Huge new Google+ Feature: Google Communities! The Photo Community

Come see The Photo Community (Google+ should activate it at some point here…) – Come join as soon as you can!

What are communities? They are very similar to regular Google+ accounts, except they are not tied to a person — they are tied to a passion or an idea. This will allow threaded conversations to begin and live independently in the world of Google+.

Think of a piazza in Italy where the whole community comes to hang out, eat gelato, watch artists, have coffee, and talk about the world as it goes by. To me, this is what a Google+ community is.

Besides making The Photo Community, I am also going to make a private community just for people involved in the Stuck In Customs (my website). That will be a private one — invite only. This will replace the Sorry 1990’s Forums that currently run on the website. I’m so sick of that old style of forums… aren’t you? I assume everyone will be able to make public and private Google+ Communities soon.

You’ll notice that The Photo Community has categories on the left. This is a cool thing that allows conversations to be established within certain buckets. Here are a few of the categories I set up, with more to come:

General Discussion – a place for everything… it’s sort of a catch-all for everyone just to hang out.

Critique Me! – Do you have a photo that you would like critiqued? Just post it in a new thread here, and you’ll get it analyzed. I can’t promise it will all be rosy, but we would prefer it if the feedback is civil and constructive! 🙂

Gear Talk – If you have a particular penchant for the hardware side of things, this is a great place to have these discussions and ask questions.

Newbie Photo Zone – Are you just getting into photography and have a question? This will be a great area for you… don’t be shy!

Moderators

Google+ Communities can also have moderators, which will be very helpful. I’m going to start setting those up today to take the burden off of me as an individual. As a rule, we’ll try to make sure the community is a positive happy place… Back to that Italian piazza example above, these will be the kind old-lady-shop-owners that come kick the cretins out of the piazza.

Features to come?

Here’s a few features I’d like to see in upcoming iterations. Google has a tradition of quickly iterating on design to improve the user experience.

– Allow commenters to embed photos in a thread — this is especially handy for photographers, and I think it would also be handy over on the food-related groups!

– Allow moderators to have a “sticky” or community-news post that doesn’t get pushed down the stream.

– Any other ideas you have? Put them in the comment

Many Comments Yesterday – Responses (and an upgrade!)

The comments from yesterday got a little crazy, and I did my best to respond. You’ll also notice a massive-upgrade to the commenting system. What do you think?

Trey’s Variety Hour #39: Body Painting and Photography

Warning: If you are offended by nudes, watch the TWiT pixelated version in the podcast.
Opportunity: If you can effortlessly handle the naked naked, be sure to watch the embedded YouTube below! 🙂

Artists Paul Roustan, Alexa Meade, and Daniel Ibanez join me this week and show us a bunch of their artwork and tell the stories behind them.

*Bonus Notes:

– Awesome time travel movie I recommend: “Primer”. Give it your full attention otherwise you might miss something 🙂
– Barry Glassman, a colorblind photographer, of bgphotos.net is looking to pay someone to help him process photos. Go check him out if you are interested!

Thanks to Leo Laporte, Tony Wang, and Dave Veffer for helping out with the whole production!

Podcast Options – Get it free FIRST via:

• Option 1: Subscribe for free in iTunes
• Option 2: Subscribe to My YouTube channel
• Option 3: Other subscription options avail on the TWIT page

Behind the Scenes

Here is a new video that I just made down here in the Caribbean for you. It shows how I set up to take the photo below, along with a few others!

To see my camera equipment, lenses, and stuff, jump over to the Camera Reviews page.

Daily Photo – The Abandoned Engine Room of the Coppermine

This coppermine on the edge of Virgin Gorda was a great find thanks to Stuck On Earth! I knew about many of the main places around the island to take photos, but I may have missed this place if I wan’t using the app. Be sure to go download it – and yes – we have plans to make it for other systems as well.

Here are some old pictures from our time in the US Virgin Islands. These are from St. John… this is back with a different camera and I could not quite get the quality I would have liked, but oh well… they are still not bad.

When we were there, we stayed at Caneel Bay, which is one of the Rosewood Properties. It was a very nice place and we had our own hut down on the beach. The worst thing about the trip was we had a diabetic driver that worked for Rosewood and he had an seizure WHILE he was driving us around the island and ran off the road into the jungle. We were lucky nobody was killed, actually. Afterwards, Rosewood management did nothing for us… can you believe it? Totally ignored! We’re not even the type to complain, but comon…

I took a small boat over to St. Kitts today to do some snorkeling. It was pretty decent, although I have had considerably better on other Caribbean islands. I almost caught a lobster, but it was too fast for me. I did grab a nice conch shell… I’ll get a picture of it after I use some acid to clean off all the gunk. It’s not a perfect specimen, but it does have some unique colors.

Here is a picture of the Nevis volcano from the channel that connects the Caribbean and Atlantic Ocean. This is the same place I saw a giant sea turtle but it did not stay surfaced long enough for me to grab a pic.