flickr

SAN FRANCISCO--The Chinese government has begun blocking access to Yahoo's Flickr photo-sharing site, but co-founder and general manager Stewart Butterfield has a tip on how to get around it.

China is blocking only Flickr's images, Butterfield said in an interview here Tuesday during a party to celebrate the company's expansion beyond the English-speaking world and the launch of the 24 Hours of Flickr book. The way in which the country is doing so means that the Firefox Web browser, augmented with the Greasemonkey plug-in, can automatically bypass the block.

Specifically, Greasemonkey needs to run a script that … Read more

San Francisco-based Blurb, a site that enables users to print as few as one copy of a book on demand, on Wednesday announced plans to expand its business to Europe.

The company plans to begin printing books in the Netherlands in three weeks. Europeans can now order books with a shipping time of 5 to 7 days (instead of 7 to 10 days) at a lower shipping rate.

Prints in Europe are set to maintain U.S. size standards: 7x7 inches, 8x10 inches and 13x11 inches. "We're going live with American sizes and see what the market prefers,&… Read more

So Flickr has had an interesting couple of days on both sides of the restrictions fence.

First, the San Francisco Chronicle is reporting that Flickr says it is being blocked in China.

"In postings on its Web site Thursday, Flickr said it was experiencing no technical problems and that its service was in fact being blocked, without saying by whom," The Chronicle wrote on its Web site late Friday night. "In an update Friday, co-founder Stewart Butterfield wrote that the Web site's staff is checking on the issue periodically and that the blocking continues.

"We … Read more

SpaceTime is a new tool for searching the Web in three dimensions. You can search using Google and Yahoo, or dig deeper into niche services like eBay and Flickr. Results show up in a swirling sky-like environment where you can sort through rendered pages in stacks, similar to Windows Vista's Flip 3D window-shuffling effect and the upcoming Time Machine in OSX Leopard. You can maneuver around any page, and zoom back and forth. To see any result up close, just double-click on it and it will revert to a customized browser window that's running a shelled version of … Read more

Photo-sharing site Zooomr began a second try Monday to launch its third-generation photo-sharing Web site, attempting to combine social-networking features with unlimited photo storage and, eventually, the capability for photographers to sell their own pictures.

The new site, when available, features a Twitter-like interface called Zipline that lets members tell their contacts what they're up to and hear the same from those contacts, according to a video demonstration by co-founder Kristopher Tate. It also lets members join groups and subscribe to discussions.

Zooomr had attempted to fire up the Mark III site in March, but instead bugs and migration … Read more

The Flickr API has opened up a lot of fun tools over the years. This morning we got a tip about Image Mosaic Generator, a free service that creates neat-looking picture mosaics of uploaded images. The service uses Flickr images to make up each mosaic and lets users save the end result to their hard drive. Images have a fair bit of variation, although you're likely to see a few repeats close up. The service doesn't link back to the original Flickr images, which is a bit disappointing, but as a result, handles the conversion from image to … Read more

DPhoto is a photo-hosting and sharing service that uses a Flash interface for both organizing and sharing photos. It's no Flickr-killer in terms of price or community features, but it's got a really easy to use uploader, and the slide shows look great. Give it a look if you want to make a cool-looking slide show or gallery with a few of your photos.

Adding your shots to DPhoto is very user friendly. The uploader tool lets you pick out your photos one at a time or select entire folders on your hard drive. There's also a custom e-mail address that lets you send pictures from your phone.

The free version of DPhoto is limited to 100 photos, and also limits individual file size to 3MB, which is about the size of most people's photos, assuming they're shooting in something around the 5-megapixel range. DPhoto charges $2 a month to upgrade to their Lite account (and $7 for Pro), which is on the steep side. Both premium-level accounts net you the option to upload more shots. The Pro level account increases the cap on individual photo-file uploads from 3MB to 20MB, and lets users download entire photo albums as .ZIP files, which is handy if you intend on using DPhoto as a business tool.

I can't wholly recommend using DPhoto over some of the more established photo-hosting services, especially since at $84 a year, the Pro subscription is a hard sell over typical mainstream photo services (Flickr, Fotki, SmugMug) that come in at about $25 to $50 a year. I'd like to see them build on the looks with a little more backing on the community and support. The service is a still a little rough around the edges and certainly is capable of improving its offerings in both departments. Either way, the site navigation and photo browsing are very well designed, making it a joy to use.

For more shots of the interface, keep reading, or give DPhoto's sample gallery a look.… Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Sun Microsystems is trying to make the case at this year's JavaOne conference that its Java software is good for snazzy and elaborate desktop software. To give a taste for this concept, Sun showed off a Flickr-based photo editing site it calls Iris.

Iris--though either pokey or unable to handle the collective attention of the thousands of JavaOne attendees--lets Flickr members view their photos and perform a variety of editing tasks such as cropping, rotating, sharpening and blurring. Each image is shown with a histogram that represents the distribution of light and dark tones in the photo.

The … Read more

Flickr quietly launched a new version of its slide show feature today. The new design forgoes the once small black box and takes over your entire browser window with full-sized photos that fade into one another. Also tweaked is the speed control, which has gone from a slow to fast slider to one-click options for slow, medium, and fast. Flickr decided to retool the slide show feature based on user feedback, as the previous version would restrict photos down to small size, even on large monitors or browsers set to full screen. The new version will simply resize itself to … Read more