2010-01-14
post/334543782
“The Schienenzeppelin or rail zeppelin was an experimental railcar which resembles a zeppelin airship in appearance.” I may have posted photos of this thing before, but there’s something about the contrast of the high-tech machine and the old-fashioned clothing on the people waiting for it that’s wonderful. (via, via. Lesson learnt: when you see a historical image on ffffound or a similar design site, always check Wikipedia first; it’s probably from there.)
2009-08-09
Flash vs ffffound
Hey! Designers! You know how you like using Flash, because it stops people “stealing” your work?
It does mean all of the attention ends up on some other site where people know how to use command shift 4.
Oh yes, it also annoys people who want to link directly to the source.
I’m sure that’s what you wanted.
2009-06-05
post/118419051
Apollo 12 astronaut Charles “Pete” Conrad reflected in visor of Al Bean as he stands on surface of moon (via)
post/118416810
Apollo spacesuits; the pre-Apollo 7 fire one to the left, the post-fire one to the right (via)
2009-05-21
Internet Will Eat Itself
I’ve just noticed how much overlap there sometimes is between Tumblr’s recent popular page and ffffound. (upcoming popular seems more like LiveJournal. Who knew so many 18 year olds needed to post photos of fashion and whining about their exams?)
2008-12-09
ffffound / ddddownload
In a moment of procrastination, I noticed that ddddownload (previously) was at the top of the delicious home page (with 150+ links). Noting a mention of swissmiss, I saw her post about it, and this comment:
FFFFFound is a pretty lousy company as they disregard copyright laws. I know from experience; they’ve posted pictures of mine without any credit to me.
This new download only makes things worse.
I notice that “Olivia” doesn’t provide a URL, so I can’t tell who she is, or which images have been reused. However, ffffound have been known to do copyright takedowns, so presumably she hasn’t complained.
Personally, I think the easiest way to beat this is to be more open, not less. If you post your images in a Flash slideshow, but people still like them enough, they’ll just screengrab them and post to their own websites. When they end up on ffffound, the attribution chain (already meagre at best (previously) is completely broken. On the other hand, if you’d just made the image available, then there’s more of a chance that the bookmarks would point directly to your work on your site.
On the other hand, she probably has a point. As I said yesterday, ddddownload strips what little metadata there is on a ffffound image away entirely, leaving you with only image filenames. Please, general-projects, fix that. (Hell, I’ll even try and learn PHP if you can accept the coding help.)
Meanwhile, while I’m in one of my occasional ffffound posts, I’m pretty peeved at the practices of some of the big names in design blogging. Both swissmiss and fubiz now seem to crosspost every image to the site, which has a couple of nasty effects.
Firstly, swissmiss bookmarks from the front page, not the article page, so the link above the image is useless once the image is more than a few days old. (fubiz used to do this, but thankfully don’t any more.) This is all the more annoying as a more specific URL from a user that follows isn’t used in preference.
Secondly, ffffound’s automatic following system seems to be based on comparing who posts things (first? before? as well as?) that you also post. When you end up with a blogger tagged as one of your favorite users, that can drown the autogenerated “new for you” page with their posts, while your quieter, more interesting “real” peers suffer. Of course, the lack of any tools for editing followers means there’s nothing you can do to block them short of finding which images offend and removing them.
Even so, ffffound continues to be worth looking at for me, and given people still seem to be hunting for invites, they must be doing something right.
2008-12-08
post/63734285
Kind of self-explanatory. And before you ask, no, I don’t have any Ffffound invites. Ssssorry.
Someone seems to have taken the idea behind my ffffound mirroring scripts, added the ability to download the actual images (which is, admittedly, really handy), and wrapped them in a website (which is even more handy). Nice job. Shame about the slightly iffy anti-aliasing on the logo, but I really shouldn’t even mention that.
(No, I don’t have any invites either.)
Edit OK, now I’ve used it and have the zipfile, which is just a collection of the raw images, with an arbitrary timestamp (boo) and no index. Perhaps I’ll twiddle my script to generate some nice HTML so you can actually manage that folder of images more usefully. Still, it’s good to have an archive.
2008-11-27
post/61848424
In the wake of the Creative Review blog posting the British Design Classics set of stamps, designed by HGV for the Royal Mail next year, the ffffound hive mind is in full gear. (Not that I’m immune to the tendency, but I tend to limit myself to just one image from the set. After all, I can always go back to the original post.)
Anyway, how could I not love those stamps? Mind you, I do wish they’d used one of Beck’s diagrams, or at least a recent TfL map that doesn’t look far too cluttered when turned into a stamp. Still, that’s full-blown rant material. Best step away from the post editor.
