Presidential e-blast with my Photography

Here is a photo used in another e-blast from Eastern Washington University President Arévalo. This is a great use of flickr.

Merchants Use flickr to Feed Sites

Here is an example of an online merchant that uses flickr to propagate their web pages. In this instance Bike Mate uses it to feed a flash rotator. Using this technology, a business could make an online catalog of current products using item numbers as metadata tags within flickr. You could start with an excel spread sheet of current products with quantities and item numbers. You convert the spreadsheet into an html table and have the item numbers pull in the photos.

New flickr Widget

Get this widget at roytanck.com

I found this cool widget at roytanck.com. It is pretty cool although it did take me a minute to figure out where to get the RSS of my photostream. I resized it to 400 pixels square to better fit this blog. The rotation of the globe is affected by mouse-over also. Pretty cool.

Flickr Banners

After searching for universities with flickr accounts in an effort to see how other institutions use this resource I found a few that were doing interesting things with web implementation. The University of Charleston uses flickr to feed a flash banner on their homepage. The images used can be found in their set here.



New Jersey Institute of Technology uses a similar approach feeding a rotating web banner on their homepage with images pulled from flickr here.

It makes total sense to use flickr in this way. Edits to the banner don't have to involve touching the code, simply update the flickr set that the banner is pulled from. Cloud computing is evolving into a new method of content control. Also the update to content is instantaneous. Our current web server takes over an hour to update a web page, with flickr as soon as the content is updated in the set you simply refresh and the content is posted to the web page.

From Lightroom to flickr by Magic

I was given a link to this great Lightroom 2 plugin by a good friend that throws me tidbits of social networking goodness occasionally. This plugin allows you to export directly to your authenticated flickr account. It is truly a timesaver.



This talented programmer is living in Japan. His name is Jeffrey Friedl. After downloading and installing the plugin I was having trouble with it enabling. I sent him a bug alert and he emailed me with a fix within a few hours. Great customer service for a guy that was just demo'ing his plugin.

The plugin basically puts the functionality of flickr into the export section of Lightroom. You can not only upload the exported media to flickr but you can click about a million option boxes to totally optimize the way your media is handled by flickr. You can put your photo in a preexisting set or create a new one. You can send the photo to a group photo pool. You can specify the level of permission the photo gets and then send a tweet about it.

I love it when software goes above and beyond by not only giving me what I want, but giving me 100 extra things that will give me new ideas for working. That's what makes great software. Check him out .

StumbleUpon as a Marketing Tool

Yesterday after implementing StumbleUpon tools including the Firefox toolbar I decided to do a little test. I picked one of my photo from a trip I had to Cannon Beach in January of this year. The light was great and the Nikon D60 performed admirable for its first time out of the box. I clicked on the "I like it!" button on the StumbleUpon toolbar. The results the next day were remarkable.



One great thing that flickr does is analytics on referring websites. This makes StumbleUpon a unique marketing tool that is measurable and trackable. You can clearly see just how effective StumbleUpon can be below. Similar to YouTube in it concept of channels, a user can tailor their stumbles to their own likes. Similarly your online content that you refer to StumbleUpon will be viewed only be users who have made a conscious decision to see content similar to yours.



The process I am developing is to incorporate this involves creating interesting, compelling assets then throw them out to social networks via facebook, twitter and StumbleUpon and ba-da-bing you have a pseudo-viral marketing campaign.

Stainless Steel Eagle Logo

20090413CampusTour009.jpg
Originally uploaded by ewuphoto

Here's a photo I took yesterday on a campus photoshoot. I cropped and color corrected the photo in Lightroom 2. I think the added vignette and intense yet muted highlights compliment it well.

2009 Spring Flowers

Spring flowers have survived the flowers at Eastern Washington University.

Flickr, the Future of Broadcasting?

Flickr can possibly have a actual real-world application?!

Let's say you have a number of large displays situated around you business. On these displays you show photos, events and marketing messages through PowerPoint. Now you can feed these displays through flickr. Shazam! Flickr is now something more than just an easier way to share photos with your friends.

Simply put your favorite photos in a set, click the slide show button, go full-screen and violá you are broadcasting you photos. The beauty about this is that you don't need the PowerPoint application on every computer you just need an internet connection and a browser. Updating is also supremely easy. Just drop an new photo in the set and arrange the order to your liking.

All this would be total awesomeness if only the slide shows would loop. Flicker built the best slide show solution on the web but forgot to put an option to loop. I wrote flickr a flickrmail. I got several responses, one of which I believed was actually from a person. I hope that they really consider this added functionality.

Slideoo is the BOMB!!!

This handy slideshow from Slideoo is simply awesome. I can think of all kinds of marketing and branding opportunities for this puppy.

Flickr What Are You Doing?

This latest iteration of flickr stats is idiotic! Removing 'All time' views and referrers to add stats from 'So far today' is pure stupidity. A concise list of the most popular photos on our flickr site enables us to create target market driven content. Now that is gone. Here's an idea. Add to functionality don't take it away.

Your customers expect a certain level of service. I feel like they are in breach of contract. I spend $25 a year and expect things to remain as they are unless I get a notice. Don't they have anyone that does customer service over there?

Twitter Spurs Education

Calendar Blur
Originally uploaded by John Demke

I just created this by using Illustrator and Photoshop. I found this tutorial with a link found on a twitter feed from Layers Magazine. If you have engaging content then tweet it.

Embedded flickr Slideshows Increase Visiblity

A few months ago we placed a link to a embedded flickr slideshow on the University's home page. The concept was to provide a quick glimpse of life at Eastern without spending a lot of time programming it. After researching several different flickr enabled slideshows we settled on flickr's own. It is clean and easily re-sizable and loads very quickly. Another great asset is the full-screen mode. Our Admissions reps can show this to a group of prospective students with a projector. This is a great tool for small businesses. It is up to you to create good perceptions of your business and enable others to see them.

To date we have recorded 1,787 visits to our Photo Tour page. That is fairly significant as it makes up 5.5% of all the traffic on our flickr site. Not bad seeing that it took about two days to make to page. Now I am creating new flickr slide shows for individual departments and programs for them to embed on their sites. Share with me how you are using flickr slide shows.

A Bridge to flickr: Metadata Propagation

Here's a little table that is in beta. It is an attempt to determine what metadata fields Adobe Bridge inputs and flickr outputs. This can help with serialization of media content.

Data Sets	Adobe Bridge CS3	flickr.com
File Properties	Filename	*Information may be propagated from Filename, Title or Headline.
	Document Type	File Type:
	Application	Software:
	Date File Created	Date and Time (Original):
	Date File Modified	Date and Time (Modified):
	File Size	File Size:
	Dimensions	Image Width: and Image Height:
	Dimensions (in inches)	Dependant upon Dimensions and Bit Depth
	Resolution	X-Resolution: and Y-Resolution:
	Bit Depth	Bits Per Sample:
	Color Mode	Color Space:
IPTC Core	Creator	Artist: and By-line:
	Creator: Job Title	By-line Title:
	Creator: Address	Creator Address:
	Creator: City	Creator City:
	Creator: State/Province	Creator Region:
	Creator: Postal Code	Creator Postal Code:
	Creator: Phone(s)	Creator Work Telephone:
	Creator: Email(s)	Creator Work Email:
	Creator: Website(s)	Creator Work URL:
	Headline	Headline:
	Description	Caption- Abstract:
	Keywords	Keywords: and Subject:
	IPTC Subject Code	Subject Code:
	Description Writer	Caption Writer:
	Date Created*	Date Created:
	Intellectual Genre	Intellectual Genre:
	IPTC Scene	Scene:
	Location	Location:
	City	City:
	State/Province	Province- State:
	Country	Country- Primary Location Name:
	ISO Country Code	Country Code:
	Title	Object Name:
	Job Identifier	Original Transmission Reference:
	Instructions	Instructions:
	Provider	Credit:
	Source	Source:
	Copyright Notice	Copyright:
	Copyright Status
	Rights Usage Terms	Usage Terms:
	Raw Filename	Raw File Name:
Camera Data (EXIF)	Exposure Mode	Exposure Mode:
	Focal Length	Focal Length:
	Lens	Lens:
	Max Aperture Value	Max Aperture Value:
	Flash	Flash Mode:
	Metering Mode	Metering Mode:
	Custom Rendered	Custom Rendered:
	White Balance *Note this value is of the original image.	White Balance: *Note this value is of the original image.
	Scene Capture Type	Scene Capture Type:
	Serial Number	*Not displayed.
Camera Raw	Raw Filename	Raw File Name:
	White Balance *Note this value is of the adjusted Raw image.	White Balance: *Note this value is of the adjusted Raw image.
	Temperature	Temperature:
	Tint	Tint:
	Exposure	Exposure:
	Recovery	Saved Settings Parameters Highlight Recovery:
	Fill Light	Saved Settings Parameters Fill Light:
	Blacks	Shadows:
	Brightness	Brightness:
	Contrast	Contrast:
	Vibrance	Vibrance:

Profile Widget

Profile Widget
Originally uploaded by John Demke

A fun little widget that creates a banner for your flickr profile using your photos and stats. It is free by a site called Big Huge Labs. The cool thing is that it is dynamic. When you change your content or contacts the image changes which is totally awesome. They have some pretty cool stuff to check out on their site.

Metadata in Bridge

Adobe Bridge CS3 is a great tool for browsing photos, videos, and documents, but it really excels at is metadata editing. Metadata is the extra stuff, besides actual picture data, that can accompany a digital photograph. There are two classes of metadata within Bridge: EXIF and IPTC Core.

EXIF is fixed, uneditable data that comes directly from your camera. It contains a host of cool information about the focal length of the lens, the shutter speed, the ISO and metering amongst others. One of the more Big Brother-esque bits of data is that it records the camera's serial number, so if you sent your product registration into Nikon, they now know every time you post a picture to flickr. Spooky.

IPTC Core are editable values that can contain information about the photographer, the copyright status and location of the shoot. The most interesting values that can be input are the title, description and tags. When you information in these fields magic happens when you upload them to flickr. These metadadata fields propagate themselves to the same fields in flickr. So by entering this important data in Bridge, you have the information for your own back up plus you don't have to reenter it when you post it to flickr. The data is pretty durable also. I uploaded a photo to flickr, downloaded it to another computer, uploaded it to Picasa and all the metadata came with it. It was awesome.

Flickr Slide Shows: An Easy Way to Show your Stuff

At Eastern Washington University, I am working to push the utilization and power of our online photo archive housed on flickr. Our site, ewuphoto, contains over 1,300 original photos and has accumulated almost 30,000 hits. What makes flickr cool is it built-in sharing functionality. You can download, link, email and embed approved content from our site but the killer app is its slide shows.

The slide shows are great. The content can be pulled directly from a bunch of different criteria including: photostreams, collections, sets and keywords. They look great, can be resized to fit different frames and can go full-screen with the single button click. Check out EWU's phototour for a great example of how this was implemented. In this case I made a set in flickr unique to the slide show. The slide show is Flash and it loads pretty quickly. The beauty of this is that if you want to change the photos in your slide show you don't have to go and rebuild the flash document, you simply go to flickr and update the set with the photos you want. Utter simplicity.

The New Adobe CS4 is More Organic

I found this on a facebook friend's photo page. It is actually a flickr photo. This Japanese photostream is very avante garde and I love it. Check it out.

Score Me!

I just found a fun new way to interact with other people's photos on flickr. Score Me! (post 1, score 5) is a flickr Group that requires you to rate the photo of five other photographers in order to post your own. In return you get five rating on your own photo. It is pretty interesting to see how others view your art. It also forces you to evaluate others. I think I grade a little easily. Usually nothing lower that a 5.