Flickr

Camera makers long have sponsored workshops, camera clubs and other activities to try to nurture new generations of camera buffs with time and money to spend on a hobby. Now Nikon is adapting the principle to one of Flickr, the social-networking, photo-sharing powerhouse.

Flickr on Wednesday announced Nikon's sponsorship of a Flickr site, the Nikon Digital Learning Center. The site provides online tips and tutorials and lets photographers chat live with pro shooters Rosanne Pennella and Cliff Mautner as well as Nikon School instructors Reed Hoffman and Bill Durrence.

The Nikon effort grafts onto Flickr social-networking tools such as … Read more

iPhone has its touch Safari browser, ZenZui will have its tiles, and Yahoo has Yahoo Go 2.0 Beta, a free service that also seeks to give users a novel Internet experience--especially if the users in question are Yahoo groupies.

Essentially a buffed and polished vehicle for its products and services, Yahoo Go groups its search bar, calendar, e-mail, news feed, and Flickr photo services in a single, well-proportioned design. Rotating carousel icons launch each service and keep the interface snappy. The app stays on top of frequently refreshing the page.

Yahoo Go avoids the problem of overcrowding suffered by Yahoo's Web portal by limiting its quick-launch services to maps, e-mail, photos, entertainment, weather, news, sports, and finance headline feeds. It sounds like a hefty load until you skim Yahoo.com's landing page and realize the leagues of content left behind, including auto, auction, Answers, personals, travel, tech, groups, and games; not to mention the new OMG! gossip headlines leveled at teenage it-girls. … Read more

Flickr updated its Web uploader yesterday, adding a slew of improvements to what for many is their primary way of adding photos to the popular hosting service. The biggest update is that the upload cap of six photos at a time has been lifted. I was able to send off about 40 high-resolution shots (at about 3MB a pop), all at once, and without a hitch. Also new is a status bar for each photo, as well as a "master" bar to show you how far along you are on the entire upload--these were things you previously needed … Read more

Vuvox was one of the few services that wasn't quite ready for the public after showing off its wares at Demo 2007. Like Flektor, Good Widgets, RockYou, Slide, Mixercast, and other mashup services, Vuvox lets users pull in media content from the Web or a hard drive, and put that content together using a Web-based editor. The end result is something that's visually engaging and can be shared via e-mail, or embedded on blogs, Web sites, and social networking profiles. The service is officially opening its doors to everyone as of today.

Vuvox grabs your media in two places. The first is from Web services such as YouTube, Flickr, Picasa, Photobucket, and Google. The other place is your hard drive. You can upload files one at a time, or in batches after installing Vuvox's small browser plug-in. Once you've added your media, it's a simple drag-and-drop process. You can reorder, combine, or delete pictures or video in a simple queue. When you're done creating, you can apply one of Vuvox's 11 different themes. Each is unique, and has various visual styles that enhance, or in some cases stylize, your media. You can also use some advanced editing tools, like a cropper and layer mask, to tweak your shots.

Once published, each user gets their own channel. Other users can come by and comment on slide shows, and then share the slide shows with others either by e-mail, embedded link, or a URL. The service also has a featured section, showing off some of the more popular, or notable, works by users.

Like most services these days, Vuvox also has a Facebook application. Similar to the full version of the site, you can grab content from Flickr and Picasa. Since it's Facebook, you're also able to pick photos from your Facebook albums. When finished, you have the option to share the content with friends, and post it to your profile. The only downside here is that the Vuvox editor has been tweaked slightly, both in size and features, to accommodate the Facebook crowd. The results look just as good, but the editing experience isn't nearly as enjoyable.

Is Vuvox worth using over the competition? It's pretty impressive for a new service, and quite polished. The one snag is that it can be a little slow, and you don't have a lot of control over the way some of the themes play with the presentation of your shots. If you're looking for a similar media mashup tool that offers stylization but also a little more user control, check out SplashCast (also a Demo 2007 launch) and Flektor (review).

For more screen shots of the interface and an example of the embedded application, click the Read More link below.

… Read more

While people without clothes on dominate a great deal of traffic online, the same can be said about those with clothes--otherwise known as the world of fashion. StyleMob, a new social network for street fashion, is opening up its doors on Thursday. Aimed mostly at female users, the service is a social network about clothes and people who like to show off their outfits. Users can pick who has the most style, and submit their own outfits or fashion inventions for others to rate and comment on. There's also the virtual equivalent of a fashion police with groups of … Read more

The number and quality of online photo-sharing sites, along with their burgeoning communities, have been growing exponentially ever since mainstream consumers embraced digital photography.

Flickr, Picasa, Snapfish, 23HQ, Zoomr, and Webshots (disclaimer: Webshots is owned by CNET Networks) are only a handful of the free sites that let you publish your own pics and explore other photographers' creations.

Once you've established your digital presence on a photo-sharing site, you may find yourself uploading hundreds, if not thousands, of photos to share with friends and family. While the sites have powerful technology to display, categorize, and host your images, they'… Read more

There are already a lot of useful plug-ins for downloading or uploading from online sites such as Flickr, Picasa Web, Snapfish, Webshots (disclaimer: owned by CNET Networks), and the rest, but most applications only work with one specific service.

If you want to move all of your images from one site to another (if you're one of those unhappy Flickr users, for example), and you're not looking forward to manually downloading and uploading hundreds of pictures, Migratr might be able to help. A home-brewed tool from independent developer Alexander Lucas, Migratr automatically downloads all of your photos from one site, and uploads them to the other.

It sounds great, so what's the catch? Well, Migratr only currently includes support for Flickr, Picasa Web, 23HQ, SmugMug, and Zooomr (which shouldn't even be counted because it has temporarily disabled bulk uploaders). However, downloading and uploading among the four available online photo services worked wonderfully for me. I must admit, however, that I was transferring tens of files, not thousands.… Read more

Want to emulate that neat collage look you get when you get photos printed out? There's a service called Collagr that does it for you pulling in photos from Flickr. If you've got shots on there, just fill in your username and Collagr will do its magic. The result is a square array that may look a little small in the preview, but if you save it to your hard drive you'll notice it's 1,400x1,025, which is larger than the average desktop wallpaper. The recommended use, however, is for MySpace profiles--you know, the kind … Read more

Most iPhone Web apps are standalone applications that live in isolation from all the others. This means that if you use a lot of these applications, you'll either have to bookmark a ton of them, or enter in all those URLs by hand. Leaflets, however, is a site that collects a bunch of small handy Web applications into a single iPhone-friendly portal. The site is very well-designed and feels a lot like an iPhone within an iPhone (even the icons look similar). Not only is there an RSS aggregator, but there's also one-tap access to iPhone-optimized content from … Read more