One Shot Design

With 14 employees and an annual budget of € 2.5 million, Europe’s first joint digital library Europeana will open on Thurstay the 20th of November 2008. Users will for example be able to read Dante’s Divina Commedia, and view Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa or Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring.

The library, created to compete with Google’s Book Search, will initially feature 2 million of documents and works of Art that have fallen in the public domain. Europeana was built upon the expertise of France’s BNF (Bibliothèque Nationale de France), which opened a website in 2007 based on its experience with the 1996 Gallica project.

The European Commission plans to invest some € 120 million until 2010 and is calling for private companies to increase the resources and fasten the digitization of works.

UPDATE: upon official launch, Europeana overwhelmingly received more than 15 million hits per hour which ended up slowing down the servers. The Commission had the portal unplugged and plans to restore accessibility by mid-december. For more information, read the official press release.

Having lost my local data, I managed to recover all the pictures previously posted with their original Exif data on Flickr thanks to a nifty little application compiled for MS Windows called FlickrDown and developed by Greggman.

Greggman deserves a two thumbs up for the clever idea. The application allows to search Flickr image database based on some filters, like tags or user account name. Once identified, the full-size images can be batch downloaded. This can save one a lot of clicks and wait.

I speculate that Flickr is still leaving the “batch download” function out of the features because they probably prefer users not using the servers as temporary storage media. Which is sensible.

I give Greggman a five stars.

Recently I’ve started using other services besides Google Mail, such as Google Agenda, which allows me to publish a centralized calendar to which I can synchronize Evolution on Ubuntu and Sunbird on Windows Vista.

I noticed that Google also offers a Web Album service with Picasa, featuring a whopping 1 Gig of server space, free of charge. It seemed like a bargain compared to the annual US$ 24.95 I pay for my Yahoo Flickr Pro account, until I asked myself it the Picasa account really came with no strings attached.

A quick search led me across these posts, Why I can’t try Picasa Web Albums, written about 18 months ago; and Photographers! Beware of Facebook and Google’s Picasa!, written about 3 weeks ago. Basically, by uploading pictures on the Picasa server, you agree with the terms of use, thereby granting Google Inc. a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, adapt, distribute and publish in its sole discretion, even for some unspecified time after the content has been removed from their servers. It appears that content uploaded through Blogger.com is subject to the same terms, since the company is a property of Google Inc.

Here is the excerpt from Picasa’s Terms of Service, as of Feb 7^th 2008:

By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through Picasa Web Albums, you grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, adapt, distribute and publish such Content through Picasa Web Albums, including RSS or other content feeds offered through Picasa Web Albums, and other Google services. In addition, by submitting, posting or displaying Content which is intended to be available to the general public, you grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, adapt, distribute and publish such Content for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting Google services. Google will discontinue this licensed use within a commercially reasonable period after such Content is removed from Picasa Web Albums. Google reserves the right to refuse to accept, post, display or transmit any Content in its sole discretion.

Of course, there is the option of marking the content as “Unlisted”, which will keep it out of search results and make it only visible to your friends. But still, knowing that information, I think I’ll stick with my Yahoo Flickr account: Flickr’s policy is in fact way less blurry: they do endorse Creative Commons copyrights, which means you have the last say as to where and how your content may or may not be used.

Having failed to find any existing T-shirt template, I quickly made one based on a manufacturer specifications sheet using Inkscape. I hereby publish t-shirt_template.svg in the Public Domain.