Strange Duck - Tech Talk in Plain English

An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube by Mike Wesch was presented at the Library of Congress, June 23rd 2008.

Instead of a powerpoint presentation, the professor made a 40 minute video with the help of his students talking about the cultural phenomenon of Youtube.

His point - “when media change, human relations change.”

Youtube, as an aggregator of content, of which 88% of it is new and original content, is changing the way we relate. It’s a connector.

“it’s a story of new forms of expression, new forms of community, and new forms of identity emerging.”

Remember Numa Numa’s Gary Broelsma? Wesch credits him as being the first guy on the dance floor of this “global mixer” who inspires others to dance in their bedrooms for joy.

Take the tour of Youtube. For Wesch, it’s a celebration.

Tags: Wesch, An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube, Gary Broelsma, Numa Numa

Vector Magic takes bitmapped images and turns them into beautiful vector images.

Huh? What’s that mean?

Well, very simply, it takes photos or other complicated graphics and turns them into line drawings. Line drawings that can be stretched to infinity.

That’s the original photo on the top left. The other 3 squares have been traced using Vector Magic’s three settings - high, medium and low.

Yup. A Stanford University team has developed a tool that makes it super easy to do, and does it better than most other auto-tracers, like the one in Adobe Illustrator.

Basically, there are 2 ways a computer can draw pictures:

1. with tiny little squares, or pixels, called bitmap, or raster.
2. with a command that says something like “draw a circle and make it red with a circumference of 10 pixels. ” This is called a vector image.

The trick is to know when to use which one.

For example, ever try to take a jpeg and make it bigger? It turns all squarish and jaggedy - or pixelated - meaning you start seeing the individual pixels the image is made of. Now if you shrink the same image, it will get all blurry.

That’s not good for some things, such as logos. For those, you want them to be either teeny weeny, or something to paste on the side of a skyscraper. That means you need a vector image.

Now I can’t tell you the number of times I have received bitmaps instead of vectors when someone sends me their logo. This can be a big headache, especially if it’s sitting on a background colour.

Not anymore. If i get one of those nasty things, I will shoot it up to “Vector Magic: The Online Tool for Precision Vectorization” and change it to a more usable form for logos.

In fact I had to use this myself. I never made a proper logo for Bitter Tonic as I was in a big rush to get content up, and so a friend just made a great header for me. And being too busy, I never got around to doing the work. So I tested this by uploading a TIFF of my logo to Vector Magic.

I gotta hand it to them, it makes traces beautifully and the site is easy to use too. And even keeps your photos stored online for a whole month. Check out the difference. The top is a bitmap.

Magnifico!

Did I mention how fast it is?

I wish this team would develop for my ridiculously not-easy-to-use cell phone.

Click here for great tracing by Vector Magic

Tags: free tools, online tool, vector, auto tracer, Vector Magic, line drawing, trace, logos, Stanford University

Tags: funny video, iPhone, David Pogue

Non-techies listen up - now you too can have a Wordpress blog set up and running at your own domain.

The how-to instructions on how to do a manual install of Wordpress can be rather intimidating. This is because you need to set up a database on your web hosting server to run Wordpress, and in order to do so, you need to get into the “tech guts” of your server. Spooky.

That’s why One-click installs are great - all you have to do is follow the instructions set up by your web hosting company, which usually amount to clicking a few check boxes. The trickiest part in the operation will be naming the database, but that’s basically all you have to do: name it. The rest is done for you.

Another thing that is great about One-Click Installs is that they make handling updates to the Wordpress software easy. The kind Wordpress developers keep making their software better and safer, and so it is a good idea to keep updating to the latest version of Wordpress. With one-click installs, the web hosts will upload the latest software for you, and when you are ready to install it, it’s just another click away.

Here are a few reputable companies that offer one-click installs. Sign up with either one and you could be blogging in about 10 minutes.

Hostgator

We are happy to say we have started using Hostgator as a web site hosting company and are delighted with the servers and with service. With packages starting at $7.95 USD per month, Hostgator is a sweet deal. It is also the host of choice for many pro Internet Marketers who use the Reseller Package to host all their web sites. It boasts Cpanel and WHM control panels.

• Click here to check out the Hostgator web site or to sign up for an account.

Dreamhost

Is probably the most popular one-click install company, probably because of their very popular affiliate program. There are as many Dreamhost evangelists as there are detractors, but the one thing you can be sure of is that Dreamhost’s newsletter will make you laugh, as it boasts the wittiest corporate writing out there.

A big plus - the company is very honest about what’s going on with their service and have a blog and wiki set up so that you can stay up-to-date with what is going on with your server’s status.

Dreamhost’s Crazy Domain Insane! package costs $7.95 a month if you sign up and pay for 2 years up front. This will get you 150 GB of web host space, which increases weekly by 1 GB. Yes, this incentive is quite unique, but it seems to be working.

Your allowed bandwidth or transfer amount increases weekly too, starting at 1.5 TB and increasing weekly by 16 GB.

With Dreamhost, you can host as many domain names as you like on this package and have unlimited MySql databases running - enough to set up a blogging empire. You also get 1 year of free domain name registration.

I am currently hosting this site and a few other blogs with Dreamhost and I have had very little problems with them and found their support service quite speedy.

• This way to review the Dreamhost package in more detail.

Midphase

Is growing quite a strong fan base. Their packages tend to be a bit more costly, but advocates swear the service is worth it.

Midphase’s basic package is $7.95 and will get you 200 Gigabytes of space, a domain name for life, and 3oo GB of bandwidth. You have to bump up to the $11.95 pro-phase package to get unlimited domains.

• More about Midphase

AN Hosting

An Hosting is offering a lot of great deals recently. Their usual package is 250GB of disk space, 2,500GB of bandwidth, 20 fully hosted domains and a free domain for life, all for $6.95 a month. But if you wait for sale time, you can get some pretty good deals - like this $4.95 a month special that is available until Nov, 22, 2007.

• More about AN Hosting

As usual, do your research to choose the right company for you. A quick Google search of any company name above and you will find tons of fan mail, heated debates, as well as a few horror stories. But I think you will be safe with any of the companies above unless you plan on getting millions of hits a day, which in that case you should be able to afford a dedicated server (one that you do not share with anyone else.) And that is a good problem to have

This post is part of my “Blogging with Wordpress Made Super Easy - Well, Almost” series. More coming soon.

Tags: wordpress, blogging made easy, one-click installs, web hosting, blogging for beginners

This video shows Blaise Aguera y Arcas, an architect at Microsoft Live Labs, demonstrating some amazing software that can manipulate images into the most wondrous things.

Seadragon let’s you interact with enormous amounts of megabytes, some in the 300 megapixel range. Watch him zoom in and out of a complete issue of The Guardian and be able to get right down to the tiniest detail - a bit of technical information they embedded in a car ad to showoff the power.

Photosynth takes Seadragon and melds it with computer vision research done by Noah Snavely, with Steven M. Seitz, and Richard Szeliski, developing software that creates breathtaking composite images from photos taken from the web.

Here Blaise presents a reconstruction of Notre Dame made entirely from pictures uploaded to Flickr, the popular photo sharing site. The three-dimensional image is composed of thousands of photos taken with a wide range of cameras - from cell phones to professional SLRs - and even a poster. Once again, you can zoom in and out from a wide angle shot to the tiniest detail of a gargoyle with Seadragon’s extraordinary navigation features.

You can explore Photosynth for yourself on the Microsoft Live Labs web site. Works only on Microsoft PCs, bien sur.

The video is a tape of Blaise’s presentation this past March at TED - the Technology, Entertainment, Design Conference that’s all about ideas,and putting them into action. See more TED presentations by the brightest and most entertaining minds at TED Talks.

Tags: photosynth, seadragon, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, microsoft live labs, digital imaging, flickr