Major weight update, details from this past weekend and the Flickr 4 party…. Click here to read details…stay subscribed to my personal blog via RSS here.

Last night, I got a ::insert sarcasm:: oh so friendly email from “The Flickreenos,” telling me that since I’m an “Old Skool Account-Holding Flickr Member” member of the Flickr community, that I now must move my account over to a Yahoo account.

I don’t know if you’ve ever read this blog before, but I tend to dispise Yahoo. Google is my preference when it comes to searching, email, calendar, docs, spreadsheets, notebooks, chat, video, start page, and more. I don’t use Yahoo one bit. Not for anything. Was I glad for the Flickr team when they got purchased by Yahoo, ehh not really. I don’t like Yahoo, never have.

I do love Flickr though. It’s awesome. I even created a successful website “empire” around Flickr, which I later sold for quite a large sum. I even PAY for the Flickr service. Flickr’s announcement also will involve limiting contacts to 3000 (to “improve system performance”), I have to start asking popular Flickr users, to not delete me? I thought Flickr was all about social networking!

There seems to be quite a large number of folks pissed about this. Thomas Hawk chronicles a number of the complainst posted on Flickr’s forums.

I will NOT be changing my account over to a Yahoo one anytime soon. The cut off is March 15th, and if there isn’t some sort of alternative offered, I will have to reconsider my personal choice in online photo hosting. I currently have an account on Zooomr, of which Thomas Hawk is the CEO. Looks like, I’m not going to be the only one moving my photos over there.

I’ve been putting off buying one of these picture frames, mainly because I have wanted WiFi capabilities included. For the most part they have been some sort of flash card based.

Well this one not only does WiFi, but RSS as well. Meaning you can import your favorite photocast (Here’s mine although it isn’t very SFW). It also supports Flickr feeds. Coolest part, it even supports multiple RSS feeds.

At $249 this thing is a steal, too bad it’s out of stock currently.

My favorite photo hosting/sharing site is making it easy to give the gift of Flickr to someone else this holiday season.

The best part is that Flickr is even better then ever. Pro accounts no longer have a 2 gig upload cap, it’s UNLIMITED! Free accounts are up to 100megs per month, 5X where they were.

Flickr runs $24.95/year, and if I could only get my mom to switch from Shutterfly, I would totally buy her a Flickr subscription. You can either print out a special holiday card with their gift code on it, or have it emailed.
Give your loved one a Pro account today.

Update: Thomas Hawk does bring out a few good points. Zooomr has been allowing unlimited uploads for a while now. They also offer a FREE pro account to bloggers.

The upload file size limit on Flickr is 10 megs, thus making high end photographers shrink the size and quality of their photos, Zooomr doesn’t.

The free account may have been upgraded to 100 megs per month, but you can still only see the most recent 200. If you have a high end need for photo hosting/sharing, and like free, start a free blog and start using Zooomr.

Google’s Picasa Web Album service has expanded beyond the one price mindset that Flickr has instilled in us all. They started with an additional $25/year for an additional 6GB.

They now offer more options up to 250 gigs of space of your photos.

You only have 250 megs of space when you first sign up with them, which with the megapixel race at around 10-16 megapixels right now, you won’t be able to get many photos in the amount of space.

If you upgrade, you are also able to upload videos as well to the service, although I don’t see why when Google Video and Google’s YouTube will allow you to do the same. For free hosting of videos online in a downloadable format, there is always PodShow.

I understand where Google is trying to go with this, it does eliminate some of the confusion with monthly upload bandwidth meters, but I think Flickr’s going to be number 1 in photo hosting/sharing for some time to come.

Here are some unboxing pictures of the new Second Generation iPod shuffle. The shuffle docks to the headphone output, which is a new one.

It also comes with the OLD iPod ear buds which is quite a disappointment. New Apple stickers are included which are smaller than the previous ones. Looks like I’ve got a new sticker to put on my car.

Check out the entire Flickr set. (digg)

Well I had a great time at the Podcast Expo this year. I got to meet a lot of new people, and hang out with tons of folks from last year.

I have uploaded all of my flickr pictures to a set, which you can find here. Also check tags like PME, PME06, podcastexpo, and portablemediaexpo on Flickr for some great pictures.

Drew (of The Dawn and Drew Show!) came up with a great domain at the expo, Flickrazzi.com and managed to register it before I could. Right now he has it linked to his photos on Flickr. Their Dippin’ Dots party was pretty cool, but REALLY crowded. I was glad when we moved it downstairs to the Podshow room.

A special thanks goes out to Natalie and Sal for putting me up in the beautiful Ayres hotel for the weekend. I REALLY appreciate it. Thanks you two.

Patrick and Hollywood Adam, from Nobody Likes Onions, were really cool to me at the expo. We even drove out to the casino the second afternoon. None of us won any money, but at least Patrick got to play poker with James Woods.

The expo itself this year wasn’t as good as last year, but the parties were certainly more insane* (aka NSFW).
I got to meet some of the HUGE names in tech, like Robert Scoble and Jason Calacanis.

Thanks again to everyone I met and was able to hang out with.

All in all, I can’t wait till next year. It seems to be in Ontario, CA Sept 28-30th, see ya then.