North Vancouver Dry Dock
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Monthly Archives: November 2007
End of the Pier
A Slice from the North Shore
HDR image. More on Flickr.
Vancouver From the North Shore
I love this city, even on a cloudy rainy day. Have a great weekend.
4 exposure HDR shot with a 60mm Nikkor lens on a D200 body.
Flickr Hits 2 Billion Photos Before Its 4th Birthday
Holy Moly indeed.
In the Flickr blog today they mention that they hit their 2-billionth upload. To get a sense of the sheer volume, just check the ‘explore’ function.
If you select “most recent uploads” Flickr tells you how many photos were uploaded in the last minute. I’m usually seeing numbers between 2,500 – 3,500. That means that in one hour, at the low end, there are 150,000 uploads. Over a day, even at the low end, that’s 3,600,000 photos uploaded.
At that rate, it would take over 555 days to hit 2-billion. Flickr’s been around longer than that of course, the URL was first registered 4 years ago this month. But obviously they had no-where near this kind of uptake in the early days, and these days, I’m sure they have days that go way over that low number I’m using.
It’s staggering to think about this kind of volume. And Flickr is just one of many photo-upload sites. Add in the social networking sites that also allow photo uploads, and you really have to be impressed with sheer volume of images being uploaded, stored, tagged and displayed.
We used to keep our photos in a shoe box in a closet somewhere – the more annoying members of my family held regular ‘slide nights’ when they’d show off their snaps from their latest trip to Minot. Essentially, our family photos quietly gathered dust somewhere.
Now, they’re on display for the world to see, and in some cases downloaded, not only by friends of family, but by total strangers. Sure there are a lot of budding photographer types who use Flickr as a giant sounding board for their work, but mostly, it’s just regular photos taken by regular folks. Some of them even on a trip to Minot.
Encourage that kind of behavious, and the next thing you know you’ve got 2-billion pictures on your hard drive.
Internet surpasses TV for Young Europeans
A new study shows Europe has hit some major internet related milestones. The study was conducted by European Interactive Advertising Association. Highlights include:
- 169 million people now online across 10 European markets
- Internet use stretches ahead of TV amongst youth audience
- Uplift in online driven by rising use amongst silver surfers and digital women
- Internet users on average spending nearly 12 hours per week online and nearly a third (29%) spending upwards of 16 hours online
- Internet users access the internet 5.5 days per week
- Social networking sites now visited by 42% of internet users
- 8 out of 10 Europeans connect to the internet via a broadband connection
Blooming With A Passion
Sleeping on the Stripes
Today in the Bay
English Bay on a post-storm Monday afternoon.
This deep sea makes some mist as it turns downwind at the fairway buoy bound for Vancouver. That’s Vancouver Island in the far background, and the low darker green are Gulf Islands.
A kite surfer catches some air.
Some late afternoon colour on the way to grab a coffee.
Horror – Social Networks Are The New Crack
At least according to an Australian researcher named Julian Cole…
“For many moderate to heavy users, checking their MySpace or Facebook account has become an automatic and compulsive behaviour, with some participants reporting they log on up to twenty times a day,” Mr Cole said.
He found that many openly admitted to their addiction and, in an ironic twist, contribute to online confession groups. Full story at Sydney Morning Herald
This got me wondering about young Julian’s research methods. He’s a recent university grad…
Mr Cole’s findings were based on an in-depth survey of 20 participants, chosen from a larger survey of 300 people.
Coincidentally, Julian Cole’s Facebook account shows 373 friends.
Feel free to poke him for me, won’t you ?
Day – I'm Ready For My Surprise Close-up
Oh sure. Totally out of the blue and unplanned.
How fortunate there were so many reporters available to chronicle this amazing act of spontaneity.
Vancouver police investigating another stabbing in the city’s Downtown Eastside had a surprise visitor Thursday morning: Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day.
The minister’s unexpected appearance on a street corner in Vancouver’s grittiest neighbourhood surprised police and reporters who were already at the crime scene.
After emerging without notice from his official car, Day spent a couple of minutes being briefed by Sgt. Anne Drennan, the former VPD media liaison turned beat cop, before talking to reporters while his two handlers looked on.
If you believe this was a total surprise, drop me a line, I’ve got a bridge for sale.
Can you say hook-line-sinker?
Horror – Social Networking = Productivity Drain
The nerve of them.
Apparently, some employers thinks spending time on social networks like MySpace and Facebook are, well, not exactly essential to the job at hand…
Barracuda [a network security firm], based in Campbell, Calif., blocks its 350 employees from accessing social networks. “Our experience has been that they are a little bit of a productivity drain,” Mr. Drako said.
Barracuda said that in general, 53 percent of companies now restrict employee Web surfing. One in five companies that filter Web surfing also actively monitor employee online activities, which should make you think twice before you SuperPoke a friend on Facebook from your cubicle. Full story in the NYT
I worked at a large media conglomerate where, decades before I arrived, employees had somehow convinced management that reading the newspaper was an integral part of their jobs. It wasn’t unusual to pass cubicle after cubicle and see people deeply absorbed in reading the paper doing research.
Its not surprising, therefore, that there was a near panic stampede a few days ago when a number of social network sites were blocked (for a short while) at this very same former workplace of mine.
But web browsing during office hours on non-work-related sites is nothing new. This graph represents web traffic over the course of a day…
This happens to be my web server log, but a variation of this graph shows up on 90% of web sites. Sure there’s evening traffic, but the highest traffic is during regular working hours. And it’s been like this for as long as I’ve been looking at web traffic graphs (and that’s a long time now).
So, blame Facebook and MySpace all you want. But remember, if there’s a will, there’s a way to while away the work day.