The Library of Congress has announced a pilot project with Flickr. They are placing 3,000 photos from two of their most popular collections on Flickr for the public to use. The project is being called The Commons. You can read the Flickr announcement here and below is an excerpt from the LOC’s blog announcement. That’s why it is so exciting to let people know about the launch of a brand-new pilot project the Library of Congress is undertaking with Flickr, the enormously popular photo-sharing site that has been a Web 2.0 innovator. If all goes according to plan, the project will help address at least two major challenges: how to ensure better and better access to our collections, and how to ensure that we have the best possible information about those collections for the benefit of researchers and posterity. In many senses, we are looking to enhance our metadata (one of those Web 2.0 buzzwords that 90 percent of our readers could probably explain better than me). The project is beginning somewhat modestly, but we hope to learn a lot from it. Out of some 14 million prints, photographs and other visual materials at the Library of Congress, more than 3,000 photos from two of our most popular collections are being made available on our new Flickr page, to include only images for which no copyright restrictions are known to exist. The real magic comes when the power of the Flickr community takes over. We want people to tag, comment and make notes on the images, just like any other Flickr photo, which will benefit not only the community but also the collections themselves. For instance, many photos are missing key caption information such as where the photo was taken and who is pictured. If such information is collected via Flickr members, it can potentially enhance the quality of the bibliographic records for the images. The Library of Congress has 4 million prints, photographs and other visual materials so there is much more they could make available to social media sites like Flickr in the future. Permalink | Recent Headlines | Twitter | WWFeeds.com

Writer Blogs About Raising Wild Coyote
Writer and photographer Shreve Stockton has been blogging about a wild coyote she adopted for several months now on her blog called the Daily Coyote. She adopted the coyote after both his parents were shot for killing sheep. Shreve named the coyote Charlie. Charlie has been staying with Shreve and her cat Eli at her home in Wyoming – she lives in rural small town with a popular of just 300. Time has passed since Shreve adopted Charlie and he is much bigger. Charlie’s not a puppy anymore. He recently made his first howl and his first kill (a mouse). Shreve does have a coyote expert named MC who has been helping her with Charlie. If you a get a chance read the blog from the beginning. It’s a fascinating story and there are terrific photographs of Charlie. There are few videos here on YouTube as well. You can find some more discussion of Shreve’s Coyote Diary on Neatorama, Red Orbit, Outdoors Blog, Lockergnome and latimes.com. Permalink | Recent Headlines | Twitter | WWFeeds.com

Automattic Raises $29.5 Million
GigaOm reported earlier today that WordPress firm Automattic has raised $29.5 million in a Series B Round of funding. The New York Times Co. is one of the investors in the blog software company. GigaOm says the funding will be used to hire engineers, expand product offerings and possibly add more social networking features. So what does Automattic need the money for? After all, from what I know of the business, Automattic has been bubbling around the break-even point for a while now. Matt explains that they are going to roll out newer, hosted services such as BBPress (forums), and will expand their other product offerings, such as Gravatar and the spam-protection service Akismet. The money will be spent to hire more engineers and build out a more robust infrastructure. That would be a start. Anne Zelenka made an impassioned case for using WordPress to build a social network, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we see some social features start to creep into WordPress.com as well. They just boosted their storage capacity to three gigabytes, which indicates that they are serious about allowing bloggers to add video and other multimedia content to their blogs. WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg has a post about the funding on his blog called Act Two. Permalink | Recent Headlines | Twitter | WWFeeds.com

What’s Going to Happen in 2008?
2008 is going to be a year of political intrigue, depressing economic news, annoying web filters, weird weather, crappy television, newfangled gadgets and green hybrid vehicles. That’s the short of it and some of it is bound to be true. But no one really knows what 2008 is going to be like yet so here’s a closer look at some key issues. Australia gets a big giant filter for 2008. Duncan Riley has more on the Great Firewall of Australia here. Let’s hope filters do not become a global trend for 2008. Quality over frequency? Gawker CEO Nick Denton thinks having fewer posts with lots of pageviews is the way to go in ‘08. That could result in posts that are either very informative or very sensational or both. Robert Scoble frowns on the practice and reminds us of the popularity of his Kindle asshat post. On a positive note maybe Gawker bloggers will try to link out to other blogs more in order to get more links and traffic to their posts. Speaking of the Kindle. Some folks like that for a hot gadget in 2008. The Kindle does have some hidden easter eggs that may help it win kudos from gadget bloggers. Some more obvious forecasts are that the 3G iPhone and Google’s Android platform will be popular this year. Another hot 2008 gadget may be the Chumby. Some gadget forecasts can be found here, here, here, here, here and here. The RIAA apparently thinks in 2008 you shouldn’t be copying your music from one device to another. Some suggest that in 2008 the mainstream music industry will end. Note: It isn’t going to end but the big music labels will continue to struggle with CD sales in 2008. U.S. President: It is an easy prediction to say that U.S. politics will be a hot topic in the blogosphere this year. The polls are all over the place. The BBC calls it the “nobody knows” election. Part of the reason for the uncertainty is the lack of an incumbent. Vice President Dick Cheney could have run but he has never polled well and has health issues. The Democrats appear to be better off than the Republicans at this point. The Democrats have raised far more money and they have been polling better but the elections are still a long way away. Grist is only 98% sure we will actually get a new president in 2008. The BBC has an article about some new technologies that could be making the news in 2008 including IPTV and Wimax. They also mention there will be more of the “web to go” with technology like Google Gears. Predictions posts on Google Operation System and Google Blogoscoped also mention Google Gears. 2008 may not be an exciting tech year. There could be much iterbore says Damien Mulley: “2008 is going to be the most boring year in tech ever. Everything is about iteration. Yawn yawn yawn.” Damien could be wrong and he knows it. The subject of his post is “Complelety Wrong Predictions for 2008.” Writers Strike: We certainly hope that WGA writers is ancient history by the end of 2008 but it looks like lots of reality tv shows is a given for at least the first few months of 2008. The number of scripted shows remaining is quickly shrinking. The striking writers have won the battle for public opinion but the AMPTP is still holding out on cutting a deal. It has been depressing to watch but there have been a couple postive signs. The fact that some of the networks are already losing ad revenues is a sign the networks may need to return to the bargaining table. The Worldwide Pants side deal was also a positive sign. Despite these positives some analysts are saying the strike could last until the SAG’s deal with the AMPTP expires in June. NewTeeVee has some thoughts on the strike from insiders here. Ongoing updates on the strike can be found here and here. At least the strike brought us the Writer Boi video. Online Video: That there will be continued growth in online video was a sure thing even without a writer’s strike. That there is a battle over it between the writers and the giant media companies is a good example of just how important web video is. There will be serious growth in online video in 2008. Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb sums it up this way: “Online video will become so ubiquitous, including live and mobile, that everyone will wonder how the internet existed without it. It won’t feel like a big deal, though.” NewTeeVee has some short video interviews about what will happen in the online video world this year. Marketing Shift thinks 2008 will be a big year for Joost. Paris Lemon expects Flickr to launch a video service this year. Download Squad offers five video predictions including one that Seesmic will die. Mike Elgan is forecasting a 2008 Beijing Olympic Disaster. B.L. Ocham predicts that social networks will turn to subscriptions starting with small fees. “The fees will be small, but they will replace conventional advertising as a revenue model.” Rev2.org kills off some 2007 buzzwords including AJAX, The Long Tail and Folksonomy. Economy: A lot of how 2008 goes depends on what the economy does. There are some indications that the economy in 2008 might be unfun and possibly even scary. See here, here, here and here. Some of these stories contain the dreaded stagflation word. If these dour economic forecasts pan out than we could lose some of our social media friends in 2008. At a minimum there are likely to be many more Web 2.0 shutterings in 2008 than we saw in 2007. Blogs: AdesBlog.com is predicting a slow down in blogs about blogging and blogs about making money online. DailyBlogTips sees some consolidation in the blogging industry in 2008 but expects “2008 will be another big year for blogging and new media in general.” Rex Dixon predicts there will be less blogs. Facebook Fatigue: Facebook ended 2007 by finally allowing users to turn off the invasive Facebook ad beacon. John Batelle doesn’t think 2008 will be kind to Facebook. Business Week is also forecasting Facebook fatigue. WebMetricsGuru predicts the continued growth of content aggregators. The more content there is the more we need tools we need to filter it so that we do not become overwhelmed. Green: There is no reason why green won’t get even hotter in 2008. Especially if tech companies can come up with green ideas that also save you money. GreenTech Pastures has some green predictions for the new year. Digital Urban predicts the launch of Google’s own Virtual World system. IP Democracy has a useful table that provides summaries of sixteen prediction articles. The Crunchies has a “Most Likely to Succeed” category. Companies listed include Kayak, Mint, Slide, Wordpress and Zivity. Robin Good has a two part predictions post that covers a number of subjects. His predictions include an increase in live-blogging and online collaboration tools. He also predicts that some small publishers will move away from Google AdSense. Twitter. Twitter is the still the leading microblogging service even though Google now owns Jaiku. One of the trends that emerged in 2007 with microblogging was a drop in blog posts. On this blog there were less posts in 2007 than in 2006. It’s easier sometimes to do “hey look at this” type entries on Twitter than to write up an entire blog entry. Some bloggers are predicting Twitter will be acquired in 2008. It will be interesting to see what happens. A good question is When will any of these microblogging services ever let you host your microblog account on your own domain? Maybe that will happen in 2008. Celebrities: Unfortunately, you should expect more celebrities to find themselves in the gossip blogs in 2008 for not wearing underwear or for getting a DUI. There are some forecasting celebrity turnarounds for a couple of 2007’s troubled female stars. One blogger predicts a big turnaround for Britney Spears. Defamer has excerpted some celebrity predictions from this ET Online article. If these predictions are accurate then it looks good for Lindsay Lohan from July onward. Epicurious says farmers will become the new celebrity chefs. Can’t really see a Top Farmer show but the networks may try anything if the writer’s strike continues much longer. Celebrities will also jump to online video even more in 2008. Trendwatching has a prediction post that includes some acronyms and phrases you may not have heard of like premiumization, nethoods, MIY and crowd mining. Start using some of these terms early in 2008 and you might be able to fool people into thinking you know a lot more than you actually do. Still need more predictions? Try a search on Google News or Technorati for predictions and you will find many. There’s a few hundred 2008 prediction videos on YouTube as well. Permalink | Recent Headlines | Twitter | WWFeeds.com

Baltic Dance Championships 200 – $60
Baltic Dance Championships 2008 Hanza School Grostonas School 5 Riga, Latvia LV-1030 22-24 Feb 2008 more details at website event schedule http://www.worldcdf.com ADMISSION PRICES ARE VARIABLE,STARTING FROM 6O EUROS NOT DOLLARS

Delivering the Right Advertise – Price Not Available
The Problem: Delivering the Right Advertisement Your typical ad server delivers advertisements based on pre-selected filters such as Geographical Targeting, Content Channel Matching, Keyword Matching, and/or Date Scheduling. While these filters are needed and considered a norm, advertisers want, and need, more targeting control. http://www.sellandtelladnetwork.com http://www.sellandtelladnetwork.com The Solu…

Google Adding Blogs to Universal Search
eWeek reports that Google is going to add blogs to its Universal Search alongside images, news, books, maps and videso. Google has been running Google Blogsearch as a seperate search engine. eWeek says Google will make the move to include blogs this week (which is nearly over) or next week. Starting this week or next, queries on the leading search engine will return links to blogs alongside the images, news, books, local maps and video, Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience, told eWEEK in a briefing at the company’s headquarters here. Blogs have been gaining significant momentum in the last couple of years, fueled by everything from fascinating news revelations to gossipy snipes. The inclusion of blogs as a genre on Universal Search is a nod to their growing number and ability to get people to go online to find content, which is what Google is all about. Universal Search is the fruit of a five-year effort involving hundreds of engineers working to refine the company’s search algorithms and add multimedia content to its search returns to give users richer results. It’s a logical move for Google or any search engine that wants to provide current and relevant information for it users. Frequently updated blogs tend to contain news about what is happening right now. That’s often just the kind of information people are searching for. Blogs have always been indexed by Google so it will be interesting to see how much more exposure this will give blogs and what the search results will look like. Here is a video explaining what Google’s Universal Search is all about. (hat tip Jim Kukral). Permalink | Recent Headlines | Twitter | WWFeeds.com

The Queen Launches YouTube Channel
The Queen of England and the British Monarchy have launched a YouTube Channel. The Channel will features The Queen’s Christmas message as well as current and historical footage of the monarch and other members of the Royal Family. The site contains a number of videos already including this video clip of the Queen’s Christmas broadcast from 1957. Among the older clips is footage from a film by Lord Wakehurst called Long to Reign Over Us, which has never been released to the public. The former Tory MP, who died in 1970, was a keen amateur film maker and charted many key royal events, including the death of King George VI, the Queen’s accession and her coronation. The site also has footage of Queen Alexandra’s West End tour among the rose-sellers in 1917, and silent newsreel of the 1923 wedding of the Duke of York and Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon – the Queen’s parents. Announcing the launch of the channel, a spokeswoman for Buckingham Palace said the Queen “always keeps abreast with new ways of communicating with people”. “She has always been aware of reaching more people and adapting the communication to suit,” she said. “This will make the Christmas message more accessible to younger people and those in other countries.” The BBC says this year’s holiday address will appear on the site at about 1500 GMT on Christmas Day. Permalink | Recent Headlines | Twitter | WWFeeds.com

Hammer Time: MC Hammer to Launch Video Sharing Website
Here’s a new web launch that didn’t make anyone’s list of 2008 predictions. The BBC is reporting that MC Hammer plans to launch a video website that will challenge YouTube. The site will be called DanceJam and will let people share dance videos. Famous in the early 1990s for his hit song “U Can’t Touch This” and very baggy trousers, Hammer is launching a website that hopes to rival YouTube. Due to debut later this month, DanceJam will allow users to share and watch their own dance videos. If the website is a hit, it could help Hammer’s finances – he went bankrupt in 1996 with debts of almost $14m ( 7m). The BBC article says the website will launch later this month. It will be advertising based. MC Hammer reportedly told the AP that he is well informed on Internet technology. Hammer said, “”There is no high-tech lingo or business strategy that you can talk that is above my head. I breathe this stuff.” There is truth behind his bold statement. MC Hammer has been actively blogging at mchammer.blogspot.com since he launched his blog in February, 2006. He has blogged about the power of blogging to connect with others. YouTube is likely too large and powerful for even the Hammer to overcome but he may be able to get something going with a niche video sharing website. Posted in Videos Permalink | Recent Headlines | Twitter | WWFeeds.com

This entry was posted on Friday, January 25th, 2008 at 6:04 pm and is filed under Celebrity News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.