Mapwing is a neat little application that allows you to create your own virtual tours from digital photos and then share them online. If you're familiar with IPIX for watching video online tours of real estate, etc., then Mapwing is a very similar tool, but done with photos instead of video. Best of all, the basic package is free and you can create the tour yourself using Mapwing's online tutorials.

• 1+ megapixel camera with enough memory for at least 60 pictures
• Flash unit
• Tripod
• Clipboard, paper, and pencil
• Map or floor plan of the area (if available)
• Compass (optional)

• A modern operating system (Windows, Mac, Linux)
• An up-to-date Web browser (Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer)
• Adobe Flash Player 7 or higher (Flash Player 9 is required to create virtual tours)

GigaOM is running a profile of Medium, a new startup that "thinks it can help make web browsing social by telling you what pages your friends are on at any moment, and where people are congregating on the web at that instant." The software comes in the form of a Firefox sidebar that displays real-time map of the web with the site you're currently visiting in the middle and "related" sites--determined by what people with similar browsing habits visit--surrounding it. Below that is a chat area where you can talk to other people who are visiting the same site as you. GigaOM's Liz Gannes describes the experience of following your friends around the web to see what they're looking at, and hopping over to a site where people are congregating. Though the chat thing has been done and done again, this social "map" aspect sounds pretty novel, and Gannes says it's easy to turn the tracking on and off, and that it's disabled by default for password-protected sites. Medium is currently in private, invite-only beta, but in classic Web 2.0 you can enter your e-mail address at the Medium web site to be notified when the site launches this winter.

This is part 3 of a 4-part series on uploading photos to Flickr from your Linux box (part 1 looked at jUploadr, & part 2 touched on Digikam). I'm assuming you already know what Flickr is and you have a Flickr account, and now you want to bulk upload photos to Flickr from your Linux box. In my case, I'm using Kubuntu, but the software I cover should work for you regardless of distro.

Our software for today is the quickly-increasing-in-popularity F-Spot. Of course, it's also a bit controversial, seeing as it's built with Mono, but we can ignore that today. I wrote a column for Linux Magazine about F-Spot a while ago, while it was still pretty immature, but it's gotten better. If you use GNOME, then you're probably using F-Spot; if you use KDE, you're probably using Digikam, which we covered yesterday, as both programs are the premier photo management apps for their respective desktop environments (each will run, however, in the other's desktop environment, so you can use F-Spot on KDE, for instance).

Once F-Spot is open, select the pix you want to publish to the Web, and then go to File > Export > Export to Flickr.

As with the other proggies, you have to authorize the app with Flickr. Beyond that, you can set permissions for viewing, resize the images, remove metadata (though why you'd want to do that is beyond me), and - finally! - export your tags from F-Spot to Flickr. This is great, because tagging is key to Flickr's awesomeness, and F-Spot's ability to manage tags is MUCH MUCH MUCH improved from where it used to be, to the point that it's actually pretty easy to tag pix in F-Spot. Just make sure that the tags you're using in F-Spot are in fact the tags you want to use on Flickr!

F-Spot is another photo management tool, so it may be overkill for those interested in a simple, does-one-thing-only tool to upload pix to Flickr. But it's a very good photo management tool - in many ways better than Digikam - so it might be a better choice for many folks.

Tune in tomorrow for our last app!

This is part 2 of a 4-part series on uploading photos to Flickr from your Linux box (see part 1, which covered jUploadr). I'm assuming you already know what Flickr is and you have a Flickr account, and now you want to bulk upload photos to Flickr from your Linux box. In my case, I'm using Kubuntu, but the software I cover should work for you regardless of distro.

Today let's take a look at Digikam, a popular KDE photo management tool that also uploads your pix to Flickr. I'm not gonna cover Digikam itself, as there are plenty of reviews of that program available on the InterWeb; instead, I'm just going to focus on Digikam's ability to interact with Flickr.

Open up Digikam, and then go to Album > Export to Flickr.

(The first time you try to Export to Flickr, you have to authorize with Flickr, just like all the other apps we're looking at here. Do that & then come back here.) Immediately after selecting Export, you're presented with the Flickr Export window, which gives you a couple of options for the photos you've selected.

First of all, press the Add Photos button & then select the images you want to upload. You can add tags to the pix you're uploading, & set the privacy options, & resize the pix to a maximum dimension. That's about it. Make yer choices, & then press OK. Your pictures start to upload, & you're finished.

If you use Digikam anyway, this is a good way to upload your pix to Flickr. If you don't use Digikam, I wouldn't start using it just to get images into Flickr, as it's too heavy of an app for a small purpose. There's overhead to Digikam that ain't worth it if all you want is a Flickr tool.

Tune in tomorrow for our next app!

This is part 1 of a 4-part series on uploading photos to Flickr from your Linux box. I'm assuming you already know what Flickr is and you have a Flickr account, and now you want to bulk upload photos to Flickr from your Linux box. In my case, I'm using Kubuntu, but the software I cover should work for you regardless of distro. Our first app up to the plate is jUploadr.

• Webchat - a multi-user Flash-based chat interface, that can be easily plugged into any website
• Webmessenger - a Flash text, voice, and video instant messaging application
• Webrecorder - a Flash-based audio and video recording app for recording and playing audio and video messages
  
• Sitesearch - a user search engine
• Presence - live user tracking, enabling you to see who is on your site right now.