See-ming Lee by iDLg / 2009 / SML Thank You

You never know what would happen when you post photos of yourself on Flickr. An artist named iDLg (Flickr:iDLg / Twitter:iDLg2009) did some ink drawings of me from my self portraits... Lots of SML Love to him!!!









Related SML
+ SML Flickr Galleries: SML Me

Brooklyn Art Project

Brooklyn Art Project (FriendFeed / Twitter) is a free online social network that connects 5500+ artists, collectors, and art enthusiasts from over 44 countries featuring over 44,000 artworks and 800+ short films and videos.

Members can participate in collaborative exhibits in Brooklyn and beyond while enjoying unlimited online gallery space, blogs, forums, chat, and tools to share / promote their artwork across the web.

I first learned about it via Anthony Cospito (Facebook / Twitter) two years ago, and signed up for an account. BAP has many events which nurture social interactions for typically anti-social artists - I even blogged about one some time ago. I have been meaning to go to some of these but never had the time. So when I found about the Flash Mob for Artists happening in DUMBO (2009-09-10), I decided to pay for a visit.

What's an Art Mob? An Art Mob is a flash mob for artists. Artists from all over the city show up and do collaborative drawings. ~ Brooklyn Art Project Blog

Here are some photographs taken at the event, together with short description about the artists. See also SML Flickr Sets: Brooklyn Art Project.

Alexandra Young (BAP) is a recent graduate from Pratt who majored in illustration.


Harry Bogosan also graduated from Pratt recently. He currently works as an illustrator and does photography at a jewelry store in Chinatown.


Eric Bloom is another recent Pratt graduate who majored in illustration. He currently works as an illustrator as well as at Rabbit Movers — a moving company in New York completely operated by artists!!!


Mey is a recent graduate from Pratt who majored in sculpture.


Harry Bogosan and Alexandra Young participated in the OCD: Obsessive Collaborative Drawings.


Frank Contreras working on a larger collaborative piece.


Maya Fiks-Margolin, a recent graduate who majored in marketing having fun doing her own doodles.


James Cospito (BAP / Facebook / Flickr / LinkedIn / Twitter) talked about his work with me. He is the Co-Founder / Creative Director at StrutNYC and BrooklynArtProject. He is an is an artist, painter, photographer, illustrator, designer in New York City.

BAP Group Show at Rabbit Hole Studio

In conjunction with the Flash Mob event, there is an art opening which took place at the Rabbit Hole Studio in DUMBO.

ARTCADE is the title of the show. Fun stuff inside!


Clock wide from top: Adam Shub Megaman 9 Intro acrylic 1,200; Steve Shub Bad Boy 1 oil on canvas 2,000; Steve Shub Bad Boy 2 oil on canvas 2,000. You can purchase these at http://brooklynartproject.myshopify.com/collections/sept09.


James Cospito Global Illuminati mixed media 2,500. Also available to purchase at http://brooklynartproject.myshopify.com/collections/sept09.


No ARTCADE is complete without actual arcade games.


Shawn Lions from Rabbit Hole Studio.


Unidentified Woman + Shawn Lions + Katie Boyd


Alan Carr


Related SML
+ SML Fine Art Flickr Group
+ SML Fine Art Friendfeed
+ SML Fine Art Twitter Feed
+ SML Flickr Sets: Brooklyn Art Project
+ SML Flickr Sets: SML Fine Art
+ SML Flickr Tags: Art
+ SML Flickr Tags: Brooklyn Art Project
+ SML Pro Blog Labels: Art

Flickr Faves Browsing = Best way to discover new talents

If you want to explore good stuff, forget about Explore, just browse your contacts' favorites. Chances are you will like because that's why you added them as contact in the first place. Finding other people's source of inspiration (the process) goes hand-in-hand with looking at their work (the result).

You can also usually get a fairly good read about the person from looking at their favorites: for example, did the guy like my photo because of the composition? Or do they like it because they just like the subject matter?

Dijubos de Molina (Daniel Molina is one of my all-time favorite photographer on Flickr, and I usually find really good stuff on his favorites:



Browsing a single person's favorite is great, but when you wish to track multiple people's favorites, it becomes rather time consuming and annoying. There isn't yet a function on Flickr to allow you to track all your contacts' favorites yet - but FriendFeed does.

FriendFeed tracks a person's individual stream as well as their favorites, which is a very cool feature. If you track your contacts photo by the default Flickr RSS, you will get single image blocks, which is somewhat annoying, so what I do instead is creating two Imaginary Friends on Friendfeed:


Imaginary friends is a great feature on FriendFeed which allows you to track people even if they are not on the FriendFeed network. Feeds from imaginary friends are only viewable to the logged in users (private).

Now each person is individually tracked by the imaginary friends, they will show up as a row in clusters:



Related SML
+ SML Flickr Favorites
+ SML Friendfeed

SML Wiki New Pages Yahoo Pipes

An ultra simple pipe. I think that this will be a very good intro for folks who are not familiar with Yahoo Pipes and wish to see how Pipes can help solve their common problems.


Screenshot: pipes.yahoo.com/seeminglee/smlwikinewpages

My wiki is hosted on wikidot.com and it has an auto-feed feature which reports recent changes and new pages creation via an RSS feed. I use this feed with my friendfeed account, but when I edit pages heavily via frequent saves, the list of "recent changes" makes the feed very hard to follow. Wikidot does not provide a separate feed for new pages vs source changes, so I created this pipe to output only new pages.

Some feed readers appear to have problems getting feeds from the RSS results generated by Yahoo Pipes, so I take the RSS feed and burn it with FeedBurner. Now add the feedburner feed onto FriendFeed and now there's a less-noisy feed on my FriendFeed.

For comparison
Original feed: feeds.feedburner.com/smlwiki
Feed using the pipe: feeds.feedburner.com/smlwiki/newpages

To do
I do still want to include source changes though. I am working on a pipe which truncates items with the same title that were posted too close to each other.

Related SML
+ SML Flickr Tags: SML Pipes
+ SML Pipes

SML Wiki: Flickr Censorship

I have created a page on SML Wiki regarding the incident where Flickr flagged my Flickr account as 'restricted':

SML Wiki: Flickr Censorship

In February 2009, Flickr set my account to Restricted status, resulting in a drastic decrease in stream and photo viewership.

During this incident, my entire stream become unavailable to public, which means that my photos on Flickr can no longer be viewed on SML Wiki. Additionally, my portfolio is down, and I was no longer able to post anything to any of the groups.

This article recounts what happened to my account, my discussion with the Flickr staff, together with data, screenshots, photo examples, related blog posts on the Internet, as well as up-to-date Meta Search Alerts results found on the net.

Related SML
+ SML Pro Blog: Flickr Censorship Standards = Gay Bashing?

Facebook Network / 2009 / SML

Update 2009-10-14: The author of the program announced that the app is permanently shut down because of lack of resources to maintain it. They have published the source though. Get it while it's still up!

I revisited Nexus a week ago to check out how my Facebook network's topology has become now that I have made some new friends in the art and music scene. The interactive application is useful, but what interests me most is the forming of different clusters. Unfortunately, Nexus does not yet intelligently group these for you, so I took a screenshot of the result and did some visual mapping of the underlying cluster on Inkscape.


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The clusters are formed predominantly through the channel where I meet the folks:
+ Family and friends of family.
+ Sexual orientation: gay aka extended family.
+ Education: high school, college.
+ Professional: co-workers, clients, industry events.
+ Interests: art, music, photography.
+ Random: by chance meetings, dates, social networks like Flickr and Twitter.

What is important to note in this diagram is that it reveals the interconnectedness of relationships between your contacts.

Since I have spent a large part of my adult life working in interactive media in New York, most people that I know which forms the core of the diagram lies in the center of the graph. There is a separate cluster (green) which is fairly separate from the rest, from the network of friends living in Hong Kong.

There are interesting links moving from the interactive design world with the art and music world because it is not difficult to imagine the interconnectedness of the creative world. Some nodes do not connect with anyone else because I met them via social networks like Flickr and Twitter. These are folks I would not have met if not for those networks, so it is not hard to imagine that they likely would not have come in contact with the rest of my network universe either.

One feature that would have been nice is to see a time-lapse display of the graph changing over time.

The author of the program ludios on Flickr actually told me that he may implement an animated / temporal version of this program, but I guess he hasn't had time to get to that still after 17 months. :)

I don't really have time to hog in front of my computer to do screenshots of the program, but I did take some screenshots over time, so you can at least see the forming of the clusters. The image hosted on the Flickr contain notes if you wish to figure out where the clusters are forming (precisely the reason why I decided to map over it this time!)

2008-03-04: I just joined Facebook not too long before this so the hubs are mostly co-worker, but you will notice some fairly unconnected nodes, again, mostly from either being gay or people I met on Flickr.

View original (694 x 644 PNG)

2008-04-16: 315 freinds. Small Hong Kong cluster on the right

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2009-01-11: the Hong Kong cluster is particularly pronounce in this one :)

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2009-09-01: same one as above so you can see the change

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Colophon
Created using Nexus with Facebook relationship data of See-ming Lee on 2009-09-01. Nexus is a Facbook network visualizer and can be found at nexus.ludios.net. Cluster mapping and infographics created using Inkscape.

Flickr Censorship Standards = Gay Bashing?

Update 1: See also SML Wiki: Flickr Censorship for my complete report of the incidence, together with screenshots, examples, and all my email exchange with the Flickr staff.

Cross-posted on SML Gay Blog.

Earlier this year, Flickr popped my account to "restricted" status, resulting in a 4000 to 200 daily stream views.



It took me 6 months to figure out what the hell was wrong. I didn't get a reply from the official staff despite several attempts to contact them. Eventually I got so pissed off that I did a Twitter stunt and posted a long-winded outcry on GetSatisfaction.com. That appears to help, I got a reply from the Flickr staff within one day.

Apparently, according to Flickr standards, the image below is to be treated as restricted.



Personally I do not understand why this image is restricted (aka x-rated in Flickr sphere). Afterall, don't you see guys like this *all the time*?

Flickr replied by saying that the image needs to be restricted because the person is wearing "skin-tight" clothing. I then asked them if I took photos at the Olympics or at the beach, do I need to mark them as restricted as well, to which they reply, that "regardless of where they were taken, they need to be moderated."

In other words, according to Flickr Censorship standards, this will only appear in an R-rated movie. Meanwhile, the Yahoo Pride page during 2007 happily use my photos on their site, so WTF?!

As such the image above is flagged as moderate as well. Even though I disagree with Flickr's standards...

One thing to note, also, is that the image below, which was taken at a skydiving event, was considered OK to Flickr. The only difference is that the guy above is gay and the guy below is straight.



Anyhow, SML Flickr is now "safe" after flagging all these images to moderate to restricted status, but this standard appears questionable.

Related blogosphere
+ Now Public: flickr: Racist and Homophobic, or Scamming?
+ Thomas Hawk: Someone's started a Flickr Is Fascist Blog, Accuses Flickr of Anti-Gay Censorship Policies