Michael Seguin

My Digital Me

All cloud, all the time

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As the pace of technological change accelerates, we seem to be increasingly drawn to buzzwords. They rear up as the public tries to encapsulate the latest craze, and then die off just as quickly it seems. Virtual, web 2.0 (since when did zero become ‘O’ by the way?), disruptive, responsive, crowd. My latest favorite is cloud.
It is all cloud these days, all the time. If you are building a website, webapp, app, or really anything having anything to do with technology, you had better be ‘in the cloud’ or it is all over.
‘Cloud’ has come to mean so many different things, but at the end of the day, the idea is that rather than being tied to a physical server, or cluster of servers, that the “network really has become the computer” (thanks Sun micro, for seeing the clouds before the rest of us).
It isn’t until we start really thinking things through that we stop missing the cloud for the silver lining. While there are undeniable advantages to ‘cloud based stuff,’ whether we are talking cloud computing (the ability to have compute cycles augmented or shifted on the fly due to the elasticity of cloud based server resources), cloud fronting (the ability to have web requests served from the closest server to the client request), cloud storage (see computing, think storage), etc.
Understand this – remember it…

PicSona – a persona for your pictures

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Introducing PicSona – a cloud based service to let content producers invoke content (photos) from repositories (Flickr) and provide attribution/linkback easily to the content generator. While still a very raw service, we would love it if you would take it for a spin and let us know your thoughts.

In a nutshell, PicSona lets you search for pictures published through the flickr photo sharing service, and get an embed code for these pictures. More content libraries will be added soon if the concept seems useful to folks.

The end result? If you are constantly looking for a fast, east, legal way to get access to stock images, PicSona may be just what you have been looking for. Just go to PicSona.com, search, click, copy and paste the embed code.

Scroll down for an example created from some of my own photoshop creations. Just mouse-over a photo for attribution/link to the author. We look forward to extending this service soon should it prove useful.