A taste of FlickrFanMonday, August 18, 2008 by Dave Winer. FlickrFan, like all rivers of news, is about flow. In this case it's a flow of pictures, from your contacts on Flickr, from AP and AFP, and from anyone else that you know that provides a feed of high-def pictures. I like to view the pictures on a big-screen TV that's hooked up to a Mac Mini, but I also use it on my desktop, and various laptops -- no matter where or how you watch, it's an interesting way to view the news. Then I thought, why not scroll the pictures through a web page, one every few seconds? So last night I put it together, on an experimental basis, and it's pretty interesting! It's just a taste of what you get with FlickrFan, but it doesn't require any software other than a web browser. Click on the link and kick back for a few and let the pics scroll by. Today the news is mostly the Olympics and General Musharraf of Pakistan (he resigned). Last week there were lots of Russian tanks. Tomorrow I bet there will be hurricane pics from Florida. Watch out cause sometimes the pics are not work-safe, usually not because of sex, rather because of blood, even death. But that reflects what's actually happening in the world. Thanks to two very fine organizations for their support: AFP for their fire-hose of wonderful news pictures, and WordPress.com for hosting the pictures and providing bandwidth. I couldn't afford the hosting myself. Update: Interesting to see Boston.Com going in this direction too. |
Dave Winer, 53, pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in Berkeley, California. "The protoblogger." - NY Times.
"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.
One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web. "Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.
"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.
"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.
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