A particular blog entry usually feels relevant and topical when fresh, at least to the author. So let’s say a blog entry even carries some non-zero long-term value. How do you find it after a while? And more importantly, how will your readers find your blog entry?

Descriptive subjects go a long way. But your readers may be searching for “development model” when your header says “release plan”. And even if you anticipate the search words used by your readers, you can only pick one wording for your header.

Full-text search also helps. There’s now a brand new Search field in the top left corner of Planet MySQL. Chances are you’ll find what you look for, no matter if search for “Chinese”, “DRBD”, “development” or “PHP”. You may even search for several words, such as “Chinese, UTF”.

Easy searchability calls for yet a bit more, namely tagging. Tags are a great way for the author (or for the reader!) to underline key aspects of a blog post (or Flickr picture or Slideshare presentation or any item you post on the Web, of course).

And next to searching, tagging is the second area where PlanetMySQL has lately been improved, by Dups, as announced in his blog entry last week.

Four key points:

1. Tags are displayed under the blog header. We import the tags originally written by the blogger.
2. When you click on the tags, you’ll find blog posts with that tag across individual blogs. Example: http://planet.mysql.com/?tag_search=169 has all PHP tagged posts, on any blog aggregated to Planet MySQL.
3. You can also search for (multiple) tags in the search field. Example: “Tag: PHP, development”.
4. The community may edit tags (when logged in to MySQL.com). The wisdom of individual community members can thus be shared by others.

For more, go read Dups’s blog!

P.S. UPDATE: I got a question on what the numbers in the picture are. They’re “numeric tags” in the Firefox browser, as appearing with the “Mouseless Browsing” add-on. They enable me to “click” on links from the keyboard without moving my hand to the mouse.

Last week, I had the opportunity to visit the three Baltic countries for Sun Microsystems, talking about MySQL powering the Web economy. The tour started on Monday and Tuesday in Vilnius, Lithuania, followed by Riga on Wednesday and Tallinn on Thursday. Many similarities between the countries, which are externally often seen as one unit and which internally sometimes view each other as siblings.

I was joined during the trip by Dutch Sun colleague Martin de Jong, who observed that each of the countries have a larger area than the Netherlands, whereas the combined .lt .lv and .ee population isn’t even half of that of the Netherlands.

But the economic importance of the Baltics is increasing. The Sun Microsystems activities are being managed through Sun Finland, whose country manager Hannu Nyländen accompanied Martin and myself through most of the tour.

I’ll offer some country specific observations, but let me start by saying that the countries don’t share a mutually intelligible language. While Lithuanian and Latvian are related and share some words, they are at least as far apart as German and English. They’re both very old Indo-European languages, with Lithuanian being the older one, with one well-informed Vilnius attendee claiming close relationship between Lithuanian and Sanskrit. Estonian isn’t Indo-European at all, but related to Finnish. Probably a bit closer to Finnish than German is to English (but quite a bit more distant than, say, Danish is from Swedish). At any rate, this leaves young Baltic people speaking English to each other, a bit older ones speaking Russian, whereas a generation or two prior to that, many would likely have spoken German to each other.

The trip started in Vilnius. Sadly, long-time MySQL colleague Domas Mituzas was in the US, so I didn’t meet with him. Instead, we were hosted by Sun Microsystem’s local Business Development Manager Rolandas Kymantas, who had gathered perhaps 60 Lithuanians into Reval Hotel Vilnius, where the venue was held.

I was very challenged to give the first five minutes of my speech in Lithuanian, as pronunciation is non-trivial and the stress was very challenging, on a par with Russian.

To continue my habit of writing blogs in languages I don’t speak, I started a blog also in Lithuanian. The blog is at http://blogs.arno.fi/laisvas_zodis/, where Laisvas žodis means (or at least is supposed to mean) “Free speech”.

The second destination was Riga, familiar to many MySQLers from our Developer Meeting two months ago. Here, we were hosted by Evijs Taube, Sun’s Business Development Manager for Latvia. The event was in Reval Hotel Riga (the one with the bar on the 26th floor), and coincided with the Latvian Open Technologies Association’s event. LATA (for Latvijas atvērto tehnoloģiju asociācija) and its sponsors (among them Sun) had managed to collect a whopping 350 participants to the event.

I was happy to note that my attempt at speaking Latvian was greeted by the audience. One attendee, Janis from Daugavpils (also known as Tvinky), posted a recording of it online. And my Latvian blog is live on http://blogs.arno.fi/labrit/, named Labrīt! for “Good morning!”. I’m curious to see whether there will be any reaction to them, by MySQL’s Latvian friends, such as Michael Dexter, who helped us a lot in September and whom it was a pleasure to meet again.

Estonia and Tallinn was the third and final destination. Again, the hotel belonged to the same chain. Reval Hotel Tallinn is somewhat of a double name, as “Reval” is the old Swedish and German name for Tallinn.

Martin de Jong and I were alone here, as Hannu had left for Finland. Our host was Sun’s Estonian BizDev mgr Maidu Harjak. He had collected roughly as many attendees as Rolandas in Lithuania. On account of knowing Finnish, the Estonian speech wasn’t quite as difficult as Lithuanian or Latvian. Creating an Estonian blog was a bit harder, though, as Google Translate doesn’t help me with that. Instead, I had to resort to Aivar Joonas, my Estonian friend and reconstruction expert working at my country house in Finland. With his help, I chose to host the blog on http://blogs.arno.fi/vaba_lava/. Vaba lava is what you say when it’s time for anyone to speak up, “The floor is open”.

My blogs in Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian so far only contain my speeches in the respective languages. And realistically, I won’t post very frequently to them (in particular, Estonian is not supported by Google Translate). Nonetheless, I hope there is some benefit from having my local presentations online.

Links:

• Vaba lava: Kas Kaj räägib eesti keelt? http://blogs.arno.fi/vaba_lava/
• Labrīt! Vai Kaj runāt latviešu? http://blogs.arno.fi/labrit/
• Laisvas žodis: Ar Kajus kalbu lietuviškai? http://blogs.arno.fi/laisvas_zodis/
• Blog aggregator for all my blogs, across languages: http://kaj.arno.fi/

Yesterday, I started my sporadic series of blog posts where I share my experiences improving my online manners through social networking websites, many of which are powered by MySQL. My first target was the traveller site Dopplr, and this time, it’s Google’s picture sharing site Picasa Web.

My starting point is the same: “Everyone else” among colleagues and friends was there long before me, and I feel like a latecomer. I want to go in, do what seems to be the right thing, and share the observations I had. And everything within the time constraint of not being able to do a full evaluation, as I obviously have other things to do as well.

Unlike Dopplr, starting with Picasa Web never required invitations. My first exposure to Picasa was through MySQL colleague Zack Urlocker’s biking trips. He shared albums of his trips, which I browsed through, and found “quite OK”. Meaning: Easy to consume pics posted by others, but no trigger for me to start producing web albums myself. When running with Zack, the Picasa topic occasionally popped up, with me expressing skepticism towards the time expenditure for uploading a gallery, and Zack saying it wasn’t that hard, as there is a good picture uploader. It turns out Zack was right, as I learned much later.

What triggered me to join Picasa Web was my blogging. A blog entry without a single picture isn’t very appealing, and some blog entries require many pictures. I had for long used a complex setup, uploading my pictures using Unix utility scp from my Mac to my account on @arno.fi. The domain arno.fi was a parallel domain to a now-extinct server grankulla.mysql.com, which I had to stop using after the Sun acquisition, as the use was bordering on the private. So I started to host arno.fi privately (a different story entirely) and became worried about bandwidth cost for the pics referred to from blogs.mysql.com/kaj. So the MySQL Web Team enabled uploading of pictures as part of the MySQL Wordpress blog site itself. This worked fine, but by this time I had already thought a bit about hosting the pics on Picasa or Flickr. So when I saw Picasa pictures automatically connected to Google profiles and Google maps, I decided to try out Picasa.

Like for all social networking sites, I obviously had to register. This wasn’t hard, and it was part of my general Google profile (Google Reader, Google Mail etc.). The real obstacle which had kept me from doing it earlier was installing the picture uploader, called “Picasa Web Albums Uploader“. I’m not a person who likes to tweak with the technical setup of my computers, hence the reluctance. But it was OK. I didn’t have to know anything in advance; the Picasa web site gave the relevant pointers and I wasn’t lead astray during the installation.

Next came the learning part, which in fact turned out to be fun. Uploading the pictures was trivial. I am a character based (”command line”) type of guy, hence the perceived ease-of-use of the scp utility. But merely dragging the pictures from the Mac Finder to the Picasa Uploader was easier still. And uploading pics with the Picasa Uploader came with two real benefits:

1. Automatic picture resizing into multiple sizes: 144px, 288px, 400px, 800px. For that I had used the resize command of Imagemagick, which took me quite a while to install, and which despite its command line nature wasn’t as fast and automagick as the ease of use of the Picasa Uploader for this specific task. Plus, Picasa relieves me of renaming pics in various resolutions to distinguish them from each other.
2. Easy housekeeping of album names / directories. I like order (not that I always succeed in keeping it). So I dislike putting all pics into a one single directory. The Picasa uploader provides me with a drop-down list of my previously used albums ( “directories”), which I can refill, or the opportunity to create a new album (”directory”). And at the point of upload, I can very quickly label the pics.

The next step is completely optional, but very “cool” and inspiring: I can tag the pictures, and I can place them on Google Maps.

Tagging is merely about finding out multiple, good descriptions for pictures, for later searches. So that doesn’t take long.

Placing the picture on the map can be everything from dead easy to very frustrating. For my pictures from Munich, I very simply typed in the address: just “Balanstr. 22″ for the pictures of my son trying to be an actor, and “Kleinfeldstr. 28b, Germering” for the pictures of my daughter by Riccardo Desiderio. For South Africa, it was much harder. It didn’t know Kievits Kroon, Reier road, or even Kameeldrift. I just had to point manually to somewhere north-east of Pretoria, where I assumed the pics were taken. That was a time drain.

Still, as a result, I got a nice map of where I took the pics of the trip, and if I’d like more detail, I’ll even see the individual pictures placed on a map.

The last step is about using the Picasa pictures in the blog itself. And this is also a bit simplified from my character-based scp blogging, where I had to semi-manually concatenate the first part of the picture urls (”http://kaj.arno.fi/”) with the name of the picture (”IMG_1234_Blabla.JPG”). In Picasa, I do the opposite, i.e. I cut-and-paste the huge text provided by Picasa, e.g.

<table style=”width:auto;”><tr><td><a href=”http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/YpJLrGsLVDIbs_jSHkAQ-Q”><img src=”http://lh5.ggpht.com/_6eAQKKvv8LA/SQwrd02hu3I/AAAAAAAAAXw/xvphDvabhsQ/s288/Kaj_RD_Kvadrat_B_7729.jpg” /></a></td></tr><tr><td style=”font-family:arial,sans-serif; font-size:11px; text-align:right”>Från <a href=”http://picasaweb.google.com/kaj.arno.2/KajArnPortraits”>Kaj Arnö Portraits</a></td></tr></table>

and clean it up from surplus stuff to get only what I want, i.e.

<img src=”http://lh5.ggpht.com/_6eAQKKvv8LA/SQwrd02hu3I/AAAAAAAAAXw/xvphDvabhsQ/s288/Kaj_RD_Kvadrat_B_7729.jpg”/>

which I then paste into my Wordpress blog entry, perhaps adding an align=”right” or align=”left” in the process. And I take care to select the desired resolution: 144px, 288px, 400px or 800px; more than once, I’ve been happy with reducing the picture size further than what I would have done during my Imagemagick resize days.

In all of this, I see little if any problem, except the huge size of the licensing agreement I clicked through. That’s another barrier of entry. I don’t know what I really agreed to. Who knows, perhaps I even violated the agreement by taking screen shots of what Picasa looks like, for this blog entry?

Which brings me to my summary:

	Positive experiences: Many, and significant   + Very easy and fast to upload pictures + No need to shrink the pictures before upload — Picasa does it for you + Great to get many resolutions (144px, 288px, 400px, 800px) automatically + Fast integration of pictures in blog entries + Easy to keep pictures in order + Cool to tag the pictures for searches + Cool to place pictures on maps
	Negative experiences: Few, and all related to legalese   - Very irritating to have such a lengthy license agreement - The license agreement was so long and difficult that I don’t know what I agreed to - Meaning, I also don’t know if I’m missing something important - And why didn’t I get http://picasaweb.google.com/kajarno as my public page?
	My own confusion — no fault of the social network itself  Privacy! It isn’t even 20 % clear to me when it’s in my interest to allow the albums to be visible for everyone, and when it should be private (sure, I won’t put up pictures of drunken friends, or of myself in a similar state — but what about the innocent family pictures I linked above?) I first thought Picasa was a standalone photo organiser like iPhoto, and then learned it was a picture sharing thingie like Flickr, but only now reading Wikipedia do I understand I was right to begin with, and Picasa Web is separate from Picasa (good thing I read that before posting this blog entry, as I now sprinkled in the word “Web” here and there after “Picasa”)
	Remaining questions from my side   How much time should I spend uploading my existing pictures? Should I do that at least for my past blog pictures? Privacy! When should I make my pictures public? Why? Should I link the pictures from other social networking sites? How can I do that easily? Privacy again! Who will use the tags I provide Picasa Web with? Will that be of benefit or harm to me?

Starting to use Picasa Web Albums has so far been a very positive experience, and I do expect to manage all my online pictures in it, and get lots of good vibes from it going forward.

Links:

• Picasa Web Albums: http://picasaweb.google.com
• My Picasa Web page: http://picasaweb.google.com/kaj.arno.2/
• Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picasa#Picasa_Web_Albums