Time magazine presents the White House photoblog, a good example of the adoption of photoblogs by mainstream media. The photoblog focuses on images taken by Time's photographers on White House duty, and range from intimate moments in the West Wing to stumping on the campaign trail. Most of the featured images are the kind of behind the scenes shots you wouldn't normally see in the papers, many offer an amusing view of events, such as this one by Christopher Morris.

It's great to see high profile photoblogs like this one popping up, does anyone know of any others?
Thanks to Frisky for the link.

The Barcelona Photobloggers group has joined the photobloggers.org family!

Nitifixis says: "You are welcome to contribute with news of events, exhibitions, contests, new cameras, tutorials, or anything else that would interest photographers."

In an amusing parody the Online Photographer imagines how famous photographers would have fared if they had posted their images online.

(Link via André)

'Create Yout Own Photoblog' is a new book by Catherine Jamieson about creating and running your own photoblog.

Here's what Catherine has to say:

"'Create Your Own Photo Blog' published by Wiley and released by
Amazon on March 27. It will be in all major bookstores on April 10.
People will be able to thumb through a book at Chapters and Barnes and
Noble, for instance, and see our work - which is pretty cool. Barnes
and Noble have agreed to a premium in-store placement and it will be
contained in their monthly newsletter."

The book features many of our members and is available now!

Yep, it's that time again... Time to start thinking about the Photobloggies! This is your chance to tell us what you liked about last year and what we should change for this year.

Here are a few questions to get you started:

• Should we remove or add any categories?
• Should we rename categories?
• Is there a better way to handle voting, judging, etc.?
• Any thoughts about sponsors and prizes?

We'd like to continually improve things, so we're looking for your feedback. Let us have it!

Popular Toronto photoblogger Adam Krawesky captured a street brawl in the city that has sparked articles and commentary, online and off, around the world.

The images were originally posted on citynoise.org and show a bike messenger and motorist in a tussle with bystanders jumping in to intervene. The fight apparently started after the motorist threw food out of his car and the cyclist took offense and threw it back in. Commentary on the images has ranged from the thoughtful to the hateful, with people coming down on the sides of both protagonists. Also discussed is the role of the photographer, should he have put his camera down and helped? Should he have not published the images? The images are certainly condemning of the man, snarling with menace in almost every image attacking a woman, who, in one photograph, is slumped to the ground.

I'm glad Adam's instincts were to keep shooting, there were enough people around to separate the two, and this kind of confrontation must take place on a daily basis around Toronto and elsewhere. To photograph it, then publish it, prolongs the exposure of this flare up, forcing us to look more closely at the way people interact and accept that this kind of thing is part of the communities we live in. It's impossible to know the whole story from these images and I think your own reactions say more about you than they do about the truth of the incident.

In addition to all this furore the Toronto Star newspaper took the images and printed them on its front page without the Adam's permission! An article in yesterday's Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail (without the images) updates the story.

Nominate your favourite blogs for the Bloggies Awards 2006.

I'm not a big fan of these popularity contests in general, not because I don't win any but because many of them, such as the recent Weblog Awards, seem to be more about driving traffic by allowing people to vote as many times as they like than they are about selecting the best sites (sometimes sites nominated obviously don't fit the category). Usually this results in those sites who can best organise their friends and family in voting campaigns winning.

However, the Bloggies do seem to be a genuine attempt to select the best sites of the year and encourage others, so if you're into this kind of thing go nominate!

On June 29th Google announced their new Google Maps API. See here for more details. There is also documentation online and of course a Google Group to discuss it.

Photoblogers are already taking advantage of the new service, with sites like:

• San Diego photo-bloggers locations
• seems Artless photo locations in Toronto (my site)
• Flickrcity - Flickr and Google maps

It is interesting to check out a picture, then see what other entries are close by.

In my case I am using MySQL and have stored the lattitude and longitude information along with the other information about each photo. When a user accesses the map, PHP generates the list and passes it to the JavaScript that calls the Google map APIs.

Flickrcity uses 'geotagged' entries in Flickr for a given area (New York, London, etc...)

I'm sure there must be other photobloggers using Google Maps (or other such mapping sites). Please add a link here to any others you are aware of.

Dear all it may concern,
I am shutting down the photoblogring.

First I would like to say thank you to all who took an active part in the photoblogring and tried to help by giving feedback and notifying me of dead links etc.
It seemed like a good idea at the time but due to numerous factors the ring is no longer a viable proposition.
These factors include:
*Far too many sites non-compliance with proper ring code placement.
*Far too many sites going defunct or changing their layout and neglecting/forgetting(?) to put the webring code back into their pages.
*RingSurf's less than ideal (this is an understatement!) set-up, making it almost impossible to find and manage sites in such a large ring.
*My lack of enough time in the day to give the ring the attention it needs to keep functioning properly.

Of course if I knew then what I know now about webrings I may have done things differently (chances are however I probably wouldn't have attempted this task at all it is nearly impossible for one individual to manage using the tools I used- oh well, we live and learn, if we're lucky!)

I have tried to notify all active members via email but my mail server cannot handle the task, apologies to all for having to let you know in this way. I suugest all members remove the photoblogring code from their pages as soon as convenient for them, I feel that just letting the ring degrade by attrition would probably just be frustrating to all involved, but I'll leave it up to individual members. I will leave all active members listed for two months then I will clear the boards.

Perhaps Brandon will eventually be able to incorporate some form of random photoblog browsing into the photoblogs.org site.

Once again, I would like to express my thanks and deep appreciation to those of you who helped try and make the photoblogring work.

Cheers,

Cameron

The Chicago Photobloggers will have their monthly meetup/shootout Sunday, June 19 (Father's Day) at 1 pm at the Custer Street Art Fair in Evanston, Illinois. There'll be plenty of good food, great art -- including photography -- and some terrific street photography opportunities. Our staging area will be the Starbucks on Main Street just east of Chicago Avenue.