TOPS Tastic

Introducing the new blog, TOPS Tastic. This is a spin-off from the Railway Photos blog and uses my photos to present a class by class survey of British railways locomotives and units of the modern era (i.e. post-steam). Now the blog is limited to using my own photos and i haven't taken photos of every single class (and some i will never be able to as they don't exist anymore!) But i have plenty more to cover before i run out of photos, at current rate of posting (2 a week) i have enough "in the bag" to keep updating the blog well into next year but of course i will be aiming to photograph more classes i haven't seen before over the coming months...

If you wonder what TOPS means well this is a good introduction.

10 years of blogging

The exact first blog post i wrote has long been lost but i've been blogging regularly since 2005 so i guess we can mark 10 years of blogging next year. Most of my blogs have been on the Blogger platform like this one though for a time i had a habit of changing my mind about blogs frequently,  continually creating new ones and deleting the old. These days though i just leave the old ones to gather digital dust. A couple of examples are A Meta Blog which dates from 2008-9 and Daily Wild Flower from 2009.

My oldest living blog is my canal blog which began in 2009, it is still updated 3 times a week. When i began blogging it was pretty niche, then became mainstream and everyone and their dog had a blog, now blogging is seen as rather passé as the kool kids have moved onto Instagram or whatever is cool nowadays but i am ploughing gamely on and blogging on. I tend to use blogging platforms as a poor man's CMS in any event and seldom talk about what i have had for dinner.

Our new blog

Fresh from the success of the canal (or waterways in general now) and railway photo blogs here is a third. Kris' Boat Photos includes photos of... well you can guess. Every day a different photo of a boat, usually on a canal or river but occasionally at sea or in harbour. Because i now have 3 photo blogs i've decided to stop running the "photo of the day" feature on this blog as there has been a bit too much overlap.

Speaking to aliens?

Over 77, 000 videos have been uploaded to Youtube by a user called Webdriver Torso. All the videos follow a distinct pattern, they are 11 seconds long, include simple blue and red box graphics on a white background and have a retro computer tone tune, rather Atari 2600-esque actually.

So what are these videos for and why so many? They are pretty mesmerising thats for sure, oddly relaxing. Some have speculated its an attempt to communicate with aliens, an internet version of the shortwave radio numbers stations of the Cold War, a technical test or an advertising campaign. As the BBC article shows the origin and purpose of the videos is certainly a mystery. Until its solved enjoy the following...



Or if you want to play every single video back to back here you go, will only take 289 hours!

New railway photo blog

I take a lot of photos of the railways in the UK (mainly in the Midlands and London) so i thought i would have a photo blog like my waterways one. So here it is: Kris' Railway Photos photo blog! I think i will maintain a MWF update schedule (the waterways blog is Tuesday-Thursday usually) so keep tuned. It will include mainline and preserved railway (including metro and underground) trains as well as line side features like signals, bridges et cetera.

Bitstrips

Bitstrips is the latest thing, its an app where you create comic strips including a cartoon avatar designed by yourself and supposedly modelled on yourself. Actually my avatar is female but has similar hair to me and green eyes so there some resemblance...

The changes to Flickr

Flickr is my favourite social media site (though i think it firstly as a photo archiving and sharing site) so obviously the major redesign as unveiled yesterday was of interest. The changes have not gone down with long-time users of the site with thousands registering their dismay of the changes on the official forum (the news media didn't bother checking this on the whole, they just regurgitated the Yahoo press release about it being "awesome").

I don't like the changes that much but will adapt, hopefully feedback will be listened to and the changes can be tweaked though i do not expect there to be too much in the way of change. The main thing would be a bit more white space restored, the overall feel of the site is a bit oppressive and heavy now. I suspect the vision Yahoo have for Flickr differs somewhat from that of long-time users and pro users (the pro accounts are being phased out in any event).

No Flickr is not aimed at the pro anymore but will become yet another social photography sharing site. That is a shame as many users (including myself) have invested a lot of time and effort cataloging and curating our photography collections, sorting them into sets and collections, geotagging and labelling them. The new user interface either hides or does away with much of this organisation.

I guess this could be another step in the dumbing down of the internet and life in general. Organisation and choice lost and replaced by something glitzy you can't customise. Care and effort lost to be replaced by passive consumption. What i will probably do is make greater use of blogs to organise images and use Flickr more a repository. Of course that means one is relying on one's blog platform not disappearing, but maybe its time to explore a few other platforms to hedge one's bets...

Rebooting Birches Green's Wikipedia page

Raised in Erdington, for the past 12 years i have lived in the part which has the suspiciously artificial sounding name of Birches Green. It does seem like a made-up name invented by developers to make a former grim industrial estate more appealing to home buyers though in fact the name has existed for some time. The Birches Green school were our rivals at Spring Lane back in the late 70s, so the name was at least that old!

I found Birches Green's Wikipedia article by chance, as usual found by looking for something else (something i do to a fine art). The article was a stub with very little information so i decided to use my historical research skills to fill the article out!

It was an enjoyable experience and by checking out a number of online historical resources, some newspaper archives, my collection of old Erdington maps and (of course) a VCH i was able to find out that the name Birches Green dates from the 17th century. Contrary to how i imagined the area was not named after a tree but instead it is thought the area was named after the Birch family who lived here in the early 1600s. Much of the information available on the area relates to Glenthorne Youth Treatment Centre which was a controversial "jail" for children. Still it beats having a gas works there.

I hope my expanded article proves more useful to people. There is room for improvement such as adding an image, though probably not a great deal extra information to add. I did find a story in the Daily Mirror archive of a dog barking in Birches Green in the 1930s causing a kerfuffle...

Vine

Vine is Twitter's new video creation and sharing tool and very nice it is too. You create a 6 second long video using your phone when it then posted to your twitter feed. At the moment its a bit gimmicky but i am sure that soon (if not already) someone has come up with something awesome. Here is my first attempt (which isn't that awesome but its a start right?)

Dance for me professor vine.co/v/b5TpZL0pa5m
— Chris Davies (@chrischowdavies) January 25, 2013

Instagram's suicide note?

Instagram's announcement yesterday that from next year they would be claiming the right to sell our photos without permission or any commission caused a negative reaction, oddly enough. The social media storm raged across the world and by the next day Instagram were backtracking and saying it was all a misunderstanding. More updates and clarifications will come in the coming days and weeks.

Well maybe we'll see, i am keeping an eye on the situation but keeping my account for now (one of my friends has already deleted hers). Facebook bought Instagram for a billion dollars so they have to find some way to monetize it. It will be a shame if i do have to leave the service, I find the photo format excellent for blog posts for example.

Looking at alternatives can't hurt right? The new Flickr app actually has a similar filter mode, an example of what can be produced can be seen below. Its not as good as Instagram but seems to be a viable alternative.

Sorting the wheat from the social media chaff

The sides of the road to a happy computing experience is littered with burnt out wrecks and abandoned ideas, that at one time seemed the cool new thing but quickly faded. This is especially true with social media. I use a number of platforms like Facebook and Twitter but there are plenty of others i tried and didn't like. Remember Friendster?

Listgeeks and Pinterest can be added to the fail pile i think, i have tried both but lack the interest to continue. They are fine sites (i know Pinterest has a lot of fans and buzz at the moment) but they are not for me. Now i have a decent smartphone at last its mobile social media sites like Instagram and Foursquare instead which have my attention. Retro photography and competing with my peers on how many mundane places i can go to is so me.

I am fickle though so it will probably all change around within a few months.

Having fun with Instagram

One of the nicest apps on my new iPhone is Instagram which i am having fun with, hopefully Facebook won't wind it up (i'm assuming they won't considering they spend $1 billion on it!) I do only use the 1977 filter though with its retro colour feel and Polaroid frame. Maybe i should just do all of my photos this way... I suppose the fad might wear off eventually but i can get some nice effects especially when photographing something which hasn't changed a great deal since the actual 1970s, like a motorway flyover for example.

A couple of years ago i took some real retro photographs with a Kodak Instamatic loaded with 110 film. You can see some of them here. It might be interesting to compare real and pseudo retro photos of the same thing! You can see the same bridge as in the above photo (though from a different angle) here. I'll try and take some new photos in Instagram of the same view as a 110 photograph and see how close i can get to the same shot via the various filters!

iPhone o'clock

Finally my exhausted c510 mobile phone has been retired (or put into reserve anyway) and i have got a new phone, an iPhone 4S no less. I love it of course, the only question being why did i wait so long to get one. Well of course the answer to that is i didn't actually buy it myself but it was bought for me by my wife. I did buy a rather nice and funky case for it though.

It is of course a big step up from my old phone which was barely a smart phone (though was OK for its time) but the novelty of nonsense like FourSquare hasn't yet faded away. I'm the mayor of the patch of canal i walk most lunchtimes of course.

Merging my twitter accounts

I've been using Twitter for some time, as well as my personal account i set up a work account a few years ago with the intention of it being a shared account by the web team at the university i worked at. It never worked out that way though and became a secondary personal account. However it soon became my primary account because more people followed me (no doubt because of the BCU link).

I've decided to let my original account go (it will just fade away) and de-link the account from my employers and have renamed the other account to @chrischowdavies. In case you wonder my nickname at Tw2, where i worked before was Chow. I've de-linked it for no nefarious purpose, just that people think the account is an official one and have expectations i can assist with their IT problems...

So if you follow my original account please follow the other one instead. If you follow the other one you don't need to do anything, just sit back relax and enjoy the flight.

Take a clean blog...

My music blog has had a sideline in comic reviews since its inception (some reviews also appearing here) but i thought it was high time that comics had their own blog so i have created a new blog called Take A Clean Sheet Of Paper for just that. Comics (or graphic novels if you are posh) will be reviewed here, i also intend to review comic related movies i see and maybe some other relevant items too. So take a look, i'll probably still cross post some reviews here.

Hyper local paper

Its been years since i've received a free newspaper through my letterbox. I used to get one of the Sutton Coldfield free papers until they probably decided we were too poor in my area of Erdington (my Mum still gets it, but she lives near the High Street where all the elite hang out). So when i got home today and found a copy of the Tyburn Mail waiting on my door mat i was very surprised and pleased.

It appears to be an initiative by Castle Vale's hyperlocal Vale Mail to produce a newspaper for a wider area, including the Vale, Pype Hayes, Erdington Hall and Birches Green (where i am) and very good it is too. They've done a good job with this and i hope they are successful and continue with it beyond their planned 3 month trial period.

In between the gradual decline and fall of the national press, the faster decline and irrelevancy of the regional press and the rise of social media and online journalism is there a space for free sheets like this?

When social networks attack

The big news social media wise this week are the changes to Facebook and the forthcoming even bigger changes. Taking the changes to the news feed first i can't say i'm that big a fan. I don't like Facebook deciding for me which of the personal news items in my feed is the "top story", surely that is for me to decide not a faceless multi-billion dollar corporation. Facebook's UI has also got rather clunky over time and the latest changes make this worse.

But Facebook hasn't cost me anything so why am i complaining? Thats an argument some people have presented, free service changes things so why moan? Well Facebook may be free in monetary terms but its not free in other areas of value : personal time, information, content. As a social network Facebook is very little without user generated content, generated by us of course. We've all spent a lot of time and effort in generating this content which attracts users to Facebook and hence eyeballs to adverts. Therefore i think its perfectly reasonable for us to complain when they change it!

As for the longer term changes, Facebook looks to be trying to become an entertainment hub. I can't say that interests me that much personally but it might work, it does sound rather Myspace-esque (and that worked well right?)

Strategies for Flickr hits

Lately i have been putting some effort into getting more visitors to my Flickr photostream and have come up with a strategy akin to Twenty20 cricket. In that fast form of the game the key to getting a good score is sustained and measured aggression, and thus so it is the same with Flickr. What do I mean well basically :

• Take a lot of photos obviously (though try not to take dozens of photos of the same tree as i used to do)
• Make sure everything is labelled, geotagged, put in a set et cetera
• Put your images in groups, and don't be afraid to put them in a lot of groups. There are many groups on Flickr, often for the same subject and you don't know which one a potential viewer will use so put your image in all of them. 
• But don't put everything in a group all at once. Some groups don't have daily limits and you could of course put 50 photos of weeds in there, but your photos will get lost in the mix. A better strategy is to put 5-6 photos of in that group day after day.
• If you do put your images in multiple groups try and vary the images. If someone typically visits 3 bus groups for example, if you put the same 6 photos in all 3 groups then the visitor is unlikely to visit your photos more than once. So mix it up a bit. Of course this can be difficult to organise sometimes.
• Comment on other people's photos. If someone else has put a good photo then say so, and maybe then they will visit your photostream too and laugh at your efforts... i mean appreciate your work.
• Embed your Flickr images in blog posts, this provides a handy link to your photostream (like below!) 

Any more useful strategies? Let me know!

Google Plus

Google Plus (or Google+) is the new social network from Google (natch) which is Google's attempt to dethrone Facebook. Its currently in a closed beta and you have to be invited to be able to participate... well i got my invite today and now i have an account on there. This is my profile page, i think it is publicly viewable if you don't have a Google+ account but if not let me know. Very early days of course but i like what i see. It works really well and doesn't have some the crap thats beginning to accumulate with Facebook.

Of course the clincher when deciding to change social networks is where are your friends so Facebook isn't dead yet but people thought the same about Myspace once...

Talking of Facebook this is a great site which collects some of the saddest moments in humanity's interaction with the social networking Goliath.

Google +1

Google +1 is the search engine giant's latest attempt to own the social media space and aims to compete with the likes (pardon the pun) of Facebook's Like functionality. Well using this handy tool i have added a +1 button to this blog and you should see it on the right (as with the QR code post earlier if its not there then you are living in the future and things changed but as of 22:17 on June 1st 2011 it is there!)

Are these sort of social media tools actually useful? Apparently +1ing this blog will help it rise in the search results so please feel free to click it!

Update : it looks like its appearing automatically on my Blogger blogs anyway. Whoop!