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Via the official blog, my favorite internet music recommendation service Pandora, now supports Classical music, a sorely-missed genre for lyric-free listening at work and home. I just added a Mozart station and it sounds great. I don’t normally blog incremental updates, but this is something I’ve always missed from Pandora, and am very excited to see. Perhaps Apple can partner with Pandora and develop a native client for iPhone, that would be great. Now when Flickr adds video support, rumored to roll out soon, two of the web products I use most often will be even more useful for me.  Flickr Places did roll out in the last few days, here is the Places page for Minneapolis.

• Amazon web services presentation - Mike Culver, representing Amazon Web Services,  presented EC2 and other components in the AWS family, in an event held at the University of Minnesota , hosted by the Twin Cities Linux Users Group
• Canvas screening - Joe Greco was on campus at the University of Minnesota, to present the movie he wrote and directed on mental illness, titled “Canvas.” Read my full write-up of the screening here.
• Impromptu trip to South Dakota for my new car - I purchased a used car from a dealership in South Dakota over the Internet.  Being very enthusiastic to pick it up, I convinced Sara to drive down with me (and back separately) to Sioux Falls, SD, about 4 hours away, on a weeknight.  With school and work delaying our departure, we didn’t get back home to Minneapolis until nearly 2AM.  To repay Sara, I treated her to a nice dinner at W.A. Frost in St. Paul. 
• North shore camping trip - We joined about a dozen other University of Minnesota students for a weekend trip to Two Harbors, MN, where we enjoyed tent camping and hiking on the Superior Hiking Trail.  Trip was through the Center for Outdoor Adventure.  A photo set from the weekend is up at Flickr.
• Adobe On AIR event - Adobe stopped at the University of Minnesota Minneapolis campus, for one of the final stops on their Summer on AIR bus tour, a promotional event for some new technology (runtime environment for desktop applications) they were releasing, and hoping to convince developers to adopt.  Adobe spared no expense, providing free stuff, a great dinner, an open bar, and excellent prizes (I won a great prize!), to compliment some interesting sessions on the technology.  My photo set from the event is posted.

I believe Zooomr has smart sets out of the box, but I wouldn’t know because I’m still a happy Flickr customer. I’ve been loving the full-screen plus title/description, “on black” slideshows since they were introduced last summer. One feature that Flickr doesn’t support [yet] is the ability to define rules for a Set and have it auto-generated based on some predefined interval. iTunes and other software has popularized the concept of adding some intelligence to a collection of things, in an attempt to automate the decision making process involved with building a collection.

A Flickr community member and programmer has taken it upon himself, to create a simple user interface that lets Flickr users create and administer some smart sets, after authenticating his application with your Flickr account (a quick process). He’s titled the application Flickr Set Manager.

The “random” smart set is fun for me, because it jogs my memory of pictures that tell stories I’ve forgotten or have become less clear over time. The “least interesting” pictures give me insight into what “doesn’t sell,” in other words, what people don’t click on, which can as interesting as seeing what people do click on. Finally, my “most interesting” smart set is set to auto-generate each day (I’ve setup each to regenerate daily), but mostly stays the same day to day, since I’m getting enough new visitors daily to influence the statistics. The value with this set however, is that it exposes the “most popular” statistics to users other than me, since currently the most popular photo data is available only to the owner under the “Popular” menu option when logged-in.

Viewing the “random” smart set slideshow is a nice trip down memory lane, and a gift that “keeps on giving” every day.  I highly recommend the Flickr Set Manager, though if want official support, I think Flickr will add this in the not-so-distant future.  Besides smart sets, I’m excited to have read they’re working on video support on Flickr as well, which seems like a more logical place to share my 30-second video clips than today’s general purpose video sharing sites.

Flickr unveiled a new organization feature that seems neat. Flickr Sets let you group photos arbitrarily, based on some central idea that makes sense to owner of the photos. Sometimes Flickr users will want to create hierarchy among their Sets, and prior to the launch of today’s feature, there was really no way to create hierarchy. To address the need for nested Sets, Flickr has introduced Collections. To complement the introduction of Collections, Flickr now also allows Pro users to change their default layout.

To test out this new feature, I used my trip to Asia in 2006. On the trip I visited three countries: Hong Kong, China and Vietnam. I had attempted to create a Set for each city, then add those Sets to a Set that grouped an entire country, then add the Sets that grouped countries into one large set titled “Asia Trip 2006.” One advantage to that approach was the Guest Pass feature, which lets me invite non-Flickr users to view private photos contained in a Set. With Collections I can still do that, I just now have the additional option of nesting Sets into Collections.

Collections can contain either Sets or other Collections. So to create hierarchy using the example of my trip to Asia, I removed the Sets for each Country and the Set for the entire trip, and replaced that Set with a Collection titled Asia Trip 2006 that contains other Collections (which are Collections of Sets by country). Within the country Collections, the original Sets are there (where I can control privacy at the Set level). Now users can drill down into the Set they care about. This also obsoletes Smugmug galleries in my opinion, since Flickr now does hierarchy too, but has the advantage of allowing users to place one photo in multiple sets (without uploading them twice).

The new Layout feature lets Pro users show different default photos pages, where previously the only option a layout with the standard small size photos, a vertical bar on the right side showing Sets. Now users can remove Sets from their default page, show Collections, or various combinations of those options.

There are some negative aspects I see right away: there is no slideshow at the Collection level. There is no Group Pass at the Collection level. I’m not sure why Flickr implemented Collections to support Collections or Sets, to me it would be more useful to mix and match Sets and Collections within a Collection. As of this writing the Flickr API documentation does not include Collection information. Specifying collection_id instead of set_id to create an embedded slideshow did not work. Minor issue: the algorithm that selects random images for the mosaic is not very good, since I noticed the same image in the mosaic several times after “randomizing” it, it does not seem to pull from all the Sets in a Collection equally. Regarding comments: comments are allowed on individual photos and Sets, but initially have not been implemented for Collections.