Mikkel and I are in beautiful Seattle at Gnomedex, Chris Pirillo’s (Lockergnome) annual conference. It’s great and feels much like our beloved reboot.

As Mike Arrington wrote up on Techcrunch, we’ve created a people gallery for Gnomedex. We’re pulling pictures tagged ‘gnomedex07′ or ‘gnomedex2007′ from Flickr, process them for people, and republish this people gallery on the Gnomedex site (see screenshot).

If you know who’s in the picture, you can name people with the inline editor on our site, or back at the original photo on Flickr using the plugin.
We know that there are certain elements missing like better sorting and the obvious RSS feed, but this was a last-minute crunch that the team put out (thanks, guys!). People are already calling this a must-have conference tool and we expect to put up these people galleries for other conferences soon.

Have fun and let us know what you think!

ps. If you want to test the functionality without adding pictures to the Gnomedex people gallery that aren’t really from Gnomedex, use the tag ‘prtest07′ on Flickr and they’ll appear at http://www.polarrose.com/events/prtest07

As the number of photos and Polar Rose explorers steadily grows, so does the number of features on our site. In our last post we described our rough roadmap and we are happy to announce a bunch of new features from that list.

Favorites

This is a way for you to mark photos that you like. Just click the star icon underneath the thumbnail. Photos marked as favorites will end up on your favorites page.

New menu

We are making it easier to agree and suggest names or AKA’s directly on the photos on our site. Clicking on the face thumbnails will present a menu that lets you enter or agree to names just like when using the plugin. The menu also has the following functions which are enabled by marking the appropriate check-boxes:

• This is me! – This is a way for you to show the world who you are. Photos marked as “me” will end up on your “me” page. There will also be some other fun things to do with these photos in the future.


• User avatars – This allows you to select a face to be your avatar.


• Adult content filter – Marking photos as adult content will let you and other users filter those images in your results. Photos with adult content are moderated. In your account settings page you can enable or disable the filtering of adult content.

Grid view

The grid view is a great navigational tool for quickly browsing through results on pages. It comes in two sizes and shows thumbnails arranged in a grid structure – 5-by-5 (large thumbnails) or 10-by-10 (small thumbnails).

Finally…

A lot of people are asking us when they will be let in to try out the stuff we are talking about. We are quickly ramping up the number of invites and still selecting them at random from those who have signed up. If you haven’t received an invite email, please have patience.

We also have a surprise ready for next week… more on that later.

And remember, your feedback is always welcome.