Talking of Photo-Blogs

The Aperture Photo Blog at Kamat.com is quite a hit with photo-blog enthusiasts. It does help that it's the top match in Google for its keywords.

However, it is less of a blog on photography, and more of a blog on subjects of photography. The newest entry, for example, shows use of photographs to study the cultural anthropology of India.

220, 221. Whatever it takes

I am listing below what is required of a good software so that people can publish "push-button" photo-blogs.

• Ability to compute height and widths of images, as well as provide an alt-text title. Without them, the pictures will render poorly and when you hover the mouse over the picture you'll probably see "A picture named bob.gif".
• Ability to create stubs. If you work with lots of pictures, you know what a pain it is to create them.
• Ability to point to similar images based on keywords or categories. Now we are talking sophistication. More the meta data, the better.
• Some pictures look good with borders, and some without. The blogger (the person creating the entry) should be able to specify this.
• Ability to list pictures by reels, by dates (of photograph taken, or by photograph published)
• A PhotoCredit mechanism so the blogger can publish photographs not taken by self
• A watermarking mechanism to protect the images.

• Uncommon sights of Chicago -- Pictures of the 'Windy City" (MovableType)
• Consumptive.org -- Visual treats galore (Blogger)
• Quarlo.com -- Pictures of New York City (none; coded by hand)
• Nilesh.org -- Old country meets new media (MovableType)

Misc Links

• Photokity has a tutorial on how to create a Photo Blog using MovableType.
• PhotoBlogs.org is a long list of photo-blogs.
• Eaton's List of Blogs on Photography

BTW, until last week, I didn't quite get the meaning of "MovableType". I had thought that it has something to do with fonts, type, and stuff. Then it occurred to me that movable-type would be the opposite of "stereo-type", which I thought is way cool. No?