Saturday, August 16, 2008

Boston Globe uses tag cloud for portrait of canidates

Pretty cool if you ask me, I'm just wondering what took them so long.



Anyone whose been online over the last five years can tell you that the illustration is nothing more than a tag cloud, but in print it's a bold move. It's nice to see print taking chances and playing with typography, now let's take it a step further.

Although I do have one nit-pick about the continuation, deliberate or not, of the blue and red colors being used to define the two parties. Why are we still perpetuating red states and blue states? I mean we all know it's just states and fly-over states (zing!).

If you're wondering how they did it, John Schwenkler used the web app "Wordle to pull out the most prominent words from the official McCain and Obama campaign blogs" (And yes, McCain's most prominent word was the name of his rival, go figure)

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Las Vegas Sun is hiring... GO!!!

I bookmarked this on Delicious, which in turn was feed to my twitter, but it's just too big to leave it at that.

The Las Vegas Sun is hiring and if you're wise, you'd apply.

For one there aren't many places hiring, but bigger than that, the Sun is one of the few papers that "get's it" in terms of multimedia. And currently, IMHO, it's one of the quickest growing papers. Remember Roanoke about five years ago? That's the Sun today.

Just look at all those multimedia positions just ripe for the taking. I personally know at least a dozen of you out there that would be perfect for this.

Go apply!

You'll get to work with Rob Curley, Zach Wise, and my fellow Spartan and friend Kyle Hansen.

I'd apply myself, but I've already got something bigger cooking for my plate.

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Friday, August 15, 2008

3 is the magic number, and 3 3s is mo magic-er

It's my 333 post here on SLR!

Why does that matter?

Wow, way to be a jerk, but if you must know it doesn't really. But 3 is my lucky number and thus 333 posts is kind of something special for my neurosis.

You happy now? Feel like a big man taking all the wind out of my sail?

I hate you.

And... end scene ;)

333 posts! Wooo!



Later!

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Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Still waiting for Photosynth 1.0 and now they're dangling 2.0 as well

I wrote about Photosynth last year, with great excitement and at great length I might add (with too much length and excitement some of you might add) and after all this waiting and not seeing anything come out of it, I'm now getting all excited for the next evolution of this software.

The idea of a individual documentation being universally chained and bound to create a richer, deeper and more informative tapestry is exciting. And the new transition structure and ability to navigate "key frames" (my term, not theirs) around public images opens up whole new methods for structure and navigation. Plus now you don't just point at stuff and zoom around, now you actually walk though it in near real-time.

(Awesome!)

Check it out in the video below (I'd say more, but I really can't add to anything I didn't say last year.)



If that video wasn't enough for you, check out the SIGGRAPH 2008 conference paper the team submitted for all the jargon filled goodness.

Oh MS, I have a sneaking suspicion you're just using this as tech demos that will be implemented in other products (MS Live Maps anyone? Google Maps street view killer perhaps?)-- why do I let you rile me all up and get excited? Why?!

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