About two weeks ago, when I was checking out my Flickr Stats, which I do everyday because I’m obsessed with the line graph, I happened to see that one of my pictures had 50 views that day. 50 might not sound like a lot for most other Flickr users, but for me 50 is a HUGE amount of views of one picture in a day. I went to see what site the views were coming from and it told me they were coming from the bbc.co.uk website.

Now I thought this we very weird, because the BBC is a big company and why on earth would I be getting clicks from there. I went a little deeper and found it on the BBC Internet Blog on a post about the BBC’s iPlayer for the Nintendo Wii. The odd thing was, my picture, which is of an S-Video port on my laptop, had nothing to do with the Wii. I read through the post and saw that the author was talking about watching shows from your computer on your TV. I thought it was a little weird that my picture got chosen but looking at other first page results from an S-Video search on Flickr, I can see why mine was picked over the others, I just don’t know why a more suitable picture wasn’t chosen.

Well today, the picture made it into my top 10 most viewed pictures on my Flickr photostream. I’m pretty happy my picture got used on the blog site and generated hundreds of views of that picture, but I don’t really care that much. Its nice to have you picture on some biggish website for everyone to see, as long as the picture isn’t crap or humiliating. This is a win for me

 Veronica Belmont recently wrote an article on her blog about how she doesn’t like Tumblr. The reason behind it was because of people aggregating their feeds into it. I don’t think that it is enough for you to not like a service because there is a lot more too it than that. I personally think that its the worst feature that Tumblr has but I get over it because very few of the people I follow do import their feeds into it.

But she does have very good points about people aggregating their feeds into sites like Tumblr. I think people shouldn’t do it, especially on Tumblr. Why you may ask, well it is because I don’t want to see your links and such on your tumblelog. If I want to see what you are twittering about, I will follow you on that and/or subscribe to your feed there. Same applies to your pictures, if I wanted to see your pictures, I would be following you on Flickr and seeing you pictures along with everyone elses pictures. This is also the case for all the other services that you are part of.

If I want to see various content, I want to see them together as a group. All my friends tweets, photos, blog post ect. on their own. I don’t want to see the content mixed up. I am fine with having everyone pictures together in a single feed for me to go through. The problem also is that if you do that, I am going to end u seeing your content twice. I don’t want to see it twice because it wastes time. In saying that, if you have something that everyone must see, for example, a very nice shot you took and uploaded to Flickr, that would be acceptable, I just don’t want your whole feed with all your pictures on your tumblelog, or any other service.

If you do that, people are going to get annoyed and frustrated and stop following you and unsubscribe from the feed, so in the long run, you lose. This is a greater loss if you actually use the service for what it was intended, the imported content clutters your actual content and you end up with a mess that few people are following because of it. In saying that, I am sure it is acceptable for you to have a place to import your feeds in one place to give to a contact, or contacts, that don’t follow you everywhere and would still like to see what you do online.

It would be good if there was a service that could deliver that and that only, aggregating content, not creating it. I am sure there are services that do that an I don’t think Tumblr is one of them, even though it is possible. I think it was a mistake to ever put that feature in to be honest. Anyway, I think it is unfair also for someone to dislike a service for something a feature on the site, one that the minority would use. Tumblr is a wonderful service and is definitely my favorite one of 2007. Please keep your feeds of my Tumblr

I’m too busy to studying to post anything so I’ll just put a picture of my study area for today for everyone to see.

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Yesterday evening I had planned to watch the lunar eclipse. The 4 days building up to Tuesday were perfect, no clouds and warm weather. On the day of the event, the weather changes, rain and clouds! 30 minutes before the event I went outside to look for the moon. Lucky for me, I could see the glowing ball in the sky. I got the camera set up and took a few pre-eclipse photos of the moon.

Just before the time it was going to start, the clouds came in I couldn’t see the moon! About 20 minutes later the clouds cleared and i saw the moon, being slightly shadowed. I was hopeful of seeing the spectacular event. But no, thing couldn’t turn out right, the clouds came back. Why do the might gods smite me?

As time went by, the clouds didn’t clear. I though I was going to miss out. Just before I was going to call it a day and hit the sack, I looked out the window to see a faint red glow in the sky. It was the moon. As I watched, I could see the clouds around it clear and could see a clear sky, full of stars. I tried to get a picture but I couldn’t hold the camera steady. I needed a tripod. I didn’t get the picture I was looking forward to taking but I guess there is always next time, in 10 years or so.

Here are three pictures I took. Better luck next time.

• Pre-Eclipse
• Shadowed Moon
• Blurry Red Lunar Eclipse

For other people’s pictures of this amazing event, go to the Lunar Eclipse Flickr Group

• Lunar Eclipse - Aug 28th 2007 (Pool)