Clear Blue Dei

I ran across these and they blew my mind! It is called coverpop and it is a website created by Jim Bumgardner, of KrazyDad.com, to house his experimental coverpop project. Per his FAQ page: ”
A coverpop can be a unique work of art, a software toy, or a fun way to shop for stuff.

Each coverpop is an interactive mosaic, made of tiny images, such as magazine covers. These are called “micro thumbnails”. As you drag the mouse over each micro thumbnail, it pops up to a full-sized thumbnail image, and provides some information about the item. For some coverpops, you can click again to produce either a full-sized image, or to go to another website to learn more information about the item.

Some coverpops arrange the images by time, by price, or color. Other coverpops arrange the images into a photomosaic.”

If you go to main coverpop site , you will see a random choice of oneof his coverpop mosaics. You can choose from the list on the right side to see specific ones. He creates mashups using flickr, youtube, amazon and other web 2.0 apps to create really amazing mosaics that you can spend endless time browsing and playing with.

He has a set of youtube video mosaics too. And just plain mosaics that are really interesting. Here is a description of how it works and here is a brief description from that page:

“Data for each coverpop is prepared using Perl and the ImageMagick library. Space-filling is implemented (with visual feedback) using Processing (p5). The interface itself is presented in Flash/Actionscript within a PHP webpage.

I download information about all the covers using various means. I use Amazon Web Services for the Amazon-powered coverpops, and I screen-scrape websites, such as the Visco archive for the Science Fiction coverpop. This is done using a Perl program. Then I download all the thumbnails (again with Perl), and analyse them for color, using ImageMagick to reduce each image to 1×1 and recording the color of the remaining pixel.”

You can also generate banners to put on your website with various mosaics like Harry Potter on Amazon or Time’s Top 100 Novels. These are linked to amazon and you receive credit when someone buys through your site except he receives the credit every 6 times or so. I created one just to try it out (you can generate the code from his site) and put it on the bottom of my Goggle Blogger blog Along the Path to 2.0. It is at the bottom of the blog. Go take a look at it! Unfortunately I can’t put it on my Wordpress blog yet since it is hosted by Wordpress.com. I hope to correct that soon!

To learn about new coverpop or just to find out more, you can go to his blog. He has a lot more interesting things on there.

He has also co-authored a book called Flickr Hacks - Tips and Tools for Sharing Photos Online that talks about the flickr .APIs and how to do some of these things and sounds VERY interesting.

Check it out! But don’t do it until you have some time to spend because you definitely will.

~Susan Mellott

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I was looking at my feed from Boxxnet for Web 2.0 related items and I saw one called “Hey, that’s my data!” from Canadian Technology News. And like any good blogger, I stole what I could from the post, including, in this case, the title.

Before I even read the article, I had an idea from the title, which was that what we write online is “up for grabs” from anyone and their brother (or sister). So what if someone decides to write a book and publish it and uses only information that has already been written from other people, without giving any credit (or money) to those people who actually wrote the book? Or who takes the best of flickr and makes a beautiful coffee table book from the pictures they find? Or I watched a show on TV that is ongoing that is just a bunch of YouTube videos they have found on the internet. I can’t remember what it is called but I just did a little looking on my digital cable and found a show on the Comedy Channel called Web Shows and the description is “A compilation of online videos”. When I went to ComedyCentral.com, I could look it up but when I clicked on “go to site” it took me to a page with episodes they had on the web (I think). So I looked clicked on “Go to TV schedule” instead and it too me to the schedule for that show and described it as “This groundbreaking half-hour series features several of the internet’s best webisodes and short-form content.”.

Anyway, I know I have watched shows on TV made up of videos that other people have made and posted on the web. Now I don’t have a problem at all with people sharing information that I have written or posted or videos or pictures I’ve taken. That is the beauty of the whole Web 2.0 concept. That it is greater than its parts. But what control is there over people taking the creative and hard worked things that people have done and using it to just make money?

Or what if someone wants to use something that you created in a way that you don’t agree with? What if, for example, you took a series of beautiful nude photographs and posted them on flickr as an art set. But someone copied them and put them in Hustler magazine as “Hot Chicks from the Web”?

Or for that matter, for something a little closer to home, usurped your website and redirected to a site you found offensive? We had a website at one time that we no longer use, but since I was into koi ponds at one time and posted pictures and descriptions of our ponds, there were links to it several places. However, a porno site redirected our links to its site and even worse, it had a million popups and all sorts of things so once you got there, you couldn’t get out or stop the madness. I tried every way possible to do something about it but had no luck. I couldn’t even edit the places where my link was posted, or in most cases, contact the person who could.

And back to the point of the post that originally sparked this thought, what control do you even have over anything relating to you on the internet? The original post was subtitled “Why we’re all on Facebook, whether we like it or not” and dealt with a situation even closer to home that I am sure we all can relate to. It is about how this person had been at a party on a cruise ship and found his picture (looking rather raggedy) on someone’s facebook page. Here is a quote: “This is what happens to data in an age of social networking. We don’t necessarily create the content, we don’t store the content, and we have little to no control over how it is managed, distributed or manipulated. At the moment, if all you knew about me was the stuff about me you found on Facebook you’d assume I was a haggard-looking ne’er do well who spent too much time boating and not enough time sleeping. Which might be true, but it’s not the entire truth.”

I highly recommend you read his post, he has much to say on this particular issue and I don’t really need to re-state it here. I guarantee it will hit home and raise some interesting questions.

And as you can see, I am not above stealing a catchy title, or using what someone else has written. Are you?

~Susan Mellott

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I imagine most of you know who Wil Wheaton is. He is an actor who played Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Actually, he has done a lot more than that, but that is mainly how I know of him.

But what makes him interesting is his love and knowledge of technology and his leading edge use of Web 2.0 tools. Here is the wikipedia entry that talks about him and what he has done.

From wikipedia: “After leaving Star Trek, Wheaton quit acting altogether. He moved to Topeka, Kansas to work as a programmer for Newtek, where he helped develop the Video Toaster 4000.” (I assume they meant he temporarily quit acting)

Wil was a very early adopter of blogging, creating his site wilwheaton.net (see the wikipedia article on his blog) which is currently being updated (since about last June) and is replaced for now by his blog WWdN: In Exile - Wil Wheaton’s not-so-temporary blog. Per the wikipedia article on his blog: “Rather than just a fan forum, it was a place where people could gather to talk about various subjects including movies, music, books, religion, politics, gaming, geocaching, and miscellaneous topics; the original emphasis was on topics of interest to Wil Wheaton and not the man himself.” He has entries on his blog dating back to July 2001.

Wil also has written 3 books, and most of the entries are extended versions of his online blog entries. (Take note, bloggers, this is not a bad idea if you have a following).

Also from wikipedia: “In late September of 2006, Wheaton began hosting a Revision3 syndicated video podcast called InDigital along with Jessica Corbin and veteran host Hahn Choi. ” Of note: Wil found an error on the wikipedia entry for himself and asked on slashdot for someone to correct it.

Wil also twitters regularly and has just recently twittered on the Comic-Con he attended. Interestingly, he is having a problem at the moment trying to remove people he no longer wishes to follow and is talking about it on twitter. Update: as of about 4 hours ago, he twittered that the problem was a bug in twitter and was fixed by Biz Stone.

Wil also uses flickr and has some very interesting photos. And something I found interesting too that Wil has been doing on buzznet is “What is Wil looking At?” which is sort of a cross between flickring and twittering (flittring?). It looks like he is taking pictures with his phone of whatever he is doing and uploading them. It’s a neat idea and I’m sure at some point, people will be doing that just like they twitter now.

And of course, he checks technorati for links to his blog and has a profile technorati for wilw. Here are some other things of his (from his blog):

• My Netscape Submissions (he’s a navigator at Netscape News)
• My delicious bookmarks
• Geek in Review
• blogging.la

And there are quite a few interesting videos of him talking about technology on YouTube. Here is one where Wil talks about Podcasting (answering fan’s question at reading of his book, Just a Geek)

And there is a lot more that he is or has been involved with. The wikipedia article and his blog has more information.

To be honest, although I knew who he was, I’m old enough that I watched the original Star Trek more than I watched The Next Generation. But I think he seems like an interesting person and certainly one who is Web 2.0.

~Susan Mellott

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If you have been using Wordpress.com to host your blog, you might be wondering how to embed a video in your post. I know I have been! Well, thanks to what else, a YouTube video, I found the answer. It isn’t hard, but I just didn’t know.

Essentially, you just copy and paste the code next to the “embed” tag that is part of the information listed for each YouTube video while viewing the post using the “Code” tab (not the “Visual” tab). This worked for me and I didn’t need to do anything.

It is the same in Google Blogger except you go to the Edit HTML tab to add the code instead of the Code tab.

Actually, the video didn’t really help me except to point me to the ‘embed’ code and then it was obvious that it needed added to the Code section (or Edit HTML section in Blogger). And it was even more obvious when I tried it again and forgot to go to the Code first and it just displayed the code as text (as you would expect).

But if that doesn’t work, according to the video, it may be because of the WordPress Advanced Text Editor. Now the instructions in the video seem to be a little different than what I see so I’m wondering if it is pertaining to the WordPress version that you host on your own, or maybe to an earlier version. So this may or may not be applicable. I think maybe it was an earlier version of WordPress that didn’t allow you to view the code, since all I needed to do was to copy the embed code into the post while viewing it in the Code tab. But here is the video I watched for this, and my first embedded video (I cheated and went back and put an embedded video in the post before this one too).

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgLv9XQWlMA]

~Susie

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There is a new channel on YouTube called CleanMyRide. This is what it has to say about itself: “This channel is aimed at making people aware that Congress is about to begin an important debate about the energy bill. The bill is a good start, but it still needs provisions to take on the really big stuff - increasing gas mileage requirements and mandating the availability of flexible-fuels. These tough solutions will slash oil use and slow global warming.”

One thing new about this is the high production quality and celebrity involvement. Some of the celebrities in these videos are Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Jason Biggs and Jennifer Garner, to name a few.

Here is the first video:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBx3xIz1F3k]
The videos are funny, informative (slight adult content) and really rather addictive. Ben Affleck is hilarious in part one as a big piece of “street” corn. Here is an article from People Magazine about the videos.

Check out their website to see some really cutting edge Web 2.0 used for a campaign to inform people about an important bill before Congress.

Visit CleanMyRide.org to learn more and sign the petition. Tell Congress: Clean My Ride!

~Susie

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I hate to admit that I did not watch (or twitter) the presidential debates last night. However, thanks to the 2.0 aspect, it has been captured in ways that were never (or seldom) done before. Here is an excellent blog titled The YouTube Campaign 2008 that has a great deal of information and I believe they were liveblogging the debate. And here is the post from the YouTube blog entitled The CNN/YouTube Debate: How Did They Do? And don’t forget the next YouTube Debate video entry request which is for the YouTube Republican Debate September 17.

There is controversy over the real value of this though, and many people think it was more of a good marketing ploy for the candidates than a true discourse with “the people”. And questions were raised about the video questions that were selected since they were selected by CNN’s political team. I must admit, I have my doubts too. I love the idea of political candidates really answering to the people and having real people ask real questions. Do I think it is there yet? No. But I think this is the right path to be on and I think it can help the campaigns get more ‘real’. Here is a link to a Yahoo! news article on the Debate over Whether YouTube made a Difference. And one final link to The BuzzMachine about the debate. There are many interesting comments on this post.

~Susie

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I have created my first YouTube video and it is of the community of Fort Wayne streaming into the Allen County Public Library for their fabulous Harry Potter Release party that was held 7/20/2007 from 9pm to post-midnight (at which time the lucky lottery winners could check out 1 of 200 copies of the final Harry Potter book).

It is a very sped up version of part of the people entering the ACPL when the doors opened at 9pm. The actual time it took just for the people who were waiting for the doors to open to get in was 10 minutes. I can’t imagine how many people that must have been.

Fortunately there were a lot of activities taking place on the Library Plaza (they started at 8pm) as well as inside. There was a band playing, games for the kids including the spiderweb maze, potions classes, costume shows and I believe there was even Potter Bingo.

ACPL, the community of Fort Wayne thanks you for all you do.

This is a pretty poor video, but it is my first one so I am sure I will get better. Anyway, enjoy!

People entering the ACPL at 9pm 7/20/2007 for the Harry Potter Release Party

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3nxu7Oaduw]
~Susie

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As I was taking our cat, Ubi, to the vet this afternoon, I turned on the radio to NPR and there was a fascinating discussion on Talk of the Nation about the web’s role in the presidential debate. It was called Digital Democracy: YouTube’s Presidential Debates and you can listen to a podcast of it on that site. It is very well worth listening to. It is about what role Web2.0 tools such as YouTube, MySpace, blogs, web searches, etc. will play in politics, both in the upcoming presidential debate and in politics in general. Here is the NPR Blog of the Nation post entitled Democrawikiyoutubia 2.8 that is about this NPR broadcast.

As you may or may not know, CNN is asking people to submit YouTube videos with a question for the presidential campaign debate that will be taking place next Monday, July 23. Here is where you can submit your video. And here is a Washington Post blog post entitled CNN/YouTube Debate: The Best of The Questions So Far that has videos of some of the best questions that have been submitted so far. There are also many interested comments for this article.

Another interesting fact is that much of this information is in blog format, such as the NPR Blog of the Nation, The Washington Post’s Blog and the Official Google Blog post where the YouTube Presidential Debate program was introduced. YouTube also has a You Choose ‘08 channel for the 2008 presidential campaign.

And after listening to this broadcast and reading the associated articles and blogs, I realized just how much Web 2.0 is permeating our culture in every way. Yes Virginia, there is Politics 2.0.

~Susie

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My husband, Sean Robinson’s incredibly funny and pertinent YouTube videos that he and Kay Gregg created for the Allen County Public Library.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWY8OBMlroI]

iACPL

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYwoHCdIDKU]

iACPL 2.0

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFzHH5LRK2M]

iACPL 3.0

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6uWmT2TXlQ]

iACPL 4.0

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