I am kind of undecided about Flickr’s recent move to allow small video snippets. Quite a few members are at least not amused. Flickr sells the very short films as long photographs which seems kind of ridiculous at first. The video service Vimeo tries to focus on high-quality, original short movies. There i just went through some of Philip Bloom’s videos and they are amazing! Great perspectives, interesting people, wonderful colors, and good music. In particular, Autumn in Richmond, Piccadilly Furs, South Bank, and Kew Gardens. While only paying pro members can upload video on Flickr, i wonder if this approach towards video – videos are just photos that move up to 90 seconds – will attract such good videos, or better their makers. Right now the video group on Flickr is dominated by mostly snapshot videos.

Icaro Doria came up with the great idea of using national flags to visualize social issues of different countries. The project Meet the World (larger images) was actually an advertising campaign for the Portuguese magazine Grande Reportagem.

This saturday the third see conference on visualization of information is happening in Wiesbaden. It features quite a speaker list including Ben Fry, Bruce Sterling, and Frank van Ham. I really wanted to go, so i got my tickets well in advance, but something came in my way and now i hope for good video streaming. By the way, i was promised to get the money back. Very nice.

Yesterday a lonely bicyclist had an unpleasant encounter with a slippery curb that didn’t want him to get onto the bicycle path. He fell and later felt severe pain in his knee. Now he can’t really bend it, but the doc said it aint broken – just a bit bruised. The irony is that just two minutes before the lonely bicycle commuter had his tragic fall, a police officer yelled out of the car and demanded that he used the [non-mandatory] bike path - which the bicyclist refused first knowing that it was not mandatory… Well, he is working diligently again on his diplom thesis, but once in a while he procrastinates away, e.g., by reading the first bike shop web comic that has all the necessary cyclist tragic, bike lane content, and car contempt.