memeorandum is cool

I agree with TechCrunch's post about memeorandum (which I incidentally came across reading memeorandum). It's a great site. A "newspaper for anyone interested in what's happening right now" -- couldn't have put it better myself.

New version of Google Picasa 2!

There's a new version of Google's Picasa photo management software, version 2, and I'm most excited about this feature:

External drives - Find photos on external drives using Picasa. Simply go Tools > Folder Manager to choose whether Picasa should scan a connected external drive to find pictures. When you unplug and reconnect, Picasa will find your pictures instantly (with no scanning), and will also preserve your labels

I've been needing this for a while since I'm constantly having to move files off my hard drive onto external storage.

qoop + flickr = I'm unimpressed!

I read ehomeupgrade's post about qoop-flickr and it reminded that I wanted to post some brief feedback on qoop+flickr.

The ordering experience was OK, nothing stellar, but by far the biggest downer was the print quality of the photos in the book that I ordered. Pixely, dithered -- how else can I describe them?

While Derek Powazek does point out the inferior print quality, I think he understates it.

Anyways, I'm surprised that flickr did a deal with qoop with the quality being what it is. You'd think print quality would be criteria numero uno for them!

UPDATE: Phil, President of QOOP, found my posting and has just responded in the comments. His attention is commendable and I look forward to seeing them improve the quality of the QOOP-Flickr service.

UPDATE 2: Phil just called me and after chatting with him, I have a high level of confidence that they'll address these issues fairly soon. When I see the new results, I'll definitely be posting my feedback then.

Idea: vertical search engine for stock photos

Searching for stock photography has always been a pain -- visit corbis, then getty images, then veer and then... who knows what else. I'd like a single site to deliver a consolidated image search across all of these image databases.

And most stock photographs seem to be pretty well tagged, but how about letting people tag/rate photographs, collections and stock photo companies? This additional meta data could go a long way to making it easier for designers to find good stock photographs.

The site could make money through referrer fees (assuming that these sites have such a thing), though this sort of revenue model could create a conflict with the goal of providing high quality search results. Maybe the site could make money providing other services to a designer community that it would foster.

One of the other cool trends that I think will grow to dominate the stock photography business, or at least grow it to a new set of customers that don't buy stock photography today is the trend towards amateurs and prosumers selling their work online. Why couldn't some average photographer upload a bunch of his stuff to flickr and, in turn, have someone else pay him for those photographs? I'd buy those photographs -- they'd be less expensive and there'd be a lot more to choose from.