Curl

Zooomr, a social photo-hosting/sharing site, is giving away free pro accounts to bloggers. I’ve had a Flickr account, one way or another, almost since they started. But there’s no harm in looking at the competition.

In this case I like the ease of geotagging, the way that nearby geotagged pictures appear on the photo page (see here, for example) and the little icons which pop up on mouse-over for each picture. There are also trackbacks which show you if/when your picture has been used elsewhere on the web and you can add an audio track to a picture.

The downside (on cursory inspection) is that there do not appear to be any slide shows at all, let alone the full-on BubbleShare-like functionality I’d love to have on my photo-hosting site of choice. Also I don’t like the styling included in the “add picture to blog” option. You can’t see it above because I’ve removed it all, but doing so for every picture uploaded would be a pain.

While digging about on Zoomr I also found Newzpile which is a hugely useful tool. It’s a search interface for twelve different sources of social/citizen-generated digital web content. One search box combs them all.

And there’s a nifty ticker service too, but which seems to be based on mainstream media sources. Although the fields of interest for the ticker content are currently pre-defined I feel sure that it won’t be long before users can make their own.