkward moment between presenters, where the laptops are being swapped out and the lav mic belt packs are being detached and re-attached, and so I decided to fill. I told the attendees that I was happy to be speaking to them, and especially glad to be back in Toronto, because that’s where I grew up. I offered them some advice for fitting in (especially since they would be doing an observational research exercise later) by not calling the city TOE-RON-TOE as many Americans do. Instead, I told them, we call it Trawna, and I even spelled it out – T-R-A-W-N-A. This is an old semi-truthful joke about the name of the city.

Turned out this was the meme-of-the-day. People came up to me at the break and asked again how they should spell it. Every time someone else said Toronto they stopped and said Trawna. It was just a funny thing that spread more than I had expected.

The next morning we had a followup session to the observational research people had done (briefly – walking through some different neighborhoods in Toronto with some different lenses through which to observe. As people settled in, they were asked to share a key story with a partner. One woman at one table announced to those within earshot that she does not write stories; she hasn’t done it since high school and she doesn’t do it now. O-kay. The rest of the group went about their business and were actively talking. This same woman summons me:

“Excuse me?! Excuse me!”

I look at her.

“Where is this Trawna thing coming from? Because…uh, we’re FROM HERE and we don’t say that.”

I replied that I was from here as well, and sure we do. This didn’t satisfy her and she seemed very annoyed. I thought it was strange that she had never heard of this phenomenon. It’s widespread. http://www.trawna.ca/ is a website about Toronto. It’s everywhere. My friends told the joke three days later over brunch. And not only doesn’t she know it, but she’s pretty damn angry with me for starting everyone else saying it. I guess it’s a version of the native effect where we reject observations about our own culture, because we don’t see it that way. Meanwhile, the rest of the morning must have been torture because we got into a lot of detail about what people learned and synthesized about the city from their observations, and I’m sure some of it would have bugged the hell out of her, accurate or not.

In another example of that (without the venom, mind) I was looking at Nicolas Nova’s photos from his trip to California, and being intrigued by the things he noticed that I take for granted. They reminded me of my pictures from when I travel – stuff you see on the street and so on, but it was things that I don’t think to photograph because I see them all the time. The familiar through someone else’s eyes.

Bangkok Pics posted to flickr

I’ve finished uploading more than 200285 photos from Bangkok to flickr. Check ’em all out, but here are a few samples

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It’s butter

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Ronald does the wai

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Crockery Flower

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Detail: Shrine at a shrine at a temple

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Working Boat

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Thai Coke

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Reserved for monks

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Monk awaits

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Soi Cowboy

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Big Bowling Pin

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Reindeer pair

Hong Kong Pictures posted

I’ve finally finished posting 269355 pictures from Hong Kong. I put every one most of them through Photoshop and tweaked and optimized and cropped. Uploaded ’em all to flickr, tagged ’em, titled ’em, wrote a description, and sent them to various groups. No wonder it’s taken more than three weeks.

Still to come is Bangkok and India.

Here are just a few samples.

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Sorta Tasty Snax

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Schoolgirls and Bag-Noodles To Go

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Panties on the Street

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Burning Incense closeup

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White Eyeglasses Frames

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Busy Signs

Series

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