There are so many ways to be a baseball fan — you can be a stats person, a hometown loyalist, a fan of one slugger in particular, or just into the notion of sitting outside with your friends and drinking beer. I grew into a fan reading great baseball books, many by David Halberstam, who died last year. Check out his October 1964 if you want to see how baseball can echo the struggles of society at large. Or just check out Zach Hample’s Watching Baseball Smarter if you want a fun primer on the sport.
The beginning of the season is about optimism, so here’s to the fact that everyone’s team is still in post season contention. I hope your team makes it.
Video! Video! Video! The rumours are true and “soon” is now. We’re thrilled to introduce video on Flickr. If you’re a pro member, you can now share videos up to 90 glorious seconds in your photostream.
90 seconds? While this might seem like an arbitrary limit, we thought long and hard about how video would complement the flickrverse. If you’ve memorized the Community Guidelines, you know that Flickr is all about sharing photos that you yourself have taken. Video will be no different and so what quickly bubbled up was the idea of “long photos,” of capturing slices of life to share.
Hey group admins! The launch of video on Flickr brings additional moderation tools to your group. In addition to specifying what kind of content you’d like to see in your group (“photos”, “video”, or “photos + video”), you can also have a say in the safety level of what people can contribute to your group pool. There’s more info in this revised group FAQ.
Bonus (for those who’ve read this far): We’re doubling the size of photos that can be uploaded — 20MB per photo for pro members and 10MB per photo for members with free accounts.
And, I also love being able to welcome the second cultural heritage institution to The Commons on Flickr: the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia.
The Powerhouse team has published 200 photos from its Tyrrell Collection into The Commons; wonderful old photos of Sydney and New South Wales from the turn of the 20th Century. One of the other exciting things about the Tyrrell images is that many of them are geotagged, so you can see what old Sydney town looked like 100 years ago! The Powerhouse is planning to open a group or two on Flickr to see if we can collect ‘then and now’ images of Sydney, using the Tyrrell images as the historical reference. Seb Chan from the Powerhouse has also written about it over at fresh + new(er).
In more news about The Commons, we’ve put together some more general information about what the “no known copyright restrictions” rights statement means, and provided links to the further information on the participating institutions’ websites. We also continue to receive expressions of interest from cultural heritage institutions around the world, large and small, and are actively working to continue to expand the program.
By Blurb’s count, more than 800 books have already been created by the Flickr community, including group photo projects from Through the Viewfinder and Swiss Peeks. Whether as a group or individual, you can enter a book through July 14, 2008, with the awards ceremony taking place in San Francisco on Friday, September 12, 2008. (You can enter any book you’ve self-published, not only Blurb books, you’ll just need to use the offline entry form.)
If you are interested in browsing the books your fellow Flickr members have created, the Flickr book category in Blurb’s bookstore is a good place to start, or visit Blurb’s Flickr group for more information.
Flickr is a revolution in photo storage, sharing and organization, making photo management an easy, natural and collaborative process. Get comments, notes, and tags on your photos, post to any blog, share and more!
