As yesterday’s release did feature some bugs, i have just re-released it with fixes for photo sharing in groups and tagging with spaces. Check it out. The installer should make setting it up almost a breeze.
Archive Page 2
There is an “early alpha” release of Atomique available at Cakeforge including an installer. The wiki holds more information on how to install it and which requirements ought to be met by the Webserver.
This software is not at all ready for production environments. It is rather a snapshot of where we’re at. So be aware and cautious.
If you encounter any troubles or like it so much you want to help out, feel free to comment in the blog. Any feedback is welcome.
Update: the group sharing feature seems to be broken. Sigh…
Today I have given a short presentation at the Interactions Lab meeting at the University of Calgary in front of many smart people. It was something like a dry run of the defense of my internship thesis I will be giving in April in Magdeburg. I have received some interesting hints and suggestions, summarized as follows:
- what about having contacts?
- easy install/deployment is essential
- what about some kind of DOI or tracker?
- decentralization is an inherint aspect of the Web in general
In the next weeks I will work on an install routine that would make getting Atomique up and running as easy as possible.
Here are the slides (PDF).
Decentralized and Distributed Photo Sharing on the Web
Published by February 13th, 2007 in Announcements. 2 CommentsYesterday I have handed in the mini-thesis covering my internship project: Decentralized and Distributed Photo Sharing on the Web (PDF) and this is the abstract:
Tagging-based communities allowing users to share, organize, and explore resources such as photos and bookmarks have pioneered the combination of social networking and resource sharing. Formerly rather tiresome activities such as annotating information sources have been transformed to ways of connecting and interacting with other people. Resource sharing in a community environment allows contributors to engage in conversation, play, and challenges. However, most resource-sharing communities have architectural and institutional shortcomings due to their usually centralized, restricted, and profit-driven nature. Users do not have control over the community’s policies, functionality, or appearance. The social aspects created between contributors are locked within a community, while it is usually not possible to interact with users from other communities.
In this report, a decentralized approach towards photo sharing is introduced allowing for community and conversation while fostering access to shared photos and empowerment of users. This concept draws insight from a diverse set of disciplines including information retrieval, databases, distributed computing, interaction design, and psychology. A web-based photo repository is conceptualized employing tagging as a classification scheme. Established standards and protocols of the blogosphere are used to provide for decentralized photo sharing in groups.
A prototype photo repository allowing for decentralized photo sharing was implemented. An overview of this software and its functionality is given, and challenges throughout the implementation phase are presented, including considerations regarding presentation, interaction, uploading, syndication, and photo sharing groups. The document ends with a summary and a discussion of the results including an outlook to potential future work.
I am (still) working on the mini-thesis on my internship project besides regular studies. While I am very euphoric about Atomique (unintended rhyme here) I have some difficulties to put my thoughts about these ideas and approaches that I read about in a coherent, readable structure. I just made this small mindmap to organize myself a bit. Does it make some sense? Well, once the mini-thesis is written, it comes as a designated chapter.
Last friday i have given an introductory presentation at the Seminar for students writing their diploma thesis or doing their internship at the Information Retrieval Group. I was contrasting the conventional communities labelling themselves with ‘web 2.0′ with a rather decentral way of community building and, in this case, photo sharing and how looks like employing groups:
Atomique - decentral and distributed photo sharing (PDF)
I have spent the last six months in Santiago de Chile at the Web Research Center doing an internship about distributed social software with Javier Velasco as one of my supervisors. Both of us are aficionados of photography while being also interested in usability and social aspects of the web. With Javier’s support i have designed and developed a software that enables photo sharing via groups in a decentralized and distributed manner. This is an attempt to create a decentral, open source alternative to sites like Flickr and Fotolog trying to create open standards and protocols for social interaction on the web. This approach will be covered in more detail in the internship thesis i am about to write during the next weeks and months.
While Atomique is still pre-alpha it has already some basic functionalities like tagging, comments, RSS, and the mentioned groups feature. Check out the demo sites of Andrea and Lisa. If you also wish to login acting as a host you need to enter the subdomain as the user and test as the password. Please don’t try to break it. It still is very edgy.
As there is still a long way to go you are happily invited to help out. In the next days i will setup the necessary infrastructure to turn Atomique into an open source project and continue development. You can find more information in the wiki and via this weblog all news regarding Atomique will be published. Stay tuned and please share your opinion.
Thanks to anybody who already has helped a lot by giving advice or interviews, doing paper prototype tests or listening to presentations in poor Spanish.
