Summer is over and it’s time to deal with all the snaps vegetating in your digital camera or cameraphone. It is a fair bet that despite the weather, more photos were taken this summer than in any previous one, as a result of the explosive growth in digital cameras.
Hundreds of companies are falling over themselves to host your photos for nothing. There are three categories: Web sites offering many gigabytes of free storage, a raft of places dedicated to photos and videos, plus a new generation offering to archive your entire life online — if they are still there in 50 years.
In terms of numbers, photo-hosting is turning into a three-horse race with Yahoo’s Flickr, Google’s Picasa and Photobucket in the lead, each with around 40 million regular visitors, with ImageShack trailing in fourth place, ComScore figures indicate.
I am a Flickr fan and will stay for the moment because of its great community, but I have to admit the improvements Google will soon release for Picasa — a startup it bought a few years ago — are extremely impressive. There is a host of new features, but the scene stealer is image recognition. I uploaded 80 photos from the iPhoto collection on my Mac — Windows has even more features — to Picasa through the Export function. They all contained faces. Picasa scanned the images and presented them in groups of faces with similar patterns including many plucked from the background of a photo, ready for me to add a name or e-mail address. So in years to come, all the snaps of Granny Bertha could be culled from obscurity by a single search made by grandchildren.
But that assumes your host site will still be there in the next century — and even if it is, computers or formats may have changed so much that they will be inaccessible.
This issue, which the British Library’s Digital Lives project is addressing, is vital because numerous Web sites are in the pipeline, offering to become an archive or diary of your entire life. This offers the prospect of our lives being revisited 100 years hence not just by our descendants, but by historians who could have access to a cornucopia of information about the way we live today.
Some sites are UK-based, such as thetimesofmylife.org, soon to be launched in the Cabinet Rooms by that personification of nostalgia, Dame Vera Lynn. This is not your typical Silicon Valley startup. It has been devised by Mark Hickman, who until a month ago worked in a paint shop. It is not available for pre-launch testing but will provide a timeline diary, in which you can put up photos, video, text, etc of your entire life day by day, including interviews with relatives. It sounds like a more practical version of the sophisticated Oxford start-up miomi.com, which attracted a blaze of publicity when venture capitalists swarmed around it, but now just carries the message: “Service is currently unavailable.”
These UK start-ups face competition from the likes of dandelife.com and wiseline.com, which chronicles your life in one long “life graph” and can be embedded in Facebook or wherever.
The proliferation of lifetime diaries makes longevity a big issue. But there are some simple steps you can take to ensure your place in history. First, save all your files with a unique tag, such as john-smithwxyz so that someone could access them in theory 50 years down the line with a single search term. Second, save images in multiple formats, such as jpeg and tiff, in case one becomes obsolete. Third, create backups on the web — via the huge storage that Google, Yahoo, Microsoft etc offer for nothing — on your hard disk and/or an external storage facility, such as a hard drive, that plugs into your computer’s USB port.
Above all, there is surely an opportunity for a trusted independent archive, maybe an offshoot of the British Library, that would secure all our data and still be there decades from now for our families or historians to delve into. That discussion has barely started.
Two major Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-People’s Liberation Army (PLA) power demonstrations in November 2024 highlight the urgency for Taiwan to pursue a military buildup and deterrence agenda that can take back control of its destiny. First, the CCP-PLA’s planned future for Taiwan of war, bloody suppression, and use as a base for regional aggression was foreshadowed by the 9th and largest PLA-Russia Joint Bomber Exercise of Nov. 29 and 30. It was double that of previous bomber exercises, with both days featuring combined combat strike groups of PLA Air Force and Russian bombers escorted by PLAAF and Russian fighters, airborne early warning
For three years and three months, Taiwan’s bid to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) has remained stalled. On Nov. 29, members meeting in Vancouver agreed to establish a working group for Costa Rica’s entry — the fifth applicant in line — but not for Taiwan. As Taiwan’s prospects for CPTPP membership fade due to “politically sensitive issues,” what strategy should it adopt to overcome this politically motivated economic exclusion? The situation is not entirely dim; these challenges offer an opportunity to reimagine the export-driven country’s international trade strategy. Following the US’ withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership
Since the end of former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration, the Ma Ying-jeou Foundation has taken Taiwanese students to visit China and invited Chinese students to Taiwan. Ma calls those activities “cross-strait exchanges,” yet the trips completely avoid topics prohibited by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), such as democracy, freedom and human rights — all of which are universal values. During the foundation’s most recent Chinese student tour group, a Fudan University student used terms such as “China, Taipei” and “the motherland” when discussing Taiwan’s recent baseball victory. The group’s visit to Zhongshan Girls’ High School also received prominent coverage in
Late on Tuesday evening, South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol declared martial law. A BBC analysis cited as reasons the opposition parties’ majority in the National Assembly, their continued boycott of the national budget and the impeachment of key officials and prosecutors, leading to frequent government gridlock. During the years that Taiwan and South Korea traveled the road to democratization, our countries hit many potholes. Taiwan cannot return to the Martial Law era. Despite the similarities in our authoritarian past, Yoon’s political travails are far removed from the issues Taiwan faces. Yoon’s actions are a wake-up call to the world about
RSS