ResearchBuzz

And by a little, I mean 90 seconds. Flickr recently announced that Flickr would be hosting video. But only up to 90 seconds, and only for Flickr Pro users — those who have paid for the service, in other words.

This may seem like a very conservative way to get into online video, and it is. And considering the intellectual property headaches Google is still going through, the continuing evolution of how people are watching video online, and the core mission of Flickr in the first place, it was the right thing to do.

If you want to see what’s being offered, you can view a video pool at http://flickr.com/groups/video/ . If you pick one, like this video of a cat getting a bath, you’ll see that it’s embedded and has comments, tags, and pools like a photograph.

If you want to search for these videos, look to the advanced search. You’ll see that you can limit your search to photos/videos, or to CGI/animation. (Why there isn’t one option that allows you to limit your search to moving images is past me.) You’ll also want to check the option that allows you to filter your results by media type. Choose videos. (Does this include animation or not? Not clear.)

I couldn’t search videos, filtering video content only, and get search results without a keyword. So I did a search for the and got over 7000 videos. Sorting by most recent found a variety of things, including what looks like very short vidblogs, travel videos, and pet videos. (There’s one video of a Welsh Corgi puppy attacking a stuffed rabbit that made my computer explode in a cloud of cute.

I know that you can get RSS feeds for tag searches on Flickr, and the Flickr sites indicate that video results can show up in Flickr RSS feeds. But I couldn’t find any way to get just the latest videos as RSS feeds. It’s possible that I’m missing something very obvious.

PicAnswers LLC announced yesterday the launch of a picture question and answer site called, appropriately enough, PicAnswers ( http://picanswers.com/ ). I thought a site like this would be kind of pedestrian but as always the Internet amazes me with what it’ll ask questions about.

You’ll get the idea from the front page of the site — it’s like an answers site, with images. There are a series of pictures with questions attached to them. The pictures at the moment include what appear to be bones on a beach, what look like anime photoshopped llamas, an old tobacco can, and someone’s broken patio ceiling. The questions range from “Is this valuable?” to “What IS this?” and “How do I fix this?” Most of the questions I looked at had some kind of answer, and most of the time it was a useful answer.

The front page has the most recent question, with additional tabs for the most popular and most discussed questions (”Is this a toothpick or a food skewer?”) On the right there’s a tag cloud and on the left there’s categories for browsing. You can also do a keyword search; I did a search for “bird” and got questions from birdcages to bird eggs to a Ford Firebird that turned out to be a Thunderbird.

Some of the questions are, admittedly, very goofy, but a lot of them are useful and really not the kinds of questions you could ask without pictures (look in the Tools and Construction section of the site.) I would love to see RSS feeds for this site.

Oh, such coolness — the Library of Congress recently announced that it’s teaming up with Flickr. According to the LOC blog post, “If all goes according to plan, the project will help address at least two major challenges: how to ensure better and better access to our collections, and how to ensure that we have the best possible information about those collections for the benefit of researchers and posterity. In many senses, we are looking to enhance our metadata…”

(Flickr is actually working on a project to get the world generating metadata for publicly-held photograph collections — see The Commons at http://www.flickr.com/commons .)

The idea is that the Library of Congress now has its own Flickr page at http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/ . Photos are being posted there for users to tag, comment about, and provide more information on. Though there are literally millions of photos/prints/visual things in the LOC’s collections, the LOC page has launched with over 3,000 items.

The photographs cover a lot of ground but the LOC does have two sets of photos available — 1930s-1940s in Color and News in the 1910s. Just browsing through all the photographs finds all kinds of topics, from smokestacks to medals to cowboys to baseball players.

I was amazed at how many people have commented on these photographs. And get a load of the tag clouds. “Vintage”, as you might imagine, is a very popular tag.

If you want to search Flickr for just LOC content, you can use the search form at http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=&w=8623220%40N02 . I tried to use Yahoo Images to search the images by other parameters (like size,whether the image is in color or not, etc.) but I couldn’t figure out how to limit Yahoo Images results to a particular Flickr user.