When Fotonauts debuted at last year’s TechCrunch50, I called it a “gorgeous photopedia” because it promised to turn your photo albums into collaborative Web pages about different topics and subjects. Fotonauts is a desktop photo client which helps you tag, organize, and share your photos in a live feed, and is still in private beta. But you can see a glimpse of what the Web-facing version will look like at Fotopedia, which just soft-launched. A message at the top of the page states: “Fotopedia, a sneak peek. This site is an in-progress read-only preview of what we are going to launch in a few days.”
One of the features of Fotonauts which has yet to be turned on is the ability to turn any photo album into a Web page, complete with tags, associated Wikipedia entry, and Google map information where available. Fotopedia showcases some of the same public albums you can see in the Fotonauts client, plus it adds a few twists. Each photo can be voted up or down or flagged as inappropriate. There is an Encyclopedia tab, which shows albums by topic/tag. For instance, you can see albums about Volcanos, butterflies, or Venice.
There are nearly 150,000 high-quality photos already, organized into 4,289 “articles.” Each article is a Web slide show, along with the associated Wikipedia entry and Google Map. Each photo contains a lot of metadata making it search-engine friendly. Fotopedia is supposed to be a cross between Flickr and Wikipedia, an= long-lasting archive of “images for humanity.” Fotonauts founder Jean-Marie Hullot explains in a note: “Flickr and other photo sites give you exposure for only a brief window in time, and adding photos to Wikipedia proved too complicated for the average user.”
In addition to the photos, there is also an active community. You can follow other people or follow specific albums. You can also see individual profiles when you are logged in. You can also share albums as widgets. (I’ve included ones for Volcano and butterfly albums below).
everybody loves pretty pictures.
hey who doesn’t right?
Their help and community pages seem a bit sparse… what are the licensing terms? What does a photographer agree to by allowing his/her photos to be used as part of the service?
http://teentech...-for-windows-7/
Latest tweak for windows 7
Sneak peek! Sneak peek!
The nature photos can be especially breathtaking !!
The interface is slick and some of the photographic content they have is excellent.
You might as well checkout productopedia.info. You can do everything here that you can’t do in wikipedia.
“http://www.productopedia.info a sneak peek. This site is an in-progress of what we are going to launch in a few days.”
Yes, the pics and site layout are really good. How this will make money I don’t know.
Google should just let people skin their Picasa web albums page. Picasa web albums + wave is probably going to be way more popular in the very near future.
Google never lets people add CSS to their pages. They should really start.
Google would be so much more popular if they did.
urgent!!!hey Michael Arrington,we developed a search engine that will redefine they way people use the internet.it uses a simple payment system that charges people to acces content on the net…doesnt require a credit card..period!!!cant reveal the revenue model.
Disappointed personally. The fact that I could type puppy into the search and get NOTHING was just really lame.
Hopefully they’ll get real content in it because it seems like a ghost town right now.
It is a collaborative photo encyclopedia, they are not supposed to provide the content, you are supposed to do it
starting in a few days according to what they say. Being a beta tester since a couple of months I have this privilege. Here are some puppies for you, some real content at last!
forgit the url for puppies : http://www.foto...ia.com/en/Puppy
forgot the url: http://www.foto...ia.com/en/Puppy
Wow! This is very interesting especially to those photobloggers and photo enthusiasts.
They have a nice website and the embedded galleries are about as good as html based galleries can get. There are much better flash based ones out there however.
The problem with the site/service is the current form of their TOS, specifically point J. in the service agreement: Basically, they will claim perpetual, irrevocable, and sublicensable rights to any content users will post (even after such content is later “deleted” – I put deleted in quotes since technically if you gave someone irrevocable, perpetual right to use your content, you can’t really delete it!). Bummer.
Good find Keyon. That “sublicensable” term is killer. Wow.
Thanks for highlighting this. It was clearly wrong. The term “sublicenseable” has been removed and updated TOS will make it at the next deploy in a few hours.
Due our collaborative approach, once images are posted in your own public fotopedia albums, others can start “using” them in their own fotopedia hosted albums. These images can also be “promoted” to the encylopedia pages. Always with the right attribution and links back to the author. Point J in the TOS is to make sure that this is possible.
Also we do not claim any rights on people images, you retain all rights. We just want to make sure that we have the license to distribute these images in our network as mentioned above, sometimes in a modified form when we create vignettes to access them.
Here is modified Point J without the term “sublicenseable”:
“fotonauts does not claim ownership of Content you post, submit or make available for inclusion on the Service. You retain all rights in and ownership of such Content, but you hereby grant fotonauts the worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable and non-exclusive license to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publicly perform and publicly display such Content on the Site and in connection with the Service.
Jean-Marie Hullot – fotonauts founder
You can do everything here that you can’t do in wikipedia.
They should really start.