Posts tagged Look
13 Website Social Optimization Oversights That Make You Look Foolish
Apr 12th
It’s imperative to audit your website and blog to ensure it is optimized for social interaction, discussion and sharing. These 13 barriers present a wall between you and social engagement success. Are you guilty? If so, read on to find the remedy!
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[Infographic] A Look Back at UNIVAC
Apr 2nd
It was the first computer – ever – and it was turned on in March of 1951 for the U.S. Census Bureau. The UNIVAC, or Universal Automatic Computer, was big: an entire room, filled with more than 5,000 vacuum tubes and consuming 150 kW of power. It operated at a mere 2000 instructions per second. (By comparison, the average laptop today routinely handles about 100,000 million instructions every second.)
The UNIVAC had Big Bertha printers, too, that could print 600 lines of type every minute on form-fed paper, and weighed in at 800 pounds. Thanks to the folks at Royal Pingdom, who have put together this infographic.
The UNIVAC’s big claim to fame: It was the first computer used to predict a U.S. election: UNIVAC said at 8:30 p.m. EST that Eisenhower would win 43 states and 438 electoral votes: he actually won 39 states and 442 votes. Wired had the story several years ago here. CBS news, who had hired the programmers, never aired the prediction, however.
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How to Look at Art Through Apps
Mar 16th
“Images were first made to conjure up the appearance of something that was absent,” writes John Berger in his seminal publication Ways of Seeing. “Gradually it became evident that an image could outlast what it represented.”
On the Internet, where variations on the Hey Girl meme live and die, Nicki Minaj battles it out against Katy Perry and cats, dogs and horses vie for the most beloved and adorable pet, it’s a wonder to think about how one can and should look at art through the lens of the edited Internet and apps. Taking Berger’s ideas for looking as a starting point, how is the idea of looking changing on the Internet and through smartphone apps? In the age of always on apps and the Internet, is it possible to return to the childlike state of looking?
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“Seeing comes before words,” writes Berger. “The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.” Indeed, the Internet is ripe with stories about how children are interacting with iPads and iPhones. Writes PCWorld nearly two years ago, when the first iPad came out: “I think the iPad will spark a revolution in children’s culture…by the time these kids reach middle school, they will have been using multitouch user interfaces almost every day for eight years or more.” The narrative has since expanded, and children are at the center of it.
In looking at art, we at once have to become child-like again – approaching the image with zero preconceived notions, seeing as if we knew nothing. We become blank slates, wiping clean our memories and experiences when at all possible. Does using apps and the Internet amplify or make possible this “for the first time” experience? Not in an adolescent way. Rather, in a childlike way.
Seeing Art through Art Museums, Augmented Reality & Map Apps
The High Museum of Art in Atlanta released an app that offers maps of the art museum, a browsable collection of art at the museum, comments on each work of art from members of the community. And then there is the ability to take a photo of a work you see, which you can then either share to Facebook or Twitter, or discuss it in the community that lives within this tiny app. “So amazing in person!” writes a user named Marykh about Pablo Picasso’s 1928 work of art Girl Before a Mirror. No comments have been posted yet.
Project Paperclip is the first augmented photography exhibition by Portuguese photographer Nuno Serrão. The app provides augmented reality soundscapes to accompany each photograph in the exhibition. Walk up to the image in an actual, physical gallery space and scan the QR code. Doing so triggers some pretty trippy music that, depending on your current state, could take you to an augmented reality of your own. The effect of scanning a QR code with your phone from your computer screen and experiencing the music is a neat hat trick. But take away the QR code gimmick and translate this to a real world art space, and it has the same effect of walking into a darkened gallery show of video or installation art, minus the full physical effect.
Three years ago the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago presented “Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson”, a visceral exhibition of sound, light, color and nature. Science met culture, and reverted back to the elements. Eliasson acts more like a scientist, probing the visceral and translating it into a full body experience for the viewer. This is work that demands a full sensory experience. It asks you to take your time – something that technology does not.
Moss Wall (1994) is a simple, elegiac installation of Artic reindeer moss covering a single wall of the gallery. The viewer is left overwhelmed by the fresh, earthy scent of the moss, and as such is transported to another mental space. Imagine yourself as reindeer, brushing up against the brocolli-like nubs of moss, quietly munching on it underneath a sunny sky.
Beauty (1993) is another visceral experience, of stepping into a darkened room quietly inhabited by mist sprays that spit from a hose on the ceiling. Inside a spotlight shines, making a quiet rainbow visible only to the lucky few. We cannot replicate a full-sensory experience through technology, and especially not apps. But at least we can augment our current state of being.
Project Paperclip proposes a way to augment reality. It takes a highly replicable Internet photograph of nature, combining it with a QR code and sound emitted from an iPhone app. It is subtly disconcerting, an ominous prediction of the artificial realities we build with the help of smartphone apps and the Internet.
When the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York announced Google Goggles for Android and iPhone, the experience of accessing information about art changed dramatically. Now you can go to the Met, take a photo of the work you’re looking at in person, and pull up a database full of information about it.
More recently, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority introduced an app that guides users to 186 permanent works of art that are installed throughout stations in the city, and a few off the Metro North and Long Island Rail Road systems. Public art is indeed now easier to find, especially if you prefer to ask your phone for directions rather than a person or prior Internet research. Or, more importantly, if you prefer the experience as mediated through an app rather than the idea of just stumbling upon something beautiful which may or may not be public art. The app provides information either by subway line or by individual artist.
“In a setting like the subway,” Sandra Bloodworth, the director of MTA Arts for Transit, told the New York Times, “art really does something. It gives a certain amount of dignity to your ride and your day. And this is finally going to be like having the whole collection in the palm of your hand.”
The RedEye Chicago reports that the Windy City is indeed one of the top places for street art. Grafrank.com pulls grafitti photos from Flickr that are tagged “street art” and “graffiti.” It also features artists who tag and have marked the city with their ink that comes from cans.
“The random tagger or etcher on the subway won’t be photographed because most people don’t recognize that graffiti as a form of art,” said New York writer Jake Dobkin, who launched the tracker. “This is more a tool for high quality artists.”
Looking Through the Glass Screen
Smartphones, iPads and social networks provide us with new ways of finding – but they may detract from the actual experience of looking and experiencing in the full-body sense of the word. And even the biggest tech nerds know that.
“So, stuff like this can help educate/self-educate, but it also has the horrible ability to amputate a direct experience of the art,” says writer Curt Hopkins. “I don’t think anyone should ever allow their first encounter with a piece of art to be mediated by so much as a tri-fold brochure, much less augmented reality, if you can help it. It robs you of that moment of pure encounter and limits how you develop your own sensual relationship with art.” To which he adds: “Afterward – or remotely – I think it’s a great resource.”
But as the child continues looking through the glassy screen of smartphones and tablets, the experience of looking at art will evolve.
Image via Shutterstock.
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Friendsheet Makes Your Friends’ Facebook Photos Look Like Pinterest
Mar 7th
When Mark Zuckerberg likes a page on Facebook, people take notice.
Within hours of Zuckerberg publicly liking Friendsheet on his Facebook profile Tuesday night, several blog posts about the site had popped up. But assertions that Friendsheet turns Facebook into Pinterest are a bit of a stretch.
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Friendsheet takes public photos your friends have posted and arranges them on a grid that looks an awful ike Pinterest, except that it replaces Pinterest’s red-and-white color scheme with Facebook blue. You can also upload photos directly to Facebook through Friendsheet, and you can choose which friends’ photos you see, as well as whether you see captions and comments.
“The goal was to take Facebook photos, and turn it into a visual experience while maintaining speed, performance, and a great, intuitive experience,” Friendsheet creator Zachary Allia said in a post on Facebook.
But Friendsheet is not Pinterest in the sense that you cannot pin images to Friensheet, nor can you organize images into pinboards or categories. The only thing Friendsheet has borrowed from Pinterest is the clean, crisp design which – arguably – is a big reason for Pinterest’s runaway success.
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Google+ Makes Itself Look Silly with Hangout Cat Masks
Mar 2nd
It dismays me to report that Google+ is adding animal masks to Google+ Hangouts. Now, instead of just having conversations like normal people, you can pretend to be cats or dogs! Isn’t that cute and fun? No.
Why are you doing this to yourself, Google? Why did you add a LOLcat generator to the main stream? We didn’t need that. And now you’re messing with Hangouts, the best thing you’ve got going, by adding corny special effects? I’m all for having fun with your features, but you shouldn’t be publicizing this.
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Google+ is down in the polls right now, and people are kicking it. It’s sad, really, because the community that is active there seems to love it. Even I, who once hated Google+, have found things to love. Specifically, I stared using Hangouts.
Google+ has used Hangouts for amazing purposes. It enabled the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu to meet together despite political obstacles. It enabled scientists at the biggest physics experiment in the world to take people from around the world on a tour. President Obama held a Hangout that put cable television to shame. And now it’s going down the road of original programming by hosting high-profile debates.
Yes, it has been used for silly celebrities, too. I don’t know which ones, because I’ve ignored those. I’ve wanted to believe that Hangouts are a world-changing tool. But Google, you make it so difficult sometimes.
Cat faces? Really?
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What Siri Would Look Like If It Were a Person
Mar 1st
Siri is the crowned jewel of Apple’s iPhone 4S. It arrived in smartphone users’ pockets back in October. Since then, it has caused quite a stir – from not being able to locate abortion clinics to hogging data on an annoyingly large scale. Siri is based on a DARPA-funded military artificial intelligence project, and it might just be the AI-powered future of search. It is more than just a “voice-powered virtual assistant tool,” as many tend to call it. What does this possible “future of search” tool look like, beyond a glowing purple microphone and white text on black background screengrabs from the main screen of an iPhone4S?
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Shapeways decided to find out by hosting its very own contest. Anyone with ideas tweeted a link along with hashtag #3DSiri to @shapeways. It announced the winners on leap year day, February 29.
But first, try asking Siri what it looks like. Here’s what I got, when I tried to engage with it.
Omniscent Siri by SaGa Design (@SagaDesign3D) took first prize. Wrapped around an iPhone 4S, Siri’s half-human, half-alien looking head rises up from the phone’s screen. Its material looks like wads of white gum smacked together and carefully rolled into a single film. Malleable and ghostly, Siri conforms to the phone’s design. Its face is cleanly symmetrical, eyes slots for only slivers of light. The phone’s owner can still easily tap the home screen, power button up top and sound buttons on silver edge.
Siri is genderless, a cyborg existing only in the mind of the user. Other designers portray Siri as female or just robotic. But the real Siri is beyond both of these cultural ideals, appearing as a being from the future, some combination of human and machine.
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Google on technical SEO at SMX West: A look at rel = ‘alternate’ – Brafton
Feb 29th
 Brafton |
Google on technical SEO at SMX West: A look at rel = 'alternate'
Brafton During an SMX West session about technical SEO, Maile Ohye, Google's developer programs tech lead, spoke about the benefits of the rel = “alternate” hreflang tag for marketers looking to reach users worldwide. For those in need of a quick tutorial, … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Forget $3B In Revenue: Things “Don’t Look Good” For Facebook
Feb 24th
Evidence is quickly mounting that Facebook’s initial public offering will not be the big boost the social media sector needs as Silicon Valley companies try to prove to Wall Street they can grow revenues.
On Thursday, PrivCo CEO Sam Hamadeh told VentureBeat that several people close to the company were saying Facebook was going to miss first-quarter revenue projections. Meanwhile, eMarketer released a report predicting Facebook’s advertising revenue growth will slow in 2013 and 2014. That follows reports earlier this week about retailers shutting down Facebook stores.
Oh yeah, and don’t forget about that class action lawsuit filed this week that once again brings Facebook’s ongoing privacy woes into focus.
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“Facebook is clearly choosing to increase its ad intrusiveness and frequency to pad its numbers short-term in preparation for its IPO and first quarter results post-IPO trading, at the cost of user experience and long-term growth.” – Financial data services company PrivCo
“We’ve confirmed with sources close to the company that Facebook is indeed behind its projections for ad revenue for the first quarter,” Hamadeh said. “It certainly doesn’t look good for Facebook frankly.”
In a blog post, PrivCo cited recently-leaked documents and noted that Facebook’s announcement this week that it was launching a new premium advertisement service suggest the company is scrambling to meet revenue goals. As we have previously noted, Facebook’s move to a publicly-traded company will mean it will need to react to shareholder pressure and may have to launch products sooner than expected to make up for revenue shortfalls.
“These are the types of actions ad-supported companies save for a Rainy Day,” Hamadeh said. “It should be a red flag for investors that Facebook apparently considers that Rainy Day to be now.”
The eMarketer report was slightly more upbeat, projecting ad revenue to grow will grow 60.5% to $5.04 billion this year. But that rate of growth is expected to drop off, falling to 32.8% next year and 13.7% in 2014.
Part of the problem is that Facebook is still heavily ad-dependent. eMarketer estimates that 85% of its 2011 revenues came from display advertisements. The company has failed to roll out other revenue generating products, as Google did ahead of its IPO in 2004, and the company still hasn’t developed a mobile platform that supports advertisements.
The bottom line for you, the end user? Expect more ads as Facebook tries to meet revenue projections.
“Facebook is clearly choosing to increase its ad intrusiveness and frequency to pad its numbers short-term in preparation for its IPO and first quarter results post-IPO trading, at the cost of user experience and long-term growth,” PrivCo said in its blog post.
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A Look at DeltaCloud: The Multi-Cloud API
Feb 17th
Amazon Web Services, OpenStack, CloudStack, VMware… Developers have no shortage of IaaS offerings to support. And, lucky them, no shortage of different APIs to deal with, either. DeltaCloud, a top-level Apache project, is designed to help developers cut through the complexity and work with everything from EC2 to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager (RHEV-M).
DeltaCloud works with 11 different compute APIs (ranging from EC2 to vSphere) and five different storage APIs (including S3, Eucalyptus Walrus, and Google Storage). The 0.5 release also has experimental support for the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) Cloud Infrastructure Management Interface (CIMI).
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What does DeltaCloud do? It’s a server that accepts a standard REST API for doing things like creating new instances on the compute nodes, rebooting instances, getting hardware profiles and image details, and more. On the storage side, DeltaCloud provides a standard API for creating new “buckets,” manipulating the buckets and storage “blobs,” and reading/writing data. In short, the basic operations that users want for interacting with cloud services from any management tool or application.
The DeltaCloud server then translates the requests it receives into the appropriate API calls for the IaaS providers it supports. If a service doesn’t have a native API for doing something, like providing a way to inject user data, then DeltaCloud advertises that fact so developers can work around it.
Why DeltaCloud?
David Lutterkort, the vice president of Apache DeltaCloud, says the idea is that users should not be “beholden to any one vendor.”
The project was kicked off by Red Hat in 2010. Lutterkort says that the company “looked at the nascent cloud landscape and realized there is a big gap in terms of portability and data lock in. Writing applications to do anything with cloud pretty quickly locked [customers] into the cloud vendor’s API.” To counter this, Red Hat wanted to offer a vendor neutral API developed openly.
Red Hat took the first swipe at the code and then talked to customers and partners. Everybody liked the concept but worried about it being a Red Hat-only effort, so it was proposed as an Apache project and eventually accepted into the incubator. The Apache project announced that DeltaCloud graduated this week.
Lutterkort says that graduating from the incubator is not about the state of the code or actual project readiness. It’s about “a community showing that they’re active and growing, and that they can follow Apache processes.” Lutterkort says that the project is also seeing substantial contributions from Rackspace, IBM, OpenNebula and (of course) Red Hat.
Right now Lutterkort says that DeltaCloud is being used by Red Hat’s Aeolus and CloudForms projects, and that there’s an Eclipse plugin that can be used to talk to clouds via DeltaCloud. He also says some providers are using the DeltaCloud API definitions with their own implementations, but may not actually be using the DeltaCloud code.
Marten Mickos, CEO of Eucalyptus, says that the company also sees DeltaCloud as important for customers to avoid lock-in. “We make sure that Deltacloud works well with Eucalyptus so that users of Deltacloud know that they can run it on top of Eucalyptus. It’s important in the cloud world to avoid lock-in. Eucalyptus already does this by being open source and by following the leading industry API for clouds. Deltacloud further adds to this flexibility by being an overarching layer that can connect with multiple different underlying clouds.”
In the absence of a unified cloud API, DeltaCloud might just be the next best thing. It’s still early days and in rapid development, but if you’re looking to support multiple clouds, you might want to take a look at DeltaCloud.
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NPR’s Music App For iPad is What Radio Should Look Like in the 21st Century
Feb 17th
Before the rise of smartphones and tablets, it was hard to imagine Internet audio content ever supplanting radio. The limited Web programming that was available may have been convenient to listen to at one’s desk, but it didn’t do much good in the car, on a jog or otherwise on the go.
Today, traditional radio is still far from being displaced, but streaming audio from mobile devices sure does offer an attractive, personalized and more interactive alternative. For some of the strongest examples, look no further than NPR’s digital efforts. The historically radio-centric news organization has wasted no time building a bridge to the future with its digital products, including a few rather impressive mobile applications.
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Most recently, NPR has expanded its music-focused iPhone app to the tablet screen. NPR Music for iPad, which went live yesterday, takes their voluminous archive of music coverage and live performances and packs them all into one very well-designed app.
The content is broken down in a few different ways, which makes it easy to browse depending on what users are looking for. It can be viewed by content type (articles, videos, etc) or by genre or individual radio programs. There’s also a search utility if you’re looking for a particular artist. If the band or musician you’re looking for has appeared on any NPR program in recent years, they’ll come up in search results. This could be an interview on WXPN, video of a live “Tiny Desk Concert” performance, a feature on “All Things Considered” or just about any other kind of music coverage NPR does.
The interface is fluid and intuitive, with blocks of content sliding and falling into place when you make a new selection on the navigation. When you pull down and release to reveal additional content, the page blurs quickly blurs in and out of focus, which is a nice touch. They could have simply sized the iPhone app up and made it fit on the iPad without any bells and whistles, but they didn’t. It’s evident that the team put some thought into the user experience on this one.
If the app has a single feature that makes it worth downloading, it’s probably the playlist builder. As you come across audio clips and shows you want to hear, whether it be via search or by browsing, you can add queue them to play one after another. This ends up working like a sort of personalized radio station, not of songs, but of NPR’s best in-depth music coverage.
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