Atomique

Hibernation status

Published by Marian Dörk September 9th, 2008 in Announcements. Closed

I didn’t really find the time so far to continue my work on Atomique and I probably won’t be able to in the near future. The last thing that I added is a minor extension, that includes the geocoding of photos as shown on this demo page.

As Atomique is not the only project aimed at opening up the walled gardens of online communities and social networks on the Web, I would like to direct your attention to the following projects:

The idea of decentralized photo sharing is still in the back of my mind, however, I am currently involved with other things. If anybody of you wants to wake up Atomique, feel free to do so. Atomique is open source and available at its project page on CakeForge.

Technical demo at ACM Multimedia 2007

Published by Marian Dörk August 22nd, 2007 in Announcements. 0 Comments

At the end of September 2007 Atomique will be presented as a tech demo at the ACM conference on Multimedia in Augsburg, Germany. Check out the preprint version of the accompanying 2 page paper. At the conference we will show how Atomique can be used to organize, explore, and share photos in groups. The demo will take place on Tuesday, September 25, between 2:00 and 3:30 pm.

Call for action: Let’s decentralize photo sharing!

Published by Marian Dörk June 25th, 2007 in Announcements. 1 Comment

Shameless crosspost from the Flickr forums FlickrCentral discussion

Why move to another social data silo where censorship can happen again? It is time to think about decentralized alternatives to Flickr & Co. While the blogosphere shows that it is possible, we can also do it with photo sharing.

Check out the open source project Atomique. In the moment it is a rather rough prototype, but with the help of others, it can become a viable alternative to Flickr. It uses RSS and Trackback to allow photo sharing in groups without a centralized database.

This is not against Flickr. Once these or similar protocols and standards for open photo sharing are established hosted photo communities (like Flickr) are welcome to implement those, too. This way we can interact with each other no matter which community or software we choose.

If you are interested in Atomique check out the demo sites of Andrea and Lisa and if you feel adventurous install the alpha version. If you are also knowledgable in PHP check out the current SVN version and join the mailing list.

Update: As the forum post was closed by Flickr staff i reposted it in the FlickrCentral group.

Still early release: 0.0.3

Published by Marian Dörk June 20th, 2007 in Updates. 0 Comments

This is another release for you. The main improvement of this version is that photo groups now also aggregate tags. They are displayed in a nifty tag cloud (see above) and you can browse group photos by those tags. To install this release anew, check out the install procedure and the known issues.

Remember: Atomique is still not suitable for production environments. We have not stabilized the data model, so please only use it for testing and playing around with it.

For those of you who have 0.0.2 in place you can upgrade if you follow these steps:
- make backup of /app/config/database.php
- replace everything in /app except /app/webroot
- empty cache in /app/webroot/cache and /tmp/cache/
- move database.php back into /app/config/

If you encounter any problems, leave a comment.

We have a mailinglist (update)

Published by Marian Dörk June 20th, 2007 in Announcements. 0 Comments

To better coordinate progress, discuss things and tackle problems i have started a mailinglist over at the big G. It is open and everybody can join. So feel free and pitch in into the discourse about Atomique and decentralized social software in general.

Update: Even though it doesn’t seem like it, but you don’t need a Google account to join the mailing list. I have created a page where you can just enter your (possibly non-google) email address.

The unbearable lightness of censorship

Published by Marian Dörk June 14th, 2007 in Miscellaneous. 7 Comments

On my personal blog i have ranted* more than once about centralized communities where censorship is technically possible. After we have seen how YouTube deletes thousands of videos due to copyright claims now another Web 2.0 prime example gets bad karma from its community. Flickr employed censorship-like mechanisms filtering photos flagged as ‘moderate’ or ‘restricted’ for users that have specified a certain home country, e.g. Germany. While community operators stress that they have “no intention of censoring the content” the Flickr software – as any centralized community’s architecture – makes censorship technically very easy. Yet, it doesn’t seem to be a comfortable situation for Flickr staff these hours as resistance seems to be quite strong. Somewhat comparable to the Digg incident.

* I have also ranted against the fact that sharing and social relations are increasingly embedded in commercial and profit-driven contexts. At the end of the day Yahoo!, News Corporation, CBS Interactive, and Holtzbrinck are in it for the money. I am not sure if i trust them enough for maintaining the infrastructure for some of the social interaction i engage in.

WWW2007 is happening

Published by Marian Dörk May 10th, 2007 in Miscellaneous. 0 Comments

The conference is going and very interesting. Check out my posts covering WWW2007 on my personal blog.

Atomique at WWW2007

Published by Marian Dörk April 17th, 2007 in Miscellaneous. 0 Comments

I am very happy to say that I will be attending this year’s World Wide Web conference in Banff (Canada) from May 8-12 as a student volunteer. This is _the_ conference about where the Web is going and where we want it to be – so I am really happy to be able to attend it. Tim Berners-Lee will be around as will be many other smart and interesting people. The programme is packed with top-notch contributions and there are several really interesting workshops, among them the Social and Collaborative Construction of Structured Knowledge that i seek to attend.

I won’t present or demo anything officially, but I will be around for talking about decentralized social software and the process that may lead there – when not helping out at the registration or tasks alike. So if anybody is interested in having a Canadian beer or maple syrup flavored cappuccino with me in the midst of the Canadian Rockies I am happy to meet you. Drop me a line: word AT anarchitect DOT org

Defense of internship thesis

Published by Marian Dörk April 13th, 2007 in Presentation. 0 Comments

Today I (successfully) defended the internship thesis about decentralized photo sharing with a presentation in front of the Information Retrieval group and some co-students. The slides (PDF) that are mostly in German feature some new graphics depicting the way groups work in Atomique.

Service centered vs user centered

Published by Marian Dörk March 20th, 2007 in Concept. 5 Comments

Pyr0 (aka Valentin Laube) did a nice visual comparison between two different patterns for social software. On the one hand the service oriented approach where users are scattered around separate communities and on the other hand the rather decentralized approach where users can control the way they interact with other users on the basis of different types of shared resources.

The user icons are taken from the wonderful Silk icon set by FamFamFam.

Apart from this chart Valentin is involved with Atomique in different ways. We both implemented a prototypical functionality allowing a simple type of content-based image retrieval. Furthermore did he create a niftier favicon, which you might see in your address bar. Thanks

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The basic idea of Atomique is enabling distributed and decentralized yet social photo sharing by adopting well established techniques from the blogosphere such as rss and trackback.

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Demo sites
- Andrea
- Geo
- Lisa