Just a small nit, your caption says 2006 blogies, it's the 2006 vloggies. I assume it's just a mistype, I do it all the time too, and I'm a vlogger.

Oh, and BTW, it's Michael Verdi, I annotated the photo.

Funny that I should be signing up for a Zoomr account for the first time to see your pictures of vloggercon Thomas. I've known zoomr was coming along forever... perhaps it's because you've been continuing to post to flickr and are on my friends feed... but I haven't had the opportunity to come over and check it out.

I like the innovations like the photo scroll bar across the top of the page so you can see MANY photos, not just the last or next. I would argue though that it pushes the main photo to far down the page unecissarily... and that instead you should make more of your horizontal space by placing the thumbnails down the left hand side of the page.

I like how you have people editing included... I still don't think flickr has that, and I like the favoriting, but I don't like how I can't tag others photos.

If I may propose an innovation, why not add the opportunity to "bookmark" a photo right next to the favorite heart... this would allow me to do several things... first... I could add an annotation (like delicious), second I could tag the video with MY tags... not add them to the original authors tags like on flickr which is just plain stupid.

Then when I bookmark a photo I can go back and find it like I can go back and look at videos I've fav'd, but in a FAR FAR more robust way, because I will be able to browse others photos I've bookmarked, by browsing through them with tags.

Finally, I would add such annotations, and additional tags BELOW the photo right with comments and other annotations to the photos as if they were a part of a log keeping track of all activity with a photo.

I.e.

mmeiser bookmarke this photo: michael-verdi, vloggies, 2006, san-fran
indent "A great photo of Michael Verdi by Thomas Hawk"

mmeiser added the person: Michael Verdi

mmeiser left the comment: ...


See how that works out? First, it need not be JUST a comment to leave a useful trail of information.

Second, people don't want to annotate your photos for YOU, they want to annotate them for THEMSELVES... they'll add tags, and favorite, and comment, because it will help THEM find this photo later. That it helps YOU issecondary to them. Just wanted to point this out because Flickr thinks I want to tag other peoples photos out of the goodness of my heart... when it does ME no good, should I want to find that photo later.

This goes for adding people too... when I tag a photo with a persons name... that should appear with my favs, and my bookmarks so I can use it to find photos of a person later. This makes TREMENDOUS sense in this exact example. Why would I want to add the tag Michael Verdi JUST to benifit you? Wouldn't it make much more sense that I'd want to tag this photo as the person Michael Verdi, so later I can browse through my favs and bookmarks and find that one great photo I tagged as Michael Verdi that Thomas Hawk tagged?

If you get only ONE point from this whole comment I hope you will get that, I tag, and annotate, and comment, and favorite things for ME... for my own enjoyment, so I can find things easier in the future.... that this also benifits others is secondary. This is precisely how delicious works, but Flickr in particular, flickr tagging, has this completely backwards.

Other features you need up there are the actions to email, to blog, and to share (which might give copy/pasteable source for pasting into your blog, or an email.)

BTW, I've collaborated unofficially and officially on a number of projects in the social media space including mefeedia (officially and prominently), blip.tv and fireant very unoficially, even odeo... and a number of other social media services. What can I say, I love social media. Oh, and I'm sort of one of the founding members of this vlog thing... Irina and the podtechers irresponsibly let me be a judge for the vloggies... I can see now that not attending was a mistake... after all mefeedia won two vloggies (despite my voting against it), and noone was there to recieve them. :(

I would be happy to check out zoomr every now and again and give my expert opinion if there's some developer/api/user feedback mailing list or yahoo group I can sign up for.

Oh! and btw, what kind of RSS feeds do you have!?

I'm a huge fan of photoaggregation... especially with flickr friends feeds and iPhoto... do you enclose your highres photos, do you offer mediaRSS (a standard some of us vloggers help develop and are glad to see catching on), and do your feeds work in iPhoto? Because as an aggregator iPhoto is the bomb.

You can check out the photocasting stuff at:
flickr.com/groups/photocasting

It's just an awareness thing. But there are some good howtoo's and overviews.

And I'm on flickr at:
flickr.com/photos/mmeiser2
and
flickr.com/photos/mmeiser

I'm looking forward to some interesting dialogue about zoomr.

Congrats on your win at startup camp. BTW, You really only have one developer working on this? I really think I may be able to assist you with some strategy on usability, accessibility, information architechture and undesigned... which is my pet name for keeping the design flexible, and extensible, and NOT getting caught up in asethetics... especially this web 2.0 b.s.... and focused on functionality, workflow and useablilty.. Way to often even the best designers and developers get worried about concerns of design and asethetics when they have major workflow and usability issues... and they end up endoctrinating these problems into a rigid site design, navigation, or page layout when they should be continuing to experiment with things rapidly... such as swapping items in and out of the main navigation and subnavigation, renaming stuff, adding new features, removing failed features or burning them down and reintroducing them.

You're lucky becuase you can follow flick's success and learn from them, but duplicating their success will only take you so far.

BTW, again, I really like the trackbacks... you don't know how many times I've blogged a photo from flickr.com/photos/mmeiser and had to then take my blog permalink after I posted and go paste it back into the flickr comments. Flickr should pick up on that stuff automatically. It's just tedious.

Peace, -Mike
Disclaimer: this is new media, I don't proof read or spell check squat. :)

Hey Mike! Thanks man for the insightful and thoughtful post. Sorry about the vloggies typo. I fixed that on all the descriptions. I must have been drunk when I typed that.

Your ideas are great ones. We do want and will open tagging up to everyone but just need to get a few infrastructure things in place to allow people to block malicious tags, taggers, etc.

If you get only ONE point from this whole comment I hope you will get that, I tag, and annotate, and comment, and favorite things for ME... for my own enjoyment, so I can find things easier in the future.... that this also benifits others is secondary.

Excellent point and we are definitely working towards this!

Best,

Tom

but it's not tagging... everyday people don't "tag" stuff... because it's not an action that makes sense.

They "bookmark" stuff one of those things happens to be tagging andother annotating, another titling...


Oh, and you should personally use co.comments.com... that way you can track your comments and responses to them across the entire web regardless of site.

Peace, and great pics.

Keep up the good work on zooomr.