The latest post on the Flickr Blog is about the National Library of New Zealand which was one of the first users of Flickr’s Commons which is for public photo archives. The library’s collection is viewable here and the blog post is here. Nice to see someone in the NZ public sector up with the technology.
I’ve had the idea for a while, and now that I’m back in Aotearoa, and in a new city, its a good chance to get it started. Kawhe.com is the name for my new site, “New Zealand Cafe Review”.
The idea behind this is to identify the best cafes in New Zealand. At the moment we have reviewers in Christchurch and Auckland, but I’m hoping that as interest grows, so will the number of available reviewers.
This was a good exercise in Wordpress setups. The whole thing including finding a good theme and installing caching and star review module (to put pretty stars on the page) took four hours. In time, I may want to change the site to arrange reviews in a better structure, but for now tagging and categories will help me organise the reviews.
Reviews take into account the coffee (both espresso and flat whites), food and atmosphere.
It’s been a while since I posted anything. Since then I’ve left BEAM and flown halfway around the world via various contries. Posts about China, Macau and Hong Kong are still in the pipeline. Meanwhile, Lydia and I are now safely in beautiful New Zealand and below 43 degrees South of the equator. As such, my new website to promote my work is called Below43.com. My friend Martin Buchan has also recently left BEAM.TV and has a new site at www.postwork.co.uk and a blog here.
Photosynth (a cool Microsoft Labs product which stiches collections of photos together in a 3D panorama) have recently opened up to allow people to submit their own content. I just uploaded a series of photos from Djemaa el Fna at dusk from a restaurant balcony (see video of the square at night in a previous post) - it took a few attempts to get 100% of the photos stitched together (it does it automatically but some photos don’t always match up - you have to edit your submission, remove the images and reupload).
The final result is pretty cool. I think it gives a really good feel for the square and the people in it. To view it click here.
Beam Mobile got into the Broadcast Magazine today. There’s a few good soundbites from Mikey who is one of our developers, including, “This is a fundamental shift in how content is accessed”.
Unfortunately I was away in holiday so didn’t get interviewed for it. Its nice to see a mobile and not just an iPhone focus on the article though.
The article is here, and the print version goes into this week’s publication.