If you look close, the Flickr blue and pink are everywhere.

Like here, in my kitchen.

There are several Flickr colours groups on Flickr too, like here, here and here.

Do join them next time you snap the blue and pink somewhere near you!

Creative Commons, the non-profit organization behind the Creative Commons licences, is hosting the CC Swag 2006 Photo Contest on Flickr. The idea is that you upload your pictures of CC swag to your account and submit it to the contest pool.

Obviously, you first need to get hold of some CC gear, which is available from their store and helps support the cause. You can get shirts, buttons and other stuff, but the goal is of course to be as cool and creative with it as possible.

According to the Flickr Blog, there are some 22 million CC licenced photo’s available already – an amazing number. The contest pool only counts six (!) today, but that will surely change between now and 6 December when the contest closes.

Prizes include personalized voice mail messages from the Creative Commons board (such as Lawrence Lessig, which might be neat if you knew who he is – well, I do now), but also (perhaps more interesting for budding photographers trying to get their work publicized) promotional CC postcards featuring your work. That is cool, since this material will be distributed worldwide.

Start snapping and remember, make your work available if you can so that the world can share and enjoy it even more.

Also, watch the CC videos and support the organization by clicking the ad at the end.

Image under CC by 1of@kind

Yes, 30 Boxes is still alive. Thank God for Flickr.

On that other little Flickr tracker, FlickrNation, Thomas Hawk presents us a cool tool that allows you to show off your Flickr photographs in a 30 Boxes calendar view.

You don’t have to sign in or even be a 30 Boxes member. Just add your Flickr feed and you’re offered a neat piece of code that you can embed anywhere you like – although not (yet) in a WordPress.com template like this apparently.

It’s not unlike Flickr’s own calendar viewing option, but it does have the added value that Flickr pics aren’t the only thing you can add to your boxes.

The service offers mashups for your blog’s feed, your iCal data or just about any RSS or XML feed you like.

It’s also dynamic, so that when you manage your photostream, the changes will show up in your boxes.

A mini version meant for blog sidebars was also announced.

It doesn’t seem entirely up to par yet. As you can see from the image above, it seems to think I only began snapping on 1 November and when I added my blog feed it seemingly arbitrarily chose to display a mix between post titles and post pictures.

What is cool, though, is that you can choose from a number of calendar themes (e.g. OSX, Flickr White, GMail blue, etc.).

No, it won’t make me use 30 Boxes now.

But go and play with it, it certainly has potential for a lot of uses and a lot of photosharing fun.

‘Welcome to teh Intarweb, losers. Now you can go to jail.’

That’s what a Dutch guy’s first reaction was when pictures of the thugs who had stolen his phone showed up in his Flickr photostream. But things don’t turn out to be that straightforward.

So what happened?

A few days ago, a Dutch 25-year old blogged about how he’d lost his mobile. It could have happened anywhere, really – on the bus, on the train or at any moment of his journey that day. He was unable to do more than report his phone as stolen (or missing) to the police and block his SIM.

Losing a mobile phone, however, is never a police priority, so that would have been the last he ever heard of it.

Or so he thought.

This morning, the guy, Martijn, was rather surprised to see several pictures he had never taken himself show up in his Flickr photostream . Together with a rather mysterious image of a parrot, there was one pic showing two guys he’d never seen before.

The guys who had either stolen, or found, his phone.

Now, Martijn had a little app by ShoZu installed . With this program, the phone’s user is asked whether they want to automatically upload the pics they’ve just shot to their Flickr account. The two curious looking types apparently had no idea what this meant and clicked ‘yes’.

So, now the guy knows who has his phone, but he doesn’t know who they are. And the police still can’t do a thing, because the duo might just have well ‘found’ the phone.

If they did find it, they’re not the most honest of types either, because they should have just turned it in at the nearest cop shop – not switch SIMs and use it for taking happy snaps of themselves.

The two won’t remain anonymous for long though. Dutch satirical news site GeenStijl (NoStyle) has already picked up on the story, and the item has everything to become quite the ’skateboarding parrot’ for the regular news stations as well.

I’m real interested for sure to see how this little Flickr gem will turn out.

A couple of wonderful images of sweets on Flickr. Just sit back and water at the mouth.

All images under CC by Belgian Chocolate. Click them for full size original pages.

In Europe these days, there always seems to be some vote going on somewhere. But when the US shuffles to the polling stations, the world pricks its ears.

It seems only natural, although it can become a wee bit too much for us Eurotrash clicking away the election-related posts in our feed readers.

But what can you do.

Luckily, Flickr offers you the chance to see what is actually happening on the spot, making the event more close-by, personal and real than any news broadcast can.

It wouldn’t be Flickr if there wasn’t also a group, created for the event.

First, check out this selection of cool CC licenced images. Click them for their original photo page.

Vote Feminist by Ocean Yamaha

¡Ya Voté! by Honan

Election Day by Johndan

Opening Count by Hyku

I Voted… by Possum4All

November 7, 2006 by Dom Dada

The post header image is by Mariannika Lowell, from my Project 365 group.

I have absolutely no clue how interestingness works. For all I know, someone at the Flickr HQ does exactly the same like me, browsing the millions of photographs available and tagging them as favourites.

Flickr Hits, however, has an interesting post out today, asking if Flickr is deliberately blacklisting certain groups from interestingness. I haven’t the foggiest about this claim either, but seriously? What would be the point?

Well, let us see what would be the point.

The discussion first got sparked at the 4 Aces group. 4 Aces is one of those massive membership groups (although 3,289 is still within reason) with a multitude of photographs that is mind-boggling (29,812) – although even that is relative of course.

One of its members posted about how he was under the impression that the group is being barred from showing up on the Explore pages. He comes to this conclusion based on four assumptions:

1. images of his, with quite a few favs and comments, didn’t show up on Explore;
2. images belonging to the group have disappeared from Explore;
3. one image, that made it to number 120, disappeared after being added to the group;
4. a random screening of four Explore pages on a given day didn’t yield one image from the group.

Now, with what little I remember from science class and how to conduct credible research, I think I can safely say this testing technique is far removed from the principles of the scientific method, i.e. being duplicable, predictive, controlled and falsifiable.

But, wait, I’m not here to bash the gentleman in question. I also hold other values near and dear to my heart, such as being critical, inquisitive and not afraid to speak your mind. So, in a way I’m happy with his thoughts.

The question is, however, not whether Flickr is banning groups for no good reason (I’m convinced they don’t), but how does Flickr calculate its interestingness and – more importantly – does it have the right to alter these devious and hidden mechanisms so that the results better reflect what is truly the bees’ knees on any given Flickr day?

I think yes – definitely.

Flickr isn’t about scoring, about making headlines or becoming popular. Personally, I don’t even much like these groups, that exist solely on the basis of adding more and more images with nothing else to bind its members than nonsensical rules like ‘you have to comment on the picture third from the left on the second page’.

The images may be beautiful, it may be great to get a lot of comments, but what does it really say about you and your photographic skills? Not much, I fear.

For a minute, imagine if blogs worked like that. ‘I’ll comment on your previous post if you’ll comment on mine tomorrow’? It’s madness.

And it is exactly the reason, if I may assume that much, why Flickr keeps tweaking its interestingness formula, so that the numbers and the herd don’t overrule the quality of the content. That isn’t blacklisting, it’s creating a reliable quality product.

In that same vein, I was surprised to read The Tech Den’s criticism of Flickr apparently patenting interestingness. Apart from the question if words can be patented, I don’t think Flickr is patenting just a page rank system (like Google’s) or a front page system (like Digg’s).

I think Flickr is just trying to keep Flickr interesting.

I know I would spend a lot more time on YouTube, for instance, if they had anything even remotely similar, and if they wouldn’t just feature the junk of the day that finds its way to the top via MySpace clicks.

So, join Flickr, join as many groups as you like, but remember what it’s about – the sharing of our collective photographic memory or just letting your friends know what you’ve been up to, but not about who and how many you can convince to like you.

Via Digg and Digg

Vlogs are great, but people like pictures too. They offer a calmer, more relaxed way of viewing and taking in an event after the dust settles.

On Flickr, photographs of the Vloggies have begun appearing.

Here are some striking CC images on Flickr right now. Click them to go to their original photo page.

Image by R3wind

Image by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

Image by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

Image by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

There are tons more, but it’s up to you to discover them. I do wonder, though, why so many people still mark their images as fully copyrighted by default. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of photo sharing going on that way.

But that’s material for another post.

For a list of all the winners, visit the Oracle.

Post header image by: Thomas Hawk

Say what?

Flickr user John Ralston has devised an interesting interpretation to the Moo cards.

He created two sets (one, two) of fifteen drawings printed on Moo cards that you can arrange in any order to create a unique panorama.

You’re not limited to just the one panorama, though, because the fifteen cards can be arranged in no less than 1,307,674,368,000 different ways. I didn’t bother to check that however.

You can order sets of his moo’s at $10 each.

More (non-Flickr) polyorama’s can be found here and here.

Via Fabulist! via Drawn!