Category Archives: Internet

Happy Birthday, Flickr!

Flickr turned 20 years old last weekend. While it may have lost some of its original lustre in recent years, Flickr was, is, and remains one of the prime sites for amateur and professional photographers alike. My recent photo digitisation project made me rediscover Flickr in a manner akin to meeting an old friend who had recently beaten cancer. Flickr has, meanwhile, returned to its core audience of enthusiasts and professional photographers after it was “saved” from the clueless clutches of corporate greed by a small operation named SmugMug. Continue reading

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Webris, netsam and the demise of Flash

“Webris and netsam” is a term I use to describe material and debris left over by internet-related tasks — you know, the kind of stuff you download during a specific project and hold on to in case you might need it later or because it’s too good to delete. Continue reading

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Offline, online, offline, online

No sooner had the ink of the previous post dried did the blog go offline for a day — at least that’s what the alert message said. A day later it came back, and then it went down again for three days. That was in August. And that was just the beginning of my troubles. Continue reading

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Meta blogging

Any housekeeping writing about how it’s been a while since you’ve written, or how you changed some obscure part of your blog, doesn’t tend to age very well and is seldom particularly compelling in retrospect. The exception are genres like technical or design blogs, where the meta is part of the message. But certainly the world doesn’t need any more “sorry I haven’t written in a while” posts. Continue reading

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Something is weird about YouTube

“YouTube’s algorithm is easy to game. It’s a system that rewards creators for figuring out what works, and then doing that same thing over and over again.” Continue reading

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Happy Birthday!

Here’s another anniversary. This site, hmvhDOTnet, is ten years old. Having an own site (read: domain and hosting space) has been a dream since I first ventured online. It’s the culmination of several past projects, current interests, and future endeavours. It’s my man cave where I get to share old geek stuff and express random thoughts and conspiracies with near-reckless abandon to an imaginary audience. Continue reading

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15 years at Discogs

So today is my 15th Oggsday. I’ve been a member of discogs.com for a decade and a half. It has become as much a part of my daily online regimen as checking my email or Twitter feed. No other site has grabbed my attention in the way that Discogs has, nor has any other online resource infuriated me in the same manner. Discogs is as fascinating as it is frustrating. Now, if this sounds somewhat familiar, then you’d be right: I used a similar introduction for my 10th Oggsday. Read that article first to gain insight into how it all began and how things developed during my first decade there. What’s happened since? Which features and improvements have been introduced? Continue reading

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Evacuating MySpace

Would those of you who still use MySpace please stand up? Well, it’s been a while since it was the poster child of the burgeoning social media scene — back when we all had a friend named Tom Anderson and there was tons of new and free music to be discovered there. MySpace was the cool place to hang out. Continue reading

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