Why I hate Flickr

Excerpted from a Flickr email sent to me today...

CNN: Vets pay tribute to fallen comrades at virtual Vietnam wall

Footnote.com ended up on the home page of CNN this afternoon (then migrated to the Tech section). It was an unexpected surprise, which kept us on our toes.

The story gathered ten Vietnam veterans at an American Legion Post 911 in Atlanta, Georgia to test the online Wall for CNN.com.

The bottom line: They say the new Wall gives a face to each of the names, and helps keep their memories alive. They have hopes it will help bring back those veterans who have yet to get back on their feet.

First 48 hours of The Wall

It’s been both surprising and humbling to observe how people have interacted with The Wall since it’s announcement on Wednesday.

After discovering some issues with our clustering providers and optimizing code on the site, we’ve been able to keep the site humming. It’s not easy to quickly serve up a 20GB image - one of the biggest, if not the biggest on the Web - to thousands of people anxious to explore and contribute to it.

Despite some hiccups at the start, we saw a remarkable ratio of visitors contributing highly compelling comments and photographs. Here are just a few:

The Last Footsteps

Soldiers on Hill #376 in Tam Ky (1969)

Tiger Hunting

Gary Lee Smith

The Wall on CNN

The Situation Room’s Abbi Tatton does a great job of summarizing the idea of The Wall.

Free Vietnam photos from Footnote and The National Archives

As part of the release of The Wall, Chris and Footnote.com are going to be making 1 million Vietnam era photos and documents from The National Archives for free.

Here’s a sample from the first 50,000 photos:

Launching The Wall

Today Chris and his team at Footnote announced with The National Archives the launch of their latest project: The Interactive Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

It’s a near full-size image - 20 gigabytes - where people can attach photographs, leave comments and read official military information on any of the 58,000+ names of those who lost their lives during the Vietnam conflict.

They are also providing for free newly digitized photos from military archives.

Sometimes the most obvious ideas are the hardest to see - and build. Here’s a sketch from Chris’s notebook the evening the idea struck him:

And a portion of The Wall photograph:

A key idea to making The Wall a unique experience was being able to let people connect documents and stories to any name. Here’s the original sketch of that concept:

The Wall took about 4 months to build and require the expertise of National Geographic photographer, Peter Krogh, and the tireless work of Darren Higgins.

Update: (26 March 2008: 7PM ET) The Wall story was picked up by AP, CNN and MSNBC, which has caused some site performance issues.

Update: (26 March 2008: 10:27PM ET) The Wall is working well and people are sharing.

Footnote goes first click free

Free. Free. Free.

On Footnote.com, you can now view any Premium image that has been Spotlighted or part of a recent Member discovery.

Premium images are historic photographs, documents or newspapers newly digitized from The National Archives and others.

Here’s a photo just discovered from our 50,000+ image archive of US WWII photos:

To view the full resolution image of this German bombing raid, go to its Spotlight page and then click on the image.

Speaking at We Media today: Start thinking like an anthropologist

I (Chris) just finished participating at the Developer’s World panel.

We could distill the message of that presentation (and our last eight years of focus) to this:

Start thinking like an anthropologist.

If you want to create the next big thing, it needs to connect with people in a powerful way.

To do that, you need to understand your customer/reader/audience in a new way. Surveys and focus groups have their place. But you need to feel their pain. You need to feel empathy.

The big challenge is then making sure your developers, designers and senior executives feel that pain, too.

Be less like Rupert Murdoch and more like Margaret Mead

How do you do this? That’s for another post but you can start now my observing friends, family and strangers behave with your product.

When you do make sure to: Ignore what they say. Watch what they do.

At We Media Miami today

Chris is blogging today and speaking tomorrow at 9:15 am at the Storer Auditorium at the University of Miami.

Updates (ET)

3:03 pm: Putting more decisions in the hands of patients requires helping them understand at least the right questions to ask, according to the cardiologist speaking, that’s empowerment.

3:01 pm: Lots of great questions from the crowd.

2:55 pm: Current political debate probably won’t solve it. Will heathcare companies stop being strictly providers but facilitate the conversations.

2:54 pm: Beware of blogging about your pre-existing conditions. Someday that might haunt you.

2:52 pm: A doctor on the panel says people are too distracted to accurately and thoroughly track their conditions and care. (But why should we be in charge of tracking that?)

2:45 pm: Audience brings up trust and privacy issues. Are we, as patients, just parts of a value chain.

2:20 pm: Humana’s Grant Harrison talks about making health more entertaining. Consumers are saying that health is about doing what you want to do in your life. Humana is looking at connecting customers together, mobile apps and games that encourage exercise by measuring sensors. One idea they are working on: A virtual you from the future that changes based on changes in your lifestyle and eating habits. (Difficult to embrace these idea fully without a better understanding of how they plan on resolving privacy and coverage issues.)

2:08 pm: Listening to a remarkable conversation where healthcare industry experts saying that We Media and storytelling are becoming critical components to solving problems in the world of health care. The shift is moving from authority to enabling dialogue and ultimately a collective voice.

Tapping into the Power of Participation

Here are the slides from my (Chris’s) part of Sunday’s NFAIS panel. It was a rare delight to have an instant rapport with such talented and diverse thinkers: Bryan “always on” Alexander from NITLE, Dr Jean-Claude Bradley, a Drexel chemist creating open-source cures for Malaria and our capable yet sassy moderator Sue Polanka.

Here is the annotated deck (Fixed. Thanks, Chris LaLonde! The last slide is extra. It was meant for Thursday’s We Media Miami talk) :