TechMedia

Word Cloud created from my blog on Jan. 29

Have been checking out Wordle.

Wordle is a toy for generating word clouds from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.

From the gallery, looks like people are having fun with this data toy

I stumbled on this link in Twitter this morning and found it highly amusing. We have come a long way, and are still on the go! (Who posted this link, I can’t find you again to credit, sorry!)

I started my new and final slate of classes at BCIT last week. Wow, the past nine months have flown by.

In our Trendsetters class we will be looking at citizen journalism, Twitter, etc. Some of the trends teacher Earl Einarson pointed out were:

• handmade over mass-produced (giving graphics a more organic look as opposed to a plastic/metal appearance)
• hand lettering as opposed to ‘template’ fonts
• retro
• online communities
• DIY
• indie music

For our group project we will look at touch screens and how they will impact designers/programmers. But that covers such a diverse range of devices, will it all be C and C++ coding? We haven’t learned that!

While I was writing this post, Scobleizer Twittered about some favourite mashups, which lead me to programmableweb. This site looks like a fantastic resource, I will be reading its article on How To Make Your Own Web Mashup. But not now … sleep time zzzzzzzzz.

I have been working on a portfolio site for my URL www.ehargreaves.com, and have now uploaded a home page. I used the menu from my After Effects/DVD project, exported the clip as an FLV file, then imported it into Flash.

Once the FLV file was inside Flash I added invisible buttons over the DVD navigation. These buttons all link to external sites – my YouTube and Flickr streams, and this blog. The “_blank” tag on the button links cause other tabs to open (the intended effect), but this also causes the Flash to become deselected, so then the buttons don’t have their sound/roll over effects again unless the Flash document is clicked on

That means I have to get going on the inside pages. Once I have these pages to link to, I will remove the “_blank” tags because my links will lead to internal sources.

My plan for these inside pages (which I will create in Dreamweaver) are to add:

• a video page, using my YouTube content as embeds
• a photojournalism portfolio in the big-photo style of Boston.com
• a new ‘About’ page, which will link back to this blog

WordPress site upgrades also needed

I will also continue to make changes to this site. A prominent RSS feed button would be nice (the text version gets a bit lost), and eventually a custom theme. I will be picking the brains of other bloggers at two upcoming conferences: WordCamp Whistler and 2009 Northern Voice.

Still mulling Twitter options. I like having the update feature since my tweets are mostly about technology, but if I get too busy to blog for a few days, then Twitter takes over. I would welcome suggestions

Even before the Flash-animated movie Waltz With Bashir took home a Golden Globe for foreign-language film prize, I had been interested in seeing it. After all, it rated an impressive 95 per cent Fresh Pick on rottentomates.com

The New York Times has a thought-provoking video interview with the movie’s writer/director Ari Folman in which he discusses how Waltz With Bashir was animated in Flash using 3,500 keyframes, giving the film its unique, graphic-novel style look.

Preview for Waltz With Bashir

You can check out more details on Folman’s innovative techniques in studiodaily.com’s story.

The team used photographs to build realism into the environments, then added the background details.

Waltz With Bashir was made for two million dollars, and took four years to complete. Animators would slave a whole day over a second and a half of footage. That’s dedication, but it looks like their toils were well worth it.

And the paperless one …

Who knows, I may need the USB, eSATA and FW800 cords one day.

CNN, Facebook partner

Interesting story on journalism.co.uk about CNN’s plans to incorporate social media into its coverage of President Elect Barack Obama’s inauguration on January 20.

So of course I had to log on and become a Facebook fan of CNN to see what it was all about. The event promo says:

What will your Facebook status say when Obama becomes President? CNN.com and Facebook are partnering to enable you to update your status, and follow you friends’ updates, while you watch the inauguration live online, all on http://cnn.com/live …
Whether you’re at the office, at home, at the library, or anywhere else, you can share this moment in history with your Facebook friends live, as it happens.

The story links to NPR (National Public Radio), which is requesting help with its social media coverage, including

• Mobcasting: audio recordings of voicemails left by listeners about their thoughts and feelings on inauguration day
• An inauguration tag of #inaug09 for Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, blogs, etc
• Maps of user-generated content

iReport blog gathers news from masses

The maps feature is also prominent iReport, a site run by CNN with the disclaimer: “Only the stories marked ‘On CNN’ have been vetted by CNN for use in CNN’s global news coverage.”

Its world map feature lead me to a report on this fun gadget, a HD Video Recorder Snorkle Mask with Lights, shot at the CES in Las Vegas.

This massive crowd-sourced blog generated 225,003 reports worldwide last month, 1,085 of which ran on the CNN site also. That’s quite a content generator for the amount of resources needed.

LG Electronics made a splash at the Consumer Electronics Show when it introduced a fully functional, touch-screen wristwatch cellphone.

The watch-phone is expected to be available for sale in the second half of the year.

It looks a little clunky from the photos displayed, but has many features, such as:

• a built-in speaker for text-to-speech
• an MP3 player
• a Bluetooth compatibility camera which can be used for videoconferencing

I am not sure that I would want to watch TV on my wrist, but I do like the idea of all-in-one gadgets. How handy to have devices such as GPS, phone, camera, video recorder, all bundled together, like my fetish object, the Nokia N96.

Why carry 10 gadgets when one can do it all?

As well, LG and all of the major television manufacturers are expected to push 3-D technology at this year’s CES, according to a story on CBC.

That could open up all kinds of opportunities to develop more interactive games …. combine that with a Wii (with better graphics of course!) ….

So now I am enrolled in the Star Trek webmaster program. Embed!

This wee widget I grabbed from its site packs in a lot of functions, and acts as almost a mini-website for the upcoming Trek movie (T minus 121 days!), featuring a photo gallery, synopsis, downloads, and of course my favourite movie trailer.

What a great way to promote a movie, get buzz going online. And its cool interface transitions (like the website) mimic the way DVDs transition once a button is clicked, slick.

I would advise seeing Trek’s amazing high definition trailer, give you a taste for the Imax version of the movie, coming May 2009.

High definition viewership online is rocketing according to a recent story on TechCrunch: Move Networks Streamed 100 Million Hours Of HD Video On The Web Last Year.

The article says that Move Networks, which powers the Web video streaming for ABC, Fox, the Discovery Channel, and Animal Planet, streamed 180 million hours of video, 100 million of which it claims was in high-definition. And with Hula and YouTube adding HD services, “you can expect that 100 million hours to be dwarfed this year across all the major Web video services.”

Yeay to less pixelated video offerings!

I remember back in the days of my first photojournalism job at the (now defunct) Nanaimo Times I would spend hours a week in a darkroom, working with toxic chemicals to process photos for the next edition. Now with the advent of new media, not only do I not have to inhale fixer (or try to wash the smell from my hands), but I can add other multimedia elements to my photography projects. Recently I have been working with the Adobe application After Effects, and using the Ken Burn’s Effect to animate still photos to sound in order to tell old stories in a new way.

One journalist using these new tools to great advantage is Globe and Mail photographer John Lehmann, who uses a mix of uses of video, stills, soundcape and interviews in stories ranging from the tragic, such as  Man Behind the Log, about a homeless soapstone carver sleeping on the beach, to the more lighthearted, such as Barely Bowling, with its look at nude bowling nights.

Magnum photographer Jonas Bendiksen uses stills and soundscapes/interviews to tell the stories of slumdwellers in Caracas, Mumbai, Nairobi, and Jakarta in The Places We Live, which also has book and exhibition components. The website excels at transitions – from scenes of the outside slum (with accompanying city noise) – to the inside, family stories, told in their voices.

But it isn’t the death of ‘static’ photography online. One of the web’s most interesting photo sites is Boston.com’s Big Picture, which showcases the best photos from the news wires for display in a large-format (990 pixels wide) photo blog, with the pictures placed vertically for ease of viewing. Simple yet brilliant.

A recent twitter post by kk that linked to the 2008 Greek riots got me hooked on this site’s large-scale format – these amazing photos need to run this large to capture the drama of the events there.