This is what I’ve been doing today. Grant’s cousin Caroline (who, as you can see, is significantly more bendy and stable than I am) has been staying with us this week, and we’ve been exploring Sydney a little. Today we did the walk from Coogee beach to Bondi, finishing up with an impromptu yoga session on the sand as the sun went down. Yesterday we went to Taronga Zoo, and saw this particularly ridiculous bird:
The one above is embedded with Embed.ly, which generates embed code – it uses img tags rather than an iframe, and therefore has the benefit of letting you muck about a bit with the source, correct typos, and so on. It also has the bonus of being visible in WordPress previews. Right now while typing I have no idea what the top photo’s going to look like, whether it’s sized sensibly for my blog template, etc. I don’t know if it includes comments or like counts or captions. [edit: counts yes; captions no.] It also means the bird photo will be the one pulled in elsewhere on this site attached to this post, unless I upload the others separately; my related post plugin won’t look for images inside frames.
It’s a sensible, if belated, move from Instagram to make their content more easily spreadable, in the way that Vine and Twitter are; it’s hard to see it as anything but a way to encourage people to make more use of its video features, by making those videos are more broadly available. Of course, because some laws of the internet are immutable, there are already people writing SEO-friendly posts of advice for brands about how to leverage it. It makes Instagram a more viable option for live coverage of events, because it’s more easy to pull it all together afterwards into a single page. But right now, for me, it just makes it a little easier to show family back home who don’t know what Instagram is the beauty of Australia in midwinter.
