I’m on my way to Germany today, so it’s timely that I come across this post on the development seed blog:
This week Flickr greeted its new international audience with a surprise: radical censorship. Originally I planned to write about how wonderful it was that Flickr added multilingual support for seven more languages. I was going to predict that its number of users and photos would quickly explode. That was before Alex clued me into the buzz from the German Flickr community, people who have been blocked from accessing a good chunk of Flickr’s content.
To access all content on Flickr you need to sign in with a Yahoo! ID. And now if you’re Yahoo! ID says you’re from Germany – or Singapore or Hong Kong or Korea – you’re blocked from accessing “moderate” and “restricted” photos. Because of the country you live in.
I am also heartily against censorship, and join the ranks of the noisy Germans in calling for an end to censorship on Flickr. May Yahoo respond quickly and find it in their hearts to reverse this decision!
This incident is a reminder also that we need to keep in mind that Flickr and other powerful Web 2.0 sites are not merely appliances that we can expect to continue using forever as we are using them today. Just yesterday I went looking for a tool to retrieve some of my favorite flickr photosets to copy onto my brand spanking new Sansa e250 mp3 player, and found that it was tricky to do so. Indeed Flickr does not offer a simple way to do it and you have to use a 3rd party tool that takes advantage of Flickr’s API.
Anyone attempting to visit saidia.org today most likely encountered some fairly hideous database connection errors. Pole sana = many apologies! Especially after asking a bunch of people on the DDN list to come and help me identify the best Open Source in Civil Society book. D’oh! It’s not too late - please come and add your suggestions.
In any case, it’s good to have the move behind me. I had been planning to move to a new server for a bit now but the timing was decided by some severe errors I was suddenly getting on the old server relating to posting comments and a bunch of other things. Now I’m happily moved to this ridiculously powerful Dreamhost server and I can’t wait to see how I will take advantage of the space and cool features. Let me know if you notice anything unusual after the move.
If there is one book that needs to be in the local public library on the importance of Open Source in Civil Society, what would it be? Add your comments to this post.
I am open to all suggestions - I just want to know why. Special points for books that talk specifically about Africa, and do a good job explaining what Civil Society is all about. The most suitable book will be purchased for the Bainbridge Island library by the local Rotary Club in my name, so I want to be able to read it and recommend it to friends and neighbors that want to know more about why I do what I do in Africa.
Update: as luck would have it, various things seem to be broken on my blog including commenting. I’m trying to fix it - in the meantime, please email me your suggestions and I’ll post them here later. Thanks!
Sorry for the confusion for those looking for this site earlier today and getting error messages or blank screens when submitting your comments. I had been planning to move saidia.org, but the errors I was getting at the old place this morning precipitated things. Please go ahead and add your book suggestions now!
Africa Source Photo: GNU/Linux loyalty. Photo by Frederick “FN” Noronha. Creative Commons. Attribution. Some rights retained. 2006.
I did a little flickr search for iphone today to see what folks are thinking and posting about the little gadget that has so hurt my feelings by coming with a $60 monthly plan at a time when I have no need - or budget! - for such a thing.
By far the coolest picture I came across is this Apple Evolution Timeline (click here to go right to the huge version). Not only did it make me nostalgic about burning my way through the yellow pages as a twelve year old, trying to find a good price on an Apple //e. That would have been an awesome upgrade from the Radio Shack TRS-80 we had, but sadly it was out of my price range. It also features the Apple Mac Classic my wife used all through college and which I am still hoarding in a box in the closet. The last time I turned it on it displayed a little blinking question mark on the screen - probably a dead hard drive. The macs we still use are a purple iMac G4 (for my five year old to tinker on), a 12″ Powerbook “Aluminum” G4 and an iMac G5.
Besides making me feel better about not having any prospect of ever owning an iPhone, this pic is actually really handy for me - over the years I have only been in contact with macs periodically, and I tend to forget when various macs were produced and also which ones to avoid. 
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