Getty Images has come up with an odd, inventive, and intriguing take on the streaming music service (pandora, last fm, etc.). Getty’s Moodstream combines audio with shifting still and video images. The user dials up a “mood” by adjusting sliders for such qualities as “happy” vs. “sad,” “calm” vs. “lively,” and so on. (Or you can choose from presets.)
Moodstream is intended as a promotional tool. Getty hopes that creative people will use it as a brainstorming tool and end up licensing some of the images. Certainly Getty is rich in excellent stock images. Unfortunately, the music is the weak link, and I suspect after the site’s novelty has faded the comparatively insipid music will not be good enough to attract a sizable audience.
Still, it’s an interesting concept, and one worth checking out.
This is post that will be of interest only to WordPress bloggers. Fernando Briano, a programmer based in Uruguay, has created a simple WordPress plugin that produces a list of posts by category. You can adjust the number of items shown, but the adjustment is global — it would be nice to be able to control the number of items in each instance that you use it. Also, the posts are listed in chronological order, and there is no option to change that.
To use the plugin you place some code in your post that calls up the category by ID number. Many plugins use ID numbers. But since version 2.5, WP doesn’t show ID numbers in the administration panel. What to do? The answer is to click on the category in the “manage categories” list — the ID number is shown in the url.
I wish I could say I invented this technique for correcting color cast, but I actually learned about it from an online tutorial. Here I’ve added a wrinkle that is helpful for people like me who haven’t upgraded their Photoshop in a while.
We’ll start with this image of the multimedia center at the main branch of the San Francisco public library.
The first thing we need to do is to duplicate the image.
Here’s n interesting case study in how a final magazine layout is arrived at. The designer is Matt Willey, the magazine Royal Academy.
The title changes are amusing, in a wicked sort of way (I assume the endless revisions are coming from an editor) — at some point Wiley just stops entering the changes and works with a row of exes instead.
Graphic designer Frank Chimero had the cool idea of comparing his silhouette to those of a bunch of famous people. He turned the project into a nicely designed little book. A selection from the book is on his website (though the text is too small, regrettably, for reading).
Wordle is “a toy for generating ‘word clouds’ from text that you provide.” Words that appear more often are presented more prominently. The site will make word clouds from text that you provide or from urls or even from a del.icio.us user’s tags. It’s so pointless it almost becomes interesting.
What if some well-known American writers had become wordle poets? I fed six poems into the machine and accepted the default output (except in one case where I rejected a black background).
“The books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation — a book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.” — From a letter of Kafka to Oskar Pollak.
DoFollow: it was a noble experiment. But it brought me a lot of thin or spam comments that benefited no one. I spent a fair amount of time either deleting these or agonizing about whether they had a shred of content and should be spared.
You might have heard about the restaurant in China that, in preparation for the Olympics, decided to translate their name into English. I guess the translation program was down and, well …
BibMe, despite its unfortunate name, may be the easiest bibliography maker available. The site allows you to construct a bibliography in MLA, APA, or Chicago style and download it or save it to the site. You enter an ISBN, author, or title and BibMe does the rest. In addition to books, BibMe can handle websites, journals, videos, newspapers, and “other” (whatever that includes). The service is free.
I tried it with my “books for writers” list at Powell’s (that meant only testing books, so I threw in this blog to see how it would handle a website). I chose Chicago style. BibMe produced the following results.
If you are at all interested in the current arts scene, I’m sure you have heard a lot about about the imminent opening of the Museum of Folly; probably you are growing tired of the endless media coverage. What I have for you today is something entirely better. Blog.rightreading.com has arranged for a special preview of the museum, for its readers only!
While only a few display cases have been installed at this point, selected areas of the museum are nonetheless ready for viewing. To be one of the first to visit the new facility, just click on the screen shot below. (For the special tour, you will enter through the front entrance, but later you can use the member’s shortcut to the new acquisitions galleries.)
Graphic designer Frank Chimero had the cool idea of comparing his silhouette to those of a bunch of famous people. He turned the project into a nicely designed little book. A selection from the book is on his website (though the text is too small, regrettably, for reading).
