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:

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

As Wanda Martha just mentioned, last night we had the first meetup of the Wellington Bloggers Facebook group (or the catchy ‘WBFG‘ for short) at the Southern Cross bar. It was great fun and quite surreal meeting bloggers in real life for the first time – especially as we already knew so too much about each other already. Unfortunately nobody thought to take any photos so I can’t post any pictures of the happy bloggers discussing blogging, Facebook, RSS, anything 2.0, and all those other cool, geeky things.

If you’re a blogger in Wellington and you’re not on Facebook – you’re missing out.

Update: Mauricio did what I couldn’t be bothered to do and linked to everyone who came along. Read his post here.

Pulitzer prize winning photos in the Feature Photography section:

Awarded to Renée C. Byer of The Sacramento Bee for her intimate portrayal of a single mother and her young son as he loses his battle with cancer.

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 stumbled across this site recently via Tim Haines’s blog – fivepointsix.co.nz is a new photo sharing site based in New Zealand. I’m always interested in local offerings of services that are usually only available overseas – Zoomin is another good example of a great NZ site.

I’m not too sure about the fivepointsix site though, it doesn’t seem to have any advantages over any of the other free, photo sharing sites. You’re only allowed to store 50 photos and they can’t be over 2MB each. I was most interested in the storage facilities because any locally based site will suffer from the economies of scale and probably won’t be able to offer unlimited storage like most other international sites.

But there are some cool features, and from reading the News section, it appears as though more and more features are being added every day. One of the nice features is the ability to have open galleries where several people can contribute to one album – good idea for parties and functions where there are lots of people with digital cameras.

I didn’t like the fact that nowhere on the site is there an email address or contact details of the owner or webmaster. I was keen to pose some questions to the creators but could find no way to contact them. There’s no advertising on the site, which is nice, but it makes you wonder what their business model is, or whether the site is just someone’s part-time hobby?

Links:

• fivepointsix
• Tim Haines’s blog post mentioning the site