Posts from chromatic orb

In memoriam

nobody@ipernity.com (chromatic orb) — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 23:59:08 +0000

Gary Gygax left the table yesterday. He would be 70 years in a couple of months.

I owe a lot to the game he created (toghether with Dave Arneson), a game like no other before. I played Dungeons & Dragons for the first time some 20 years ago and met some fantastic friends playing it. I hold many dear memories from many late night (and early morning) roleplaying sessions. Still have the books, of course, my son is reaching 10 years now, I think it's time to pass the flame to a younger generation.

Keep the dice rolling.

[edit: All around the web, tributes to Gary Gygax are being posted. I'll, add links as I find them. If you find some, please let me know.]

About copy (right, left or wrong)

nobody@ipernity.com (chromatic orb) — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 01:44:30 +0000

chromatic orb has added a post:

Today's global digital communications, computers and the internet allow us to instantly and simultaneously share ideas and works in a way that was not dreamt over one century ago. And in this digital age, traditional copyright doesn't even make sense, as the act of copy is part of the process of communication. In the digital world, in order to read a book, listen to a song or see a video, you need to create a copy on your computer.

Think about it: when you look at a copyright protected photo on your computer, your browser have already downloaded a copy, something copyright prevents you to do. So, when you upload a photo to ipernity and place it under copyright, how can someone see it without breaking traditional copyright protection? Remember: copyright prevents copy.

If on the other hand your intention is to prevent unauthorized redistribution of your work, you need to extend copyright by allowing a certain type of copy, something not covered by traditional copyright. After all, copyright means all rights reserved. This is where Creative Commons enters and upgrades copyright to the 21st century.

By using a creative commons license you keep some right reserved while allowing normal and lawful use of your work over digital networks. The fundamental aspects of copyright are carried over to creative commons: authorship remains with the original author through the Attribution clause, work integrity is warranted by the No Derivatives clause and economical retribution is retained by the Non Commercial clause.

What's more important, the right to reuse the work is explicitly granted by creative commons. You can freely download the work for any personal use, you can redistribute it and, if the author explicitly allows, you can even modify it and use it as source or part of your own creative work, as long as you credit the original author.

Now, if you're still with me, let me share with you why I felt the urge to write about this subject. While looking through my contacts' beautiful images, I was pointed to a serious instance of copyright violation, in this case, plagiarism. Of course a creative commons license wouldn't prevent this from happening, a bad apple is a bad apple.

As the offending account seems to have been terminated, I can't judge on the motive behind the plagiarist but I've often seen cases where people so much love the work of others that they collect and share it. It's quite common for fans of musical groups to do this and the motive is frequently to share something you love, not steal it. The problem with copyright is you're not allowed to share or redistribute, even when you rightfully credit the author. I'm convinced that a larger awareness of creative commons would help to reduce the cases of unlawful copyright violation and give creators and consumers a lot more options.

Random thoughts about ipernity

nobody@ipernity.com (chromatic orb) — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 17:22:16 +0000

chromatic orb has added a post:

I've now visited hundreds of photographies on ipernity and have yet to find a single instance of those dreadful awards that litter comment pages on flickr. It's common to see some (discrete) invitations to add photos to groups bu nothing like the ugliness I was used to find on the other site, to the point I had over 200 such images blocked with AdBlock.

And speaking of groups, on ipernity groups seem to be close to dead. Sure people still place images on groups but I guess the advanced comment functionality (eg. replies and comment tracking) and blogging make groups less useful for discussion. However, groups like Canon's and Nikon's should be very useful but have almost no members and even less discussion traffic.

One thing I neglected to mention on my comparison was the search function, which in ipernity is just broken and close to useless. For example, something basic as searching for a strig using quotes just doesn't work. I've reported this to technical support and was assured that boolean search was on it's way. Search is also missing basic functionality like searching documents in a date interval, sorting groups by number of users and so on. I'm eagerly waiting for the new search function.

Going back to the awards absence, it seems the ipernity community is not suffering from the global interestingness obsession there seems to be on the other site. I don't know if this is because theres really no equivalent to interestingness, as there is at least one group for photos appearing on the front page, but as all other groups this is very low traffic.

From flickr to ipernity (part 4)

nobody@ipernity.com (chromatic orb) — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 18:42:03 +0000

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Emotional considerations

I don't pretend to be un-emotional about this review, quite the opposite. I have been an advocate of flickr since I first created my account there and have invited (and helped) everyone I cared about to use the site. Flickr has been my homepage for a long time and I consider it one of the best sites around. Right before the Microsoft bid, I had been making plans to use it for a couple of projects I am considering to participate.

If it wasn't for Microsoft's bid, I wouldn't even think a second time about ipernity, which I had already try when there were censorship issues with flickr. But beeing a Free Software advocate I'm very biased against Microsoft and the prospect of it buying my "beloved" flickr hit me like a stone. I was sure that Microsoft would start moving things towards it's windows-centric way of working and would be just a matter of time before compatibility issues started popping.

But now that that prospect is out of the way, I'm able to look at things on a less emotive way. Now I no longer feel the need to move away from flickr so I am no longer looking at ipernity as an escape route but rather as a possible way forward.

flickr pros

I consider flickr the best photo sharing site on the web. The site is very friendly, clear, easy to use and has all the basic features one might need. It's major feature is it's powerful API that allows creative minds around the globe to access the images and metadata it stores and build upon it.

Flickr also has the highest quality content on it's market and is home to a large number of outstanding photographers. The excelent classification algorithm they call interestingess works wonders (most of the times) at enabling the best works to easily stand out.

Again, this review is from te point of view of someone moving from flickr so the fact that one already is part of a community is an important factor.

flickr cons

While interestingness is very useful, it has a huge downside: people frequentely fall into the trap of trying to gamble the system to get exposition. There's too many people collecting comments and favorites and too many comment groups and comments threads.

ipernity pros

I think the social networking features of ipernity are very well balanced with it's photo sharing features. The addition of a blog, the ability to reply to comments, enhanced tracking of comments and the network of contacts approach give users very flexible ways to build communities. One interesting thing for me is the way groups are almost unused on ipernity.

Ipernity has a strong position supporting Free Software, not only using it to run their services but also by promoting the use of Firefox and not being shy on thanking the community. Also worthy of note is the fact than ipernity relies on the community for help on translating the site.

I also like the way different languages are so commonly used on ipernity's comments, blogs and discussions. Due to this exposition I'm considering to restart learning Esperanto and maybe begin to learn German. The world is a much richer place when there's diversity.

ipernity cons

While claiming to be a "web 2.0" application, ipernity lacks the support of a good API that enables interface from outside.

The lack of a high quality content classification makes it hard to find works, specially if they are from a few months ago. Also the searching function is very poor at the moment.

My conclusion

During the last week I've been very busy and had no time to take photos. What little spare time I had, I spent it looking around ipernity so I had no time for flickr. While at the start I thought the hardest part of moving would be missing the community, I found out that I already feel quite at home in ipernity and looking forward to spend more time here, exploring some more.

Looking back through my review, Flickr has only one thing that ipernity doesn't: API. The other strong point of flickr, it's community, isn't something that ipernity lacks, just isn't as large. On the other hand, ipernity's tools for communication are more flexible and I look forward to find out what improvements are planned.

So I guess I'll be taking a holiday from flickr and give ipernity a try. I'll probably crosspost from time to time to compare the reactons I get on both communities and also say hi to my contacts there, but I'm switching my home page to ipernity. This is not because I think ipernity is better, but mostly because at the moment ipernity gives me more to explore.

Now I need find some time to go out and take some photos.

[ part1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 ]

Small print: This review is from someone who has been using flickr for over two years and only has about two weeks using ipernity, so if you have more experience with ipernity and notice that I'm missing something, please mention it.

From flickr to ipernity (part 3)

nobody@ipernity.com (chromatic orb) — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 18:29:12 +0000

chromatic orb has added a post:

Pro accounts

I didn't remember what free accounts miss on flickr, so I had to go there and read about it. And then compare it with what ipernity pro account offers. This gives me the chance to try tables on the blog so that's what I'll do.

	flickr free	ipernity free	flickr pro	ipernity pro
storage limit	100MB/month	200MB/month	unlimited	unlimited
upload limit	5MB/photo	90MB/photo	10MB/photo	90MB/photo
photostream limits	200 photos	unlimited	unlimited	unlimited
set/album limit	3	unlimited	unlimited	unlimited
group limit	10	unlimited	60	unlimited
advertising on pages	yes	yes	no	no
other limitations	can't replace photos no "original size"	no "original size"	-	-
price (1 year)	free	free	$ 24.95	€ 23.88

There you have it. Before giving the vote on this item, I'll just say that, while ipernity mentions "no ads" as a pro feature, I haven't seen a single ad on my few days on a free acount. But maybe that has to do with Adblock Plus...

So, loking at the table I'd say ipernity gives you more for free but it's the same on pro accounts even if the price on ipernity is a bit higher due to the low dollar performance. Personally I could live with the free account either on ipernity or flickr, but I like to pay for good service so this one is a tie.

ipernity 7.5 - flickr 5.5

Not only pictures

Until now all this match has been focused on photo and image sharing, because that's what flickr is specialized on. However on ipernity photography is only part of the picture (pun intended). While photo sharing is the major aspect, ipernity allows us also to uploadand share videos, music and other types of documents.

I'm an "old fashioned" photographer, so video is not my scene and while I love good music I don't have any kind of talent to create it. This means I won't take advantage of the enhanced media type support but I do realize that many creative minds will be envolved on various aspects of the arts and ipernity does offer more support for them. So I'll add one more point for ipernity.

ipernity 8.5 - flickr 5.5

Help!

On flickr it is quite easy to find the information we need. On ipernity there's no help yet. Actually, there's some help if you select the french language, but that's not what most people will expect.

ipernity 8.5 - flickr 6.5

Policy

Browsing over flickr's community guidelines and ipernity's member guidelines, theres not much difference to be found, just standard talk. The major difference is that flickr recentely added the obligation for users to mark their images whenever they are "not safe for children". This was in response to government laws yadda yadda yadda... For now there is no such obbligation on ipernity but something like that is on it's way. Tie.

ipernity 9 - flickr 7

Third-party support

Flickr is built on and around a very powerful API that allows third-parties to create applications that supply a wide range of services. This is used by companies that offer printing services, programmers that offer extended functionality for users or create fantastic sites like photophlow and communities that were built around flickr, like Utata. As far as I could find, there's no such API available for ipernity.

ipernity 9 - flickr 8

Freedom level

Both sites support and recommend the use of Creative Commons licenses. The technology behind both sites is based on free software. Neither site publishes it's codebase under an open source license. Both sites work well with Firefox and Konqueror on Linux, though ipernity takes a small lead by stating that "only Firefox is fully supported". Also at the moment ipernity is more relaxed about things like a woman's nipple. And Microsoft didn't announce it was going to buy ipernity. (update: as Yahoo! rejected the bid, this is a non issue, so both sites are about equal)

ipernity 9.5 - flickr 8.5

next: the conclusion...

[ part1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 ]

Small print: This review is from someone who has been using flickr for over two years and only has a couple of days with ipernity, so if you have more experience with ipernity and notice that I'm missing something, please mention it.

From flickr to ipernity (part 2)

nobody@ipernity.com (chromatic orb) — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 01:07:29 +0000

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The community

Flickr's community is just huge when compared to ipernity, no point in trying to compare numbers, so I won't. At first sight there seems to be an identical mindset and I'm sure most of the users have used flickr sometime in the past, so I can expect it will not be difficult to (re)build a network of contacts. From what I've seen in discussions and comments, people are friendly, polite and helpful.

It quickly became clear that ipernity has a much higher percentage of europeans and there tends to be a lot more conversations and comments in french and german than there was on flickr. Personally, I like that.

This review is about migrating from flickr and the cutting of ties with contacts there is probably what newcomers will miss the most so I'll consider the community

a point if favor of continuing on flickr. For someone starting from scratch I'd call it a tie.

ipernity 3.5 - flickr 2.5

Explore

The one thing that marvels me the most on flickr is exploring photos. Flickr's explore and interestingness make for a wonderful experience and I stayed for hours just listening to music and reloading explore or browsing the calendar.

The first thing I tried on ipernity was it's own explore interface. It is nothing like flickr, not even close. Actualy, it's very, very far. I can't just figure what's the idea behind that page other that just having some sort of placeholder for ways of browsing ipernity. Theres some sort of behind-the-scene "rating" system, most likely based on views, comments and favorites, but while flickr uses interestingness to rate images close to real-time, ipernity seems to use a monthly based algorithm. As a result, the what's hot page stays the same from day to day.

On the fourth day I stopped trying to find interesting photos using explore. That's just not the way to go on ipernity. I consider the difference so huge that not only flickr wins on this one, it rules. I'll even grant two points to better express the difference.

ipernity 3.5 - flickr 4.5

Groups

In flickr groups have photo pools and discussions. Ipernity's groups are exactly the same only there's less of them and they are less crowded. Tie.

ipernity 4 - flickr 5

Comments

On flickr you can comment on photos, discussions and write testimonials. The same on ipernity, but you can also add replies to comments. This allows for threaded discussions and better comment flow on photo pages. What's more, the page you use to follow comments you made allows you to "do not follow anymore" for each comment. This is something I always wanted to have on flickr, so ipernity wins here

ipernity 5 - flickr 5

Keep up with your contacts

I find Ipernity's aproach of a network of contacts is a lot more versatile than what flickr (doesn't) have. You can not only see new photos your contacts post, but also see their latest comments. In addition, ipernity also keeps track of who visited your page and photos (if the visitor has the preference enabled) so you have a more "personal" contact with your visitors.

And something I also find interesting, is that you can add a special tag to document pages: a "member tag". This allows you to establish a relation between the document and a contact. You also have access to a "I am on this photo" link on your contacts photos. Of course, this open up some interesting privacy issues, but very useful for social networking.

ipernity 6 - flickr 5

Blog

Flickr has no blogging functionality. Ipernity wins this one with both hands tied and ballancing a coconut on it's head.

ipernity 7 - flickr 5

to be continued...

[ part1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 ]

From flickr to ipernity (part 1)

nobody@ipernity.com (chromatic orb) — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 19:46:25 +0000

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Creating the account

I already had an ipernity account, so I skipped this step but there's one really big difference here that I really want to talk about: ipernity fully supports authentication using OpenID. If you don't know what I'm talking about here, you should read about it because it is really useful.

What it means for a new user coming from flickr is you can use your Yahoo! OpenID to to create your ipernity account and use it afterwords to authenticate to ipernity. That's one less password to maintain and one more step on the development of your network identity.

As I'm a big fan of OpenID, this is a big plus to me so I consider ipernity better on account creation

ipernity 1 - flickr 0

Uploading images

So, once we have the account, the first thing we want to do is upload some images. Here ipernity tries really hard attract people coming from flickr by supplying not one but three methods for importing images from flickr:

We can upload images from any URL, so we just need to supply the URL to the image, on flickr or anywhere else on the web. This is a very useful feature.
There is a Greasemonkey script for importing a batch of images from our flickr account, complete with title, description and tags.
There's another Greasemonkey script that does the same, but on a image-by-image basis.

There's also another way to add photos we don't have on flickr: we can upload a zip file of images and ipernity will extract individual images. That's useful if you're uploading BMP or uncompressed TIFF files, or just to do a lot of JPG images on one go.

On flickr I never used the flash uploader and don't intend to use the one ipernity supplies, so I can't compare that. I consider ipernity wins the uploading contest as it give me more freedom to move from one image hosting provider to another.

ipernity 2 - flickr 0

Annotating images

Once you get to the image page, it's hard to spot the differences. You can edit title and description, add to groups and albums (that's what ipernity call sets), add tags, notes and comment on images in a way so similar you can't easily tell the difference.

I did notice some subtle differences, but I'll have to dig some more to be able to write about it. For now I'm considering a tie on this category.

ipernity 2.5 - flickr 0.5

Privacy

Ipernity is matching what flickr offers in terms of privacy options. Threes family, friends, network (contacts), member and everyone else. The only difference I noticed was ipernity missing the permission to see location. But that's not enough no make a difference so it's a tie

ipernity 3 - flickr 1

Account options

Again, threes no noticeable difference here. That is until I noticed the "Your home page" link. On ipernity you are allowed to alter a lot of visual options on your account, specially color related options. This means you can have the black background page so many flickr users want. But that also means you will stumble upon some really odd looking pages. I like flickr's simplistic, coherent look and feel so for me this option is a mixed blessing. I call it a tie.

ipernity 3.5 - flickr 1.5

to be continued...

[ part1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 ]

reaching for freedom

nobody@ipernity.com (chromatic orb) — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 13:25:57 +0000

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But now Microsoft announces it's intention to buy Yahoo! and flickr will be in the package. As I strongly dislike Micorsoft's strong arm business policy, I'm starting to pack my things in preparation for the buyout. I have a flickr pro account payed for another eight months but won't be paying any more after Microsoft gets in charge.

So, this post marks the start of my exeprience with Ipernity. I'll try to use this space to post my findings and experience.