Here’s a blog entry for my son Nathaniel!

This looks like fun!

Lorcan has a useful post about the Powerhouse Museum experience with Flickr Commons to date. Seb Chan there writes that their 400 images have been viewed 39,685 times in the 71 days they have been up (actually, most have been up for considerably less than the full 71 days, since the museum is loading them 50 at a time). This works out to about 1.40 views per image per day. [Update: See Seb's correction in comments, actually about 3.5 views per image per day.]

Meanwhile I worked out last month that during our MDL Social Side of Reflections project the MDL Reflections database got about 0.18 views per image per day. Flickr is producing over 7 times the number of views that our Reflections system provides.

It is also interesting to note that Seb finds only 1% of the Flickr hits are due to search. 75% is from inside Flickr, the rest from direct references and web links. That 75% number is remarkable, and might be an indicator of the community that Flickr builds.

Also pertinent to the MDL discussion:

Tonnes of tags have been added and they have been of a quality that we’ve not experienced in our other tagging projects. I am firmly of the belief that the quality is a result of the Flickr environment (lets call it ‘culture’) and its userbase.

And:

Some notable interaction highlights include… user tagging of image content (the copious use of notes to identify features)… addition of extra information in the comments field… discussion of possible image locations like this long demolished pub in the Rocks. I like this one especially because the discussion takes place over at Yahoo Answers. This also happens within Flickr as in this example from Wentworth Falls in the Blue Mountains.

We need to mainstream our image content. It belongs on sites like Flickr.

OK, this is big. I’ve mentioned Processing a few times in the past weeks. It’s pretty cool, I just wish I had a reason to use it. Well, this week it seems that John Resig has given us all a birthday present: Processing.js, a version of Processing that runs in JavaScript. This has the potential to supplant Flash, we’ll see. I certainly find Processing itself pretty compelling.

Between this, the coming CSS web fonts, and newer/faster machines, web standards are on the cusp of a significant shift.

This made me smile…

A brief, but very nice interview with Brad Bird at Gigaom last month. Among many bits of wisdom: “there are some [things] that only need to be good enough to not break the spell.”

We are still working on the Feautor site that Mary brought into being during her sabbatical. It is coming along nicely. It even offers video embedding! Check out this video I found there.

Way back at the beginning of this primary season my mom kept telling me that the only reason Obama was able to raise money was that Republicans were giving him money. Leaving aside the question of why that would be so bad, it is worth noting that the shoe is now firmly on the other foot. Joe Felice shares this interesting video about Rush L’s “Operation Chaos” and the impact it had cushioning Hillary’s wins and losses.

Mary just handed me Here Comes Everybody and I hope I get a chance to read it soon. Meanwhile, in this video Clay Shirky discusses where we all get the time to participate in a web 2.0 culture. His notion: we are giving up just a little of our addiction to TV sitcoms, the opiate of the masses, for a bit of participatory media. Not a bad thesis.

Remember the Milk looks like it keeps growing into a pretty reasonable to do list manager.