It is but a Slice

At our small group last night, we talked about how community has changed with the advent of the Internet. This is a reminder to all of you readers that what you see on this blog is but a slice of who I am. If you want a fuller picture, give me a call. Better yet, come visit and have a meal!

Next Question on Photography

Does anybody have a comparison between Google's Picasa (a free tool) versus Adobe Lightroom for workflow processing?

Facebook photos vs. Flickr vs. Picasa vs. Smugmug

As some of you know, I have been pondering about the different ways of showcasing photographs. What are the differences between the different sites? Are the paid subscriptions worth it?

The different sites are built with different philosophies, and hence they have different strengths by design. So let me tell you the punchline right away.

You will get the largest audience for your pictures on Facebook. Google's Picasa Web is the best free site out there. Smugmug is the best paid site that I have found thus far.

Flickr is a great site too, but there are sufficient limitations with its free service that it should really be considered a paid site. Other free sites like Kodak Gallery (originally Ofoto) and Snapfish are poor.


Facebook photo (Free)
You will get the largest possible audience for your photographs on Facebook. With extensive name tagging, your friends will wander over just to see what new pictures you have of them. However, the picture quality is also extremely poor. The site is meant for sharing connections, not displaying photographs. For those of us who do not sell our photographs, or who cannot find a sufficiently large enough audience to sell the photographs, Facebook (sadly) remains an option.

The snippet from Lily's website show a recent birthday party. Image display quality is poor, organization is so-so, but each photo can have its tag. With a large community of friends, these photographs can propagate very far.



Flickr ($25 per year for Pro)

I see people using Flickr in two dominant ways. The first is a photo blog, a continually story on the lives of your family or yourself. Take a picture, post it up, write a little comment. It's like a stream of consciousness with images. The following is a screen snippet from my friends Don and Cheryl. They post beautiful pictures of their family.

Flickr is also a social network tool. It has name tagging, as well as labels, so that things are easily searchable. The main drawback of Flickr's social network compared with Facebook is its reach; Facebook simply has too many users on it, no matter how poor the pictures are. So Flickr suffers from having a smaller community to network to.


A second use of Flickr that is quite popular is showcasing the very best work by a particular person. This next snippet is from b|w, a fabulous photographer and friend. I don't know how many shots he takes on any given outing, but it looks like he displays the top 1 or top 2 out of the entire collection for that day of shoots. Flickr does a nice job of displaying the photographs in rich colors, and there is a photo stream preview typically on the right side.

Flickr is actually quite disorientating to me. It is structured like a stream of thought, rather than a collection of subjects. It is great if you are looking for single photos, or trying to figure out what has changed since the last time you were at this person's site. It is poor if you are a first time visitor trying to figure out how all of the photographs fit together. There are collections called sets that collect photographs together, but even then the place to display the sets are much smaller than Smugmug.

Picasa Web (Free)

I rate Google's Picasa Web as the best free option out there. Picasa, the desktop software editor and organizer, is a fabulous tool that I use all the time. Picasa Web is not as thrilling. This following snippet is from Jaume Cusido's public album. It shows a collection of shots that are logically associated. It's free, and if you click on each individual picture it shows the bigger version of the picture.

It is an excellent website for the cost. However, I feel that Smugmug still does a better job of displaying photos and making a wider array of tools available. The pictures on Picasa Web is not as crisp or as brilliant as Flickr or Smugmug.

Smugmug ($40 per year for basic, up to $150 for professional)

The most expensive photo display website of the bunch, it is also the prettiest. It does not require your visitors to get an account before seeing the pictures. Smugmug has lots of tools to organize the photographs into logical groups, has geographical tagging to put pictures on a map, can print on paper, mugs, books, T-shirts, and much more.

The following snippet is from GeoHsia, who is on assignment around the world at this moment. I like Smugmug's elegant black background, but there are plenty of other themes to choose from. The site does not charge based on the number of photographs uploaded, but rather on the volume of traffic your site generates. Let me pause and say that it is doubtful 95% of the users will ever hit that limit.

Smugmug also has lots of ways of showing different sizes of photos. It will also resize itself to fit the screen resolution you are using, so that the display looks right for a netbook, or an iPhone, or a 24" gigantor LCD screen. Slideshow is easy to activate.

Smugmug lacks social networking, however. The community base, though fanatical, is too small. It can link to Facebook and other sites easily enough, but such network is not native.


My use of the sites

Finally, here are the screen shots from my own sites.

Get Rid of Yellow Pages

Opt out of getting Yellow Pages, follow the link: www.yellowpagesoptout.com

Save your sanity, and some paper while you're at it.

Tennis

Trying to play tennis in Seattle is miserable. There are very few indoor courts, and the ones near me all belong to country clubs. $300 initiate fee, with $50 monthly fee? No thanks.

Portland was hard too, but I had some friends that would play on an occasional spring day. Summers were glorious.

I have not found equal success in Seattle yet.

U.S. stock market capitalization shrinks

Standard and Poor's World by Numbers report for September 2009 shows a surprising fact that I did not know: the U.S. stock market is only worth 40% of the total world stock market. It wasn't that long ago that the U.S. was worth 60%, and then 50% of the world.

This continues something that we already know: the U.S. is doing well, but several countries are catching up. As the value of the dollar drops, the U.S. share of the world will continue to drop.

For those of us who care about diversification, global diversification is one of the things to diversify across. As the United States loses its pre-eminence, it is necessary to diversify your investment into other countries. To match the world distribution you should now have 40% of your stocks in U.S., and 60% in the rest of the world.

I will be making some more changes to my equity allocations in the new year.

First Flight

Congratulations to Boeing, whose 787 achieved first flight today.

Annualized

Some expenses get really magnified when I turn them into annual expenses, and some of the others shrink.

Verizon cell phone (2) $924
Comcast internet $576
Boeing union $340
Netflix $216
The Economist $120
Smugmug $ 99
ooma VOIP phone $ 0


None of these compare with mandatory expenses, though. Things like food, mortgage, utilities, automobile, tithing, and taxes all swamp these figures. Still, some of these numbers are quite large.


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Savings

carpool - $500

Be Resolute

I think resolutions should start the day after the shortest day of the year. That way, there will be motivation to carry out these resolutions. Starting after winter solstice just makes more sense than January 1st.

No Digital Home for my Guns

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is a thoroughly enjoyable first person shooter. Its single player missions are awesome, just like before. You really feel like you are playing in a movie. It's that good.

The multiplayer matches are fun, but the redesign has taken away a crucial sense of home, of belonging. Gone are individual servers hosting multiplayer games. That means you can't log into your favorite servers, and waiting for the number of players to build up before launching into a game. Instead, the game automatically finds other servers and combines players from other waiting servers.

Now, I understand why they do this. It provides fast pairing to get games going. However, you lose a lot of customization, and with it, a sense of a particular digital home that I go back to again and again. I have met casual acquaintances this way, and it has been quite enjoyable playing against polite people that enforces the ban against egregious behavior.

Well, here's a shout out to "A Canadian Crew", whose servers I have spent a large quantity of time in. Thanks for the fun times with the Call of Duty 4. See you around, somewhere, on Call of Duty (6).




P.S. Its irritating how many otherwise innocuous people would use foul language and shout false bravado while online. Most would never say those things to a person's face, simply because they can get punched. In the online world, they hide their identity and the baser elements show themselves.