Here they are, in five parts: Alaska07 pics. And here are a few shaky-hand youtube videos. The teaser image here is an ice cave underneath the Mendenhall Glacier outside Juneau.
Something I read in this month's Wired got me thinking of ways I could cut down on all that post-vacation photo labor. Wouldn't it be great if you could, say, put all 1500 of your vacation photos up on Flickr and have the hive mind of that established community tell you which 100 photos best represent the entire collection?
The article is worth reading, an interview with Luis von Ahn. Luis is the inventor of those squiggly/obscured strings of text used to prevent bots from setting up accounts for various online services. These are pretty darn useful for things like keeping communities legit (i.e., preventing spambots from overrunning Yahoo's game sites or craigslist's apartment listings). The device itself is called a CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Humans and Computers Apart), and they're starting to be used for productive side-projects as well, like having unassuming computer users decipher words that OCR systems can't parse.
Other projects von Ahn has worked on are more like games that get bored cube-jockeys and dorm-dwellers to put their time-wasting cycles to work tagging images for use by massive web search tools. There are a lot of applications of this kind of distributed human computation good for broad, gigantic projects, but I'm curious to see if anyone has ideas of how this can be good for me. The crux here, as the article explains, is trying to make the work something fun, that people will play on their own volition, without you having to, like, pay them. Hit me up with great ideas and/or VC cash any time. ;-)
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