Category: Geek

Fixing your Flickr photostream

Watching the Watchmen with @pakysse #g20voice

If, like me, you’re a Flickr photo nazi, then you’re probably one of those people who goes nuts when images or videos aren’t tagged correctly or you get minor headaches when certain uploads aren’t placed in the right sets etc. Right?

One bugbear of mine (that I’ve recently solved the problem of), is that of my photos being out of order within my Flickr photostream.

Simply put; Flickr keeps users’ streams in order of DATE UPLOADED not DATE TAKEN. This can be annoying at best and at worse, quite possibly the most frustrating thing in THE ENTIRE WORLD.

To put this into context, a couple of weeks ago my girlfriend and I went to the rather awesome Big Chill festival. We took a multitude of imaging equipment (admittedly, mainly phones), and between us we must’ve shot about 2-300 photos.

If, when we got back home, we uploaded these to the same account one after the other, then that is exactly how they would appear. One set, after the other. But what if I don’t want them like that? What if I want them ALL in chronological order?!

Question – “How do you change the chronology of your Flickr photostream?”

Answer – You use h4ppier photos

With this handy app you can go back and change ALL of your photos date by using one handy little button.

To get to this point, first select ‘Very h4ppy’ at the top of the page, then put in your upload dates and then hit the search button. Once h4ppier photos has found the images it’s looking for, this button (amongst many others) will present itself.

Yes you need to let the app to access your Flickr account. Yes it can be dangerous. But I’m telling you; this is by far and away my favourite 3rd party Flickr app, ever.

Use it. Today.

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At this point I kind of feel obliged to point out that Flickr isn’t all bad. In fact, most of the time, I absolutely LOVE Flickr. When they introduced some new UI changes recently it was quite possibly the coolest… oh wait, hang on – just watch this –

http://content.screencast.com/users/whatleydude/folders/Jing/media/3aa8c73a-60be-4211-88e3-53f03f0bc26c/jingh264player.swf

The Purchasing Journey: Split/Second

Sometime ago now, some friends of mine asked if it was OK to film a short interview piece discussing the future of the shopping experience – aka – the purchasing journey.

I don’t know what happened to the footage (if I find out I’ll see if I can upload it later), but what I do know is that the thoughts from that day still rattle around my head like it was only yesterday:

In today’s super-connected society, how can any one activity (be that marketing, advertising or PR) truly claim to be the sole driver behind product sales?

Let’s take a look. Using the analysis of one of my own purchasing journeys; Split/Second, a new racing game for the Xbox360.

The first part, the very beginning, was when I saw a tweet from a trusted friend saying “This looks awesome!” with a link to a game trailer. It was so long ago now that I forget who it was, it might’ve been Kev or Joe but I’m not sure. Anyway, like I said, that tweet led me to YouTube, where I watched the trailer. Then I watched it again. In HD.

It was a Saturday morning, the girlfriend and I were getting ready to go out and I stopped her to watch it with me. It was that good. Excitement. I am a fan of Burnout, a similar arcade-style racer. I’ve finished both Burnout 1 & 2 for the Gamecube and I’m very close to finishing Burnout: Paradise City on the 360. Split/Second is very similar (but in the same breath very different), so this game spoke to me.

Interesting.

Next, came the research phase. When was it out? What could I do to find out more? My Firefox history tells me that it was May 1st when I saw the video above. At that point, I was in game-buying mode. I tweeted:

A few things came back, but nothing that really grabbed me. I waited. A week later I saw this tweet from Nik Butler:

Nik played it. He liked it. I went to bed thinking about it and, the following morning, I wake up and download the demo. It’s one car, one track, one race. But I like it.

A few days after that it’s holiday time. Dubai. Beautiful, relaxing, sunny Dubai. I buy Edge; the thinking man’s games mag. What’s inside? A review of you guessed it, Split/Second.

They said:

Ultimately, much like a summer movie blockbuster, Split Second offers thrills galore, but there’s a hint of glossy superficiality to it, too. Large-scale explosions distract from a lack of tactical depth for a while, but the game’s lifespan would have been improved, particularly as far as multiplayer is concerned, with a more comprehensively involving strategic element. Yet there are few games in the genre that create quite so many sharp intakes of breath and instances of unintentionally barked profanity as this one, and sometimes that’s what racing gaming is all about.

That quote there, that last sentence even, was what finally clinched it for me. The journey was long but on May 31st, a full month from my first encounter, I bought the game.

It started with a tweet, then a trailer, then trusted referrals, a demo of the game and finally an official games review (in print no less).

The purchasing journey can be long and winding with many different touch-points. I hear conversations about acquisitions, downloads and click-throughs and I despair. The modern day ROI model cannot be put down to just one thing. There are many routes to my wallet and none of them are exclusive. They live and breathe around each other and, it’s only through that understanding will we ever really make an impact.

Points of interest:

Modern technology helped my map the data; Firefox history with viewing the trailer, my Xbox Live account with my demo downloads and of course Twitter, time-stamping my progress. This stuff can be mapped, it’s just knowing where to look.

Also, massive thanks to the cool cats at Edge who, after I managed to lose the copy of their magazine that I wanted to quote from (see above,) kindly emailed me a PDF of the original article I needed. Rockstars.

More iPad thoughts

I’ve been using the iPad for around two months now I guess and, although my thoughts on the device have been percolating since February… I think, at last, some words have finalised themselves in my head;

The iPad is a high-end, luxury disposable device. An oxymoron. Social, yet non-committal.

Social, is the key word here and it’s this, as well as the whole damn anthropology of it all that brings me to our conclusion.

  • The mobile phone; hyper-personal. Unique. Yours.
  • The laptop; still personal, but inclusive. At times, socially unacceptable. Effort.
  • The iPad; social. Open. Socially acceptable.

Flat and, like table top space invaders of old, it just works. Around the home, in the pub or even in the office – the iPad is handed ’round like it’s always just been there.

I like the iPad. It’s a social consumption machine and there really is nothing else like it.

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– – – Drawn, written and posted,  from my iPad

We surf the Internet. We swim in magazines.

I repeat, the iPad will not be the death of print.

Props to Rolling Stone, Steve Waddington and Jon Mulholland; three voices of sanity in a sea of madness.

Technology is a wonderful, wonderful thing. But people always seem to forget the practicalities. The feel of a good book in your hands, the smell of a fresh off-the-shelf comic book, the joy of being able to pass on that knowledge-imbibed article to the next suitably eager set of hands.

I think it was Russell Buckley, now a VP at Admob, who quite rightly pointed out that although mobile vouchers were indeed ‘the future’, nothing could prevent the person behind the till forgetting their glasses that day. The iPad overheats, it reflects poorly in bright light and it, just like every other new piece of media technology of recent years, is just another medium.

As Steve puts it quite rightly in his blog post:

The iPad will no more spell the end of print than any previous generation of technology. Radios, TVs, PCs, CD-ROMs and the internet were all at one time set to hasten the demise of print.
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The iPad is simply another device in the ongoing narrative of an industry reeling from the shift towards advertising online, the internet as a low cost real time distribution platform, and competition for consumer attention from screen based media.

For the record, I quite like my iPad. But the death knell for all paper-based ocular consumption it is not.

This is my iPad post

Last week I was approached to write a piece about the iPad. But if you read here regularly, you’ll understand that it’s not something I’d typically do. However, I’m not proclaiming to have uncovered something new or shocking about the product, I just fancied putting a few thoughts down about how I feel about it because someone asked me to.

The original piece I wrote is now up where it should be available here (after said someone changed their mind at the last minute), and is a reasonable assessment of my thoughts on the subject. However, the very idea of writing a piece about Apple (a company about which I have never had any interest in writing about), forced me to look at the brand in a whole new light.

I am, as you may guess, no Apple fan. I have never owned an iPod and I will never own an iPhone. Though the keys I’m currently tapping away at belong to a MacBook Pro, a lot of the posts here were first written in my moleskine (my true creative pallette) then transferred to this page at a later date.

A zealot I am not.

iPods enforce iTunes. iPhones enforce iPods. I don’t like the iProducts, because I like to do things my way. Mine. Not Apple’s.

I digress.

When I was eight years old, my father bought my sister and I the complete Encyclopedia Britannica; appendices, indexes – the lot. This was before the Internet, before the Web, before Wikipedia.

The Encyclopedia Britannica got me through school. I used to sit and read through the pages, sometimes just for fun. ‘Let’s see what I can learn today’ was my daily motto. It was a thing of wonder.

When I look at the iPad, that is what I see.

Not a great big iPhone, nor a simplified MacBook Pro. Just a small boy, spread out on the lounge floor. With his school books on one side and the iPad on the other, he’s laying there, doing his homework.

For that reason and for that reason alone, I think I might get one.

Expanding the Universe

Or ‘How we can expect developers to make games more social into 2010 and beyond‘

Some time ago now I spoke at an event in Marlow called ‘Six Degrees of Social Media’ – I talked through couple of social media for business case studies (mainly those of my own), and made it clear to the attendees that if there was a place for an online outreach programme within their business, then they should do it.
Obviously, the explanation was a bit more detailed than that, but you get the idea.

Anyway, after the talk (and subsequent Q&A), I remember getting into a lengthy conversation about how you could use hidden elements within video games to drive the gamer’s experience further into other mediums. The result of which would, in turn, either unlock further gameplay features or maybe, just simply expand the online world within which you’re playing.

Which brings me to Batman: Arkham Asylum

Arguably one of the best games to be released this year, Arkham Asylum is not some lame attempt at a movie tie-in, oh no. Instead what we have here is a well thought out action adventure game set inside Gotham’s very own institute for the criminally insane. With an original (and remarkably well-written) story, Arkham is a game that stretches across many different genres taking inspiration from such games as the Grand Theft Auto series, Ultimate Spider-Man and even Eternal Darkness.

One of the best parts of the game is that of the character of The Joker. Maniacal, murderous and just plain hilarious, the clown-faced villain is always with you – – he’s taken over the asylum you see, and as such has access to both the asylum tannoy and video screens. At one point, towards the end of the game during one of the Scarecrow sequences, a Joker ventriloquist dummy appears on screen and happens to mention a very specific URL.

The script is from a cut scene and as such, I can’t go back and replay it. But I think it goes something like this:

“If you think you’re going crazy and are in need help, then why not try http://www.ithinkimgoingcrazyanddressedlikeabat.com/idiot – BAH HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!”

See that URL?
Yes. That one.

The puppet says it so quickly (and so quietly), that if you’re not paying attention, you miss it. In fact, I did miss it the first time I played that section, but thanks to a rather unfortunate turn of events, I was forced to play through a second time.

Miss it again, I did not.

Leaning over to my Mac (I was 2screening, as usual), I typed the URL in from memory quick and was suddenly whisked away to quite possibly the most awesome website I have ever visited…

This, Ladies and Gentlemen, is – believe it or not – a user-generated ‘Easter Egg’. Possibly even the first ever UGC easter egg at that! In the website-owner’s own words:

“Many of you have written to say hello, and many more of you have written a few encouraging words… all the emails I’ve gotten have been positive and friendly. You’re a wonderful bunch of crazy bats!

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The number one question seems to be, “Are you affiliated with Rocksteady or Eidos?” The answer is “no.” I’m just a fan who found this URL like any of you, except that when I went looking, the domain was still unregistered.

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The number two question is, “How come Rocksteady or Eidos did not register it first?” The answer is, “I have no idea!” But I’m glad they didn’t, as it’s given me a chance to virtually meet and greet a lot of great people!”

Amazing.

So even thought Eidos went as far as to start such pre-sales online activity such as Arkham Care and Gotham City Digital, they actually managed to miss the one URL that appears in game. Astonishing.

Anyway – to my point…

One of my colleagues over at 1000heads recently blogged about the excitement born out of the ‘easter egg‘, the notion being that just by being ‘in the know’ about a hidden secret within something like a DVD or a video game (or even a fast food menu), you suddenly feel like being part of something incredibly exclusive.

Including such things in the video games of the future (given that we’re now talking about a multi-billion dollar industry), is only going to become more and more commonplace as we move into 2010.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait 😉

Living in the future

It was my birthday last weekend and, as quite possibly the best birthday present I’ve ever been given, my girlfriend sprung two tickets to Paris this weekend.

Doors - Kube Hotel

However, not content with taking me to the most romantic city in the world, seeing the sights, taking in the museums and generally doing ‘the tourist thing’ – my lady also decided to check us into the coolest hotel I have ever seen.

Don’t believe me?

The future is here. The future is now. The future is Omar Sharif.