Over the next week we’ll invite the rest of you who signed up for the beta. It feels truly wonderful!

Inviting the rest of our signed up beta testers is one of the final procedures ramping up to our public beta, something we and those who’ve followed us have been looking forward to for some time now. We’ve come a long way.

So far 2000 registered beta testers have found over 21 million images, featuring over 8 million people and named nearly 150.000 of them. Thats not bad, and I’m curious to see how this scales as we add more users.

For me Polar Rose has become a cockpit for my visual web. I find 40 images of me being “seen with” a selection of people (click the stacks to see who). My friends and family are also now searchable – most of them were not before, I think this makes sense.

In the short tail I find several hundred links to Barack Obama and while that might not bring much value compared to any other search service, knowing who he’s seen with on various occasions definitely does. Its a whole new way of navigating the web and I like it.

No need to worry if you do not get any results by searching for your own name. Using the plugin and the coming widget for partner sites you and those who know you can add you to the index as we go live.

Stay tuned. Public beta coming up.

Christmas presents seem to come early this year. Two weeks ago we were awarded Best Technical Innovation at the SIME conference in Stockholm, last week we were announced to be on the Red Herring Global 200 100 list, and yesterday the World Economic Forum selected us a Technology Pioneer 2008 alongside Wikipedia, Clearwire and Yandex.ru.

We’re honored, we’re charmed, and we couldn’t be happier. While recognitions like these don’t in and of themselves resolve issues like those we’ve had the past couple of days, they – together with great user feedback – definitely keep up the spirits in Warsaw, Malmö and Amsterdam and makes the late night crunches more bearable.

See you in Davos come January!

A month ago in Seattle we launched the people gallery, a snapshot of people appearing in photos at Flickr tagged ‘gnomedex07′. We found a total of 1.988 shots of people, of which about 45% ended up being named.

This morning we rolled out a new version of the events people gallery based on the feedback from Gnomedex. The first implementation is for the TechCrunch40 conference going on today and tomorrow in San Francisco.
Reports are that the wi-fi network is flaky, so only a few photos have come up on Flickr, but we’ve already picked out 138 people from the photos by now.

As you might have noticed, we’ve added RSS feeds to Polar Rose ‘found’ pages, including an RSS feed for the TechCrunch40 people gallery.

I’m at home, but stop by and say hello to Mikkel who’ll be in the conference Demopit all Tuesday.

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

Like most other blogs this blog has been heavily attacked by blog-spam. Akismet has done a fair job keeping most spam out (48,491 and counting as of today), but some was still making it’s way through.

The next obvious step was to install a captcha solution and as you’ll see at the bottom of this post, we’re now using reCaptcha.

reCaptcha was conceived by one of our very biggest heroes here at Polar Rose, namely Luis von Ahn, assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University and father of the fantastic ESP Game (licensed to Google as the Google Image Labeler).

Along with stopping spam, reCaptcha helps the Internet Archive digitize parts of books that could not be automatically OCR’ed.

So keep those comments coming!

PS. I wrote more about reCaptcha on the O’Reilly Radar team blog where I also post.