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Google Plus, Google+? Both seem to fine, though I expect that the + sign will win the day and G+ will become the norm. Whatever, it's clear when all is considered that G+ will not go the route of Buzz and be an embarrassment to Google. This time, it seems they've got it right. Perfect? No but give it chance, it's still in beta. Even so, over a billion items (such as photos and videos) have already been "shared" and uploaded to this new social network. Considering G+ has been in open beta for little more than three weeks, that's pretty impressive. A cross between Facebook and Twitter — my opinion — once fine-tuning and a refined featureset is in place it's going to explode when it's finally unleashed to the public at large.

Currently there is no business option, like Facebook's Pages but this is only a matter of time and thousands of businesses are already exploring how they can use it with just a standard Google Account. Imagine a more flexible version of Facebook with no 140 limits imposed by Twitter, with the sensible ability to allow people to "follow" you, like Twitter, without the need for a reciprocal "friend" arrangement forced by FB. "Circles" bests Twitter's Lists and facebook's Groups, and the photo gallery feature is first class and, from my persepective, only bettered by that of Posterous. (My own photography portfolio, hosted on Posterous, can be seen here: http://www.portfolio.gregwallis.net )

While there's no need to rush headlong into Plus at the current time, it won't be long before small business needs to, and the best tine to start playing with it and understanding its possibilities is right now. Anyone who requires a G+ invite can email or message me and I'll send one straight out: gregwallis@gregwallis.net

By the end of 2011, the three major social networks will be Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. That's likely to be it (I doubt the market can stand another one) and there's an urgency to not only embrace all three, to maximize marketing potential, but also to actually understand them and why they're different. It only takes a few minutes every day to post short updates on each; time needn't be an issue if you work smart. So G+ is the new kid on the block but don't underestimate it, it'll be bigger than a lot of industry pundits wish to admit.

https://plus.google.com/u/1/112494069482592479384

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Finally, I sorted out a creative portfolio. Never really sure what to include in a showcase so I decided to categorize it and have uploaded images that I think most represent my personal photographic style. I'll update this from time to time and am always happy to receive comments. The only answer as to where I should put it was on Posterous and using the built in gallery feature, which was so simple to set up and a breeze to update.

http://www.portfolio.gregwallis.net/

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This candid shot of a father kissing his baby son is tender and poignant. Captured quickly with manual focusing and guestimated exposure, I've cropped it to to a square aspect (visually corrected to 11:10) and given it a delicate monochrome treatment.

Another shot taken in Greenwich Park, London, this April on an amazingly sunny day, it just shows how many photographic opportunities are out there if we just have a camera in our hand.

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Once, a few years ago now, from the nascent photo sharing market was thrown Flickr. It was different, refreshing, and very much the modish choice for the IT in-crowd; simply, it was outstandingly cool. Then it grew and grew, many things changed and it finally came out of beta. Never intentioned for professional and business use — even, weirdly, with a Pro and paid-for account — features were added, complexity grew and, worst of all, it got bought out by Yahoo.

Now lots of professional photographers use it to display their work, but run the risk of account deletion should some jobsworth at Flickr HQ decide it was being used for promotional purposes. And this has happened, and not infrequently, either. For the amateur and enthusiast Flickr is a great choice and the basic and free account is a sensible option, but I'm looking at this from a pro and semi-pro viewpoint.

In terms of page load speed, things seemed to have slowed down. The graphical look can't be customised in any way, though as it's not meant for anything other than amateur use this can perhaps be forgiven. But it's looking decidedly old-hat, now. I'm also concerned that having a Flickr stream, professionally, may well devalue the images and the photographer in the eyes of potential clients, though that may be stating the obvious.

Are there any decent alternatives? Yes, unquestionably. A parallel photo sharing service is the little known French site Ipernity. In many ways far superior to Flickr and has seen droves of former (and ususally disgruntled) Flickr members setting up shop on a more flexible though similar platform. Although very much worth a look and with a closer-knit and very friendly community, it still has the same downsides to public photo sharing but nevertheless it's fast, free (with a paid option that I've yet to see the point of) and reliable. It's also partly customisable, though not to the degree that most people would wish and often seems unfinished (it still carries a beta tag). But it also has one fab feature that seems unique: you can upload mp3 audio files that can then be used as a soundtrack for a full-screen slideshow and is probably the best of its kind anywhere, and this alone makes it a bit of a sexy choice. It's a hidden jewel and very worthy of consideration.

Professional alternatives? Many. But I've never been happy with any of them, not until I discovered SmuMug. No free account, which is likely a good thing, and three paid-for options which can either be settled annually on monthly, with one naturally being cheaper. SmugMug rocks. I'll say that again, SmugMug ROCKS. No, it's not perfect, it's a little clunky in some aspects, confusing in others. But it can be completely customised, have domain name URLs pointed at it and has an incredible user community for help and advice. It's aimed at the marketing of photographs and if you're in the US this would work brilliantly. As I'm in the UK, it doesn't have the same attraction and I don't wish to sell my work that way, either, so that's fine.

And if you're into video streaming, and want your productions to be embeddable in a web page without branding, then SmugMug is the best choice I've ever seen. Their Flash based player is brilliant, attractive, simple to configure and streams HD video like lightning. Oh yes, and with no bandwidth and usage limits, either. YouTube is fine, but for those requiring a more polished and professional option, SmugMug rules.

Although I've only skimmed over what's on offer, and I'll probably write more in-depth reviews at a later date, the two best alternatives to Flickr are — in my humble opinion — Ipernity (the free one) and SmugMug (the paid one). Me? Oh, I have both.

Here's an example of Ipernity's slideshow, showing a collection of my monochrome images with soundtrack. Just check out how quickly this loads:

http://www.ipernity.com/doc/gregwallis/album/193028/show

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I was in Greenwich Park, at the top by The Royal Observatory, when I saw this very happy couple, and I managed to catch them unawares with a longish lens that was wide open. Although the bokeh doesn't show too well, because I've processed this image for maximum skin effect, it was decidedly striking in the original image. I might attempt to redo it, if I think I can still get the image as effectively striking.

Taken with a Pentax K10D, old and trusty 135mm SMC lens, and a x2 teleconverter, which although not technically outstanding I seem to have fallen in love with. Both exposure and focus were completely manual, which in theses days of complete automation is decidely tricky once you're out of practice.

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Caught with an old 135mm Pentax SMC lens with x2 teleconverter, this was hurriedly focused and exposed manually, and has been processed to give a very cinematic look and feel.

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Imagine the scenario: a contact sends you mail, resends it and you still haven't got it. You doubt them, they doubt you. For the umpteenth time you check Gmail's Inbox, the Priority Inbox, and the Everything Else section. Nothing. So if it hasn't gone into Spam, then your contact hasn't sent it, right? Wrong. Here's what can happen if you use Labels and Filters.

Labels are a great idea, no question. A "soft" form of folder that doesn't actually exist but is a list of mail that's had a name tagged to it. Makes sorting your mail easier, simpler, and theoretically visually quicker to access. And to take advantage of a Label, you apply a Filter to it, so that emails from yournicefriend@wotever.com conveniently all pile up in one place where they can be seen instantly. Now this works fine, but occasionally you'll want to rearrange the way you have your personal system organized and may well delete a Label, thinking (wrongly!) that mail that would previously have been directed to a specific Label location would then simply appear in Gmail's Inbox.

Sadly, this won't occur unless the Filter that was originally applied to the Label (are you still with me?) is deleted, too. Failure to do this will see mail from your beloved contact appear to be undelivered. Oh it's there. Hasn't gone missing — and Gmail can't be blamed for losing anything — but it's routed directly to the All Mail section. Not in your Inbox (logical), not in Priority Inbox (reasonably logical if mail has regularly come from a particular address), and as All Mail is hidden by default you'd be unlikely to check it, surely?

This is what I experienced with two people, who swore they sent me mail and I swore I hadn't received it. So if you're using Gmail and have Labels and Filters organised, do make sure that when you delete a Label that any corresponding Filter associated with it is deleted as well. Mail will then be put in your Inbox as expected and your cyber-world will be as it should be, rather than being cast into mail-hell.

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Quietly and unannounced Google has added a much needed feature to its horizontal navbar element from within Google Sites: Horizontal navigation drop-down menus. Quite why these weren't included in the initial roll-out of the horizontal menu earlier this year isn't clear, but this new feature is much welcome and very needed by anyone that has more than a handful of pages to their site.

Somewhat rudimentary, it nonetheless adds an extra dimension to site navigation and bolsters the argument for the use of Google Sites, particularly in a corporate environment. Background colour and text colour of the dropdown menus are changeable so that they'll fit the site's colour scheme but there are a couple of issues that should have been addressed.

See the full gallery on Posterous

Firstly, the background colour is just one solid block of colour (albeit with a 1 pixel white border around the whole submenu, which is helpful to visually separate it from underlying content) but with no border per item that would have allowed greater visual clarity and a more polished look. Secondly, the hover colour can't be set and is inherited from the main horizontal menu, which is fine except that if you wished the dropdown to have a complimentary colour scheme (say a black background with white text, if the main menu had a white background with black text) then the menu item, when moused over, will then disappear from view — which means, in reality, that the colours of the dropdown have to be similar to those of the main menu. Not a huge drawback but one that could easily have been rectified with a little thought beforehand. 

However, it's very nice to see that there is a small time delay when the mouse moves away from the dropdown menu. Probably only 300 milliseconds, but it makes the submenu very user-friendly. A nice touch, even though it's not programmable. So the good news is that a much needed feature has been added and one that is simple and quick to implement, and I shall be using it right away with client sites.

But... this is Google and not some backstreet developer working in his spare time, so resources should not be a problem, and it beggars belief that progress is so slow and clunky. It's also worth noting that a couple of weeks ago a very strange thing happened to the horizontal menu in Google Sites; the "Horizontal navigation selected text colour" option simply stopped working. Not just on my sites but across the whole of Google Sites. Google staff wrote on a help forum that a bug had occurred but plainly this was because they were introducing the new dropdown menu feature (which necessitated new code) and were covertly beta testing across the whole of the Sites' system. Why would any professional IT team do that? It does seem that the team that works on Google Sites is either not full-time or they have no one to really answer to, as the potential of this feature of Google Apps is enormous but is almost overlooked by Google itself, and is certainly looked down upon by web professionals who just aren't aware of what's on offer.

With better IT management, better marketing, and a more mature product, Google Sites could take on the corporate web sector and make a massive gain on the competition. Why isn't this the case? I don't know either.

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A new audio podcast, 3 1/2 minutes long, and a simple take on the many advantages of using Posterous to blog.

Podcast-WhyUsePosterous.mp3 Listen on Posterous

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Most of my photographs I like to imagine as still frames from a movie; it's one of the main reasons I favour a 21:9 aspect ratio (the nearest equivalent to Panavision's 35mm anamorphic cinema ratio of 2.39:1). There's something about a proper widescreen aspect that gives an illusion of there being more rather than the logical assumption that, being letter-boxed, there's less.

In this particular shot, the colours really lent themselves to a deeply cinematic treatment where saturation and brightness are lowered and contrast is raised, to attempt to replicate the native look of 35mm movie film. The warm and strong orange light from the sun, on a hot summer's day, was just perfect for tweaking in post-processing. A delicate vignette was added to aid the idea of a really old lens being used and (as always!) no HDR.

The subject matter is slightly amusing, I'm not too sure what was going on but the woman appeared to be about to eat the man's finger, and this is a typical example of how innocent movements in the course of every day life can, if freeze-framed, be pulled out of context and given a completely new meaning; such is the power of the camera.

Shot with my reliable Pentax K10D (soon to be replaced), and a 135mm SMC prime lens I bought in 1985 which still works exceptionally well, though on this occasion coupled to a cheapish x2 teleconverter to allow me to stand 60-80 feet away and capture moments like these undetected — one of the difficulties of candid photography.

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Right, this may sound a little strange, but why use WordPress for my main website and then use Posterous for the actual blog? Yes, it sounds odd, but there are good reasons. Whilst WordPress is turning into an all singing CMS solution that's hugely configurable, it's also not the most elegant solution for quickly putting audio, video, and documents online at the drop of a hat. Which is where Posterous comes in. Though e-mail was touted as the favoured and easiest method to get content on to a Posterous blog, now that the "Post by web" option has been implemented it's even easier.

If I want to blog I want things to be fast, simple, and easy. That way there's no halt in any creative process and I can maximise my effective use of time. And Posterous seems to fit the bill here, perfectly. And the way I decided to integrate it into my website works along the same lines. Firstly I set up a DNS account with ZoneEdit, which was simple and FREE. Then I set up a Google Apps acount for the domain, which was simple and FREE — here's a pattern forming here. Then I set up (and I know you're with me) an account with Posterous (yes, which was simple and FREE). Using ZoneEdit's control panel I created a sub domain (blog.gregwallis.net) that I pointed at Posterous's servers and then linked that domain to my blog in the Posterous admin page. All super simple, everything worked, and completely free of charge. Sure I pay for hosting the main site separately, because it's a WordPress installation running on Linux, but that's about it. And it's worth noting that Google almost instantly crawls the site and ranks it. It really is close to a perfect solution.

For those that are on a very tight budget (and no shame in that) the addition of the new Pages feature that Posterous has just added, it's possible to have a small and streamlined website for absolutely zero, apart from the cost of the domain name itself. All that's required for an extra professional gloss is the modification of an existing theme to give the site a corporate identity. Now if you look at this blog you'll notice that there's no mention of Posterous except in the footer, where I have provided a link to the main Posterous site by way of courtesy and so as to not fall foul of their terms & conditions.  Not that I wish to hide the fact that it's run on Posterous(you'll have gathered by now I'm somewhat enamoured with it) just I hate the fly-out branding at the top of the page that is pretty much normal. Quite easy to modify and they still get a credit.

This works for me, and I think it would work for a lot of other people too, particularly very small or part time businesses. Simplicity is the key, and all too many people get carried away with the idea of building a huge flashing online presence, but I humbly suggest that starting small and simple is the best way to go.

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So I thought I'd have a play with the cloud and signed up for Amazon's S3 "simple storage service". Easy registration, nice and quick, too. Downloaded Cloudberry Explorer and logged in to the system. A few files were uploaded, a few downloaded and links tested left, right, and centre. All worked perfectly, I was most impressed.

But how much was it really going to cost? I mean the amount that actually appeared on my credit card and not some under-estimated sum that someone in Amazon's marketing department thought they could just about get away with quoting. No minimum amount was being bandied about and after a few Google searches I couldn't find anything to doubt that. So I uploaded some more, including some HD video, and nervously looked at the Total Charges Due section on the Amazon AWS website. 5 cents. Yes, you did read that right, just $0.05 as the anticpated cost for the whole month. I was doubtful and come the end of the first month awaited the real world bill that was going to pop up on my card.

Nothing. Nothing happened: no charge, no demand for payment, nothing. Except that looking at my online statement there was a note in red on it that said I was forgiven: "Amount forgiven June 4th $0.05 " And the same the next month. Confused, I Googled. Turns out that a lot of credit card providers won't accept an amount that's under $1.00 so although Amazon try to bill me, they can't. Personally, I'd have been happy for them to let it accrue or to charge a nominal sum up front and deuct it from that, but no, that's not what they do. So, it appears, that until I seriously ramp up my using of the Amazon S3 service, by a factor of twenty, then it rather seems that it's free. How odd, but how wonderful, too.

Feel free, Amazon, to find a way to take my money (I have PayPal, but you don't take that, do you) but until you do I'm most happy with S3 and shall continue to use it with your compliments.

Update:

Amazon eventually got cross and threatened to delete my account for an outstanding balance of approximately $0.10. So I made a manual payment using the same card that they'd been unable to collect from and now it seems there's no problem as either rules have changed or my credit card company is now playing ball — so now the monthly payment is working fine, which is a situation I much prefer. Even from smallscale business usage, I've yet to pay more than $0.12 in any one month. As IT costs go, this one's bearable!

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With the best will in the world, I meant to keep this blog up and running, with new (and hopefully interesting) snippets about various issues on web design, photography, and video production. Many issues have come between me and this objective but I shall now make a concerted effort to produce a regular contribution that will, hopefully, be of some use to a few people out there. So stay tuned, anyone that's interested, there's a fair bit coming over the next few weeks and months.

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I've been playing with the Twitter Times, an online news aggregator that tailors content specifically for Twitter users, and what it does is it looks deep into your Twitter followers and those you follow, checks out links etc. and then over a period of a day or two creates a continuously updated edition just for you. Very cool, and works rather well. Do check this out if the idea of focussed and relevant content is something you fancy.

My edition is here, you set your own one up in seconds:

http://twittertim.es/gregwallis

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Today's main story in The Independent highlights the appalling behaviour of police forces throughout the UK regarding the over-zealous and deliberate misuse of Section 44 of the Terrorist Act whereby the police can search and detain anybody without a required reason to do so. This grey and bizarre legal instrument has been directed at photographers, amateur and professional alike, for taking innocent photographs of everyday subjects.

Our civil liberties are being eroded in a deliberate and Machiavellian way to grant insidious authoritarian powers to limit our democratic rights. If we don't stand up, speak up, and put a fight up, then the process will be irreversible and we'll have succumbed, by stealth, to what is effectively the seeds of neo-fascism (and yes, I'm serious).

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/warning-do-not-take-this-picture-1833127.html

And if you are interested in maintaining your rights and fighting back using the power of peaceful protest, then also check out this new group who I wish much success and who facilitate a dialogue between the public and the police.

http://www.mypolice.org/

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Here's a great example of how Old Media needs to fight back and push the case for the simplicity, tactile delight, and practicality of physical media against the unnecessary complication of trying to replicate it in a digital environment. Digital's cool, sure, but physical (analogue) media such as newspapers, books, and magazines need to be embraced and supported to ensure their very survival and to avoid a fast approaching journalistic Armageddon.

Note to Rupert Murdoch: Stop this protectionist arrogance, and realize that charging for online content will never work, it will simply alienate people who will then neither visit your news websites nor buy your newspapers — they'll migrate elsewhere (and the Guardian Online is a likely destination in the UK). Simply make your newspapers better value, cheaper, and offer unique content, that will then be reason enough for ordinary people to buy a "daily" on a regular basis. It used to work; it still can. And yes, I know the above video is from News International, and I applaud them for it.

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How café life has changed. No longer a cup of tea and a fried egg sandwidge; but good coffee, a pannini, and a laptop. Yet another Caffé Nero candid. And I thought mono plus a little grain added a certain irony to the modernity. Cinematic 21:9 aspect and viewed best at full res.

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