#91 Fun With Photos

Online image generators and editing tools can be a lot of fun for creative people. The results are really only limited by the user's imagination. Some sites of interest are BeFunky, FotoFlexer, and BigHugeLabs.



Here's an original image:



Here's the image enhanced using BeFunky "Watercolor" effect.


And here is the image enhanced using FotoFlexer "Painting" effect.


The photo editing site which seems to have the most bells and whistles is BigHugeLabs. Here you can change your photograph into a pop art or motivational poster, create a magazine cover or trading card, make photo mosaics and jigsaw puzzles, add captions, create slide shows, generate LOLcats, and more.

FaceInHole allows you to plug your picture into a scenario such as a famous book or painting. I have to say, I had more fun with this site than any of the others. And who could pass up the opportunity to become The Queen of All Wild Things?

#90 Sharing Photos

What would you do if you got a knock on your door in the middle of the night, and the police were there telling you you had ten minutes to leave? It's a horrible question to ponder, but one that might frequently occur to residents of New Orleans, the Texas Gulf Coast, or those who live in Southern California communities plagued by wildfires. Of all your possessions, what do you most fear losing?

Many people would want to save their photographs above all else. They are the visual reminders of the people, places, and events that mean the most to us. I have a rather large collection of photographs from days of yore, when pictures were taken using film, which was then sent off to be developed at a lab. It would be impossible for me to go anywhere quickly if I had to lug 20 or so albums, numerous shoeboxes, and packets of negatives with me.

Fortunately there are many ways to save pictures and back up collections. You might burn them to a CD or DVD, or copy them to a flash drive. You could also take advantage of an online photo sharing service.

Some of the most popular online photo sharing services include Flickr, Photobucket, Facebook, and Picasa.

Flickr is the service HCPL uses to store and share photos. Flickr offers simple editing, geotagging on maps, free and pro accounts, versatile sharing tools, and other features. It's a great resource for bloggers, because Flickr has an enormous public data base of images. A search can be limited to include only creative commons licensed content. Even without setting up an account, one can browse through random shots, from around the world. There is an extraordinary amount of highly creative work there, waiting for anyone who would like to see it. I feel lucky that so many professional and amateur photographers share their photographs so freely.

Photobucket is another leading photo sharing service and it is very easy to use. You get 1GB of space (enough for 10,000 photos) with a free account. There is integration with other social media sites. Slideshows are a popular feature. They are easy to embed on the web or on sites like Craigslist and eBay.

Facebook is the site I use most for sharing photos with friends and family. I am able to upload photos from my computer fairly easily (Facebook seems to have a trouble with photo uploading every so often), and instantly share them with the people in my social network. I retain control over who sees my personal photo albums too, which is nice.

For this exercise I chose to try Picasa. Picasa seems very similar to Photobucket and Flickr. I downloaded the free version of Picasa 3 on my home computer. I really like the editing tools, including Retouching. (Picnik also had that tool, which works like airbrushing, but it wasn't available with the free account.) Picasa saves your original photo along with your edited version.

Image courtesy of Jacob...K

#89 Basic Photo Editing

Digital cameras are so affordable, pretty much everyone uses them. With the prevalence of social networking online, it's no wonder that picture sharing is so popular, and it goes without saying that if you're sharing your pictures, you might have some incentive to make sure they go out into the World Wide Web looking their best. There are a number of online photo editing sites that can help. Some of them are Picnik, Photoshop, and Fotoflexer.

The most obvious advantage to using an online site is the price: free! While professional photographers might want (and actually use) all the features that come with expensive photo editing software packages, I would guess that for most digital camera owners, the current free technology online is sufficient.

One could spend an inordinate amount of time playing on the various sites with their numerous features and a whole plethora of options. The site I spent the most time on was Picnik. I found Picnik very easy to use and I liked the way I could select a feature and see how it would change my picture, before actually "applying" it. Perhaps Picnik designers were thinking of the fumbling or new user when they placed the "undo" button so prominently in the upper right corner of the site. It think that was good planning. Premium features are available with a subscription. (I was pretty excited at what I could do with the "airbrush", but then I discovered it's a premium feature. Rats.)

It seems to me that the editing features one prefers to use depends largely on the individual photograph and its particular strengths and/or weaknesses. I was really pleased with how Picnik's sharpness and contrast features improved an old personal photograph. I also used crop and museum mat to edit my photo:

#88 Google Wave, Buzz, and Mobile

For the past week or so, I've been watching people drop like flies from Facebook. There's been a huge uproar on the internet over the most popular social networking site's alleged lack of concern for their over 400 million members' privacy. This is not just a matter of someone giving out TMI. In April, Facebook announced the Open Graph API, which basically means that users' information can show up on sites other than Facebook, without the user's permission and without their even being logged in. Thus, if you type in the phrase "how do I" on Google, the first option that appears is "delete my Facebook account".

If you don't mind that potentially everything you put on Facebook is public, and you don't mind that Facebook will still have your stuff even after you delete your account, and you don't mind large corporations following your Facebook presence in order to better sell you something, you probably could remain happy with Facebook, as long as you don't unwittingly compromise the privacy of anyone you've friended.

So where have all the Facebook users gone? One place you might find them is on Google Buzz. While I can't claim to know all the ins and outs of the site, Google Buzz seems similar to Facebook; it is for social networking, and it is supposed to allow the user control over whether content is public or private. I'm a bit skeptical about Google's claim about the privacy thing, especially since the company owns Doubleclick technology and probably most of the web already.

Google Wave is an interesting project being studied in Google Labs. Students, coworkers, or just about anyone who is working on a collaborative project could use Wave to share ideas, sources, and photos in real time. I wanted to try it myself, but currently it is an invitation only site, so I'm not using any collaborative tools at present.

Mobile technology is amazing and just keeps getting better. Of course Google is right there offering all kinds of products that can be used as long as you have a web-enabled phone. You can search the internet, check your Gmail, access your aggregator, and more. I don't have a mobile phone, but I think having access to Google maps or Mapquest while on the road would be a life-saver and I'd probably use those tools frequently. My absolute favorite Google phone app though, is the new Googles Translates software for smart phones. Fascinating!



Image from Time online.

#87 Google Reader

I shouldn't be surprised to learn that Google has its own version of a feed aggregator. What I would like to know is, what exactly is all this vitally important information? Is someone monitoring the Swiss particle accelerator for impending black holes? Checking the movement of the tectonic plates in anticipation of the final dissolution of the earth's crust so they make it to the Ark on time? Afraid of losing their one and only chance to find their soul mate on Matchmaker.com because someone else was updated more quickly?

It's hard for me to imagine a situation where typing in a URL (or several), or a search keyword constitutes hardship, but I can understand trying to be organized. Taking advantage of tools to better manage one's time is certainly a respectable endeavor. I told an unemployed friend about Google Reader after I came across an interesting article. I want my friend's job search to be successful and thought using an aggregator might be helpful. It can't hurt to cast your biggest net (no pun intended), right? Besides, it could make a good impression on a potential employer if my friend said he found some leads while using a feed aggregator.

Otherwise, I signed up for Bloglines in a previous training and subscribed to a number of feeds related to books and reading, such as NPR Topics: Books, NYT Books, and Alltop, but so far I'm not really hooked on aggregators. I just don't seem to have the type of information requirements that make me feel I'm missing a whole lot by not using a feed reader more regularly. On the contrary, the sheer volume of material that materializes when I log into Bloglines is already a bit daunting. Any time I gain by having a bunch of feeds on one site is immediately canceled out as I either:

1.) get lost wading through the nonessential uninspiring stuff that gets pulled in because I decided to subscribe to a certain blog, for example, or
2.) get stuck on the computer for even more inordinate amounts of time because I got distracted by all the pretty headlines beckoning to me.

Maybe I just haven't yet found the particular feeds that would really interest me. Maybe I need an aggregator for my aggregator. Please don't tell Google I said that.

#86 Google Docs and Google Calendar

Online word processing/file storage programs have been around for awhile, are great time savers and meet a variety of computing needs. There are several online word processing programs, including as ThinkFree, Zohowriter, iNetWord, gOffice, and Google Docs. I've been using Zohowriter for my written work, and I like it a lot. It's like having a notebook for work projects, personal to do lists, correspondence, and business items that I don't have to carry. It doesn't get lost, forgotten, misplaced, dropped in a snow drift, or eaten by the dog. I don't have to worry about how much I put in it. There's enough room for everything, in one place, and it doesn't clutter up my desk or home. Plus, it's free. Magnificent!

One of the things I like about Google Calendar is the ability to create tasks lists, and check them off as they are completed. My organizational needs are more along the lines of don't-forget-to-submit-the-summer-camp-physical-by-May-1st, as opposed to be-in-charge-of-the-fundraising-dinner-for-500. So I could see myself using the tasks option more than the events option.

These tools are eminently useful and convenient. I really wish they had been available years ago....which got me to thinking. I wonder if, when ancient Sumerians saw less ancient Sumerians using a cart with wheels to haul a heavy load instead of dragging it, did they have a palm slap to forehead moment?

#85 Google

Google, founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, is a "multinational public cloud computing and Internet search technologies corporation". The fact that I even understand what that means makes me happy. The original nickname for the search engine was "backrub", to describe the action of checking backlinks in order to prioritize search results. The amount of information the search engine was supposed to handle was a googol (number 1 followed by one hundred zeros). The googol was named for the Google, a monster created by a crazy economist. At some point, maybe during some madcap Stanford party in a college student's garage apartment, googol was misspelled, and Google was born. Or reborn. Or reincarnated. At any rate, Google is a much better name for a computer technology company than Backrub. I also like the company's unofficial slogan: "Don't be evil".

The way Google makes money is mainly by selling advertising. In 2006 the company reported $10.492 billion in total advertising revenues. It's kind of creepy the way Google can track user interests with data mining technology. Then they can position advertisements so they're relevant to a page's context and the viewer's browsing. While it may be unnerving to know your keystrokes are under surveillance a la Orwell, at the same time the notoriety of Google seems to empower the company in other surprising ways. Perhaps, due to the world-wide popularity of Google, there may come a day in the Republic of China when censorship will be essentially ineffective. That would be a pretty remarkable repercussion, I think.

Google has an amazing variety of products. I don't use half of the services they offer, but I use some of them fairly regularly, such as web search, blogger, youtube, google images, gmail, and google maps. Google's search engine seems to be the best in terms of speed, accuracy, and relevance (see post #75). These are good reasons to Google rather than Yahoo or Bing. I had fun exploring Google Books. I could definately spend more time there looking at old Life Magazines and some even older books. The advanced search feature is easy to use. It allowed me to look for specific topics and items, and to limit my search to full view (as opposed to preview). Google Books could be a resource for students if they need a book for an assignment and all of the library's copies are checked out. There are many classics that can be viewed online. I searched for Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl, since it is a high demand item in my community. It was not available on Google Books, so there are some obvious drawbacks to the site.

Adventurous users may want to try Google Labs. There, one can explore Google products which are still in development and leave feedback. I liked the FastFlip Lab. Most of the Google Lab products I looked at, though, were only somewhat interesting, because I couldn't see how I'd have much practical use for many of them. Google has so many other applications already in service I'm still trying to process those. I guess I'm not geeky enough to appreciate Google Labs. Yet.

Google monster image courtesy of wikimedia.org