Disqus - Latest Comments for thomashawk

Re: Flickr Lost Its Appeal

thomashawk — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 16:55:41 -0000

Ah, and so it was, sorry about that! :)

Re: Flickr Lost Its Appeal

thomashawk — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 23:42:44 -0000

You touch on a lot of the problems Ayelet. That said, there's no way I think I could ever abandon Flickr. I'm pretty tied into that community and for better or for worse it is the primary place for emerging photographers to congregate on the web.

Flickr is an amazing resource. A cultural jewel of our times. Unfortunately, however, the current overseers of the service have put the values of censorship above the values of artistic expression. To make matters worse they infantilize their users, dismissing their concerns with a condescending "mother knows best," tone, rather than genuinely embracing the challenge that constructive criticism can represent. That's too bad.

Web 2.0 is supposed to be about openness and transparency -- a two way communication between users and service providers. But rather than allow that, the current Flickr/Yahoo staff instead seeks to bury negative criticism and obscuficate when they are called out on acts of censorship and poor customer service. I've been banned from the Flickr Help Forum for example.

Hopefully at some point staff changes may result in Flickr taking on a more customer friendly attitude. A respect between user and service provider that Web 2.0 ought to represent.

Thanks for this insightful post.

Re: I don’t feel safe with Wordpress, hackers broke in and took things

thomashawk — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 10:26:18 -0000

Somebody hacked into my WordPress blog earlier this year as well. It was a bummer because I was working on a draft copy of a blog post that was very rough and had not been edited and they published it. I was on vacation shooting in Chicago and didn't figure it out until several hours after they'd already published it. Fortunately they didn't seem to do anything malicious other than publish that post and add spam to a bunch of my other posts.

I tried to do the upgrade myself but it failed and wouldn't work after learning that the WordPress vulnerability may have been how I was hacked. I had to pay Aaron Brazell to do the upgrade for me because I couldn't figure it out.

Of course I don't know how I was hacked. It could have been another way. They could have guessed my password for instance. I really love WordPress though and hope that my site stays secure going forward. It is sort of a paint though that upgrading doesn't work for me and it's not something that I can do myself. Upgrading ought to be easier.

Re: Podcast #57 – Conversation with Thomas Hawk – The Man of a Million Images

thomashawk — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 17:11:22 -0000

Hey guys, thanks so much had a great being on your show!

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/03/10-people-to-follow-on-friendfeed-for.html

thomashawk — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 15:24:48 -0000

Hey Louis, thanks so much for the mention. This is a great format and way to showcase other people on FriendFeed, a service we all love so much!

Re: Photography Buddies

thomashawk — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 21:07:12 -0000

Awesome Pal! Thanks for sharing this. I love it. The processing is fantastical!

Re: Meridith - BW$P

thomashawk — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 12:21:32 -0000

Dude, amazing portrait. Nice work and great story!

Re: Flickr Finds People Faster

thomashawk — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 12:16:33 -0000

Hey, thanks much for the kind words and for blogging my photos! :)

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/03/nobody-can-hear-you-scream-if-your-rss.html

thomashawk — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 20:10:16 -0000

One word. WordPress. I used to really hate it when every time I'd bitch about Blogger people would over and over and over again bring up WordPress, but it's 1,000% better. You should hire Aaron and have him move you over.

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/03/serial-early-adopters-get-it-all-wrong.html

thomashawk — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 08:35:12 -0000

I usually jump to something new when the tech gets better and if community based a community large enough to thrive exists in the new place. Twitter was fun, but Twitter completely lacks the visual side of things and the cohesion of conversations that FriendFeed provides. The community at FriendFeed is large enough to make time better spent there.

Blogger was good, but WordPress is better. TiVo was good but (for me at least) Media Center with it's low cost XBox 360 extenders was a better platform. I liked my old Windows Smartphone, but the iPhone blows it away.

Competition is a good thing. If someone makes a better product I think they deserve the attention more than a company out of pure loyalty.

Re: tumbléo

thomashawk — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 20:45:58 -0000

Hey thanks for using my quote Leo.

I kind of came to this conclusion a while back after I got tired of chasing my tail over unauthorized use of my photos. To me life is too short to spend time chasing around people for unauthorized use. I make money on my photography. Sometimes people pay me. Other times people take my stuff without paying me.

The main point is that there is a peace that comes with relaxing and letting go. And I've always believed that birds are far more beautiful when free out flying around for all to enjoy than in a cage in my home. The quote is less about any true legal rights to imagery and more about a state of mind where you appreciate all the good that comes from sharing your work and your art and let go of the negativity that surrounds unauthorized use rendering it powerless.

Too many people mar their images up with ugly watermarks and signatures and spend way too much time worrying about what if somebody "steals" their image. I like to think of all of the images on the internet really as one big collective in a way.

And certainly Scott Bourne would so disagree with me on this on so many different levels. That's ok too.

Re: With Netflix Watch Instantly And Hulu, Apple’s 99 Cent Rentals Lose Their Appeal

thomashawk — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 16:00:06 -0000

analog dollars for digital dimes.

Re: The 13th Annual How Berkeley Can You Be!? Parade & Festival

thomashawk — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 11:37:19 -0000

Hoping to make this. I took photos of it last year. It's a pretty cool event: http://www.zooomr.com/photos/thomashawk/sets/23...

Re: louisgray.com: As Twitter Regains Footing, Competitors' Growth Stalls

thomashawk — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 08:43:17 -0000

Twitter doesn't have pictures. FriendFeed does. Pictures are pretty. I like my microblogging experience to be both text and visually based. I'm biased of course though as a photographer. I far prefer FriendFeed over Twitter. But I was a little surprised seeing compete's last month comparison between FriendFeed and Twitter. Beyond the pictures issue, FriendFeed seems to be such a superior platform due largely to how they present conversations around posts and media in ways that Twitter does not. And they do have a great deal of momentum and enough of a strong user base to grow their service at this point. I used to think that FF would surpass Twitter within 6 months. Now I'm not as sure.

Re: Hey, Simon Blint! Thomas Hawk is no pervert

thomashawk — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 12:35:37 -0000

Thank you Karoli!

Re: louisgray.com: TiVo Is a Zero On the Social Web. It's Time They Fast Forward.

thomashawk — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 15:30:13 -0000

Tivo used to have a TiVo blog -- it really sucked. I wrote a blog post back a few years about how badly it sucked. TiVo should hire someone to handle social media for them and implement a lot of your ideas. They are the *ideal* company to benefit from social media. Dave Zatz would be a good guy to get. They really could do so much.

I canceled my TiVo recently and use Microsoft's Media Center exclusively now.

Re: Dembot - The Real Reason Why Friend Feed is Working

thomashawk — Sat, 24 May 2008 19:03:25 -0000

One of the better articles I've seen written on FriendFeed lately Andrew. Nice work.

Re: Can We Live In Public?

thomashawk — Sat, 24 May 2008 11:55:27 -0000

Well written piece Fred.

Re: FriendFeed kill Twitter? Not going to happen

thomashawk — Sat, 24 May 2008 10:35:24 -0000

FriendFeed is very much a communications platform. At least that's how I'm using it. It's replaced Twitter for me 1000%.

Re: Robert Scoble and 20,000 People Walk Into a Bar (or, what I learned during the Twit-Out about Twitter vs. FriendFeed conversations)

thomashawk — Thu, 22 May 2008 16:20:22 -0000

Very clever and creative!

Re: I No Longer Feel Trusted by My Own Government

thomashawk — Wed, 21 May 2008 15:19:43 -0000

This paranoia is indeed a shame. Some of my most memorable photographs of my children are photos that I took of them while they were learning to swim. In fact, recently I was thinking about investigating and underwater housing unit to shoot them underwater at the local community pool.

Love the Banksy graphic by the way!

Re: $100 to Obama (Scripting News)

thomashawk — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 14:08:09 -0000

more of my thoughts here: http://thomashawk.com/2008/01/barack-obama-is-h...