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Woophy

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 27, 2011| Leave a Comment »

I would like to tell you about Woophy, the international photo-sharing site. One of many great things about Woophy is its home page, which features a map of the world with each photo’s location. Do click on it.

I have uploaded photos to Woophy off and on since first reading about it in the Wall Street Journal. (That was when I was still reading the WSJ, which used to be full of great articles. I was one of the 170 people who cancelled their subscriptions the day Rupert Murdoch bought the paper. I know this because the WSJ wrote the next day that 170 subscribers out of 1.7 milion had cancelled.)

Woophy has always been managed by unpaid volunteers, and in recent years they struggled to keep up with the work. Loyalists worldwide helped out. Now Woophy has crossed a threshold and has partnered with a travel company. I’m glad because I would like to see it survive. I particularly enjoyed getting comments from far-away places whenever I posted a picture.

Here’s Wikipedia’s description: “Woophy (World of photography) is a photo sharing website and an online community where members can put their photos on a world map. Founded in 2005 by Joris van Hoytema, Hoyte van Hoytema and Marcel Geenevasen, the site has over 39,300 members and contains around a million photos from over 43,000 cities and villages in the world. Most of the uploaded pictures are from surroundings, buildings, nature and problems in the world. Woophy also has an active forum where photographers discuss their photos in a critical way. Woophy now has a finance deal with Eurobookings.com which should enable it to survive through the use of advertising.”

Woophians are planning a meeting in Madrid next spring. See photos of a previous Woophy forum (with music):

 

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Playwriting Class, 3

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on July 24, 2011| 3 Comments »

The next assignment is to listen in on a conversation somewhere and try to write it down word for word without adding any of your own details or dramatizing it.

In the age of Murdoch telephone hacking, is that kosher?

I do sometimes hear conversations I want to write down. Yesterday, for example, I was in a small grocery store, and a woman dripping with perspiration blew in and accosted the butcher. “I’m Christine! I’m from Burnin’ Love. I’m so sorry. I got all turned around.”

Pretty good, huh?

Another time I was out walking on a breathtakingly beautiful summer morning — clear blue sky, goldfinches flying everywhere — and two men on bicycles passed by discussing credit default swaps.

And one day last fall, I overheard a conversation as I dashed from my office building to the subway. A young woman was saying to a friend, “What I’d like to be doing is studying. But I’ll be grocery shopping and doing laundry, and he’ll be watching football and playing video games.”

This morning, I ventured some timid eavesdropping. I thought I better buy something in my chosen venues. In the first coffee shop, where I hovered near a biking couple, I bought coffee and the Sunday Globe. But the air conditioning was loud and drowned out their words. In the second coffee shop, I bought a decaf cappuccino and wandered around testing conversations, but the music was too loud. In the third coffee shop, I bought waffles with toppings (blueberries, strawberries, granola), but that place had both loud air conditioning and loud music.

In the afternoon, I tried the book shop without luck and ended up back at the first coffee shop, which had opened its screened porch for lunch. I bought lemonade. I can probably use a few snatches of the conversation among three fed-up-looking tourists.  Pretty bland, I must say.

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