A couple of days ago, when I was browsing the deep space of Tumblr, I stumbled across an interesting post. I thought it seemed pretty cool so I gave it a try to see what results I would get and here is is as follows. If you would also like to try it out, and maybe post it on my blog or tumblelog or whatever, the instructions are also below. If you do, please pingback or leave a comment so I can see your results.

Type your answer to the questions into flickr search
-Using only the first page, pick an image
-Copy and paste each of the urls in the Mosaic Maker

1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favorite food?
3. What high school did you go to?
4. What is your favorite color?
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
6. What is your favorite drink?
7. What is your dream vacation?
8. What is your favorite dessert?
9. What do you want to do when you grow up?
10. Who / what do you love most in life?
11. Choose one word that describes you?
12. What is your Flickr name?

1. Jonathan Coulton’s GlaDOS Rock Band, 2. Melting Chocolate, 3. Robotic Lego, 4. Berlin blues, 5. Masi Oka and Hayden Panettiere - Interview (1), 6. Raspberry Coke, 7. Berlin, Germany, 8. Miniature Cakes, 9. My Computer, 10. Internet!!!, 11. ultimate geek nook, 12. Leopard

Ever since I purchased my Flickr Pro account, I have been using Flickr Uploadr to put my pictures up onto the site instead of using the uploading tool on the site. It is much easier to use because you could just drag and drop pictures from your computers into the application and then just hit the upload button in they will be on the site, easy and quickly. It is so much easier then selecting all the pictures you want to upload through the website.

Recently, they released Flickr Uploadr version 3 and I rushed to get it and play around. My first thoughs were that this beta release still had a few bugs in it. Selecting images and right clicking and choosing “Send To Flickr…” didn’t work as it did in the previous version. It didn’t work at all, the few times I tried to do it that way. The only way I could get my pictures into the new Flickr Uploadr was to open the app and add them in that way. I’m sure this will be fixed and working perfectly when the full release comes.

What this has over the last version is the ability to add metadata to the images so they upload with the image. This means that I don’t have to upload them and go back to the site later to add a title, description, tags and put them in sets and such. All this can be done easily in the application and works perfectly. I have had no issues with it. You can even set who sees the image and the image type as well as easily adding it to multiple sets, including ones that you can create right in the app. This is the biggest feature added to the Flickr Uploadr and is the only reason to use it instead of the older version.

There are some things, other than the bugs, that I would have liked to see added to this. They added the ability to add title and description and such in the app but it would have been nice to have the ability to add those once the picture has started uploading. For the time it would take me to add the information, the picture would have been uploaded by then, instead I have to wait to add the description and then upload the picture. It takes longer for me to do this but shorter than uploading and adding the description on the site later. It would be nice to see them be able to do that but I’m happy with the way it is now.

Twenty days ago I got an email through Flickr saying four of my photos have been short-listed for inclusion in the third edition of Schmap Christchurch Guide, to be published early September 2007. I was pretty excited and honored that my pictures were considered to be included in a random online guide. I sat here for a while waiting for a verdict and to see if my pictures were or were not chosen.

Yesterday I got another email saying two of my pictures were chosen and included in the guide.

I am delighted to let you know that two of your submitted photos have been selected for inclusion in the newly released third edition of our Schmap Christchurch Guide.

I then went to the site to see my pictures included in the guide, with credit to me. You can see the pictures here under the Willowbank Wildlife Reserve. It is positioned at the right hand side of the page and you can click the arrows to see both pictures. Most of you guys will be like “So what? Its a stupid little online guide and doesn’t mean crap!” and you can be like that if you want but I don’t care, I’m honored to be in that guide!

There are a few new features on Pownce. I don’t use Pownce much but I do read what people post on it. I generally don’t see any compelling reason to use these micro-blogging services. People use them for short messaging a wide amount of people but that is not something I have any reason to do, let alone have anything to say, therefore these services are somewhat useless to me.

One of the new features on Pownce is the showing of upcoming events on the right side of the page. First off, generally the event don’t have anything to do with me or are of interest. I don’t care about an event happening in America or Canada or any other international country. I don’t live anywhere near there and wouldn’t travel to those countries anytime soon so this new feature is irrelevant to me.

Another new feature was the automatic embedding of Videos and Pictures. In my opinion, this is what services like Tumblr and Soup do. This feature is more for blogging and mini-blogging services and not for the micro-blogging ones. They are moving into a field half way between mini and micro blogging by taking the best of both worlds and merging them together but not focusing greatly on these features to make it a hybrid type service.

The last new feature was linking of other web services. This is somewhat useful because now people can see links to the services I actually use, for example Digg, Flickr and Last.FM. You can also put your IM addresses and links to other websites, for example your personal blog. But this feature is not really original, just taking something that another service uses and taking a different angle.

I would only use these features if I had a way to connect to these site away from my computer. Some services offer this but they generally cost money, money I am not willing to spend on them. I still keep my eyes on the sites, reading what people are up to and interesting things they post. I read what my Pownce contacts have to say on the website and I also still read what people have to say on Twitter via the RSS feed. Am I still a user of these sites, even though I don’t contribute?

Pownce - http://pownce.com/yum9me
Twitter - http://twitter.com/yum9me