Take this picture of Toyota’s iQ climbing a wall in Paris. It’s good enough that we used it in a blog post about the car, but it isn’t the only shot I’ve seen of the same scene, and it’s hardly breathtaking.

Yet in two days it’s been viewed 197 times, favourited 16 times and has received 123 comments - roughly two for every three people who saw it. Many commenters have bagged it for various Flickr groups with the usual gushingly sycophantic invite: “Wonderful find. Absolutely The Perfect Photographer…You Deserve Another Perfect Photographer Award!!!” etc.

I’m not the only one who finds that kind of invite embarassingly insincere, am I? Some Flickr groups have collections of amazing images, and many showcase active and talented communities, but I wonder about the ones that put this kind of spam into people’s photo comments and I’m dubious about their invite criteria. The iQ photo (of a car, indoors) has been invited to ‘Nature Photos HP’, for example.

The only invite I’ve had was for what I think is the weakest of a similar set. It’s been viewed just once, by the person who invited it, who didn’t bother looking at any of the similar ones I posted at the same time.

So I reckon something’s up with these groups, but I’m not sure what it is. Flickr doesn’t pass on authority with links, so it’s not a crude SEO trick. Anyone got any ideas, or am I just a little too cynical?

In fact, the Macbook Wheel reminded me of this year’s Royal Institute Christmas Lectures (a fine institution that has been steadily slipping down the channels over the years, and which now resides on Five, alas). The last lecture dealt with the challenge faced by computers in recognising complex information - text, speech and so-on - that humans see very easily. You can watch it on Five’s demand service.

It piqued my interest partly because I’m a geek, and partly because I recently wrote a How it Works on handwriting recognition. At one point (24m 50s onwards), Rhod and I stared in wonder as Microsoft’s prof. Chris Bishop demonstrated Dasher, a predictive text application which it turns out has been around for a while.

It’s a useful input device for people who can’t use a keyboard, and a great way to visualise how predictive text and other pattern-matching processes such as handwriting recognition work.

Why? Reason the first is that I’ve met a couple, and at least one of them is without merit as a human being. But the second reason - and the point of this rant - is that they’re wasting valuable seconds of my life.

I know what you’re thinking, “Here goes Handby on some predictable tirade about advert breaks or the other” but wrong. No. In fact it’s more complicated. You might want a hot drink.

So here’s the thing: like most of the stuff I write from home, I’m typing these words on Nobby: a laptop I was lucky enough to win about four years ago. He’s getting a bit grumpy in his old age, and has recently developed the habit of overheating and shutting down when he has to think particularly hard.

Now, given that I mostly use him for typing and viewing web pages, you might think that this wouldn’t be a problem, but you’d be wrong, and the reason is fucking adverts and, by extension, fucking advertisers.

Here’s why - adverts are shit and we ignore them, so advertisers are making them more attention-grabbing. For the most part this means animation, with many using flash to effectively play films at you. No problem (apart from the obvious and laughable waste of everyone’s time) if you have a decent computer, but a huge pain in the cock if you’ve got an ageing laptop without a graphics accelerator: the processor’s left doing the work. Busy processors use more power and create more heat.

To keep Nobby stable I’ve had to manually slow down his processor, which means I’m now doing the things I want more slowly in order to prevent the things I don’t want crashing my PC.

So come; join me and my favourite dead comedian as we welcome 2009 from atop a heap of twitching agency creatives.

Merry fucking new year.

I want a go. I want one from Brighton to various exciting and far-flung places.

More on Flickr

And it’s a great job, thanks to the hard work of almost everyone on the team except me. It looks better, works better, supports a wider range of content and allows for third-party adverts.

Best of all, the background doesn’t look like a J-cloth.

UPDATE:

Found an old screenshot of the front page, circa March 2008.

In the meantime:

[via Buzzmachine]

Anyway, getting a break at Christmas this year. I’ve no idea what I’m doing, but it won’t involve Lapland, and it probably will involve Google Earth’s Santa Tracker*.

Sadly, freelance is going to come into it at some point, but them’s the breaks.

I mean, really, what the fuck?

Last night, I dreamt that I was in a small three-storey terraced house with some serious left-wing armed revolutionary types. They were going to usher in a new world order, and to prove it one person was carrying around six nuclear warheads in her rucksack (they were small warheads).

There was a lot of running about in the house. I was the only journalist allowed to be there and I was putting down some handwritten notes, in preparation for a feature I’d be writing about the experience later. I was pleased about the scoop I had, and pretty relaxed, even though there were anti-terrorist police and all sorts of military people shouting through megaphones from outside.

Suddenly Antony M (sorry Antony) burst in and starting shouting “why the f*** aren’t you live-blogging this?”. Jeff Jarvis may have been behind him in the doorway.

I was at an utter loss to explain why not, and started mumbling about plans I had for the feature. But I was ashamed. Why, indeed, wasn’t I live-blogging it?

I woke up at that point, with my cheeks still burning.

I think this dream may have something to do with my new phone, which I haven’t figured out how to work yet.

But once I do, I’m going to learn how to live-blog with it. Just in case.