Month: December 2010

It is now complete. My 365 project has ended. A year ago I made a commitment to generate one image a day for the next year.

I took a lot of abuse because of this project. My kids thought some of my pictures were uninspired or just generic. No argument from me. It is difficult just remembering to take a picture each day. What do you do when it is 11 PM and you have yet to take a picture. Once I drove to the parking garage on campus and took a picture of part of the campus. My collection of pictures is a pretty good account of my life. Most of which is probably not that interesting. The final picture is a good example. We are spending time with relatives in Northern Minnesota and Scott is a great breakfast cook.

I decided this should be the picture of the year. Cindy had an angiogram and asked for data. Good heart.

So, now is the time for you to think about next year. I probably took more pictures with my phone than with the 7D. Remember, the best camera is the one you have with you. You might want to consider how you will organize and share your collection (e.g., Wes Fryer will use Tumblr for 2011). Several photographers have made the commitment to take a picture of a door each day. For me, this was as much an exercise in commitment as anything. Next year, I plan to focus on quality.

There was a time when the tools and blank media for copying records – blank tapes and tape recorder – were assumed as tools to violate copyright. The argument that the tools and media could be used for something else, e.g., recording your own voice, seem to relieve the pressure on those selling to products.

There several tools for “saving” web content and “making web content easier to read” that pose a similar ethical challenge. Evernote, an app I really like, comes to mind. Do I as a consumer have the right to subvert the format intended by the author? The most obvious intention might be to avoid viewing ads. A second intention might be to avoid the time limit the original is available to encourage a purchase of a subscription allowing long term access.

I am not certain about these concerns and admit I save resources. An option in such services that must be a copyright violation according to my interpretation is the sharing of content via RSS or some form of granting access to a specified group. If someone else gets content from me that I did not create, this seems pretty obvious. I am not arguing whether such a feature has value, I am just wondering how the practice could be considered legal.

It is time for top 10 lists. Here are the top ten posts from this blog for the past year. The list includes 12 entries, but I am discounting the home page and the aboutme page.

This blog generates most of its traffic via web searches rather than RSS feeds. The most frequent hits appear to be for tutorial-like posts – e,g., how to write to Google apps from the ipad, how to do text to speech in snow leopard. Perhaps people search for tutorials and read opinion posts via RSS.

BTW – these data were generated with mybloglog – one of those services Yahoo is eliminating.