(This page originally included a photo from Share on OVI, but after OVI went offline, the photo went missing).

I’ve been a Flickr user for a long, long time. In the olden days I was averse to the notion of outsourcing my image storage to a third party, but a walk in the Copenhagen woods with Ben, one of the people of Ludicorp, Flickr’s birthparent, convinced me that it was worth exploring the social aspects of Flickr.

What I discovered is that there’s more to putting photos online than just looking for a cheap place to store bits: being able to share photos with my friends and family, have them leave comments, mark photos as favourites, and to do the same with their photos has become an integral part of how I use Flickr. To the point when I encounter photos that aren’t stored in Flickr they are, in a sense, dead to me.

Recently, though, I got skittish: when faced with the notion that, if Microsoft were to acquire Yahoo!, my photos would be part of an evil empire, I started to think about alternatives. My experimenting with Share on Ovi, Nokia’s social photo alternative to Flickr, only reinforced my misgivings (I like Ovi, especially the one-click upload from my phone, but it suffers from the same “walled garden” qualities that Flickr does).

Which got me thinking: is it necessary to store and manage the actual bits of my photos in the same place as my photos exist as social objects? While it’s obviously in corporate best interests to have the two wedded — there’s nothing like photo-lock-in to build “customer loyality” — it’s not necessarily in my best interests, no matter how enlightened the outsourcer or rich their community.

I blurted out some gibberish yesterday at [[Gong Bao Thursday]] about the possibility of piggybacking a system on DNS, or something DNS-like to do this. [[Nathan]] countered with the notion that shareable ATOM or RSS feeds could achieve the same thing. I’m still not really clear what I’m looking for, or what I’m thinking of, but it seems to boil down to having a decentralized system where a photo with any URL could become a social object with all the richness that Flickr and Ovi afford, but without the downsides of having to rely on a single vendor’s walled community as the environment. The Internet itself, after all, is a social network, isn’t it?

I welcome thoughts anyone might have on this.

I’ve been experimenting with Share on Ovi this week (seems only proper now that we’re all part of the same family now). Turns out to be a very nicely put-together web app in the Flickr genre, but with much better mobile integration, at least on Nokia devices.

Programatically uploading media to Share on Ovi can be done using the Atom Publishing Protocol: the basic idea is that you do an HTTP POST of binary image data, get back a response that contains an endpoint for doing an HTTP PUT with the image meta-data.

While I’m an old hand at using PHP and cURL together, this was the first time I’d needed to do an HTTP POST that wasn’t a standard key-value pairs, but rather simply a binary file. Turns out this is pretty easy, once you figure it out; the keys are:

Once I got this together, and figured out the secret WSSE voodoo required to authenticate, everything fell into place: here’s the first image I uploaded with my cool new PHP class.

I’ve run hot and cold on [[Just Us Girls]] over the years, but I gotta say that the last three or four times I’ve been there it’s been a very positive experience: excellent, friendly (dare I say “sassy”) service with tasty food. [[Catherine]] and [[Oliver]] and I were there last night to avoid cooking in the punishing heat: Catherine and I both had the cold watermelon soup, which was an excellent balm for the heat; Oliver had a plate of fresh vegetables with dip (which was nice to see on the kids’ menu, as an alternative to the “deep fried X” that one usually sees). Very good hygge.

When I saw the title of The 5 Best, Surefire Ways to Break into Yankee by Yankee editor Mel Allen I thought I was going to be getting tips on which mat the key to the front door is hidden under.

I just had lunch with Ray Brow and got a debriefing on the Festival of Small Halls, an event, sadly, that I missed entirely as I was off the Island over the week it was taking place.

The Small Halls idea is simple: hold a decentralized week-long festival of traditional music, art and dance in the small halls of Prince Edward Island. The benefits are obvious: small halls and small communities get much-needed investment in infrastructure and attention, local musicians get work and new audiences, visitors get to experience real Island culture.

It’s the anti-Aerosmith.

From all reports the inaugural year was an unqualified success, so I’m sure they’ll be back again next year. And next year I’ll plan to be around.

Carlo Vespa Rent will rent you a Vespa in Berlin. Pointer from unlike (which is a good destination in its own right).

A helpful reader points out that on the Canada Revenue Agency’s Late remitting / Failure to remit page has been updated with a new penalty structure:

For remittances and payments that are due after February 26, 2008 and under proposed changes, the 10% penalty below will be replaced by a graduated penalty as follows:

• 3% if the amount is one to three days late;
• 5% if it is four or five days late;
• 7% if it is six or seven days late; and
• 10% if it is more than seven days late.

This means, for example, that a $4000 payment that’s a day late will now exact a $120 penalty instead of a $400 penalty. Which is welcome relief for someone like me who is inevitably late with payroll remittances at least once a year.

As usual, my return to the halcyon shores of Prince Edward Island last week after two exciting weeks in Copenhagen resulted in a bout of culture shock that could only be cured by an impromptu family vacation to Halifax.

This was aided significantly by my first Priceline hotel booking experience, which netted us an $80 room at The Westin Nova Scotian.

The last time we were in Halifax in the summer was last August. I groused then about the $53 cost to fill up my Jetta; this year it was $71. Here’s what we did for maximum fun this year:

After arriving late on Thursday night, we got up Friday morning and headed to Cabin Coffee for breakfast (coffee not the best, but atmosphere are cabin-like as ever, and Oliver likes the cinnamon rolls). We then walked over to the ferry docks and took the ferry to Dartmouth and then caught the #60 Eastern Passage bus out to Fisherman’s Cove. Pretty standard maritime tourist stuff — scenic views, museum with lobster dioramas, etc. Good coffee at Sea Gulps, though, and getting there was half the fun.

Upon return to downtown Halifax we took a tour of Province House, which is just like Province House in Charlottetown, but with an exagerated sense of self-importance, and interior decor that’s a lot more frilly around the edges. The people were friendly, however, and it was nice to be in a legislature that was more concerned with matters provincial than national.

Friday night for supper we went to The Wooden Monkey. Sweltering hot inside, but an excellent server and very tasty food. Highly recommended.

On Saturday morning, after excellent coffee at Caffe Ristretto, the allure of the Theodore Tugboat tour of Halifax Harbour proved too great to resist, so while Catherine went shopping, Oliver and I headed out on the water (if you’re looking for a good Halifax business idea, set up a sunscreen kiosk on the waterfront; it’s almost impossible to find it anywhere, and it’s where you need it most).

The tour was actually rather fantastic: [[Oliver]] was entertained by the Theodoreness of it all; I just enjoyed being out on the water.

Saturday afternoon Catherine and Oliver headed to the Museum of Natural History which, from all reports, was a great visit (turtles were touched, butterflies marvelled at, etc.). I took the opportunity to grab a coffee at Steve-o-Reno’s after a planned shoe-shopping venture ended in lack-of-selection catatonia.

Saturday for supper we followed a review in The Coast to Chabaa Thai Restaurant. We should have gone to Talay Thai: Chabaa’s food was bland, the portions much, much too large, and the service spotty. I don’t think we’ll be back.

After supper we headed over to the Park Lane multiplex to see WALL-E. We all enjoyed it, and basically everything that Mathew Rainnie said in his [[Compass]] review is true.

Sunday morning we grabbed breakfast at The Wired Monk, stopped at Pete’s Frootique in Bedford on the way out of town, made a perfectly-timed run for the ferry back to the Island, and were back home by supper time.

The irony of all this? We spent the entire weekend inside the prescribed tourist zones and had lots of fun, thus calling into question my entire Mask Tourism philosophy.