Recommendation for Flickr 

I've been emailing today with photographers who use Flickr to manage their sets and collections. They like it that people can view their pictures publicly, but they want to control how they're used. RSS, used as a way to distribute pictures, is a new idea for many of them.

Based on these conversations I think it's important that they have a way to:

1. Turn off the RSS feed for their pictures.

2. To have their pictures not included in RSS feeds based on tags and searches.

3. To include their pictures in RSS feeds, but only links to them, and the titles and descriptions, but not as enclosures.

Of course this recommendation isn't just for Flickr, it's a good idea for any photo-sharing site.

FlickrFan, day 2 

Good morning, lots of discussion on many weblogs about the new product, FlickrFan, announced here last night.

I'm going to write about it here, a lot, over the coming weeks and months, but first I wanted to link to some of the comments about it.

Michael Markman: How to Use FlickrFan with AppleTV.

Don Park: Dave's New Thingy.

Rex Hammock: Dave's cool new thing.

I guess it's a "thing" eh?

Phil Jones: Platform Wars.

Michael Gartenberg: FlickrFan first thoughts.

Scoble (yesterday): The MacMini HDTV revolution.

Fred Wilson and Bijan Sabet have been using the software for the last month or so in a variety of forms.

Loren Feldman marks the moment in history.

Om Malik came for a visit last month, we took a walk in the hills, and of course I talked about FlickrFan and did a demo.

There were other articles and reviews, you can find them on TechMeme or Technorati. One thing I've learned is that takes a bit of time to find the right mix of personal pics from Flickr and news pics from AP. It's an unusual app because whole families can use it, and they have different preferences and expectations. The tech blogosphere tends to rush to decide about things. I find they sometimes miss the mark, widely and I was sure this would be one of those times, which is why I didn't roll it out the usual way.

I wanted to get a base of users going, and learn and evolve the software, so far it looks pretty good, so the next step is to evaluate, listen, fix the most serious bugs I can find, think, and then move forward.

Watch this space (below) for new features and fixes...

Change Note #17: List of newly-installed FlickrFans.

End of year links 

NY Times list of buzzwords of 2007.

Washington Post: "The RIAA's legal crusade against its customers is a classic example of an old media company clinging to a business model that has collapsed."

Twitter down? 

It appears Twitter is down.

Couldn't come on a worse day. All the support concerns and links to blog posts are now flowing through email. Oy. We've gotten hooked on this technology and when it's gone, it hurts.

It's back up now.

Pride of Cucamonga 

Oh, oh, pride of Cucamonga

Oh, oh, bitter olives in the sun

Oh, oh, I had me some loving

And I done some time

Beautiful song, can't get it out of my head!