Some cool china buy agency images:
The Top 10 Ways to Improve Flickr
Image by Thomas Hawk
Recently my friend Bill Storage asked a question in DeletemeUncensored titled "What’s Wrong With Flickr." The thread wasn’t meant to complain about Flickr but to talk about how Flickr could be improved if one were starting from scratch. I wrote a couple of long responses out to Bill in the thread, but thought that some of the ideas really belonged in a longer-form blog post.
Alot of people give me crap for criticizing Flickr. They ask me why I use Flickr if "hate" it so much. The fact of the matter is that I don’t hate Flickr at all. In fact I love Flickr (even if they don’t love me anymore). I spend more time on Flickr than any other site on the web. I think Flickr represents the best place on the web for a photographer to share photos today and I think as a whole that Flickr is one of the cultural gems of our lifetime. What’s more, a lot of the stuff on Flickr works really, really well and is really really great.
That said, I’ve always viewed criticism as a positive thing. As something that helps us improve and grow. Hopefully we learn from our critics and hopefully one can view suggestions as opportunities for improvement rather than simple mindless negativity. I blog alot about Flickr because I care about Flickr. I care about photography on the web. I care about the greater Flickr community and I want to see it get better and better. So don’t see this list as a bitch list about Flickr, rather see it as some honest ways that Flickr can improve.
1. Improve the process on how account and group deletions are handled. Flickr is increasingly becoming known as a place that deletes accounts willy nilly without warning. Flickr’s "Community Guidelines" are notoriously vague (you can be deleted without warning on Flickr for being "that guy" or if Flickr feels that you are "creepy.")
Many of my friends have had their entire accounts deleted for pretty minor offenses that are not specifically prohibited in more specific language in the TOS. In some cases photos with historical significance have been permanently lost. A while back Flickr nuked a group that I administered killing thousands of permanent threads. Thousands of threads by a group with thousands of members. Threads about cameras, workflows, photographic techniques, etc. Institutional knowledge stricken from the web forever.
Flickr really only should nuke accounts or groups as a matter of absolute last resort. They should try to work with their members (especially their long-term and paying members) if they find content that they object to. They should give members opportunities to take self-corrective action before just pulling the plug on their account. If they object to a single thread or a single image, they should just delete that image rather than nuking a user’s entire account.
When Flickr nukes a group or an account it says to a user, "I don’t respect you or your data." It creates an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty is bad for community.
At Flickr when they nuke your account it is also permanent and irrevocable. There is no undo button. Even if Flickr staff mistakenly deletes an account or if a hacker maliciously deletes your account, there is no getting that data back. It’s gone forever.
Flickr could probably very easily create a system where deleted accounts are simply turned completely private and inaccessible from the web without actually removing all of the data. They could then give a user an opportunity to fix whatever they have a problem with in order to get their account turned back on. This would be a far better way of managing community than Flickr does at present.
2. Create a more robust blocking tool. Today at Flickr when you block someone, all it means is that they can’t fave or comment on your photos. This is a very weak blocking system. If someone really wants to harass you blocking them does nothing. They can still comment on photos after you do so that their comments show up in your recent activity. They can still follow you around in groups and post things that you’re forced to look at etc. Especially with cheap throw away troll accounts this creates unnecessary conflict on the site.
A few years back, over at FriendFeed, they developed a far more robust blocking system. When you block someone on FriendFeed they become entirely invisible to you. Not only can they not comment in your threads, anyplace else they post on the site is made invisible to you. They are wiped off the planet as far as you are concerned.
Now this would accomplish a few things at flickr. First it would give users far more control over eliminating anything that they found personally offensive or negative on the site. You don’t like my paintings of nudes from a museum and don’t like seeing them when you search for the de Young Museum? Fine. Then block me and you never see any of my content again. You don’t like someone who uses language that you find offensive in a group post? Fine, block them as well.
Second though, this sort of tool would encourage more civil interaction between users. If a user creates a troll account and starts behaving badly. They are quickly blocked and become irrelevant. This encourages them not to troll creating a more positive experience for the rest of us.
Many of the personality clashes that occur on Flickr could be avoided if Flickr simply empowered the user to block more robustly.
3. SmartSets. Having to manually construct sets is an incredibly inefficient way to build and maintain your sets. That’s why I use Jeremy Brooks’ SuprSetr. It’s probably the best third-party app ever built for Flickr. Flickr should hire Jeremy in fact as he’s doing groundbreaking work here, but that’s another topic.
Flickr should consider building SuprSetr technology directly into their Organize section. Let users build sets by keywords. It makes it much easier for users to build and maintain their sets. If I build a Las Vegas set for instance. In the future every single photo of mine keyworded Las Vegas, automatically gets added to this set when I run SuprSetr. Very slick.
4. Better Group thread management. At present Flickr has a very strong and robust Groups section. Here users can create groups (and there are probably literally millions of groups at this point) and talk about whatever they want and post photos into a pool. Games have been created around groups. Businesses have set up groups. Local communities have created their own groups. There are niche groups about anything and everything — from graffiti in South Florida to a specific neon sign in San Jose. Some groups have more robust discussion threads than others, but all offer this feature.
One of the problems with group threads on Flickr though is that you are constantly losing track of conversations that you are having because you have to manually go to each and every group to check the threads. If I post something in a group, but then don’t remember to go back to that specific group and that specific thread, I have no way of knowing if someone has answered my question or commented after my thoughts or whatever.
Flickr should create a page that aggregates all of the group threads that you are participating in or have chosen to follow. This page would encompass all threads from all group in a nice aggregated section. This way if you posted a really important question in a group three months ago that someone has finally got around to answering, you will actually see it, the moment it is bumped to the top of your aggregator.
Flickr should also allow you to hide group threads. Both in your aggregator as well as in the more general group view. If I don’t care about the latest Pentax camera (because I’m a Canon 5D M2 owner) I should be able to mute that thread in the group and never see it again. This would also help decrease negative trolling and bumping of threads on the site as offensive threads could just be hidden by a user if they didn’t want to see it.
5. Kill explore and replace it with a recommendation system based on your contact’s/friends photos. Flickr blacklisted me from Explore a while back after I wrote a negative blog post about actions that someone on their community management team had taken. They capped my photos in it at 666 (cute huh?). But this isn’t why I don’t like Explore. There’s a whole thread called "So I Accidentally Clicked on Explore" in DMU devoted to crappy photos that end up in Explore. The problem with Explore is that it largely shows you photos that you are less interested in. Broad general popular photos of cliches. Sunsets and kittens as the saying goes.
If I choose to follow people on Flickr, I’m probably much more interested in their style of photography or them personally than I am images in Explore. Maybe I’m a graffiti writer and am most interested in graffiti photos. Maybe my thing is mannequins. Maybe I want to see photos of classic cars. Whatever. Instead of presenting the community what Flickr feels is the best of the whole community, show each member the best of their contacts each, day, week, month. I would be far more interested in the photos of people that I actually follow, like, know, etc. Maybe Aunt Edna’s photo of her dog will never hit Flickr’s explore. But it just might hit my own personalized explore and because I know Aunt Edna and she is my contact, it might be a much more rewarding experience for me to see than say another random dog shot from a user that I don’t even know.
Flickr does have a page that shows your contacts most recent uploads, but this page is very limited and only shows the most recent 1 or 5 photos. There is also no way to filter it so that you see the photos that are faved/commented on the most and are likely to be the more interesting photos.
Get rid of Explore and replace it with something that is focused much more on your contacts than people you don’t even know. A personalized Explore would be a far more interesting page.
6. Improve Group Search. I have no idea why Group Search sucks so badly on Flickr but it does. Frequently you will search for terms that you’ve posted in group thread conversations and Flickr will not return the thread where the word exists. I would think that Yahoo! should know a few things about search and am surprised that searching for threads in groups has been so spotty for so many years. I have no idea why this is so bad, but it shouldn’t be.
7. Improve Data Portability. Flickr gives lipservice to data portability, but is not serious about it. As long as 99% of Flickr users can’t or won’t figure out how to move their photos easily to another site they are just fine with things. Functional lock in. The data that we put on Flickr is our data. It belongs to us. We are paying Flickr to hold it for us, but it belongs to us.
Recently my friend Adam wrote up a post on a help forum post about the language Flickr uses for encouraging people to buy Pro accounts. They said that they felt that Flickr is holding your photos hostage (beyond the 200 photo free limit) if you don’t upgrade to Pro. Only Pro accounts have access to original images on Flickr.
Flickr should let any member get their photos out of Flickr at any time. Further they should offer competitors API keys to allow them to build service to service direct transfer applications to move your photos to another service if you want. If I don’t want to renew my Pro account on Flickr and want to move my photos to Picasa, this should be as easy as me pressing a single button and having all of my photos transfer over.
Today it is very difficult and clunky to get your photos off of flickr. A few third party apps are available, but there are lots of problems with them. They fail if you have too many photos. They are only Windows based, etc. etc. Flickr has functional lock in and holds photos in a silo while talking about how they allow you to get your photos out of Flickr. Flickr should follow the lead of Google here and publicly both state and help make our data more portable. This ought to be part of being a good web citizen today.
8. Uncensor Singapore, Hong Kong, India, Korea, Germany and Maktoob.com. At present Flickr censors content to these places. It’s still mind boggling to me that a photo of a painting that I took in the Art Institute of Chicago can’t be seen by people in India. Trying to censor the world’s web is messy business. Flickr/Yahoo should take a stand for freedom and uncensor these locations. Google last year took a bold step of choosing to walk about from China rather than censor results there. Yahoo should stand for freedom and stop censoring in these places.
9. Let people sell their photos for stock photography. Flickr missed the boat by giving away stock photography to Getty Images. Stock photography is probably the single easiest way for Yahoo to dramatically increase the profitability of Flickr. Getty Images represents a tiny fraction of the images available on Flickr. The Flickr/Getty deal was probably done as a defensive move by Getty more than anything to keep Yahoo out of the multi billion dollar market that is stock photography today. What resulted is that users get a paltry 20% payout for a very small number of their images that can be sold.
Flickr could be a far more formidable competitor to Getty. Flickr has the size and market share to dramatically disrupt this market. The stock photography marketplace is *far* more complicated than this. But oversimplifying things, Flickr should offer two collections for sale (if a user chooses to offer their photos for sale). Cleared photos and uncleared photos. Uncleared photos should pay more to the photographer than cleared photos. Cleared photos would be reviewed by a team of stock photography experts (Yahoo could even buy one of the smaller stock agencies that already has experience clearing images) and result in a lower payout to the photographer. By turning Flickr into the world’s largest stock photography agency Yahoo could receive significant revenue from Flickr and Flickr photographers personally could benefit much more from posting their work there.
10. Build a better mobile app. The Yahoo built mobile app for Flickr sucks ass (sorry). As I understand it, it wasn’t even developed by the Flickr team. Over at Quora former Flickr Engineer Kellan Elliott-McCrea answers the question, "Why did Flickr miss the mobile photo opportunity that Instagram and picplz are pursuing?" There is no compelling mobile Flickr experience today.
Recently, one of my favorite Flickr photographers, Michael Wilbur, deleted his entire Flickr account and is now one of the most popular photographers on Instagram. Flickr needs to develop a more compelling mobile experience. Part of this should be a very easy way to view group threads via mobile.
There you go. Food for thought. And keep on flickering.
No Time At All (1958) … Iran hails ‘turning point’ (6:59PM GMT 27 Feb 2013) …item 2a / 2b.. The Twilight Zone – To Serve Man — “Flight 914” …
Image by marsmet547
"They’re watering down the ‘stop, ship and shut’ commitments in order to have a pause, a breather," said Hugh Chalmers, a nuclear analyst at the Royal United Services Institute. "This seems like a very pragmatic approach towards buying time."
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…..item 1)…. Iran hails ‘turning point’ as world powers make key nuclear concessions …
The Telegraph … www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ …
HOME»NEWS»WORLD NEWS»MIDDLE EAST»IRAN
Iran hailed a "turning point" in the confrontation over its nuclear ambitions when the world’s six leading powers watered down key demands during a "realistic" round of talks.
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img code photo … Iran’s chief negotiator Saeed Jalili
i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02494/saeed_2494555b…
Iran’s chief negotiator Saeed Jalili in Almaty today
Photo: AP
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By David Blair, Chief Foreign Correspondent
6:59PM GMT 27 Feb 2013
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/989853…
The negotiations between Iran and the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany ended with rare words of guarded optimism from both sides.
"In this round of talks we have witnessed that, despite all the attitudes during the last eight months, they tried to get closer to our viewpoints," said Saeed
Jalili, the lead Iranian negotiator.
Praising the "positive" approach of his interlocutors, he said: "We believe this is a turning point."
The six, the US, Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany, known as the "P5 plus 1, had made three crucial demands on Iran before any sanctions could be relaxed.
These were that Iran should stop enriching uranium to the 20 per cent purity that is close to weapons grade; ship its stockpile of this material out of the country, and shut the nuclear plant at Fordow, which was built in secret and revealed only in 2009.
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Yesterday the US and the other countries diluted two of the three stipulations. They still insisted that Iran must stop enriching to 20 per cent, but they have relaxed their demands for the outright closure of Fordow and the export of Tehran’s medium-enriched uranium.
Instead, a Western diplomat said that Iran was asked to "reduce the readiness" of Fordow. This would mean "standing down" some of the cascades of centrifuges. Iran would also be able to keep enough 20 per cent uranium to fuel a civilian research reactor in Tehran.
The diplomat stressed that these would be interim "confidence-building measures", designed to ease the path to a final settlement. But if Iran agreed, the US and her allies would lift sanctions on the trade of gold and precious metals and on equipment for the Islamic Republic’s petrochemical industry.
All other sanctions would remain, but the world powers would refrain from imposing any additional restrictions over the nuclear issue.
"They’re watering down the ‘stop, ship and shut’ commitments in order to have a pause, a breather," said Hugh
Chalmers, a nuclear analyst at the Royal United Services Institute. "This seems like a very pragmatic approach towards buying time."
Baroness Ashton, the European Union’s high representative for foreign affairs, who chairs the "P5 plus 1", said Iran had an opportunity to "take some initial steps that would improve the confidence of the international community in the wholly peaceful nature of their nuclear programme".
Speaking after the talks in Almaty, the capital of Kazakhstan, Lady Ashton cautioned: "The real optimism will come when we start to see progress really being made. And that means our aspiration to see Iran move forward to pick up this proposal, to agree to it and to undertake to implement their part of it."
Mr Jalili, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, listened "intently" as the proposal was set out, said one diplomat at the talks. But Iran has yet to give a formal response.
Officials will meet next month to pin down the details, preparing for another round of negotiations in April. Mr
Chalmers said the "P5 plus 1" had left much undefined. "Once they’ve reduced the readiness at Fordow, they’ll be looking to get far more intrusive IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] inspections. But ‘reduced readiness’ is an uncertain term. How many centrifuges would Iran be allowed to continue operating inside Fordow? And where do they draw the line as to how much 20 per cent enriched uranium Iran would be able to keep?"
Iran has taken conciliatory steps of its own, making it easier for the six countries to modify their demands. Tehran has converted 40 per cent of its medium-enriched uranium into harmless fuel rods, while only a quarter of the 2,710 centrifuges inside Fordow are operational – the same number as a year ago.
But Israel fears that America and its allies will give too much away. Yesterday, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, said that only a threat of "military sanctions" would make Iran back down. "I don’t think there are any other means that will make Iran heed the international community’s demands," he said.
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…..item 2a)…. The Kanamits, nine-foot tall aliens, arrive on Earth with one lofty goal: To Serve Man. They end war, they end famine. They make the military wonder: what’s the catch?
"To Serve Man" is an episode of the television series The Twilight Zone.
The story is based on the short story "To Serve Man," written by Damon Knight.[1] The title is a play on the verb to serve, which has the dual meanings of "to assist" and "to provide as a meal." The episode is one of the few instances in the series wherein the actor breaks the fourth wall and addresses the viewing audience at the episode’s end.
Synopsis
As the episode opens, Michael Chambers is seen lying uncomfortably on a cot in a spartan interior. An unseen voice implores him to eat. He refuses. He asks what time it is on Earth, and begins to tell the story of how he came to be here (aboard a spaceship) in flashback:
The Kanamits, a race of nine-foot-tall aliens, land on Earth. One of them addresses the United Nations, vowing that his race’s motive in coming to Earth is solely to be helpful to humanity. Initially wary of the intentions of an alien race who came "quite uninvited," even skeptical international leaders begin to be persuaded of the aliens’ benevolence when the Kanamits share their advanced technology, quickly putting an end to many of Earth’s greatest woes, including hunger; energy becomes very cheap; nuclear weapons are rendered harmless. The aliens even morph deserts into big, blooming fields. Trust in the Kanamits seems to be justified when Patty, one of a staff of US government cryptographers led by Mr. Chambers, cracks the title of a Kanamit book the spokesman left behind at the UN. Its title, she reveals, is To Serve Man.
Soon, humans are volunteering for trips to the Kanamits’ home planet, which is portrayed as a paradise. With the Cold War ended, the code-breaking staff has no real work to do, but Patty is still trying to work out the meaning of the text of To Serve Man.
The day arrives for Mr. Chambers’s excursion to the Kanamits’ planet. Just as he mounts the spaceship’s boarding stairs, his staffer Patty appears. He waves to her, smiling, but she runs toward him in great agitation–and is held back by a Kanamit guard. "Mr. Chambers," Patty cries, "don’t get on that ship! The rest of the book To Serve Man, it’s… it’s a cookbook!" Chambers tries to run back down the spaceship’s stairs, but a Kanamit wrestles him into the ship, and it immediately takes off for the aliens’ home planet.
So we again see Mr. Chambers aboard the Kanamit spaceship, now saying to the audience, "How about you? You still on Earth, or on the ship with me? Really doesn’t make very much difference, because sooner or later, we’ll all of us be on the menu…all of us." The episode closes as he gives in and breaks his hunger strike; as Chambers tears at his food, Rod Serling provides a darkly humorous coda in voice-over, noting man’s devolution from "dust to dessert" and from ruler of a planet to "an ingredient in someone’s soup."
Episode no. Season 3
Episode 89
Directed by Richard L. Bare
Written by Rod Serling (Based on the story To Serve Man by Damon Knight. First published in the November 1950 issue of Galaxy.)
Featured music Stock – taken almost exclusively from Jerry Goldsmith’s TZ episode scores for "Back There" and "The Invaders"
Production code 4807
Original air date March 2, 1962
Guest stars
Lloyd Bochner: Chambers
Richard Kiel: Kanamit
Susan Cummings: Patty
Joseph Ruskin: Kanamit Voice (uncredited)
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…..item 2b)…. youtube video … Twilight Zone – SO3E24 – To Serve Man – Full Episode …
… 24:56 minutes …
www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCzhsUT5Jh0
the2ndHPstupefy
Published on Jan 9, 2013
Sound is off a bit but it’s the full episode up for the first time on Youtube.
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@Jr_Scholes
Category
Film & Animation
License
Standard YouTube License
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