The Photo Stream (again)

There's something about The Photo Stream that keeps me coming back. I have a very low attention span, and I think this must be part of the reason. At that site, I don't have to scan news headlines—I scan photos instead. Looking at photos is something I love to do. I guess there's one part of it that bothers me a bit though and that's the photos that get posted that are ambiguous.

A photo of, say, a tennis player could be many different things. It could be that the subject of the photo won Wimbledon and the shot is of her celebrating. Or it could just be that the shot of her celebrating is the only photo available of her when it's reported that she was involved in some other non sports related activity, which is a bit problematic.

The Photo Stream solves this by providing mouseovers which give you a headline, and I think that's probably the best you can hope for.

The Photo Stream

The Photo Stream delivers buzz and newsworthy content to the masses through a rich, eye-opening photo interface.

Note: link was originally broken. Sorry about that

Gimp Development Branch

GIMP's development team, has announced the 2.5 development branch. It's no where near stable yet, but what it means is that we will soon have a Gimp that can support higher color depths, more colorspaces and eventually non-destructive editing—things many have criticized the GIMP for over the years.

Like I said, this is just a development branch, so it's really for nothing more than taking a peek into the future. Those who'd like to try GIMP, or find out more should take a look at their latest stable release GIMP 2.4

PhotographyBB Issue 2

An anonymous tipster writes in to tell me that the latest issue of PhotographyBB is now available. Here's a snippet of the "press release":

PhotographyBB announced today, the release of the second edition of the PhotographyBB Online Magazine. By way of download in either PDF or ZIP formats, PhotographyBB is setting the stage for the future of magazine distribution. In a completely ad-free format, each issue contains informative and educational tutorials for amateur photographers.

I haven't had a chance to read it (there's also a February 2008) issue, but when I get home, I'll be sure to take a closer look. It looks (at a quick glance) very promising, however, and I definitely expect it to be. I just hope they can keep up the ad-free format.

Original Founders Leave JPG Magazine

Being a watcher of JPG Magazine's community, (and recently a contributor) it was interesting to learn that the company who runs it, 8020, has lost the 2 founders Heather Champ and Derek Powazek. This seems to be due to differences in the back story of the magazine, though it seems as though the JPG's about page has very briefly summarized Derek and Heather's involvement in the beginning of the magazine. I think it's important to read the real story and understand where the magazine really came from, but not let the situation destroy the magazine. Let's just hope that 8020 doesn't further ruin a great thing.

It wouldn't be fair to not mention 8020's response to the whole thing.

Update: JPGMag's Unofficial group on Flickr, has some interesting comments. Most notably the number of "I'm cancelling my account." Obviously, they don't realize that Derek still owns a portion of JPG and won't benefit from this at all...

Also, The Wayback Machine has the old About page.

100 Photographs that Changed the World

Not to be outdone by some random blog with 13 Photographs that Changed the World, Life Magazine has published a gallery with, count them, 100 Photographs that Changed the World.

If you ask me, the 13 Photographs is a much better read, since it's descriptions are much more insightful.

Time Magazine Year in Pictures 2006

There was a time when, I would check out Time's Pictures of the Week, a set of 8 pictures which you can vote on for inclusion into Time's Year in Pictures.

Update:I re-checked to see if there was an index page for the Pictures of the Week, as the link above is last weeks pictures, but the old index page now redirects to a YouTube video related to the Person of the Year. The link that used to be the index is http://www.time.com/time/potw. The Year in Pictures is not affected by this.