Wow, everyone seems to be getting all… visual, all of a sudden. First Google buys Picasa, then CNET purchases Webshots. Needless to say, this is driven by the growth in broadband access along with the further development (and price-lowering) of digital cameras and cameraphones.
Along the same lines, Dick Costolo of FeedBurner turned me on to an interesting deal his company did with photo sharing firm Flickr. (Flickr seems quite similar in mission to Picasa.) The gist of it is this: you can “splice” your blog’s XML feed with your Flickr public photos’ XML feed to create a unified entity. Subscribers can then follow your every little XML move — be it visual or textual.
As Dick said:
Basically, we’ve created a feed splicing service that allows
anybody with a flickr account to splice their public photos with their
blog’s rss feed so that they have one resulting feed with all their blog
posts and their public photos. It’s a request we’ve heard from a bunch
of people and we really liked the way the team at Flickr was innovating
around photo sharing, so there you are…
UPDATE2: Have just tried it out (http://feeds.feedburner.com/the-river/testblog is my playground) and it is really fascinating. It really brings the whole “the feed is the thing” reality to the fore. After all, your Web presence — blog, flickr public files, etc. — are completely separate, but on the feed… it all comes together. The mythical unified blogging tool will solve all these problems, of course, but until then….
UPDATE1. Also very interesting from the release:
The two also announced co-development of syndication namespace extensions for richer photo display and metadata. The draft specification is undergoing final internal review and will be published for public comment shortly. The namespace extensions will facilitate the emergence of next generation RSS clients that enable sophisticated display and sharing of photos.