Sunday, April 26th, 2009
We just wanted to drop a quick note to our followers out there that we’ve been nominated for Innovative Excellence in the local VIATeC awards. This is a great honor for us, and a big step forward. It’s encouraging to see that we’ve been noticed in such a way.
See the nominee list here: 2009 VIATeC Awards Nominees
Congratulations to everyone else on the list. We’ll see you at the awards ceremony!
Sunday, April 26th, 2009
Google Trends is a great tool for doing research - perhaps not always scientific research, but hey, that’s why they call it ‘Trends’ instead of ‘Facts’… right?
A Google Trends comparison of ‘photo manager’ and ‘photo viewer’ shows how two somewhat similar terms have begun to converge over the years in how the public - consumers - understand this particular market we’re in. I would attribute this consumer change to the marketing practices of the many paid-for products in this market. Education of the public is a good thing - especially if it helps your position in the market too! Let’s take the words ‘image’ and ‘photo’. ‘Photo’, hands down, is the common term used to speak of the things that you get from your camera. ‘Image’ has more of a geek or techy vibe to it, but over the last few years, ‘image’ has become more or less synonymous with ‘photo’ in many cases. Personally, I think ‘photo’ will always be right for me…
What does this mean? Actually, not a whole lot. During the course of doing some SEO research, I came across this and thought I’d share. I hope you didn’t expect anything revolutionary! 
Thursday, April 2nd, 2009
I’ll keep this short, as I couldn’t possibly do a better job than this article over at TWIPPHOTO does at explaining the ins and outs of the mysterious histogram.
Thursday, April 2nd, 2009
A new part of the Snapact website revamp will include a ‘buzz’ page - the title may change, but we want to expose what people are saying about Snapact (including ourselves, of course).
We have plans to pull in data from blog aggregators and Twitter, to start with. We’ll display the most recent items on a www.snapact.com page for all to see. Not only do we want to be open about what people are saying, but we want to encourage ‘link love’ - having a blog posting that you’ve written appear on our buzz page will likely help your blog’s ranking, or that’s the general idea anyway.
We’ll be doing something similar for Twitter too - and likely, we’ll introduce further aggregation in the future. What do you think of this idea? Good or bad?
Monday, March 23rd, 2009
A little humor for your Monday:
This is a small jab at the web browser “Internet Explorer” - or IE for short. IE is not known for its stability, security, speed or standard-compliance. What does this mean? Using IE as your web browser tends to make you experience slow, error-prone web surfing. It also opens you up to downloading malware such as the occasional virus or spyware ‘product’. Viewing webpages can sometime be confusing as they don’t act as the web developer had planned for - layout can be broken. In fact, IE has an unfortunate, tasteless nickname: “Internet Exploder“.
As a web developer, I use around 5 different browsers for my testing, and still it’s hard to achieve a common look and feel between all of them. Those 5 are (in my current order of preference): Mozilla Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari and finally, Internet Explorer.
Now, to be fair, Microsoft, the creators of Internet Explorer have recently released a new version that will address many of the outstanding issues (but undoubtedly leave or create others), but it should be clear to users out there that there are indeed options, as I have mentioned above. I urge you to try a different browser - if only for the massive speed increase you’ll notice with ANY of the alternatives.
Wednesday, March 11th, 2009
Here’s a funny collection of photos that were found during some innocent internet surfing: birds stealing ice cream. Hilarious - yet somehow I believe that I would be saddened if it happened to me.
Monday, March 2nd, 2009
The team at Snapact has officially started to test and work out the kinks of the new Snapact Photo Sharing Online Community. It will take us some time to get it just how we want it, which has been based on both our observations of you, our users, as well as your direct feedback.
Once things stabilize, I’ll announce something a bit more specific about a time frame for public release.
Sunday, March 1st, 2009
First of all, DIY equates to “Do It Yourself”. The term applies to just about any topic, meaning instead of buying something pre-made, you can build it yourself from other, usually cheaper materials.
What’s a “flash diffuser”, you ask? It’s a simple object, usually made of translucent plastic, that fits over the ‘lit’ end part of your flash. I’ve only heard of them being used on external flashes, but I suppose you could DIY for a compact camera, if you were so inclined! Anyhow, they come in different colours so you can have varying lighting effects in your photos.
What’s the effect on photos? Well, instead of a harsh light reflecting off of walls and ceilings - which can cause a washed-out photo - it ‘diffuses’ the light from the flash. Diffusion is generally considered making the light softer by intercepting the light as it travels and reflecting some of it in different directions, so it isn’t all focused on the target of the photo. It helps to maintain pleasant skin tones in people, for example.
Now to the DIY part of this article - which helpfully points to a great photo tips website. Read the original article for how to use an airline barf bag as a diffuser!
Tuesday, February 24th, 2009
The team at Snapact likes to find neat little tricks that you can do with your camera - and I’d like to present the first on on this blog: Create your own “bokeh”. http://www.diyphotography.net/ has put together a nice little description of what a bokeh is, how it applies to your camera and lastly - examples! What a neat effect!
Bokeh defined:
“Bokeh is an adaptation from a a Japanese word meaning blur. In photography this term is used to describe the quality of the areas in the picture which are not in focus.”
Monday, February 23rd, 2009
The Photojojo Store is somewhat unique in that it has a very photography-focused inventory for people to select through - it is sort of like Thinkgeek, but oriented to photographers only. Some very neat and handy stuff there - I, for one, would love to have a MonsterPod!
You can follow Photojojo on Twitter too.
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