Category Archives: Gallery

Photo sets, albums, and visual stories.

Peaks and Valleys and Belly-Buttons

Events, Gallery, Humor, Meta

I don’t usually like to discuss traffic, but here goes. Over the relatively short history of this website there have been a number of peaks in the traffic here, usually coinciding with some particular event. The first big surge came with the MTCurly plug-in, which is now really starting to show its age. However a single link from Todd Dominey had the counters rolling. Then there was quiet in the land, and I slowly but surely built up a readership of people searching for “enron women nude” and other interesting things. And then of course there’s Tantek, Christine, Jeffrey, Kathy, and Rannie.

Then came my pilgrimage to South by Southwest, and as a result of meeting people and posting summaries of the sessions, my hits rose predictably. At least until this picture showed up in Kottke’s link blog and had my head spinning and the counter rolling.

More recently, two incidents have made me rethink my entire approach to blogging. First my blog was invaded by the French. I’m not kidding. If anyone can tell me what this means I would greatly appreciate it, because all I know is it links to a photo of the lovely Sarah C. with one of my keys. Since then a number of comments have been left on various pictures of Sarah that say things like “Sensualité.” Speculation has run wild, especially since no one I know can get a good translation of the text, but the general consensus is that Sarah is secretly some sort of underground “entertainment” star in France and her rabid fans somehow stumbled across this site.

But today was the day that broke all the rules. I was expecting a bit of traffic from the new stuff but it came instead from a surprising source. Yes, I’ve been Barlowed.

Anyway, this is all tangential to what I’ve been trying to say the entire time, my new revelation. The whole writing thing has been done. People don’t need another interesting website, they’ve got so many of those they line them up like cattle in aggregators and extract their content in such a manner as to get through as many as possible. What the world is really thirsting for is web celebrity paparazzi. You want scandalous pictures of the web personalities you know and love, and I want to give them to you. We can have the exposé pictures, something like Tantek using Safari; the scandal photos, which could involve pretty much any situation with a certain blonde SxSW panelist; and finally the relationship tracker, where to start, there are tons of these going around.

I see untold dozens of dollars waiting to be tapped in this nascent market. Obviously this is too large a task for me alone, so any help would be greatly appreciated. I’m also curious to hear some thoughts on this. How long before we see Josh Davis while standing in line at the supermarket?

New Yahoo

Design, Gallery, Google, Yahoo

Saw this via Simon and I must say that I’m quite impressed. The interface is clean, the results are an ordered list and there’s all sorts of nice features and semantic goodness. Plus I show up twice on an image search for “photomatt.” If they had good toolbar this could definitely replace Google as my main search squeeze, unless of course Google comes back with something new, exciting and neat. While we’re on the subject, could someone tell me why I keep getting hits from a MSN search for “google.net”?

The Ones That Almost Made It

Gallery

So you’ve seen the ten that were chosen from a pool of over five thousand, but wouldn’t it be interesting to know what photos didn’t quite make the cut? Here’s the story of the six photos that almost made it:

  • 6-1-2002, Rachel — I really like this photo but it’s a tad washed out in the colors, though nothing that couldn’t be tweaked I suppose. In the end it was just pushed out by stronger candidates.
  • 1-19-2003, Sarah C. — This is one of the more interesting ones from the photoshoot with Sarah. Again, I like the shot but the contrast is a too high on her face, and overall it’s blurry due to the lack of light. Gotta love the hair though!
  • 2-20-2003, Duck — A fairly recent photo that has some pretty interesting elements. I especially like the duck behind the main one that’s checking everything out. I also enjoyed these subjects because they didn’t attack me like the geese did.
  • 2-16-2003, Wood — Sarah W. swears she took this photo even though I’m pretty sure I did. The whole day is worth checking out as a lot of the photos came out very well.
  • 2-16-2003, Sauce — A cool picture of something hot.
  • 3-23-2003, Trees — I was extremely close to putting this one in, as personally I really enjoy this photograph. In fact it’s my desktop right now. There’s just something about the contrasting colors and shape of things that tickles my fancy.

In Sony World Again

Gallery

Well, I finally got my laptop back. Yes, that laptop. My trusty GRX-570 is back with (apparently) a new motherboard, power system, LCD, and AC adaptor. So basically the keyboard is the same. It took them almost three months to fix it, which is the most ridiculous thing ever, but I must say that it feels quite nice to have it back in my hands and it’s running great. It’s going to take some getting used to a laptop that is at least an inch bigger and several pounds heavier than the one I used for so long though. I’m not even sure this will fit in my new bag! Time will tell though, and I must admit it’s nice to be at 1600×1200 again. If you haven’t visited the photolog lately, there are a couple of new days of pictures with some hilarious candid shots.