While looking for some information on how to export photos directly from Adobe Lightroom to Flickr, I landed on Andy’s My Enlightenment blog. In addition to featuring some beautifully illuminated photos there and on his Flickr account, Andy also had a couple of posts that included an embedded Flickr slideshow. Off on a different search now, I found a tool called “flickrSLiDR” on the Great Flickr Tools Collection, that turns out to be the same one Andy is using.

The tool is available here and it described in more detail by its creator, Paul Stamatiou, on his site, here.

Below is a slideshow of my photographs from the Atlanta History Center. You can move the mouse toward the top of the slideshow to control the display and speed, and toward the bottom to select individual photos from the set. Or, click on any photo to stop the slideshow and get links to my Flick account.

I seriously love the way this thing works!!

Like most of the RSS readers, Newsgator Online has a clippings function, where you can save copies of blog articles and other readings from around the Internet, for future savoring. For a while now, I’ve been clipping things I wanted to write about “lateron” — but in most cases I never got around to doing the work. So, of the fifty or so I’ve accumulated, here’s a set of something-for-everyone links (with free remarks!):

– From the excellent technology site Ars Technica, an exhaustive review of the iPhone — a gadget I’m fascinated by (isn’t everybody?), but I don’t own and don’t plan to buy any time soon, mainly because of the price. There are too many other things I could do with $500 to $600.

– From Popular Photography and Imaging, a review of a new Sony Zeiss lens, something I’d much rather spend my money on than the iPhone (no offense intended against the iPhone cult!). New lenses… mmmmmmmmmm….

– Via Jesse Walker’s article Cartography for the Masses on Reason’s Hit and Run, a link to Google Maps is Changing the Way We See the World on Wired. This article begs for a whole lot more attention from me than this short mention, believe me; I hope to get around to giving it a slow, careful reading … and writing more about it.

– From Scott Yarborough at StorySouth, a discussion of the state of the short-story market and how that market has been affected by other media, including the Internet and electronic publishing. It reminds me of that gnawing sensation in the back of my mind: the question of whether or not I’ll put some fiction writing on this site. When I know the answer, I’ll tell you. Articles like this one, however, make me feel like I should.

– A few articles about the emergence of a blogger’s “code of conduct” — a subject that I thought I would be interested in then completely forgot about. But I might decide to look at these and the articles they link to again: Bloggers React to the Blogger’s Code of Conduct, You are your own code of conduct, and Bloggers Get Civilized?

– From Fusion View, a thoughtful reminder that the virtualization of our lives and our cultures comes at a price.

– From Ben Casnocha, an article and a review — The Expected Value of Being a Fox vs. Hedgehog and Book Review: One Person/Multiple Careers — that introduced me to the idea of “slash careers” and to Marci Alboher’s blog. The timing of Casnocha’s articles and discovering Alboher’s blog was very useful to me; I had right around the same time been working toward my own conclusion that all these different things I’m interested in (namely: writing, history, photography, and technology) don’t have to be treated as mutually exclusive from a career perspective, and that I’ll figure out ways to integrate them all into who I am and what I do. I’ll come back to this topic later; it’s one of the most fascinating technological/cultural (slash!) developments of our time that people are exploring multiple career paths. The things that have made this possible are culturally, technically, and socially very complex, and the potential effects are yet-to-be-understood and enormous.

– From Performancing.com, a Blog Reboot Session with some excellent suggestions. Since I just added Google’s AdSense to this site, I need to take a closer look. But I’m not so sure about the idea of including ads on every post. While I can understand how that would improve ad traffic, I’ve always thought it was visually unappealing and distracting — equally so when the ads are captured by an RSS reader. But I’ll think about it.

– From The Austrian Economists, When Global Cooling Was Upon Us… complete with the image of 1975 Newsweek article announcing the impending disaster. Good to know we survived that one….

Phew! That was exhausting! But that does it, that empties out the clippings file (except for three more that I’ve stuffed in my back pocket). I feel SO CAUGHT UP now! Or should I say … “for now” ….

From Marc Andreessen, a nicely written set of observations on his experiences since starting a blog less than two months ago. My favorites are the fifth and the seventh. Some excerpts:

Fifth, writing a blog is way easier than writing a magazine article, a published paper, or a book — but provides many of the same benefits. I think it’s an application of the 80/20 rule — for 20% of the effort (writing a blog post but not editing and refining it [to] the quality level required of a magazine article, a published paper, or a book), you get 80% of the benefit (your thoughts are made available to interested people very broadly). Arguably blogging is better because the distribution of a blog can be even broader than a magazine article, a published paper, or a book….

Seventh, it is totally clear that original content is what generates readership, at least for most bloggers. Some bloggers who blog a lot and link to a ton of interesting things every day have high levels of readership without a lot of original content, but I’d argue they are in the minority — most of the bloggers I’ve talked to over the last year who have significant levels of traffic attribute their readership mostly to original content, and this is certainly true for my blog….

His comments on challenges to traditional media are exactly true, I think, especially when he points out that the scope of that challenge is still unknown. I think creative discourse across all fields will benefit, in time, but there’s a rupture out there waiting to happen that will need to be healed first. While I hate to cast it as a battle (especially one that hasn’t fully engaged yet), I still think “both sides” will need to be vigilant as we begin to confront the ways in which media is once again changing. What matters, in the end, is that the conversations continue through the connections we make. “Only connect,” is the well-known E. M. Forster phrase we should resurrect for the new century and stamp somewhere on our sites.

Original source: Matthew Ingram: Do Blog Comments Still Matter?

Powered by ScribeFire.

I’ve added a new feature to the far right sidebar, My Flickr Slideshows, which will run Flickr slideshows for each of my photo sets. The slideshows will open in a new tab or window, depending on your browser, and you can either click the slideshow link to go my Flickr site when you’re finished, or close the session to return here.

I’ve also added a new section called Featured Books. Unlike the books shown under Current Reading and Recent Reading — both of which are images of books that I’m reading or have read but haven’t necessarily discussed here — I’ll use Featured Books to highlight some that I write a post about or take the time to formally review. Like the other books displayed throughout my site, clicking the book’s image will take you to Amazon.com via my associate’s link — by which, of course, I’ll get rich. In addition, I’ll include a link under each book’s image back to the relevant post on this site, so you can read what I have to say about it.

The first book I’m featuring is The Landscape Design Answer Book: More Than 300 Specific Design Solutions for Your Landscape by Jane Bath. Bath is a landscape designer from the Atlanta area, and I heard about her when she approached a friend of mine here in Grant Park, and asked to photograph his home for the book. If you have the book, his house is shown on pages 57, 196, and 312, along with Bath’s comments on various elements of his property that she found exceptional.

I’m writing a discussion post about the book that I’ll publish in the next couple of days. For now, the “More about this book” link will take you back to this entry; when I get the review written, I’ll update the link. In the meantime, if you stumble across Bath’s book at a bookstore, spend some time with it; the writing and the photography (along with the instructional format Bath used to highlight key elements of each photograph) are excellent.

… it sounds an awful lot like a gun going off! Trust me! Don’t try this at home:

Apparently this is what happens when you sit down to write a quick blog post after setting some eggs to boiling, the blog post takes longer than you thought, and you forget about the eggs … they wait about forty minutes then remind you to PAY ATTENTION! Or set a timer next time….

Lunch will be delayed indefinitely….