I've got Flickr set up to send me email when an image gets a comment or added to someone's favourite page. At some point on Saturday afternoon I started getting lots of messages - and the view count on one picture started going ballistic. From the few hundred views it had garnered over the last three years or so, it was suddenly gaining tens of thousands of views an hour.

Strange, I thought, and went back to looking for a decent pair of trousers in an outlet mall near Palm Springs.

By evening views and comments were still marching in, so I delved into the delights of the Flickr stats pages to find out just what had happened. As far as I can tell, at some point on Saturday morning, someone found the picture and posted a link to it on Reddit. That then led to it being added to Digg - and then for some reason people kept Digging it - over 2000 Diggs last time I looked. On a slow Saturday that was enough to get it on the front page, and that led to an explosion of traffic.

By Saturday night, Flickr was telling me that the picture had had over 60 thousand viewings. By the middle of Sunday, it had attracted well over 100 thousand viewings. I'd heard that Digg drove traffic, but I'd never seen it happen to anyone I'd known before.

To put the Digg Effect into perspective, my most popular Flickr image, which had been picked up by popular blogs (including Boing Boing, Engadget and Lifehacker) has only just past the 150 thousand view mark, and that's been over four or so years. The Digg front page has driven around 140 thousand separate people to that image in just over 48 hours - and almost 100 thousand of them came in one 24 hour period.

It's late on Monday now, and things are winding down at last. Something else has caught the attention of the Diggerati, and my picture is slowly falling off the zeitgeist radar. It's been an interesting ride to watch.

The picture?

It's actually kind of apt. No one would have seen that picture if it hadn't been for the machine I'd photographed all those years ago, in an acrylic case in a museum at a scientific research establishment on the Swiss-French border.



The place was CERN, and the computer I'd photographed was Tim Berners Lee's NeXT Cube, the first ever web server. Neither Flickr, nor Digg (nor this blog) would be here if it hadn't been for that machine and the server it hosted.

What comes around, goes around.

Google has just opened up access to the development builds from the updater tools inside the Chrome browser (you could download always download dev builds from the Chrome site, or build your own copy of Chromium...). You can download a small tool, the Chrome Channel Chooser, to define which branch of the Chrome development tree the built-in updater uses - the slow but stable beta branch, and the fast, but risky, dev channel.

Me?

I'm going for dev. I kind of fancy the ride.

Managing a large digital music library can be tricky. Often the album art is missing - and it can be hard to track it down and drop the right image in to your music management tool of chouice. Some, like iTunes, will download images from their associated stores - but they're by their very nature limited to what's in stock. The result is a significant proportion of the library without any cover art.

This afternoon I found a useful tool in the shape of AlbumArt. It's a very basic service that's nothing more than an album art search engine. It's generally accurate, and very easy to use. The only things it's had trouble with so far have been self-issued albums by bands like Marillion, magazine cover CDs, and some compilation albums (which is probably more down to my initial data entry than anything else!).

Recommended.

Once of the reasons I've not been blogging much over the last few days is that I've been getting my head around building Silverlight Deep Zoom applications. It's a surprisingly easy to use technology, and the Deep Zoom Composer tool makes it relatively easy to create the image tiles and pyramids you need to create a smooth zooming experience. It's what the Hard Rock Café has used for its absorbing Memorabilia site.

The only real problem is that Silverlight 2 currently only supports a limited set of mouse actions - and the mouse wheel isn't there. Luckily I found some code from one the Expression team that solved my problem (though I did manage to learn about using C# anonymous delegates as event handlers along the way...). That's what really took the time, but it's given me an application that doesn't need a key press - just a mouse. Click and drag to move around, and scroll to zoom in and out.

[Edit: I've added code to zoom in on a mouse click and to zoom out on shift-click]

So what did I do with what I learnt (apart from writing 3,300 words of magazine tutorial)? As it happens I have a pile of images from a trip down into the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. A collage stitch of my images of the ATLAS detector, down in its cathedral-sized cave, comes in at a hefty 28 megapixels - a little large for Flickr or any other photohosting site. However that's ideal for building a Deep Zoom.

Here's the application I built.

Zoom in and you'll see the engineers at work, and read the text on the eight superconducting magnets that surround the detector core. I've seen things in there I didn't realise were there at first!

I missed yesterday's news of Cisco's purchase of WebEx. When I came across it on various news sites this morning it gave me something to think about - something I turned into quite a long piece over at IT Pro.

This week has seen duelling green policies from both sides of the political spectrum. One thing they all seem to agree on: air travel is a bad thing, and it needs to become more expensive. Putting the rights and the wrongs of the argument to one side, it's likely we'll see a significant increase in the cost of business travel over the next few years.

So how are we going to cope?

The answer's been with us for a while, and Cisco is now putting its money on the table to link the solution's market leader with its networking equipment. Web conferencing has been around a good few years now, and WebEx and its competitors (like Adobe Connect and Microsoft's Live Meeting) have grown by offering tools to help businesses share information over the Internet. WebEx's investment in what it calls its MediaTone network has been considerable, giving it a hefty private backbone for bandwidth-intensive services - and a hefty advantage over its competition.

Read the rest here.

The other morning the postman tried to deliver a couple of parcels. This morning I walked down to the Post Office to pick them up. There were two, identical cardboard boxes that were quite large, but very light. I opened one and found a giant (and I by that I mean really really big) paper clip. Oh, and a URL.

Who'd sent it and why?

I went to the web page, and just got a teaser announcement for something due at the beginning of March.

So time for a little detective work. My favourite online Whois service came up with a domain owner, and Google quickly found their site. There was a list of clients, many familiar, and one new one.

I suspect the newest client - the font on the web site looks like one of theirs - but I can't be sure. I guess I'll find out in a few days when I get a followup email or phone call.

With the tools around I wonder how difficult it is to run a teaser campaign like this. You'd have to know that it's easy to find out that you set up the domain (in fact I was surprised that it was in a company name - I'd thought that a simple cut-out by having a member of staff register it in their name should thwart most look-up attempts), and you'd have to know that the client list on your web site would be the first place that someone would look...

Need a design font? This archive of free and shareware fonts has pretty much anything you'll need...

Categories include "Fancy", "Techno" and "Gothic".

Dafont.com

The Royal Mail's online stamp service has got a little easier (and cheaper).

Go online, buy some postage (which has to be used by the end of the next day), print out the resulting labels, stick them onto an envelope and post.

You can even use a credit card for less than £3.50's worth of postage...

Useful. And no need to subscribe to the old system.

The latest nifty tool from Flickr tools site Flagrant Disregard is just right for blog profiles or home pages. The imaginatively-named "Profile Widget" is a remotely hosted image that updates itself hourly, with pictures and statistics from your Flickr photostream. As it's a hosted image, it doesn't need any scripting support - so will work with LJ's restricted HTML set quite happily.

Here's mine!



Widgets can be horizontal, vertical, or compact, and can use any of a mix of recent and random images.

If you use Flickr, stick one in your profile now!

Pop along to IT Pro, where you'll find my round up of hosted CRM solutions (amongst lots of excellent content).

Congrats to Chris and the team for the launch!