Can You Make Money from Free Stuff?

Well, of course you can – free software is the primary demonstration of that. But that doesn't mean it's trivial to turn free into fee. Here's an interesting move that demonstrates that quite nicely.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Wikipedia + Flickr = Fotopedia

I am a huge fan of Wikipedia, one of the greatest achievements of sharing; I also enjoy wandering around Flickr, although its lack of over-arching organisation makes that hard to do. Maybe this is perfect solution: Fotopedia, "the first collaborative photo encyclopedia", which uses text from Wikipedia, but only to provide what amount to extended captions for the pix, which are generally very attractive.

It's not the first to do this - VisWiki has been around for some time - but Fotopedia seems to take a much more visual approach, which I find very pleasing, because it creates more than just a highly-illustrated version of Wikipedia. Articles and their pix are a little thin on the ground at the moment, but with any luck, that won't be the case for long once word gets out - and pictures start pouring in.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Volantis Who? - a UK Open Source Success Story

Guildford is not famous for being a hotbed of open source, but that's where the British open source company Volantis is based. It's not as well known as it ought to be, probably because it sits astride the computing-mobile divide, helping mobile operators and others to display Web content on their devices....

On Open Enterprise blog.

How Many Out of Ten for Number 10?

Number 10 has a new look for its Web site...and it's rather good (love the blues). Moreover, it's gone all Web 2.0: Flickr stream, YouTube channel - even Twitter.

That's all well and good, but I wonder whether Team Number 10 has taken on board what Web 2.0 is really about: listening to the community of users (that would be the electorate, Gordon), not just dictating in an authoritarian manner.

Time will tell whether it's a real sea-change, or all just Spin 2.0....

Update: Turns out it's something *much* richer....

Of Honey and Tin

Honey is all very well, but what we really need is more tin.

The Flickr Commons

Here's a good example of how crowdsourcing can enhance a commons:

The key goals of this pilot project are to firstly give you a taste of the hidden treasures in the huge Library of Congress collection, and secondly to show how your input of a tag or two can make the collection even richer.

It's an obvious approach to take, and one that could be widened to any public resource.

Coincidence? I Don't Think So

Here's a nice analysis of what makes today's Internet services tick:

Dopplr can show me when a distant friend will be near and vice versa. Twitter can show me what my friends are doing right now. Wesabe can show me what others have learned about saving money at the places where I spend my money. Among many other things Flickr can show me how to look differently at the things I see when I take photos. And del.icio.us can show me things that my friends are reading every day.

It's all about making connections, creating a community and finding a commonality. The post calls this "surfacing coincidences" but I think that "coincidence" is the wrong word, since it suggests something random and casual; what we're talking about is an action that is much more directed: people looking for like-minded, like-thinking, like-doing people. (Via John Battelle.)

A Moot of Folksonomies

Being a rigorous sort of chap, I was sceptical about folksonomies - ad-hoc tags. But over time I've come to appreciate their power - and the fact that once people start using them routinely, the combined body of folksonomic knowledge becomes quite impressive.

But the obvious question is: what lies beyond the simple tag? Myabe this kind of thing:

GroupMe! extends the idea of social tagging systems like del.icio.us, Flickr or BibSonomy by introducing the group dimension. The foundation of social tagging systems are so-called folksonomies, which describe how users (folks) tag resources (e.g. photos, videos, publications, etc.). In technical terms a folksonomy is just a collection of tag assignments:

(User, Tag, Resource) = User has tagged Resource with Tag at a particular time.

Over time it is likely that semantics emerge, e.g. tags that are often assigned to same resources may be synonyms. Hence, folksonomies are promising to improve (web) search, etc. With GroupMe!'s approach of taggable groups we extend tag assignments with a group dimension:

(User, Tag, Group, Resource) = User has tagged Resource with Tag in a certain Group at a particular time.

This prompts the next question: what do we call these groups? I vote a "moot".

Flickr: Happy Two Billionth!

Flickr has reached its two billionth picture: and that's just the beginning....

The 3D Digital Commons as Metaphor

A few months back I wrote about a video showing an intriguing project that built on the commons of public images posted to Flickr and the rest. By patching these together it was possible to recreate full, 3D representations of public spaces.

There's now a site with more info about this, as well as a paper on the subject:

With the recent rise in popularity of Internet photo sharing sites like Flickr and Google, community photo collections (CPCs) have emerged as a powerful new type of image dataset. For example, a search for “Notre Dame Paris” on Flickr yields more than 50,000 images showing the cathedral from myriad viewpoints and appearance conditions. This kind of data presents a singular opportunity: to reconstruct the world’s geometry using the largest known, most diverse, and largely untapped, multi-view stereo dataset ever assembled. What makes the dataset unusual is not only its size, but the fact tha it has been captured “in the wild”—not in the laboratory—leading to a set of fundamental new challenges in multi-view stereo research.

What's striking about this research - aside from the results, which are pretty dramatic - is that it provides a perfect metaphor for the benefit of pooling digital resources to create a commons. In this case, 2D pictures, many of limited value in themselves, are patched together to create an astonishingly detailed 3D representation of places that goes far beyond any single shot. And the more photos that are added, the richer that commons becomes. Exactly like all other digital commons.

Seeing the Power of the Visual Commons

I've written before about Microsoft's Photosynth, which draws on the Net's visual commons - Flickr, typically - to create three-dimensional images. Here's another research project that's just as cool - and just as good a demonstration of why every contribution to a commons enriches us all:

What can you do with a million images? In this paper we present a new image completion algorithm powered by a huge database of photographs gathered from the Web. The algorithm patches up holes in images by finding similar image regions in the database that are not only seamless but also semantically valid. Our chief insight is that while the space of images is effectively infinite, the space of semantically differentiable scenes is actually not that large. For many image completion tasks we are able to find similar scenes which contain image fragments that will convincingly complete the image. Our algorithm is entirely data-driven, requiring no annotations or labelling by the user.

One of the most interesting discoveries was the following:

It takes a large amount of data for our method to succeed. We saw dramatic improvement when moving from ten thousand to two million images. But two million is still a tiny fraction of the high quality photographs available on sites like Picasa or Flickr (which has approximately 500 million photos). The number of photos on the entire Internet is surely orders of magnitude larger still. Therefore, our approach would be an attractive web-based application. A user would submit an incomplete photo and a remote service would search a massive database, in parallel, and return results.

In other words, the bigger the commons, the more everyone benefits.

Moreover:

Beyond the particular graphics application, the deeper question for all appearance-based data-driven methods is this: would it be possible to ever have enough data to represent the entire visual world? Clearly, attempting to gather all possible images of the world is a futile task, but what about collecting the set of all semantically differentiable scenes? That is, given any input image can we find a scene that is “similar enough” under some metric? The truly exciting (and surprising!) result of our work is that not only does it seem possible, but the number of required images might not be astronomically large. This paper, along with work by Torralba et al. [2007], suggest the feasibility of sampling from the entire space of scenes as a way of exhaustively modelling our visual world.

But that is only feasible if that "space of scenes" is a commons. (BTW, do check out the paper's sample images - they're amazing.)

After Flickr, It Gets Quickr

Not, alas, open source as far as I can tell:

IBM Lotus Quickr is team collaboration software that helps you share content, collaborate and work faster online with your teams -- inside or outside firewall.

Interesting not just for its adoption of Web 2.0 technologies, but its anointing of the Flickr naming meme. (Via Bob Sutor's Open Blog.)

Crowdsourcing Sousveillance

I wrote recently about Microsoft's amazing Photosynth demo, which shows pictures of Notre-Dame taken from Flickr stitched together automatically to produce a three-dimensional model that you can zoom into in just about any way.

Then I read this:

Madeleine McCann's parents will appeal to Irish tourists to check holiday snaps for clues - while the flat their child was abducted from reportedly sold for half price.

Madeleine's parents Kate McCann, 38, and Gerry, 39, will appear on television to ask anyone who took a trip to Portugal in early May to send photos to British investigators.

It occurred to me that what we really need is a system that can take these holiday snaps and put them together in time to create a four-dimensional model that can be explored by the police - a new kind of crowdsourced sousveillance.

Given that Photosynth is still experimental, we're probably some way off this. I'd also have concerns about handing over all this information to the authorities without better controls on what would be done with it (look what's happening with the UK's DNA database.)

Great, Microsoft - But What About the Commons?

Photosynth is undoubtedly amazing. But this video indicates that it's even more powerful than previously suggested; specifically, it talks about using public pictures on Flickr to create not only detailed, three-dimensional images of the world, but also to use any tags they have to provide transferable metadata. In other words, it's a product of collective intelligence, that builds on the work of the many.

That's all well and good, but I do wonder whether Microsoft has given any thought to its responsibility to the commons it is making free with here....

Visualising DRM

Having problems getting your head around that tricky concept of DRM? Try this. (Via Boing Boing.)

Once We've Got the Coop, Who Needs a Flock?

Mozilla Labs are working on the Coop:

The Coop will let users keep track of what their friends are doing online, and share new and interesting content with one or more of those friends. It will integrate with popular web services, using their existing data feeds as a transport mechanism.

Users will see their friends' faces, and by clicking on them will be able to get a list of that person's recently added Flickr photos, favourite YouTube videos, tagged websites, composed blog posts, updated Facebook status, etc. If a user wants to share something with a friend, they simply drag that thing onto their friend's face. When they receive something from a friend, that friend's face glows to get the user's attention.

Makes sense, if you're into that sort of thing. Can't see much space for Flock in the Coop, though. However, choice is good. (Via TechCrunch.)

Kind of Blue

One of the less well-known benefits of creating a commons is that it allows people to experiment with those resources in an unfettered way. This often means that they come up with new and exciting uses that would never have arisen had the underlying material remained enclosed.

A good example is Flickr. This is a tremendous resource, and people just keep on coming up with new ways of using it. The latest is the wonderful Flickr Color Selectr: just chose a colour, and the site will search through Flickr for cc pictures that match it. Not just useful, but highly therapeutic too, for when you're feeling kind of blue.... (Via Creative Commons.)

Unreal Mashups

This is getting seriously weird.

DestroyTV lets RLers watch an island in SL, using an embedded video camera (which is "in" both SL and RL). There are also screenshots (several thousand of them), over on Flickr, complete with a tag cloud. So which world are we in now?

On Sharing and Fake Sharing

Larry Lessig has some wise words on what Flickr gets right and YouTube gets wrong.

Going Down a FlickrStorm

I'm a big fan of Flickr, even if I don't have much call to use it. Perhaps one reason for that is that it's a bit of a pain finding stuff: tags are only approximate at the best of times. I think I might start using it some more thanks to FlickrStorm (update: now Wunderstock), a kind of search engine plus:

It works by looking for more than what you enter to find related and more relevant images... Be surprised!

When I gave it a whirl, I won't say I was deeply surprised, but maybe pleasantly so, on the basis of both the images it found, and the rather cool way it displayed them, with a scrollable set of thumbnails on the left that bring up the main photo on the right remarkably quickly. Worth taking a look. (Via OpenBusiness.)