When Flickr announced their new video service that allows you to store your videos in-line with your photos, I thought it was time to start processing all the videos that we’ve taken of Elliot over the last 10 months and start posting them online.

Turns out that video editing and processing is a lot harder than I first expected.

The first thing I did was start up Windows Movie Maker on my Vista notebook, expecting it to be a complete breeze. Came across a showstopper pretty quickly – Windows Movie Maker doesn’t support the MPEG2 videos from our Sony Video Recorder. It’s not like it’s an uncommon format or anything, so it’s annoying that there’s no support built in. I also found out later that the MPEG4 videos from my Nokia N95 are also not supported by Movie Maker. Not impressed.

So I then started some research into video editing software – I was hoping to find a good freebie that would do the job, but was also willing to pay for something if needed. After much research and downloading, I finally was deciding between Sony Vegas Movie Studio, or Adobe Premiere Elements.

I preferred the interface of Vegas as it was quite advanced but also dead simple to use, so it makes you feel like a pro. The interface in Premiere Elements is also nice, but more in a pretty, child-like way.

Both seemed to do the same sorts of things, but Premiere Elements had better options for exporting videos, whereas the Sony software tried to trick you into using their own online service for uploading videos to the Internet.

But the Premiere Elements trial was super annoying because you couldn’t export videos without a huge banner overlaid on the video saying that it was produced by a trial version of the software. The Sony software had no such limitations, and I almost bought the Sony software for that reason alone.

But I went for Adobe’s Premiere Elements in the end because it was the only software that I could use to export my videos in widescreen format without the letterbox bars and without the videos looking stretched. (I also learned a lot about the differences between square pixels and PAL and NTFS sized videos along the way.)

I actually bought the Adobe Elements bundle which also includes Photoshop Elements as the interface looked the same as Premiere so I thought it would be easy to use.

Anyway, here’s the first video from Premiere Elements. I haven’t actually done any editing on it as I was just pleased enough that the size came out right. A nice feature about embedding videos from Flickr is that you can choose the size of the video when embedding.

Flickr unveiled a new feature recently that enables you to search through your address books in various email systems to find contacts that are also on Flickr. If you’ve used one of the many social networking sites, you’ll realise that this isn’t a new feature – most other social networking sites allow you to search your address books to find friends that are on the same service.

The difference is that Flickr have implemented the feature correctly.

Most other sites ask you to enter the username and password that you use to log in to the various email systems, then once you submit the form, the system logs into your email account, and downloads all of your contacts through a process called ’screen-scraping’. What ’screen-scraping’ does isn’t really important, the important bit is that you’ve just trusted another web site with your email’s username and password. Most sites will include a message saying that your username and password won’t be saved and will only be used to grab your contact details. But what if they are lying…

Your password for your email system is probably your most important password that you have. If someone has your email password, then they can access any personal information that you have stored in your inbox and there’s a good chance that they will be able to get ANY of your other online passwords that they like. For example, if you forget your password for an online service, you can usually go to that site, and click on the reset password button. This will either send your password to your email account, or send you an email with instructions on how to reset it. Imagine if I had your email account password, and I logged on to your account and secretly set up a forwarding address for emails to get sent to an anonymous email account I had set up. You wouldn’t know that your emails are being forwarded without delving into your email system’s options and checking the setting manually. Then I could go to any online site that I thought you might use, and reset your password so that I could log on as you.

Even worse, is that if you have an email account with Google, Microsoft or Yahoo!, then your email passwords are linked to all the other services that you use with them. So your Yahoo!Mail password is also used for Flickr, and IM; your Gmail password is also used for Google Docs, Calendar; and your Windows Live ID is used with almost all of Microsoft’s online services.

So back to Flickr’s new feature, and how it’s been done correctly. Flickr gives you the option to search through your Yahoo!, Google, or Microsoft/Live contacts, but the difference is that Flickr don’t ask you for your email account password. Instead they use the various API’s that are available, which means that if you want to search through your Google contacts, you’re redirected to Google’s site where they handle the authentication, and then send back the contact information to Flickr. The same applies to Yahoo! and Microsoft – at no point does Flickr ask you for your password, you only need to supply your password to the site where you would normally log in to anyway.

So the point of this post is to not just congratulate Flickr on implementing this feature correctly, but also highlight to you how dangerous it can be to give out your email account password too freely.

Flickr have just released a stats package for Flickr Pro subscribers, and it’s quite awesome. It shows trends of visitors and commenting activity, as well as top photos, and referrers.

I wouldn’t have thought that this photo would have been our top-viewed, but it’s the one we used when we sold that car, so it makes sense.

Here’s a couple of other popular photos…

Deb in Vanuatu:

And the Wagamama in Sydney Airport:

Just a few site updates…

1. I’ve started putting all my photos back on Flickr which has been made much easier due to Windows Live Photo Gallery providing support for publishing direct to Flickr, including sets, tags, and descriptions. So I’ve re-enabled the FAlbum plugin which displays all my Flickr photos on this site: http://stuart.amanzi.co.nz/photos
2. I’ve updated my About page with all of the contact details and websites I could think of off the top of my head. I want to get this into a microformat at some point.
3. I’ve implemented the AJAX version of Google’s Custom Search engine for this site which allows you to search the site from the widget in the top left corner of this page. This is all done using a nifty overlay so you don’t have to refresh the page to do the search. Try it for yourself…

Schmap the online travel-guide website just got a little better… That’s because they’ve included two of my photos in their guide to the ‘Western Suburbs’ of Wellington. I’m not too sure that Hawkins Hill should be classified as being part of the Western Suburbs but it does border on the Karori Wildlife Sanctuary so perhaps that’s why.

I took the two photos on a mountain bike ride up to the radar station.

You can view my photos on if you click on the Hawkins Hill link on the Schmap site. And it looks like other Wellington bloggers are in the guide too.

It’s not the first time I’ve been published internationaly, but this is kinda cool!

Hi Stuart,

I am writing to let you know that two of your photos with a Creative Commons license have been short-listed for inclusion in the third edition of our Schmap Wellington Guide, to be published mid-August 2007.

www.schmap.com/shortlist/p=95555995N00/c=SE51022406

Clicking this link will take you to a page where you can:
i) See which of your photos have been short-listed.
ii) Submit or withdraw your photos from our final selection phase.
iii) Learn how we credit photos in our Schmap Guides.
iv) Browse online or download the second edition of our Schmap Wellington Guide.

Our submission deadline is Wednesday, August 8. If you happen to be reading this message after this date, please still click on the link above (our Schmap Guides are updated frequently – photos submitted after this deadline will be considered for later releases).

Best regards,

Luke Ritchie,
Managing Editor, Schmap Guides

From Wikipedia:

Steampunk is a subgenre of fantasy and speculative fiction which came into prominence in the 1980s and early 1990s. The term denotes works set in an era or world where steam power is still widely used—usually the 19th century, and often set in Victorian era England—but with prominent elements of either science fiction or fantasy, such as fictional technological inventions like those found in the works of H. G. Wells, or real technological developments like the computer occurring at an earlier date.

Interesting links:

• Datamancer.net
• Steampunk on Boing Boing
• Flickr group – Steampunk
• Flickr photos tagged with Steampunk

Flickr have just notified all users that they must merge their “old skool” Flickr accounts with a Yahoo! ID by the 15th of March or else they won’t be able to log in. Lots of Flickr users (including me) are not happy with this and the blogosphere is making this known (also the mainstream news sites like BBC.) Yahoo! are also forcing a couple of other limits on their pro accounts which weren’t there previously: you are now only allowed 3000 contacts, and a maximum of 75 tags per photo. This doesn’t affect me at all, but long time, hardcore Flickr users are affected and these super-Flickr-fans are now slating the company and encouraging users to leave.

My take on the login system is that it’s much easier to associate a seperate login for each website I visit. That way I can manage password resets, email notifications, display names, etc, all seperately. That’s why I never liked Microsoft’s Passport system, and this is also why I don’t want to switch over to a Yahoo! ID. I already have a Yahoo! ID that I set up to check out their new webmail system but I never use it and don’t care about it – i.e. it is disposable. The other problem with getting a new Yahoo! ID for those that don’t already have one, is that it’s nearly impossible to get one that even closely resembles what you really want. The reason for this is that Yahoo! has a huge user base, and all of the good names are taken – so you’ll end up seeing users having to get a Yahoo! ID that looks like this: john.smith.74588394

So what to do next… Well I guess I’ll end up merging my Flickr account into my Yahoo! ID if I have absolutely no choice, but at the same time I will lose all loyalty I have towards Flickr and will start looking else where. The closest thing to Flickr at the moment is Zooomr, and thanks to a bloggers promotion I have a pro account set up there too. Unfortunately Zooomr has an even more complicated login process than Flickr – they force you into signing up for an OpenID, which is reminiscent of Microsoft’s failed Passport system. You can also, somehow, log in using your Google ID which is no better as I have to get a password emailed to me everytime I log in. So it would seem hypocritical to switch to Zooomr because of Yahoo!’s login system, when Zooomr’s is just as bad (if not worse!)

I came across this link from the GigaOM site this morning with details on Yahoo’s new travel site. I’ve seen a couple of these sites before but as this integrates nicely with my Flickr account, I’m quite looking forward to making use of it on my upcoming trip to London and Amsterdam.

So I’ve set up a trip and will modify it over the next week or so with my schedule: http://travel.yahoo.com/trip?pid=706739&action=view

Update: TechCrunch have also just covered the new, Yahoo site too.

I've been studying for my next exam (Microsoft's 70-296) so I haven't spent much time reading through FeedDemon recently, so I decided to catch up this morning. I subscribe to 122 different feeds which you can look through here: OPML.

There is a lot of good content out there, as well as a lot of crap (that reminds me, I'm down to 121 feeds now!) Almost all o the feeds that I subscribe to provide full content, the only exception I can think of is the BBC, and I tolerate it because I think the BBC is one of the best general news sources available online.

In my reading this morning, I discovered some new software (Cropper in C#), the Wordpress Themes site, four Wordpress plugins for displaying Flickr albums on your site (I'm still trying to find one that will allow me to include/exclude certain tags), and several reviews on the new webmail apps offered by the big guns (now I'm back up to 122 feeds!). I also found a very cool article on how to script iTunes in vbscript (on a Microsoft site of all places!) – I haven't yet worked out how I'm going to use this yet, but I'm sure I will!

All up, a very productive morning!