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.

This is still under development but sounds way cool. There’s a search engine on the way that will allow you to input a photo and will tell you what celestial objects are in the photo. Furthermore, the photo will be added to a database of sky images.

The site’s at Astrometry.net and it’s in really early alpha. There is a Web-based version of the search tool available, but at this writing it’s in closed alpha testing (there is an e-mail address available to apply for access.) There’s also a downloadable version of the tool you can get at http://astrometry.net/code.html . From the README file it looks like it’s Linux only.

You can get an overview of what the search engine is intended for at the project summary, check out the gallery of solved images (yow!), and, while you’re waiting for this project to get underway, browse links of related interest.

There is a lot of astronomy-language here; I think you’ll need to have a bit of background in it to get the most of it.

Apparently it’s visual image day here at ResearchBuzz. There’s a new database of 6,000 photographs — 3,500 by Jack Richard and 2,500 by Charles Belden — showing northwestern Wyoming over a span of 100 years.

The photographs are in two collections — one for Richard and one for Belden — at http://www.bbhc.org/hmrl/collection.cfm . (This is the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, by the way.) I took a look at the Jack Richard Collection.

You can do a browse of everything in the collection, or you can do a keyword search (the keyword search, by default, spans both collections.) I did a search for cowboy and got over 300 results. All the results were in black and white and included Native Americans in parades with cowboys, calves getting branded, bucking broncos, and an adorable picture of a cowboy feeding an antelope.

Results are presented in a table with thumbnails. Click on the thumbnails for a larger image and more details, including date (I saw a lot that were just “circa 1930s”), notes, subject matter, and the location. There’s also a link to where you can order reprints of that image.

I didn’t see a way to browse by date, but you can do a search within a certain date range without including keywords. Meaning, of course, that you get all the pictures for that date. I did a search for 1901-1910 and got 80 pictures, with images from other photographers besides Belden and Richard. (Jack Richard, age 4, is even in one of these very old pictures.)

All the pictures I saw except one were black and white (the one was a grizzly bear pelt from the 1950s) and most of what I saw was from the 30s. I don’t hear often about digital collections from Wyoming, so I wanted to spotlight this one here. Try the subject listings for each picture to go browsing off in lots of different directions.