Category: images

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In which I become a citizen journalist

That tornado again. I took a few snaps on my way to collect the secondborn from school and put them in a flickr set called “Tornado” with the comment “It lasted 10″ and injured 6 people but the media converged as though to some kind of national emergency.” Well, it was irritating being pounced on by reporters wanting to know what had happened “the day the sky went black”, as one of them put it. I mean, really. Was it such a slow news day?

Somewhat to my surprise I subsequently received an automated invitation from the citizen journalism outfit NowPublic asking if I would care to contribute my pictures to their article on the subject.

1 invite

I’d heard that NowPublic had a whizzy automated application which allowed quick and easy importing of photos from flickr which weren’t already available under a Creative Commons license so I was intrigued to see it in action.

Clicking on the link took me directly to NowPublic’s site and the detailed form shown below (click on it for a larger version if you want to read the small print):

2 form

I signed on and clicked upload and lo! the story in question now had my pictures as illustration rather than the lifts from a newspaper and the BBC websites which had been there just seconds before:

3 story

(The strange box with the f in the middle is my browser’s flash animation blocker hiding a piece of video of the storm as it passed over another part of London.)

Each photograph uploaded now has a trackback to the story in which it appears added as a comment.

All very clever and nifty. The only way in which it seems not to have worked entirely as planned is the fact that of the 13 photographs selected for uploading in the original request only five made it to the site, but that may have been a deliberate throttle of which I am unaware.

So. How do we make something like this for Global Voices?

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One day after full

aeroplane

The sodium smears sickly colours on the cloud base. Fifteen seconds the shutter is held open, time enough for an aeroplane to needle its trackmarks of light and flash along the sky.

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Curl

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.

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South bank rain

south bank rain

This is a test of the dinky “blog this” facility in flickr which I’ve never thought to use before. In theory this image should be 500 px wide and centred with this text underneath it.

The picture itself was taken the other night after the Lachenmann concert. I emerged, floating, from the QEH and the rain was soft and gentle, the lights beautiful. Although I have no idea what that structure is which, in the cold light of day, looks distressingly like a petrol station.

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Oh what a beautiful morning…

…oh what a beautiful day. Yesterday, now. But even the passing of midnight hasn’t lessened the effect.

I twirl across the mountain meadow warbling a happy song, regardless of the fact that the song is in Oklahoma and the mountain is in Austria.

How extraordinary to feel happy. Really, it is extra to the ordinary. Such a surprise, a novel sensation. Almost frightening in its intensity.

And what can have caused this? I have absolutely no idea. It could have been the weather – sunny outside and not so cold inside hunched over the keyboard that I had to wear sheepskin boots and two fleeces. Maybe it was the long sleep – I didn’t wake up until after 11am. But both these conditions have been met on other occasions and not resulted in joy.

There is no extrinsic cause I can discern for this mood. And intrinsic? How could I tell? The chemistry of my brain is a mystery to me.

I’ve been enjoying it like a pebble off the beach sun-warm in my hand, small and flecked with surprising colours. And the day has just got better and better. Superb music redolent of the time I finally escaped from home; work achieved; laughter with friends; children delightful; far-away friends phoning out of the blue; more superb (and utterly appropriate) music.

The only photograph I have from the day is this one, taken on my phone outside the post office.

doll bike seat

The doll reminded me of the only doll I ever loved whom I called, who knows why, Pandora. I remember sitting under the ironing board in the kitchen with Pandora in my arms while my pressed clothes above my head. In a patch of sunlight.

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Leaving with knobs on

leaving with knobs on

How could I miss this the other day? It’s the textured bit of pavement round the corner from my house which I stand on at least daily waiting for the lights at the pedestrian crossing to change.

Colour this time, and showing the tea-stain shade which adds credence to Dave ‘s surmise as to the formation of these marks. I can’t find any further information about it myself.

I think I missed it (this particular print) because it simply wasn’t there. My guess is that the process (whatever it is) must happen quite quickly given the high levels of wind and pedestrian disturbance on the pavement concerned.

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Leaving

The streets are paved with the ghosts of leaves, faint shadowed fadings where once colour was.

leaving1

Maybe it is a chemical process akin to that used by some to explain the image on the Turin shroud.

leaving2

Neither water nor oil, flowing and filming across the surfaces, are sufficient swiftly to remove these signs. I have not tried wine.

leaving3

Do these atoms bonded to brick and bitumen ever return in recycled spring leaf resurrection?

leaving4

My mother died, about a year ago. This off focus imprecision still stains. Black bonded scar no scrubbing cleans.