When I shoot pictures, like I did this week at the LIFT conference, my camera makes two copies: one in the RAW format and one in JPEG. Now, the ones that get uploaded to my Flickr account are the JPEGs. But lately I’ve been playing with my RAW files and seeing just how much better those are for doing post processing. It’s amazing how much tonal range you have access to there. Things that look too dark often can be “saved.” Or you can change the color. Or sharpen the images. In a way that’s far far higher quality and has far far more capabilities than if you try to mess with the JPEG images.

So, I’m wondering how to share with you my RAW files?

Why can’t I share them now? Well, for one, Flickr doesn’t allow uploading of RAW files. For two, these suckers are BIG. One RAW file is about 15 MB. For three, most software can’t display them (and RAW files aren’t always compatible between manufacturers either).

But I’m looking for a way to cheaply share my RAW files with you, because if I really want to say that I’ve put my work into the public domain I’ve got to give you access to my source files.

One idea is to use a P-2-P file sharing service like Wuala, which was one of the winners of the LIFT Venture Night competition. But I’m wondering if there’s another service out there that’d work better.

In case you missed my earlier post, all of my photos on Flickr are in the public domain. You may use them without crediting me or compensating me in any way for my work. That’s a gift to the Web from me and Fast Company magazine. Tomorrow I’ll be at CERN and I’ll make a bunch of high-quality images there that I’ll get up as part of my LIFT collection.

Every year I find something cool at LIFT. Two years ago I was the first site to talk about CoComment, which now has a million users.

This time I got a demo and met the development team for MixIn, which is a social calendar that hooks to Twitter. On Qik I got a good demo.

Flavio Rump, in this Qik video, asks something very interesting: is the DataPortability.org just PR? He’s been kicked off of several social networks for trying to import JUST NAMES into Facebook. Wants to know if any social network is actually changing its behavior when it comes to sharing data. He hasn’t seen any action yet and, in the video, we talk about a raft of dataportability issues. Interesting hallway conversations from LIFT in Geneva, Switzerland.