If you haven’t already tried our post by email feature then it makes blog publishing as simple as sending an email. Configure your blog, write an email, and we’ll do the rest. You can add photos and videos in your email and they’ll all be included, regardless of whether you send them from your home computer, your office, or a cellphone.

Last month we introduced a great geotagging feature that allows you to identify where you’re located when writing a post. This has now been linked in with post by email so you can send a photo, via email, from any GPS-enabled device and we’ll use that information to automatically set the location of your blog post. If you have an iPhone, for example, then take a photo, email it, and you’re all set.

As we roll out more geotagging features you’ll be able to use this information to show friends where you’ve eaten, to show places you’ve visited on vacation, or if you’re forgetful, to remind yourself where you’ve been.

Naturally you may not want your location to be public and the geo information will only be used if your personal profile allows it. Additionally, you can include the [geotag on] and [geotag off] shortcodes in your email to override your profile defaults.

Full details of all post by email shortcodes can be found on the support page. This includes how to include category and tags.

Twitter 360 can pinpoint where tweets originate from.

Articles, more video and analysis from:

The Next Web

TechDigest.tv

Geotagging is the process of adding geographical identification or GPS location to your photos, video, website or RSS feeds. It not only allows you to show where the photos were taken but also helps you organize, search, or share your images. Photo-sharing sites like Flickr, Picasa, or Trippermap provides a great way to share geotagged images online. Geotagging photos automatically, however, are only supported by few high-end digital cameras and doing it manually can be a pain. The Eye-Fi Geo wireless memory card allows your ordinary digital camera to geotag your photos automatically.

Read more…

This round is all about the extras that are included with both of these free programs. For this post, I am going to take a look at some of the extras included with Google’s Picasa, and then do a later post about the extras included with Live Photo Gallery. To say that both of these programs are completely free to use, they both include some fantastic extras for you to make use of. I am going to concentrate on the ones that I feel are likely to be the most useful to  new users.

Name Tags.

The new version of Picasa now includes name tags, and this feature is very useful because its such a time saver.  As soon as you have installed Picasa and it has finished  loading in all of your photos stored on your computer, it begins to scan all of them for peoples faces. You can add a name to a persons photo and then Picasa will find all other instances of that named person and ask you to verify if those photos are of the same person or not  You can confirm them all or individually.  I  personally love this feature and it really works well, saving you the trouble of sifting through all of your photo collection to name individuals included in them.  However, do note here that Picasa will find every person’s face in every photo that you have stored! Luckily you can choose to tell it to ignore any that are superfluous.

Creating a Collage. 

Another useful feature included in Picasa is the ability to create a collage of a collection of your photographs.  To create a collage, you simply select some photos or pictures and then click on the Collage icon at the bottom of the viewing area.  You can scramble and shuffle the pictures, change the background to either a plain one or have one of the pictures as a background. Each picture included can have a frame or not, and you have complete control over the finished  size of the Collage.

Geotagging in Picasa.

Another very useful included feature is geotagging which is made so easy to do in the new version. If you have a photo that was taken at a particular place or spot, just click on the Places icon and a world map will load on the right hand side of the viewing screen. You can then move and click until you arrive at the town/city or area where the photo was taken. Then all you do is just drag and drop the chosen photo into the map to geotag it. You can add as many shots of that area/building etc as you want just by dragging them to the map area. Each photo geotagged is then assigned a small red ‘flag’ on the right hand lower side to denote that it has been geotagged. Its so easy!  Again, I love this feature.

Making a Movie

You can take a collection of pictures and easily create a movie out of them inside Picasa.  This feature is ideal for a collection of photos of a trip that you made or a day out for example,or as in my demo a theme.   You can add some music to the movie from your music files, decide on the title and the fonts used for it, choose the transitions between each photograph, play it through and then edit it until you are satisfied with the result. You can also add some captions to individual photos when you edit it.

Unfortunately I have not been able to  include the completed video in this post  to show you as  I had  lot’s of problems trying to get my video file uploaded to YouTube, in fact I had to give up trying in the end as I do not have unlimited uploads/downloads. This uploading videos area  definitely needs sorting out by the Picasa bods as it appears that I am not the only one who has experienced difficulty in this area.  Let’s hope that I have better luck in my next post when I’ll be taking a look at the extra features available in Live Photo Gallery.

TG EDIT. Have now managed to get the video uploaded to YouTube by cheating and using Windows Live Movie Maker instead. So the enclosed video is made with Picasa but uploaded with Movie Maker. I have not altered it in any way.

Ecco subito aggiornato il geotag

Sono tornato a Roma dopo 12 ore di autobus: ho dormito quasi bene stavolta.

Peccato per il film hanno messo stavolta un film di Pieraccioni orrendo, come tutti gli altri, quello fastidiosssimo dove parla tutto il tempo con lo spettatore nel suo odioso toscano spiegando la sua visione del matrimonio. Insieme a Sconsy o comecavolosichiama, che non c’entra una cippa con il film però evidentemente in quel periodo era reduce dal successo di zelig e andava messa di traverso nel film, dove appunto interpreta il suo personaggio e basta. Un capolavoro ancora purtroppo non compreso.

Io intanto ascoltavo altro sull’ipod.

Cari autisti della SAIS: ma perchè mettete sempre gli stessi film? L’altra volta, all’andata, mi avete stupito invece, mettendo due prime visioni: La Matassa, anche se in realtà ero l’unico nell’autobus a non averlo visto, ed era pure in tema per quelli che viaggiano in sicilia, ed avete pure messo “Si può fare” che è davvero un bel film (lì però ero l’unico ad averlo visto). Per la prossima volta fatemi vedere Baaria che tanto al cinema di mio non ci andrò mai a vederlo e dura tanto così il viaggio passa più velocemente, oltre ad essere pieno di siciliani e sicilia.

Today’s openness is a normal thing. Internet and software has developed so much that everybody is now able to share everything in tremendous ways of blogging and free tracking web sites. Is that good or bad? There are many controversies about online privacy nowadays. The most recent and, in my opinion, very scary way of sharing is the geotagging, or more specifically, geoblogging. Originally, geotagging has been developed exclusively for professional need. These days you can find the function geotagging function in Google Maps, almost in every portable device, internet blog or social network. Seems to be pretty harmless. On one hand, it is quite useful and handy option. Here it is… I take a photo with my camera on my cell phone. If I am lucky enough to have brand new, expensive phone, I have the function ‘geotagging’. Immediately after I’ve shot my picture, I can see where I shot it. Even more exciting is that I can save this information and every time I go back to look for the photo I know where I took it. That is just awesome! On the other, there are web sites like ‘Ipoki’ which allows you to track and see people’s locations…for free. You can be tracked as well if you want to show your location via mobile phone’s GPS in real-time. This is undoubtedly dangerous. “We believe that Ipoki users should have control over their location information and who can see it.” This is official statement of Ipoki owners to users. That’s good, but still, everybody can sign up there for free and immediately become your ‘friend’ in case he or she wants to monitor you 24/7. Isn’t that outrageous?

Durante o último encontro da Automattic, o Team 21* refugiou-se num esconderijo nos arredores de Québec City para criar um novo conjunto de funcionalidades para um blog perto de si (literalmente!).  Alguma vez se perguntou em que sítio do mundo foi escrito um post? Onde está quem comentou? Se não existirão outros bloggers de WordPress.com perto de si? Se sim, respire fundo, porque vai gostar de saber sobre as funcionalidades de geotagging e localização que estamos a implementar.

A partir de hoje, quando escrever um post, passa a ter disponível a opção de identificar a sua localização. Para browsers que o suportem, conseguimos até obter essa informação automaticamente através da magia da tecnologia do século 21, bastando-lhe a si verificar que o local está correcto. Também pode indicar a sua localização manualmente. Lembre-se que esta característica é de opt-in, o que significa que se não quer que ninguém saiba onde estava quando escreveu um post, não precisa de o divulgar.

Indique uma morada, clique no mapa ou detecte a sua localização automáticamente

Além de poder associar geotagging aos seus posts, pode ainda associá-lo ao seu perfil. Está interessado em ler blogs de outras pessoas na sua área? Uma busca rápida irá encontrá-los. De futuro poderia até ser usada para organizar encontros locais de utilizadores de WordPress.com.

Neste momento estamos apenas a recolher e a expôr dados geográficos de posts e perfis. Os posts passam assim a conter as meta tags geo microformat, geo.position e ICBM, e os feeds com GeoRSS e W3C geodata.

Todos estes os dados não são legíveis nem exibidos a visitantes, apenas a aplicações que os entendam. Bom, mas para é que serve então? Para já, diz aos motores de busca onde as suas mensagens estão localizadas e, com extensões de browser tais com Operator e Geo, pode visualizar informações geográficas em qualquer página web (e não apenas em posts geotagged do WordPress.com).

Tudo isto é muito à frente e geeky, mas e para os humanos? Neste momento não exibimos dados geográficos. Não se preocupe no entanto. Estamos a preparar a integração de temas, vários mapas, widgets e shortcodes para muito em breve.

E isto é apenas o começo. Com base nesta plataforma, tencionamos implementar progressivamente mais recursos de geotagging, tais como a possibilidade de mostrar a localização dos seus comentadores, a localização dos votantes em sondagens, uma visualização do mapa de actualizações do blog no WordPress.com em tempo real ou ainda um relatório anual, mostrando-lhe de onde foram escritos os seus posts e comentários – uma espécie de versão em blog do relatório anual de viagens do Dopplr.

Por agora estamos bastante empolgados com o geotagging e com a (futura) pesquisa de posts e perfis perto de si, e esperamos que experimente esta nova funcionalidade.

Se pensa que há mais aproveitamentos de geotagging que gostaria de ver implementados, deixe-nos a sua sugestão nos comentários! Para obter mais informações, consulte a página de suporte sobre Geotagging.

Nota: Estamos adiar o lançamento da funcionalidade de pesquisa geográfica até começarmos a ter mais alguns dados (os seus!).

Que comece o geotagging

* O Team 21 eram Jane, Jon, Mike e Stephane.

On 12th November, WordPress brought out a new feature which allows geotags to be attached to a blog’s user profile and posts. Once the feature is enabled, setting a geotag to a post is as simple as checking a box to confirm you want the location to be made public. Although searching of geotags has not been enabled yet (they are apparently waiting for more data),  there will be location-based searching for WordPress blogs (GeoSearch) soon.

WordPress geotagging

If you’re travelling around and want to show your current location for each blog post, this is a really handy feature, and, once GeoSearch is enabled, I could see that business blogs would also benefit from this.

Here in Taiwan, Google Maps is obviously better set up to recognize Chinese addresses. I had a little trouble getting the app to recognize the address in English (the “Find Address” didn’t work and the “Auto Detect” set a pointer in Neihu when I specified Sijhih), so ended up setting it to a local landmark – the railway station down the road. Some of the comments on WordPress article introducing this feature (that can be found here) indicate there is some hesitancy to use the service due to privacy concerns. For these people, designating a close-by public landmark, as I did, may be a more viable option. The address supplied is machine-readable only anyway, so if you live in an appartment block, you’re location wouldn’t be able to be pinpointed.

I’ve attached a geotag to this post, and although there seems to be nothing apparently different (no indication of location on the post), behind the scenes the geographic data is being made available to the ’soon-to-be-lauched’ Geosearch.

 Instructions on how to enable geotagging in WordPress can be found here.

Sometimes you need to say something anonymously or under a pseudonym, and until now it’s felt fairly safe to do that when blogging or commenting on blogs, secure in the knowledge that neither your name nor your location can be easily traced.

But now, it seems that those days are coming to an end as WordPress introduce ‘geotags’: see A Blog Near You and the Geotag Support Page to find out all about it. Thankfully they’ve made it an opt-in service, otherwise every time you posted or commented, you’d find not only the date and time but also your location neatly appended to your post.

Perhaps I’m being paranoid, but to me this seems a tag too far: it feels far too much like spyware and I’ll be leaving it turned off for all my blogs. Thanks, WordPress people, but no thanks.

post location detction test

SR

Photographed by xcode

Sorry for the blurry shot.

Thanks for the jump.

– License

testing to see if the geotagging feature works on WordPress hosted blogs . . . we shall see

adioso

Chris

Yay! Nu er det så blevet muligt at geotagge sine indlæg så alle kan se hvor jeg har siddet når jeg har skrevet noget. Perfekt for en eksponeringshungrende ekshibitionist som mig…

Blogini tulee kokemaan merkittävän uudistuksen sen jälkeen kun lukukertoja on tullut yli 70 000. Minä aion muuttaa blogin nimen, koska “Joka tästä käy saa tuntea ja kauhistua” antaa ymmärtää, että te lukijat voisitte tuntea minut tämän sivuston kautta – niinhän ei todellakaan ole. Siispä uusi nimi on mietintämyssyssä hautumassa. Blogin osoite ei tietenkään muutu. WordPress on hyvä koti meille bloggaajille =)

Sitten se toinen uuditustus. Tulevaisuudessa, kun WordPress kehittää palvelua eteenpäin, pystytte näkemään tietyllä tarkuudella missä minä olen kulloisenkin merkinnän kirjoittanut. Tietenkin sillä edellytyksellä, että minä sallin teidän nähdä sen. WordPress on siis ottanut käyttöön geotaggauksen, josta voitte lukea lisää Jane Wellsin merkinnästä “A Blog Near You”.

WordPress says that my location can be detected if I opt-in to their new geotag system. So I’m trying it out via the blog. Find me!

Follow up: I played with the new feature last night, and took a look at where it actually points me today. I did an auto detect geotag and didn’t input my actual address. Result? Not too far off – about two miles. The ironic part is that auto detect puts me almost exactly at one of my friends’ house! So now you all know where Edna lives! I better let her know there’s an open house going on…maybe she’ll whip up some of her famous mac and cheese for you…

Automattic 社員合宿の間、チーム 21*のメンバーはケベック郊外のコテージに身を潜めつつ、（文字通り）あなたのそばのブログに新機能をお届けするためにがんばっていました。

このブログ記事はどこから投稿されたんだろう、とか、近所に WordPress.com のブロガーがいないかな、と思ったことがありませんか？だとしたら、今からご紹介するジオタグ＆ジオロケーション（地理位置情報）機能をきっと気に入ってもらえるはずです。

今後ログインしてブログを書く時には、投稿を作成している位置を設定することができます。対応しているブラウザを使っている場合、21世紀にふさわしい魔法のような技術を使って自動的に位置情報を取得することができるので、あなたはそれが間違っていないか確認するだけです。また、手動で入力することもできます。この機能は許可制（オプトイン）なので、投稿したときどこにいたかを他の人に知られたくない場合は使わなくてもかまいません。

住所を入力し地図をクリックするか、位置情報を自動取得します

投稿だけではなくて、プロフィールにも位置情報を追加することができます。近くに住んでいる人のブログを読んでみたいと思ったら、検索で簡単に発見することができます。将来は WordPress.com ローカルユーザーのオフ会を開くのに使えるようになるかもしれません。

現在はブログ投稿とプロフィールについての位置情報のみを収集、公開しています。ジオタグがついた投稿は geo マイクロフォーマッツ、geo.position、ICBM メタタグでマークアップされ、フィード内では GeoRSS と W3C geodata がつけられます。

でもこの機能はまだまだスタートしたばかりです。私たちはこれを基盤として、ウィジェット・ショートコード、コメント投稿者や投票機能参加者の位置情報、WordPress.com ブログ更新のライブマップ、年間を通してあなたがどこでブログを投稿したかのレポート（Dopplr.com 年間旅行リポートのブロガー版！）などなど、他のジオタグ機能を徐々に展開していく予定です。

でも今の時点では、投稿とプロフィールにジオタグがつけられるというだけでもわくわくしていて、みなさんにもぜひ試してみて欲しいと思っています（プロフィールページから有効化できます）！他にもこれを基に追加して欲しいジオタグ機能があったら、コメントで提案してくださいね。

注: 地理情報の検索は、データがある程度集まってから使えるようにするつもりです。なので、どんどんジオタグをつけてみてくださいね

*チーム21のメンバーは、ジェーン、ジョン、マイクとステファンです。

During the Automattic company meetup, Team 21* holed up in a cottage outside Québec to create a new set of features for a blog near you (literally!). Have you ever wondered where in the world a blog post was written? Where a commenter was located? If there were other WordPress.com bloggers near you? If so, hold on to your hat, because you’re going to love the geotagging and geolocation features we’re introducing.

Starting today, when you log in to write a post, you have the option of identifying your location. For browsers that support it, we can get this information automatically through the magic of 21st century technology and you just have to double-check to make sure the location is correct. You can also enter your location manually. This feature is opt-in, meaning that if you don’t want anyone to know where you were when you wrote a post, that’s okay.

Enter an address, click the map, or auto detect your location

In addition to geotagging posts, you can also geotag your profile. Interested in reading blogs by other people in your area? A quick search will find them, and in the future could even be used to organize local WordPress.com user meetups.

Right now, we’re only collecting and exposing geodata for posts and profiles. Geotagged posts get marked up with the geo microformat, geo.position and ICBM meta tags, and GeoRSS and W3C geodata in feeds.

This is all machine readable data: hidden from display. What good is it if it’s hidden? It tells search engines where your posts are located, and with browser plugins like Operator and Geo, you can view geo information on any web page (not just WordPress.com geotagged posts).

The machine readable data is cool and geeky, but what about something for us humans? Right now, we don’t display geo data anywhere in a human readable way. Don’t worry, though. We’ll be launching theme integration, various maps, widgets, and shortcodes soon.

This is just the beginning. Building on this platform, we’ll gradually roll out more geotagging features, such as showing the location of your commenters, the location of poll votes, a live map view of blog updates on WordPress.com, or an annual report showing you where your posts were written and where your comments came from — kind of a blogger’s version of the Dopplr annual travel report.

For now, we’re pretty psyched about the geotagging and (the upcoming) search of posts and profiles and hope you’ll all give this new feature a try! If there are other geotagging features you’d like to see built on this foundation, suggest them in the comments!

For more information, check out the Geotagging support page.

Note: We’re holding off on launching the geo search feature until we start getting some data (from you!). So start geotagging

*Team 21 consisted of Jane, Jon, Mike and Stephane.

Galleria fotografica di immagini con localizzazione satellitare (Geotag) sulla mappa della laguna di Venezia.

Visita la Galleria

Es ist der 12. März 2009. Schon lange habe ich von diesem Twitter-Ding gehört, nie genau verstanden, wozu man es brauchen könnte, und nun beginne ich also damit. Wie ich schon mit

• Hattrick
• MSN (heute Windows Live)
• Bloggen
• RSS-Reader
• Facebook

begonnen habe: Mal sehen, ob das was taugt. Was also taugt Twitter?

Eine Anleitung

Man braucht:

1. Einen Account auf Twitter.com, meiner heißt http://twitter.com/kohlenklau, weil ich mich früher schon einmal mit phwampfler angemeldet habe und und und.
2. Ein mobiles Gerät, auf dem man entweder per Browser oder (besser) per Applikation auf Twitter zugreifen kann, in meinem Fall Tweetie. (Nach Versuchen mit anderen Apps.)
3. (fakultativ) Auf dem Laptop oder Desktop ein Tool, mit dem man auf Twitter zugreifen kann (damit man im Browser nicht immer ein Fenster offen halten muss); ich benutze nun auch Tweetie, habe aber auch Twitter für Growl installiert, so dass ich alle Tweets angezeigt bekomme (mühsam, mit der Zeit, da der ganze Bildschirm gefüllt wird, wenn man den Computer aufweckt.)

Man macht damit:

1. Man schreibt Tweets, d.h. Meldungen mit einer Länge von 140 Zeichen. Man kann sie sich als eine Art öffentliche SMS vorstellen, obwohl man auch private Nachrichten verschicken kann. Optional kann man vom mobilen Gerät aus Geotags anhängen, d.h. Koordinaten des momentanen Aufenthaltsortes, Bilder und sogar Videos. Der ganze Dienst wird auch Microblogging genannt, die Tweets werden verstanden als Blogposts im kleinen Umfang. Zusätzlich kann man eine Art Indexsystem benutzen, indem man Begriffe mit einem Hashtag kennzeichnet, wie #twitter im Titel dieses Posts. Üblich sind Links auf größere Texte, z.B. Blogposts, welche mit Mikrolinks verlinkt werden (z.B. TinyURL oder bit.ly) – um Zeichen zu sparen. Zum Inhalt der Tweets weiter unten.
2. Die Tweets werden von Followers gelesen, also von Leuten, welche meine Tweets abonniert haben und sie angezeigt bekommen. Man kann sich direkt an einen Follower richten, indem man ihn mit @dougthehead in den Tweet aufnimmt.
3. Man selber ist natürlich auch Follower und abonniert so die Tweets anderer Twitternden. (Falls man sich fragt, was twittern eigentlich heißen soll: Zwitschern. Deshalb tauchen auch Comicvögel häufig auf.)  Diese Tweets liest man dann; verbreitet sie weiter, indem man sie re-tweetet (Syntax: »RT @kohlenklau …« wobei … für den Inhalt des Originaltweets steht) oder antwortet mit @kohlenklau darauf.

Und was bringt das?

Welche Funktionen hat Twittern bzw. das Lesen von Tweets?

1. Unterhaltung und Öffentlichkeit. Man twittert Witze, Kuriositäten und Beobachtungen aus dem Alltag, demonstriert seine Medienkompetenz, bleibt im Gespräch. Gleichzeitig veröffentlicht man viele (harmlose) Aspekte seines Privatlebens, genau so, wie man das mit einer Facebook-Statusmeldung tut (man kann natürlich Tweets auch automatisch als FB-Statusmeldung anzeigen lassen, m.E. am besten mit Selective  Twitter Status).
2. Publizieren von Informationen. Als Blogger twittert man jeden neuen Blogeintrag (auch hier gibt es Tools, WordPress kann das automatisch, zuvor habe ich Twitterfeed benutzt).  Zeitungen twittern ihre Meldungen mit Links zu den Artikeln (z.B. twitter.com/nzz), aber auch Homepages, Firmen etc. benutzen Twitter als Social-Media-Anbindung, über die Kunden und Interessierte informiert werden. Als Leser kann man also so den RSS-Reader eigentlich ersetzen.
3. (Zielgerichtete Kommunikation). Die Klammern deuten an, dass diese Funktion eingeschränkt genutzt wird und funktioniert. Beispielsweise hat twitter.com/phogenkamp schon per Twitter jemanden gesucht, der zu einer bestimmten Zeit vom Stauffacher zum Bahnhof fährt – und auch gefunden. Man könnte so eine Art ortsgebundene Kommunikation ermöglichen, man kann auch nach Tweets aus einer bestimmten Region suchen und sich die auf einer Karte anzeigen lassen. Andererseits könnte man eine Art SMS an mehrere Menschen versenden, z.B. eine Einladung.

Offene Fragen

Ob sich der Aufwand lohnt, wage ich im Moment zu bezweifeln. Wenn man Vergnügen an derlei Dingen hat, sich ab und zu von Tweets ablenken lassen will – dann schon. Sonst kaum. Folgende Fragen sind für mich noch offen:

1. Wie schafft man es, den richtigen Twittern zu followen – und wie tut man das? Twitter hat Listen eingeführt, mit denen man mehr Leute finden sollte, die interessante Tweets posten. Aber schon nur das Followen von 50 Twittern wird enorm zeitraubend und unübersichtlich – wenn man denn alle Tweets liest. Andererseits: Was bringt das Lesen, wenn man es selektiv tut? Wie oft aber soll man es tun? Etc.
2. Filterfunktionen. Twitter müsste Informationen filtern lassen, so dass man nur liest, was man lesen will (ähnlich wie Facebook das tut). Unklar ist, ob das technisch möglich ist?
3. Wie twittert man richtig? Was interessiert die Follower? Soll man – wie twitter.com/thomashutter – redundant twittern und Tweets wiederholen, oder nicht? Soll man sich eine Linie zulegen und seriös twittern, oder indiskret (wie twitter.com/promiskuitaet) oder nur privat, oder alles mischen?

Und ein Tipp

http://twitter.com/SibylleBerg - Sibylle Berg mag ich ohnehin, aber sie twittert auch sensationell. Und hier noch ein toller Text von ihr:

Twitter Halloween!

Has social networking come to this? I was working on the daily quota of articles for my Applied Entrepreneurship group on LinkedIn this morning, looking for Halloween related articles on entrepreneurship. I ran across a short post on The Next Web letting folks know how they could scare their friends. The article by Boris (I’m scared already), Twitter ♥ Halloween, tells you:

Google has a special logo for the occasion and Twitter supports a few extra signs. Here is a table of scary faces you can use today. Copy the codes on the left (like >o<) and paste them into Twitter. Then submit your tweet. Twitter will turn your code into an image. Give it a try and scare your friends!

8-#   =  N Cool?  Maybe.  Scary?  Not so much.

According to an article by Leena Rao, Twitter Tricks And Treats For Halloween, most people may not have figured out how to tweet using this hack correctly. What may be more frightening however is Twitter’s rapid generation of applications of all sorts, many of which are reportedly under-documented, and sometimes inaccurately registered as “live” applications.

Twitter’s “List” application may give us a premonition of things to come. Erick Schoenfeld’s article, Twitter Starts Rolling Out Lists To Everybody. Have You Gotten Yours? gives a brief description of the impact of this application and Jason Kincaid’s article, Twitter’s New ‘Lists’ Feature Finally Introduces Grouping, Offers An Alternative To The SUL gives more detail. In a nutshell Kincaid says:

Appropriately called ‘Lists’, the new feature will allow anyone to make a list of other Twitter users and label it appropriately (for example, I could make a list called ‘TC Staff’), then share that list with other members. Twitter writes that the feature is still in limited testing, but that it will eventually be rolled out to all users.

By default any lists you create will be public, though you’ll also be able to hide them. If you choose to leave them publicly viewable, other Twitter users will be able to hit a button to “Follow this list” so they can add everyone at once. This is a big deal — until now the only convenient way to start mass following people on Twitter has been to use its own curated SUL. I won’t be surprised if we see some users vying to become the best ‘list makers’, offering comprehensive lists of celebrities, news portals, bloggers, and more. It will also be interesting to see if Twitter aggregates the most comprehensive Lists and includes them as part of the signup process (which would effectively just be the SUL in a different form).

Twitter’s post describing the new feature isn’t particularly detailed, but it seems like this may have a larger impact than just discovery — it could also potentially be used for Grouping, a feature that some third party apps have offered but that hasn’t been officially supported by Twitter. In short, this will let you group the people you follow into different list (say, one for News, one for close friends, and so on), and then quickly jump between them.

Does this mean that people signing up with Twitter will have suggested groups to follow, in a fashion similar to suggested friends on facebook and LinkedIn? If so, what could another Twitter application add to the tricks and treats of Halloween news?

Scare up MG Siegler’s article, Twitter’s Geolocation API Appears To Be Live. But Most Of You Are Lost, which describes as follows:

I noticed something interesting tonight. In the new build of Tweetie 2 (not out yet), a bunch of little red location markers started appearing next to tweets in my stream. Knowing that this new version was built using Twitter’s new Geolocation APIs, I inquired if this mean they had been turned on. Sure enough, they have, developer Loren Brichter just confirmed after talking to Twitter.

But there’s a slight problem. Apparently, the reason these geotags are showing up for all tweets (even those not actually geotagged) is that the documentation was a little unclear on how to handle non-geotagged tweets, Brichter says. The result is that every single tweet is tagged with a location somewhere just off the coast of Africa, south of Ghana. Either this is Atlantis, the Island from Lost, or we have a problem.

So do we think that those signing up with Twitter will now have lists of people to follow generously offered to them by default, thus guaranteeing substantial increase in “tweets,” and at the same time giving an ability to show the geolocation of them as little red dot? I’m not sure I want to be a geotag on anybody’s screen. Now that would be frightening for some.

That’s what I think. Please leave a comment and let us know what you think.

Wharton’s Icefields

Originally uploaded by ocean.flynn

In an seamless blend of mountaineering, history, botany and fiction, Edmonton author Thomas Wharton revisits the shifting social and cultural events that took place on the edge of the Columbia icefields in the late 19th and early 20th century. In 1898 while on an expedition in the Columbia (Arcturus) glacier, doctor and amateur botanist Edward Bryne fell through a crevasse where he was held upside down in the icy grip of the narrowing walls of the chasm suspended in a liminal state between reality and dreams.

Using Adobe Photoshop I created this digitage inspired by descriptions and interpretations of the angel in Dr. Bryne’s icy vision. I layered images of ice taken at the Glenmore reservoir in Calgary, a Calypso orchid taken on Heart Mountain in June 2008 and my mother’s portrait from the early 1900s.

The Calypso orchid was elegantly selected as a character in the novel, as the origin of its name signifies concealment. It is a fragile plant with a wide, circumpolar distribution, that requires a highly specific ecosystem. Once it was an edible and medicinal plant for the First Nations who gathered plants in the Rockies but with increased traffic on what were once remote montaine trails, it is now an endangered species. At a certain height on Heart Mountain Trail when the scree became too difficult for me to manage, I was looking for an easier route a bit farther back from the steep edge of the trail when I came across a couple of these tiny purple orchids in a delicate floral embrace.

stoney, concealment, edible, circumpolar, ethnobotany, fairy slipper, Venus’s slipper, tagging, taxonomy, walkingtrails, wildflowersnorthamerica, wfgna, rockymountains, rockies, geotagging, geotagged, geotag, creativecommons, calgarydaytrips, alberta, CalypsoFairySlipper, Calypso.Bulbosa,

Citations:

“bare, windswept slope of ice … projecting spine of ice … stepped backward into the abyss . . . (Wharton 1995 [2007:2]) . . . deep blue gloom p.3 . . . “
“I prefer words on a page. They don’t gesticulate.”

“restless crowd with its panoply of cameras (Wharton 1995 [2007:274]).”

Wharton, Thomas. 1995 [2007]. Icefields. Nunatak Fiction. NeWest Press. Edmonton, AB.

Notes

1. The calypso orchid The Calypso bulbosa, Calypso orchid, Fairy’s slipper, Venus’s slipper or Plantae > Magnoliophyta > Liliopsida > Asparagales < Orchidaceae < Epidendroideae < Calypsoeae < Calypso < Salisb. < Calypso bulbosa

Nunatak is a word in Inuktitut meaning “lonely peak,” a rock or mountain rising above ice. During Quaternary glaciation in North America, peaks stood above the ice sheet and so became refuge for plant and animal life. Magnificent nunataks, their bases scoured by glaciers, can be seen along the Highwood Pass in the Alberta Rocky Mountains and on Ellesmere Island. The Nunatak fiction series are especially selected works of fiction by new western authors. Editors for Nunataks for NeWest Press are Aritha van Herk and Ruby Wiebe.

Sexsmith’s expedition is based on the 1859-1860 expedition undertaken by James Carnegie, Earl of Southesk.

Bibliography of research resources acknowledged by author Thomas Wharton

Adassiz, Louis. 1967. Studies on Glaciers. Trans. Albert Carozzi. New York: Hafner.
Carnegie, James. 1875. Saskatchewan and the Rocky Mountains.
Gadd, Benn. 1987. Handbook of the Canadian Rockies, Jasper, Alberta: Corax.
Kagami, Yoshiro. 1951. “Edward Bryne: a Life on Ice.” Journal of Alpine Exploration. ii:6.
Stuffield, Hugh; Collie, J. Norman. 1903. Climbs and Explorations in the Canadian Rockies. London: Longmans, Green and Company.

Uploaded to Flickr by ocean.flynn on 26 Aug 08, 3.16PM MDT.