It happens all the time. Technology takes a leap forward, and the users leap in a different direction from the one the designers predicted. The commonest mistake forecasters make is to underrate entertainment as a driver of applications. When dedicated graphics workstations that could do fancy rendering and 3D modelling cost more than I earned in a year, it wasn’t manufacturing industry CAD/CAE divisions that bought them without turning a hair – it was the film industry. First big movie companies like Lucas Film, then very soon afterwards the folks who made TV ads – for them, time was money in a big way.
It’s been a while since people started talking about the impending death of local PC apps like word processors – we’d soon be using our broadband links to access such function from servers owned by the likes of Google. It’s happening, but not in a cataclysmic way yet. Instead, the businesses that provide storage for data and images, such as flickr and YouTube, started providing tools for users to present their images in a more sophisticated way. I’m sure this is just the beginning of a trend that will eventually provide some serious editing and production tools that run on servers rather than locally on your PC or Mac.
Take a look at this collection of pics I took at Botswana’s Kalahari 1000Km Desert Race in 2001. I’ve shown them before one at a time, after some laborious HTML work, on France for Freebooters , but this slideshow only took me a few minutes to set up on slide.com.
Notice that there is even a facility for you, the visitor, to submit your own pictures to the collection. Just click on ‘ADD YOUR PICS’ in the top right corner.
I have only used the basic functions of slide.com – take a look at Keith Kellett’s Travel Rat posting about the new narrow gauge steam loco in Exbury Gardens to see some other effects. We live in exciting times. I wonder how long it will be before someone offer serious video editing facilities online?
>>Notice that there is even a facility for you, the visitor, to submit your own pictures to the collection. Just click on ‘ADD YOUR PICS’ in the top right corner.<<
I’m not all that keen on that feature, unless there’s a moderation facility of some kind in place. Otherwise, some troll could spoil your show by posting an irrelevant, obscene or just plain rubbish photo on it.
We have to assume there is a moderation feature. Even then, it’s only potentially useful in cases where you are deliberately looking for input. Haven’t found a way to disable the Add Picture button, but maybe there is one. I’ve asked Kay if she’d try adding any old pic so that I can see how it all works – if you join in the fun, that should test things out fairly thoroughly…
OK. It works as I would want it to. I submitted an image and a comment to Slide.com after clicking the ADD YOUR PICS button. In each case, I was notified via the e-mail address I used to create the Slide.com account, and then had the optio nof accepting or denying the submissions.