Natzke = Inspiration & Love

Anyone who doesn't think math or code can be cool hasn't seen Natzke's work. I've been an Eric Natzke fan since my early days creating sites with Macromedia (now Adobe) Flash. Renowned as a Flash God back in the day, Natzke has since evolved into an amazing artist. These code based visualizations, created using Flash, are emotive and beautiful.

Eric Natzke's Site
http://jot.eriknatzke.com
Create your own flickriver
http://www.flickriver.com

My Blog Gets Its 15 minutes

Wow. My little blog nearly exploded from all of the traffic from my Flickr post. I mean, holy freakin cow.

I think my CEO is planning to do some sort of follow-up on his blog (http://www.geekceo.com) later this week.

We did finally conclude that:

1. Flickr does not alter your original photo
2. Flickr does enhance the other sizes and openly admits it (not to mention it's way more sinister than I thought).
3. Zoto 3.0 will be auto-enhancing photos when we launch in March but we will also have an option to to disable this feature.

I think best part of the hoopla was reading all of the comments. I was really blown away by the amount of response. So thanks for all of your comments. Even the anonymous ones (you silly weenies). I also realize, in hindsight, that calling someone a numnut in response to a negative reddit comment is, ahem, possibly a tad unprofessional. And as for that guy who asked me if I passed the turing test, ha-freakin-ha.

Oh, and the photo from my flickr post is not soup. It's my italian chicken chili. The recipe is here.

Ok. Time to go back to blogging about patterns and stuff.

Flickr's Dirty Little Secret

The secret is...you suck at taking photos.

And flickr knows it. That's why when you upload a photo to flickr it undergoes a cosmetic lift via a sharpening filter (and perhaps a saturation filter as well). See below.



This is a capture of the exact same photo. On the top is a thumbnail of my photo rendered on Zoto (3.0 beta) . It's blurry and the detail is lost. On the bottom is the same photo thumbnail rendered on Flickr. Notice how sharp the detail and color appear. Unlike Flickr, Zoto is rendering an 'accurate' thumbnail of my photo.

The result? On Flickr I am fabulous, wonderful taker of photos. On Zoto, I am just a loser who can't get a photo in focus.

Does this subtle cosmetic lift, on a subliminal level, factor into a user's decision making process when it comes to choosing a photo hosting service? The advantage to the mainstream user is obvious, but if I was a pro photographer, wouldn't I resent someone taking liberty with my photos? We've had a bit of a debate on this issue in our office (at Zoto). I'm for passing a filter on photos to make them look better. I think it improves the user's experience. On some level, even if they aren't aware of it, they are enjoying their photos more because of this little white lie. Some of our "purists" in the office disagree. In the end the best solution may be to make this an option in the upload settings that users can control for themselves. And user control is what it's all about, right?

New word: flickrality
Definition: The version of reality where you rock at taking photos.

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