The now-famous Situation Room photo of May 1 — in which the president and his national security team, crowded together during the Osama bin Laden operation, stare in silence at something the viewer cannot see — may become the most downloaded Flickr image of all time. Why is that image so captivating? A few thoughts: First, there’s the mystery of it. We don’t know what they’re seeing or hearing. We don’t know if they’re witnessing the death of Osama bin Laden or merely getting a second-hand narration of it from Leon Panetta (the White House has been very fuzzy on this). We know only that all of these very important and powerful people have simultaneously stopped talking. This is an historic silence. Even Biden isn’t talking! And Hillary Clinton is covering her mouth — the universal gesture of tension, of I-can’t-breathe, of I-don’t-know-how-this-is-going-to-turn-out. Read full article > >

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That Situation Room photo

By Lizzy Bennett [Ed. note: This item picks up on the transit theme of several recent posts this week -- by Lizzy Bennett about SF biking here , by Brian Glucroft about Chinese biking etc here , and by Tony Comstock about self-moving artwork in Holland here.] Cherry blossoms in February! The UFO Response Team! I thought it was an undercover cop but it was much more important. Notice the text on the bottom right of the bumper. [Click for larger.]

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Things I Noticed on My Ride Last Night

Q:  I’m an iPad owner that is overwhelmed by the number of applications available. Where should I start if I’m looking for a way to utilize the iPad’s screen for browsing through photos? FLICKPAD Free lite version | $4.99 | Version: 2.1.3 | Shacked This one’s for those of us who travel in photo-happy circles. We’ve gotten a taste of what the iPad can do with loads of pictures (Exhibit A: the Photos app and its nifty stack-of-pix and scrolling grid layouts). Now we want the same treatment for those other two big sources of picture plenty: Facebook and Flickr. Flickpad is a special-purpose viewing, sharing, and commenting tool. Its name reveals its main method: you “flick” photos on and off a screenwide lightbox. Especially when you’re flooded with new pix, the app’s review-and-release system (you flick viewed photos offscreen and a replacement from the same album instantly appears) is not just efficient, but also great fun. PICK & PRESERVE : The app’s calendar-based approach (you can view this week’s haul, last week’s, or move day by day) is great for catching up on photo-viewing chores you’ve had to put aside for things like, you know, work. Save the gems you like best to a Flickpad favorite album and email any pic you like to anyone, even if they’re not a member of one of these networks (yep, still a few of ‘em out there). TONS O’ TOOLS : Other treats: double-tap any picture to see the full album it belongs to; hide friends whose photos you don’t want to see; and, in the Flickr icon, tap Explore to see a greatest hits selection — sorta like a tour through your friends’ best pix … if your friends were all pro photographers. HONORABLE MENTION: QUBICAL $0.99 | Version: 1.0 | Aleryon Half the fun of Facebook comes from the photos your pals share. But unless you’re on full-time news feed patrol, it’s easy to miss the latest pix. And even the ones you do see show up in that boring “click Previous, click Next” layout. This app stakes its future on a pretty distinct bet: photo browsing’s more fun when pictures get laid out like tiles on a twirlable 3D cube. And you know what? As you exit the Land of Lists and feast your eyes and fingers on the app’s photo-filled cube, the temptations to tap, to pinch, to — whoa, there, fella … these are your friends — well, let’s leave it at this: Qubical’s a fun way to browse. CUBE CONTROL : Grab the cube by tapping and holding anywhere onscreen (not just on the cube itself) and pivot it by moving your finger. Shrink or enlarge the box by pinching or spreading. For your autorotating pleasure, tap the arrow-around-the-pole icon. The app’s also got Facebook’s commenting hooks built in, so you can add comments. PICTURE POWER : Double-tap any friend whose photos you want to see an then head to the Albums icon. Here’s where you can roll through whatever photo collections your buds have broadcast. See something you like and wanna view it, uh, normally? Just tap the picture for a regular shot frozen in plain ol’ 2D space across your screen. Tools mentioned in this entry: APPLE IPAD More questions? View the complete Toolkit archive . Excerpted from Peter Meyers’ Best iPad Apps: The Guide for Discriminating Downloaders . Copyright 2010 O’Reilly Media, Inc. All rights reserved. Used with permission . Read more Atlantic Technology Channel book excerpts .

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iPad Apps: Best App for Friend Photo Browsing

Fraser Speirs, the software developer behind FlickrExport, Viewfinder, and a number of other products, has been visiting and talking with schools who are interested in using Apple’s iPad to help create a better learning environment, but aren’t sure how. Speirs, who teaches computing at Cedars School of Excellence, has found that most schools simply replace old PC labs with iPad labs and aren’t using the tablet the way it was meant to be used. I speak to a lot of schools who envisage the iPad in the roles that PCs formerly occupied. The “laptop trolley” becomes an “iPad trolley”. The “checkout netbooks” become the “checkout iPads”. The “PC lab” becomes the “iPad lab”. That’s not how the iPad is designed and, it seems to me, the iPad is an extremely uncomfortable fit for those roles defined in an earlier era. The iPad is not another “thing” to have in your classroom in the way that you might buy one thermometer for every seat in your science lab. You can’t easily share an iPad the way you might have pupils share a digital camera. The iPad is an intensely personal device. In its design intent it is, truly, much more like a “big iPhone” than a “small laptop”. The iPad isn’t something you pass around. It’s not really designed to be a “resource” that many people take advantage of. It’s designed to be owned, configured to your taste, invested in and curated. The idea that you can use an iPad without leaving a data footprint on the device is not outright wrong, but such an approach to this device will either lead to confusion or a lot of time taken up with “restoring” iPads back to known-clean backup images. Hardware sharing is a solved problem on Macs and PCs with multiple-user operating systems. iOS, for better or for worse, simply isn’t that kind of OS. Read the full story at Fraser Speirs . H/T Daring Fireball .

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How the iPad Is Supposed to Be Used

Broadcastr, a new Brooklyn-based startup set to launch next month (it has been open to selected users since December), will serve as a repository for thousands of audio files that are tied to specific sites. A partnership with the National September 11 Memorial & Museum will provide users with more than 2,000 oral histories from first responders, witnesses, and others who wanted to share what they saw and where they were on the day the World Trade Center fell. “This is a way to get these stories out to people who are visiting the city or who are halfway around the world,” Joe Daniels, president of the foundation building the memorial, told the  Associated Press . ”It’s pretty powerful stuff.” The National September 11th Memorial & Museum and Brooklyn-based startup Broadcastr have teamed up to curate an oral history of the infamous day’s events . As part of Broadcastr’s debut next month, it will host over 2,000 interviews with eye witnesses and first responders about their experiences on September 11th, 2001. About a week after the site goes public, Broadcastr will offer both iPhone and Android versions of an app that will be able to associate geolocation data with uploaded stories. That data can also be used to filter stories, so tourists and mourners can walk through the forthcoming September 11th Memorial, and hear the recollections of those affected by the tragedy. Broadcastr aims to become to audio what Flickr and YouTube are to photos and videos — serving as a repository of people’s stories, as told in their own voices. Read the full story at Switched .

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New Website Will Host Extensive Oral History of September 11

Get more out of your gadgets with these tech add-ons If there’s any theme to the newsworthy items found at CES this year, it’s the concept of the add-on gadget. From tweeting from a camera to printing mobile pictures and avoiding speeding tickets with phones, here are a few new things you can do when devices start talking to each other. Polaroid Grey Label Printer The lesser-hyped product from Polaroid’s new Gaga designed line, the GL10 Grey Label printer uses a new Zink (zero ink) printing technology to print quality 3″x4″ shots sent to the device via Bluetooth from a Blackberry or Android app. It gives the option of printing border-less or with an old-school white frame, and offers a variety of special effects. With its chic leather carrying case, it makes a great accessory for taking out to a party. Due out this May, the printer will run $150. Olympus PP1 Penpal To trick out their new E-PL2 micro four-thirds camera, Olympus’ PP1 Penpal fits into the flash hotshoe. When in place, a “share” option appears on the playback screen to transfer that picture to Blackberry or Android devices via Bluetooth. The pic lands in your photo library so it can be easily posted to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr or anywhere else you share photos from your phone. It’s available from Olympus retailers now for $80. Surc Univeral Remote iPhone Case Not the first but potentially the most powerful, this iPhone case and accompanying software turns phones into universal remotes. You can easily add devices and rooms to be able to use it anywhere in your home, or launch a “Surc attack” in your favorite bar and change the TV station so that you never miss an episode of Real Housewives. It comes out this spring and will retail for $70 from Surc . Cobra iRadar With Cobra iRadar a simple radar detector becomes more powerful by pairing with your iPhone. The app tracks driving information, avoids red light cameras and notes speed traps. It’s available from several retailers now for $130. Parrot Astroid The Parrot Astroid is a single-plug in-dash receiver with a simple interface and a high-res color screen featuring web apps, voice recognition, music playback and hands-free telephony—all by communicating with your mobile phone over Bluetooth.

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New Tech Pairings

Rob Walker has a wonderful exploration of digital afterlives this week’s New York Times Magazine . It’s worth reading in full , but what struck me is that we’re about to be overwhelmed by people dying and leaving behind accounts, avatars, and effects. Just a few years ago, it seemed novel to think about what to do about a dead person’s online life. It was the sort of thing that digital anthropologists wrote papers about for obscure conferences. Now, with the explosion of social media usage in progressively older age groups, deciding how to manage these situations will be commonplace and important. Walker cites one estimate that 375,000 American Facebook users will die this year; what had seemed bizarre is becoming banal at scale. Walker: Nevertheless: people die. For most of us, the fate of tweets and status updates and the like may seem trivial (who cares — I’ll be dead!). But increasingly we’re not leaving a record of life by culling and stowing away physical journals or shoeboxes of letters and photographs for heirs or the future. Instead, we are, collectively, busy producing fresh masses of life-affirming digital stuff: five billion images and counting on Flickr; hundreds of thousands of YouTube videos uploaded every day; oceans of content from 20 million bloggers and 500 million Facebook members; two billion tweets a month. Sites and services warehouse our musical and visual creations, personal data, shared opinions and taste declarations in the form of reviews and lists and ratings, even virtual scrapbook pages. Avatars left behind in World of Warcraft or Second Life can have financial or intellectual-property holdings in those alternate realities. We pile up digital possessions and expressions, and we tend to leave them piled up, like virtual hoarders.

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375,000 Facebook Users May Die This Year. What Do We Do With Their Stuff?

Pummelvision is a new tool that takes photographs you have uploaded to your Tumblr, Facebook or Flickr accounts and turns them into a rapid slideshow of your (digital) life. The Atlantic ‘s Tumblr launched in August of this year and, when plugged into the Pummelvision interface, already shows more than 230 images for the service to choose from. Amanda Mooney, a social media strategist for Edelman, recently posted a Pummelvision video of her two years on Tumblr to the blog for Ruby Pseudo, a London-based agency. In her post, Mooney noted that Pummelvision reminds her of Rick Webb ‘s summary of Tumblr: It’s “the only place you can talk serious business mixed in with badass shark photos.” As you watch our video, you’ll see that this holds true for The Atlantic ‘s account. Over the past five months, Jared Keller , our social media editor, has uploaded dozens of great stories from our 153-year archive; highlighted debates on topics political and cultural from our digital pages on TheAtlantic.com; and recognized, at the same time, less serious Internet ephemera. Today alone, his posts range from pixelated Senate members to a story on the Union Army Balloon Corp, a team that surveilled Confederate troops during the Civil War using air-filled balloons.

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5 Months on Tumblr as Seen Through Pummelvision

Mike Licht has been creating images for his website, NotionsCapital.com , since August of 2007. He now has an archive of hundreds of what he calls “Digital Primitives.” “Constructed solely with the most primordial Microsoft tools,” Licht’s works are collages that, when complete, serve as a commentary on culture. Some of our favorites involve anachronistic gizmos and gadgets placed over and into Vigée Le Brun paintings, Renoir paintings, and the works of other French and German artists from the 18th and 19th centuries. We’ve picked some of the best (and kept Licht’s original captions from his Flickr account), but you can see more here . H/t: Associate Editor Justin Miller found these images on Flickr while looking for a piece to illustrate a story.

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Anachronistic Gadgets in 18th Century French Art

Instagram, a photo-sharing social network, announced Tuesday that it had passed one million registered users in just two months.

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Bits: Instagram Passes 1 Million Users

Skim through the photos on Flickr or Photobucket, and you’ll find pictures of cats pawing at living-room sofas, children playing in backyards and mothers gardening at home.

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Online photos breaching your privacy?