There’s a spot above Killarney — Aghadoe Heights — where there’s a terrific view of the lakes.
Not surprisingly, it’s where the wedding parties go for the obligatory photoshoot.
Flickr version here.
Monthly Archives: October 2010
Tilly
A Flickr of interest
This morning’s Observer column.
At a Royal Society symposium on web science this week, Tim Berners-Lee let slip an interesting observation. Many people, said the web's inventor, no longer make a distinction between Facebook and the web. My guess is that these people are mainly teenagers – those whose experience of cyberspace is coloured by the fact that the first thing they encountered online was social networking. They started with Bebo and MySpace and then graduated to Facebook. And there they have stayed.
So, for them, Facebook is where it's at. That explains why they no longer use email, for example, except – grudgingly – to collect official communications from school or college. Most of their electronic communications are routed either via text messaging or Facebook updates. Almost all teenage party invitations now come via Facebook, which has also become the logbook of their lives. When it was announced a couple of weeks ago that Flickr, the photo-hosting site, had hosted its five billionth picture, someone pointed out smugly that Facebook already has over three times that number…
The antisocial movie
Jeff Jarvis has been to see ‘The Social Network’. He didn’t like it. Here he explains why.
The Social Network is the anti-social movie. It distrusts and makes no effort to understand the phenomenon right in front of its nose. It disapproves—as media people, old and neonew, do—of rabblerous or drunk or drugged-up or oversexed masses doing what they do. Ah, but its fans will say, it’s really just a drama about a man. But that’s where it fails most. It can’t begin to explain this man because it doesn’t grok what he made—what he’s still making “We don’t even know what it is yet,” Zuckerberg says in the movie, “It’s never finished”.
The Social Network is the anti-geek movie. It is the story that those who resist the change society is undergoing want to see. It says the internet is not a revolution but only the creation of a few odd, machine-men, the boys we didn’t like in college. The Social Network is the revenge on the revenge of the nerds…
Bang on cue, here’s the WSJ [old media] piling in to make Jeff’s point. The paper just loves the movie. “The film’s substance”, it gushes,
lies mainly in its convoluted tale of vast ambition—an ambition oddly disconnected, in Mr. Zuckerberg’s case, from a desire to make money—spectacular success and bitter betrayal. Not since “Apollo 13” has a mainstream motion picture conveyed so much factual as well as dramatic information with such clarity and agility. First Mark moves beyond—or pilfers the intellectual property of—three upperclassmen who’d approached him for help on a website they called Harvard Connection. Later the newly-minted young magnate has a painful falling out with Facebook’s original business manager, Eduardo Saverin: he’s played with great subtlety and rueful charm by Andrew Garfield, who’ll be seen as Peter Parker in the next “Spider-Man.” While the movie’s prevailing mood is excitation—hardly a moment goes by when someone isn’t having a brilliant idea—its dominant mode is litigation, thanks to one suit on behalf of those Harvard upperclassmen, and another brought by Eduardo.
Dave Winer went to see the film. His typically sensible notes are here.