I’ve been having a lot of fun playing Colorwar on Twitter lately. The most recent event is a scavenger hunt run in Google Street View. GSV is made up of pictures taken from a car driving around various cities, and you can pretend you’re driving around as well. It comes in handy for getting a view of what a storefront looks like before going there, and similar simple tasks. But it also inadvertently captured people on the street and random events around town. Finding some of these events has been a real challenge for the scavenger hunt. For example, we needed to find a crossing guard. The presence of one relies on sheer chance that school was getting out just as a GSV truck drove by. Pretty slim odds, really. But there is absolutely no way to search for something like this other than simply checking every school in existence.
Some third party sites have stepped in and tried to fill that gap a little. Google Street View Gallery allows users to post links to specific images, which they can then tag. The tags and descriptions are then searchable. This system is handy, but still relies on a user randomly stumbling across something, thinking it is interesting, and then taking the effort to post it to the gallery with an adequate description. A very long chain of events, and something most people won’t deal with.
Google Street View represents a massive database of public images. All privacy issues aside, I would love for Google to test out some kind of image-recognition search in it. That would reveal a huge wealth of usable data. Or, with Google Maps’ APIs, maybe it’s possible for someone else to work on this. I don’t know.
But what I do know for sure is that we’ll only see more massive chunks of image data as time goes by. There will simply be too much for human eyes and minds to process - organizing it all will be a big challenge, and not something I’ve heard a lot about currently. I expect development in this area to explode in the near future.
I am still a bit on the fence about Twitter. It has given birth to moments of profound productivity, but also moments of profound time wasting. But either way, one of my favorite things to come out of the service is Zefrank’s Colorwar 2008.
Colorwar is a series of decentralized team games, played via twitter. Some are synchronous, like Bingo called via a Twitter account. Others are asynchronous, like the current YoungMeNowMe challenge - recreate a childhood picture of yourself, then put the two side by side. The best submissions will get prizes.
Sometimes points are awarded by winning (as in Bingo), and other times just for participation. This setup breeds a great mix of competition and camaraderie. My team is the somewhat oddly named GoTeamPants, and we’re in second place right now!
And here’s my YoungMeNowMe submission:
I’m not entirely happy with it, but I still had a blast putting it together. This was the only young picture of myself that I had on hand.
I sort of miss my picture a day projects, even if I did run out of steam near the end. With the news that Flickr now supports video, I’ve decided to post a video clip of something every day for a month. Could be just a couple of seconds, or maybe the full 90 second limit. Who knows? This will include a week at the beach, so there should at least be some nice scenery involved. Here it is: Month ‘o Video 1
Now I just wish I had a real video camera… all of these will be taken with my trusty Canon A520.
Today’s entry:
Ever wondered what The Final Countdown would sound like as a soundtrack for an NES game? Yeah, I didn’t either. But my keyboard has the right soundset, so I couldn’t resist.
Some of the most interesting conversations I had at Midwinter were about the need for libraries to understand the culture of a social networking website before trying to market services through it. Here’s a couple of greatposts on the topic.
I’ve actually been meaning to post about this for a while. At my previous job, I experimented with creating a basic Facebook application that could search the catalog and a few other information silos. It worked great. Just one problem: nobody used it. Not one person installed the application who wasn’t staff or a student worker.
I didn’t take the culture of Facebook into account when creating that app. Why do people go to the site? Not to do scholarly research, that’s for sure. Or even if they did - why clutter up your profile with yet another application when it adds no value at all? Clicking to a similar search page on the library’s website was a far more convenient process than navigating through Facebook’s interface.
So let’s turn it around - instead of lamenting what students don’t like on Facebook, focus on what they do like. One simple response is that they love widgets. Little profile gadgets that show off some aspect of their personality or daily life. They also love updating status messages, telling the world a little about where they are or what they’re doing. So, why not combine these? Create an application which lets users pick a spot on the library floor plan and display that on their profile. “When I’m studying at the library you can find me here!” Students learn a little bit about the library’s layout while finding their spot, and the presence of the widget reminds their friends that the library exists.
Of course, I’d want to put a lot more thought into a project like this before going ahead with it. With social networking site endeavors, there is a fine line to walk. Some things are worth doing regardless of potential impact, just because they’re so simple. For example: Set up a Facebook Page for your library with a Meebo IM widget. (This has the added bonus of preventing someone else from setting up a Page with your library’s name…) That project would take about fifteen minutes for someone reasonably familiar with how Facebook is set up. Even if only one single person ever takes advantage of the service, it is probably still a worthwhile use of time. But I ultimately threw away a lot of time on my Facebook catalog search widget, an end product which has had absolutely zero impact.
We can’t just wade into the middle of a social networking site and proclaim we know what is best for it. I am extremely disturbed that some librarians are actively working to circumvent anti-spam measures in Facebook (as reported on the PLA Blog). This not only annoys users, but also runs the risk of getting the library booted off of Facebook entirely.
Different libraries can have very different user populations walking through their front doors, and libraries put a lot of effort into understanding those populations’ needs. Why should the online world be any different?
(now updated with links to the posts announcing winners)
Pretty soon it’ll be time again for me to write about things I liked this year. Books, movies, music, and games are up for grabs. In an effort to revive my somewhat flagging rate of posting lately, I’ll break each category out into its own post once I decide on the winners. I haven’t quite made those decisions yet, but here’s the nominees:
Books:
World War Z, Max Brooks
Pattern Recognition, William Gibson
Halting State, Charles Stross
The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Brian Selznick
I Am America (And So Can You!), Stephen Colbert
Movies:
300
Stardust
TMNT
Hot Fuzz
Ratatouille
Transformers
Stranger Than Fiction
Music:
(I didn’t listen to a lot of whole new full albums this year, so the list is a bit limited..)
Smashing Pumpkins - Zeitgeist
Foo Fighters - Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace
Video Games:
(This will probably be the most hotly contested category)
Super Mario Galaxy
Portal
Halo 3
Rock Band
Picross
Bioshock
You might notice that not everything in these lists was originally released in 2007. I like to make lists on everything I took in over the year, not just what’s new.
Can you feel the excitement building? I know I can
I’ll be posting the winners gradually as December winds itself up. See anything I left off the lists?
Off the top of my head, and by no means inclusive:
-My friends and co-workers
-Monte Sano and all the other local scenery and hiking
-The Space & Rocket Center / Space Camp
-Trips to Unclaimed Baggage
-Having Conan start at 11:30
-Having woot.com update with a new item at midnight
-Getting to the airport 20 minutes before a flight leaves and still making it
-I-565, the only highway I’ve ever seen built with some foresight - it has more lanes than it presently needs, but will probably need them in the future
-All the local BBQ places
Ok, so some of these are more about missing the central time zone than the specific geographical location. But I’ll still miss the place. I think it finally hit me today that I’m leaving in just over a week.
I discovered today that NBC is running some sort of online game/competition for The Office this fall, called Dunder Mifflin Infinity.
I signed up to manage the Dothan branch. I need 15 employees to cement my manager status. Anybody want to work for me? I promise to provide punch and pie in the breakroom, and a generous benefits package.
Sign up for the Dothan, AL branch with this code: 2r2qrrjqvg
I’m now halfway through my project of taking a photo every day for a year! I’ve kept up with it, and am pretty pleased with the results. I think I had more genuinely good pictures by this point last time I did the project, but I’ve still got some gems this time around. Here’s some of my favorites from the first half of 2007:
Today was a big deal for me: I hit 200 miles of cumulative running distance! The Nike+iPod pedometer kit has been a huge motivator for me, and takes all the annoyance out of stat tracking. I just sync the ipod with my computer after each run, and the stats are added!
I got the kit the day after Thanksgiving - just about seven months ago. An average of .96 miles per day, 25,595 calories burned, and I took 90 seconds off my overall average for a mile in the process - not too shabby. When I started, I set a goal to run 200 miles by my birthday. I met that objective with 29.5 hours to spare.
Prior to getting this kit, I was a sporadic runner at best. I couldn’t make it a half mile without wanting to keel over. Now I’m in the best shape of my life and routinely run over two miles at a go. Sometimes all you need is an upticking counter to follow.
While I’m enjoying George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones, it is long. 800 pages of small print long. I haven’t had a ton of free time for leisure reading lately, and after two months I’m only halfway through. Here’s the top of my queue at the moment:
