After a rather long break from active and regular blogging, I have decided to make a return to pro/network blogging. For Splashpress Media.

In the now almost 2 years that Splashpress Media has been active as a major online publisher in the about blogging area, the network has come a long way. At times the ride has been rather bumpy, but I am sure that Mark Saunders and his team have the potential to continue to grow their brand and portfolio, not to forget their influence in the blogosphere.

And what better can one do than try to help, be part of a potentially great network?
No matter what might have been.

Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it.
Charles R. Swindoll, evangelical christian priest.

To resume: I am joining the team at Bloggingpro and will report on blogging software/platforms, plugins, tweaks and themes.

It was obvious it would happen. Actually I wrote about this issue in January 2007. Today the biggest twitter whores start discovering the issue: twitter _is_ made for spammers. Hence why we need twerpscan or similar services.

But the real matter here is not the great platform for spammers created by twitter, but rather the recluse the twitterati live in. Maybe, some day the top Web2.0 posterboys will get some rationalism in their bones too. Hopefully even while they still are hyped by their latest discovery.

Some weeks ago I wrote about the reasons behind my switch from WordPress to Chyrp, but I had forgotten one aspect, I had made a huge error. Chyrp nowhere is in a state ready for prime time and that doesn’t concern the platform, the code behind chyrp.

The error I made was to jump on the bandwagon based on the technical aspect of the platform and even a small, but rather active community. Most important factor though, the main developer behind the platform, was an element I didn’t analyze well enough before making my choice and decision for Chyrp.

As beautiful as Chyrp may be, its problem lays in how Alex Suraci rushes, or not, things.

Alex is a talented coder and has built an awesome platform, but sadly his ambitions are too personal and too little focused on Chyrp for the lightweight blogging platform to become really successful. Alex is ambitious and as a young developer, constantly learning and discovering new coding languages. This sadly to the inconvenience of the Chyrp community and adopters. Some details: a PHP5 is coming… and pending. So is a Ruby port.
The community forums have been changed to a new, non Chyrp related, and unmoderated location at toogeneric. All in all Chyrp is a nice platform, one I will continue to watch, but for now the uncertainties made me switch back to good ol’ WordPress.

I should have known better being a regular early adopter.

Photophlow¹ is probably the best third party flickr application, network, I’ve seen so far.

What is Photophlow?
It’s a chatroom. It’s another social network. It’s everything one would expect in 2008. Yes, it’s Beta.

Forget what I just wrote, Photophlow is much more. Photophlow takes the flickr API to a new level.

Small intro: After years of toying round with several Point&Shoot cameras I made the step. I always wanted to play more with photography but somehow never jumped in to it. This time I did and purchased a new Canon Digital Rebel XT². More than looking forward to my new love being delivered, last days I’ve been diving in to learning photography and the networks around.

Did I want your regular photography forum (or blog)? Negative. What I was looking for was a quick way to interact with people who really know their stuff, all while discovering great photography. Flickr is your friend. But so is SmugMug. Sadly those sites are nothing more than a waste of time, waste of time because of all the awesome discoveries.

Add Photophlow.

First remarkable aspect of Photophlow is that there’s no need to sign up³. Photophlow uses the flickr user authentication process to login. Single sign on if one wants to. Once you’re logged in to flickr, you also are to Photophlow.

Once logged in online in Photophlow, you can join chatrooms based on the groups you are member of or create chatrooms for the groups you administer. And that’s where the fun starts.

In every chatroom, all flickr searches are public and display a list of results in the sidebar. On hover those pictures enlarge and on click they are posted to the room. You can immediately comment on flickr to every picture, favorite it, view the EXIF data or boil eggs with.

All in all, Photophlow so far is the fastest way to discover high level pictures⁴ and at the same time, if needed, share information about the technical factors.
But you can also use Photophlowg as a tumblelogging discovery engine.

Compulsory with the 2007 standards, Photophlow offers an integration with both Twitter and Tumblr API as well.

Compulsory invites for Photophlow available. (3 2).

1. Limited Beta right at the moment [↩]
2. Cut me a slack, it’s an older model but still quite a jump coming from Canon Ixus’s [↩]
3. They still are in limited invite beta status - or something web 2.0′y [↩]
4. This obviously depends on the level of the group you visit [↩]

Other times, it’s not so fun running a visible site. Some people are determined to deliberately misunderstand much of what they encounter in life. Sometimes I have a hard time realizing that that’s their problem, not mine.

Jason Kottke in an interview with Deron Bauman.