On March 22nd and 23rd I attended the OSCMS Summit which was held at the Yahoo Campus in Sunnyvale. A friend from Boston flew out and we drove down together. The conference, true to the open source community, was without cost. Yahoo was very generous and lunch was provided on both days, not to mention enough caffeine to keep the developers going.

I was impressed with the breadth and the depth of the topics. The people were very pleasant and supportive of each other in their endeavours and skill levels. I learned a lot and I am excited about continued participation in the community. Considering the conference itself did not cost a penny for its participants, it was quite spectacular.

I believe the next one will be in Barcelona next fall. That would be a fun trip. Who knows, maybe I will see you there! Check out the summit web site for topics covered. There were people video taping each session too, but I have not chased those down yet.

Other qualities I want for this job include: Easy to use, simple clean results (not ugly!), and if possible, FREE. Well, my quest is over. JAlbum, where have you been all my life? I have looked at plug-ins for Dreamweaver, php web based solutions, Flash with XML file solutions, desktop applications that generate files for the web (JAlbum fits into this category), photoblog solutions, and Content Management System solutions.

JAlbum is a great tool for free, with lots of customization possibilities and several skins included. You can design your own skin or customize a pre-made skin. To use the program, you just drop your files on the space provided and configure how you want your images to be presented on the web, and then create the album. Later, if you want to add or take away, or rearrange pictures, you just open the JAlbum file and make your changes and save the album again. That is it.

You can go to the JAlbum site and download the program for yourself. I will leave a link for it in my links on the right. Thanks JAlbum crew for making such a great application available at an unbeatable price! Also, how often do you get to ligitimately post a picture of a frog on your web site?

You can see my new portfolio, created with JAlbum here, and my old portfolio site is still up and running too at www.williammead.com, but I will probably retire that site at some point.

This tool is used to take photos and quickly mark them up in such a way as that they can tell a story. You can spend as much or as little time as you want on photos, marking people, places and times. You can of course annotate photos if you like. From there the software takes over and you can select various filters to display just the photos of a particular person, or a particular place, or a particular time or any of the photos where any of these things intersect. You can pick two people and see only photos that have both of them, for example. Or pick a time and place and see what turns up. It will do things like fetch maps of places from the Internet, so you can put this stuff into that kind of context. You can then export stories to the web, create slide shows, etc.

At the price, this can’t be beat. But beyond this particular tool, it is this kind of context driven way of looking at information that is truly revolutionary. Can you imagine this on a grand scale?

The age of photography started over a century ago. Photographs were precious things. Then they became something that filled shoe boxes. Then iPhoto allowed us to have a digital shoe box. By applying context to the images and putting them in some sort of shared space, they could become an interconnected web rather than singular items. I wish I could be alive for another century to see what happens.

There is tons to look at and what is truly wonderful about the show, is so much of it can be touched. There are books, magazines, cd’s, posters and all kinds of other stuff. The show is intended to focus on what designers have been doing since the dotcom bust. The changes in media and methods and how we think about media that have happened in the past few years, which is a lifetime to a designer.

There is a lot of grungy, skateboard culture influenced sort of work in the show. And the work shown has a decidedly anti-establishment / anti-war / ultra left-wing sentiment attached to it, but it does speak volumes about where we have been for he past few years from a particular point of view.

Currating this show must have been maddening. Not only because of the sheer quanity of stuff, but also the variety coupled with the small space to put it all in. They did an amazing job, and the materials promoting the show, such at the poster, and postcard were striking in their design as well. You can check out the web site for the show here