Eric Blue's Blog

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Last December, I was in a bit of a creative mood and decided to put together a video titled Morphing Faces of Beauty.

Summary from YouTube:

Using a computer generated photo of the ideal beautiful woman as a baseline(credited to faceresearch.org), I fed this photo into a face transformer (from perceptionlab.com). This transformer can convert a photo based on age, race, and other options into a new photo. I then used a morphing application to transition between these photos.

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uENxJAlN1wM

A few people have asked what song I used for the background music. And, the answer is that I actually created the song using Garage Band. I posted about my first song last July (titled "Transition") in the article Creating Music With Apple Garage Band. I started work on a second song, but only partially finished. Then, a few months later I completed the song. As I was working on the Morphing Faces of Beauty video, I realized that this song would be the perfect fit.

Here is the song:

M3U Stream

MP3 File

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I recently came across a great map and article on the Underlying Blog.

Information Architects has created a comprehensive web trend map that diagrams the 200 most successful websites on the web, ordered by category, proximity, success, popularity and perspective.

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Tim Berners-Lee, father (Sire, actually) of web, was interviewed recently and provided his commentary on the vision for the future of the semantic web.

Tim discusses some of the latest "terminology" that is somewhat related/intertwined with the semantic web: web2.0, web3.0, and even web4.0. He also touches on the origins of the web, what the semantic web is all about, and net neutrality. When asked about the long-term future of the web (web 4.0?), Tim replied:

"IDG: Some people like Nova Spivak and Microsoft's cofounder Paul Allen work with a timeline that envisions the arriving of Web 3.0 by 2010 and a future Web 4.0 by 2020. Can you imagine what this Web 4.0 is supposed to be?

Berners-Lee: (Laughs) No, I don't do that. I think about real technology. I didn't invent the term "Web 3.0." The Web is constantly developing. If you want to see what's happening that I am interested in now, there are several technologies laced together. In Web 2.0 there are some technologies like JavaScript and others that are all standards that came out of allowing people to do things. Most standards are coming out now that will have a good push towards the mobile Web initiative, which is the use of the Web on lots of different devices.

In the future we will have the Semantic Web that will allow a whole lot of other things. One of the powerful things about networking technology like the Internet or the Web or the Semantic Web, one of the characteristics of such a technology is that the things we've just done with it far surpass the imagination of the people who invented them. Take for example the inventors of TCP/IP, the original protocols for communication between computers over the Internet, created by Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn in 1974.

When I invented the Web, I thought of it as an infrastructure; I designed the Web as a foundation for many things. With Web 2.0, social networks and all kinds of things happen on top of it. When the Semantic Web arrives in the next few years, things will be using it in a way we cannot know yet. So, in a way, it's foolish to try to imagine what Web 4.0 will be like when we still don't know what will be done with 3.0.

For Web 3.0 to succeed, the people who are studying it at this moment will have ideas which will enable the new technology. They will design fantastic things just like people with Web 2.0 are designing fantastic things right now. People working with the Semantic Web will make much more powerful things. We can't imagine what they will do. But we have to build the Web to be an infrastructure. It shall never be used for particularized purposes but just to be a foundation for future developments."

Posted by EricB at 08:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Adrian Savage of Slow Leadership recently published an article on lifehack.org. Like most articles on lifehack.org, this one has its share of good advice. In particular:

Take whatever time you need to discover what matters to you most
Success isn’t simply a matter of money, power, or prestige. You could gain all of those and still feel that you have fallen short of what you wanted; or you could gain none of them and be blissfully happy and fulfilled. What constitutes personal success is mostly in your mind. It has much less to do with finding the best career in other peoples’ eyes, creating a killer business, or holding down a fancy job with a big salary than with achieving what really matters to you. Many people find this out too late. They struggle for years to get where other people said they should go, only to find it does little or nothing for them. Sad;y, it’s often too late by then to do anything else.

Read more here at: Success recipes most people know, but too few follow.

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Signals vs. Noise recently posted an article: Is the web killing our culture?. In this article, the guys from 37 Signals discuss a new book from Andrew Keen titled The Cult of the Amateur: How today’s Internet is killing our culture.

Keen sees the web, and "Web 2.0" in particular, as technology that enables mass narcissism, and perpetuates the problem of the "dumbing down" of our culture and society.

Mr. Keen argues that “what the Web 2.0 revolution is really delivering is superficial observations of the world around us rather than deep analysis, shrill opinion rather than considered judgment.” In his view Web 2.0 is changing the cultural landscape and not for the better. By undermining mainstream media and intellectual property rights, he says, it is creating a world in which we will “live to see the bulk of our music coming from amateur garage bands, our movies and television from glorified YouTubes, and our news made up of hyperactive celebrity gossip, served up as mere dressing for advertising.” This is what happens, he suggests, “when ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule.”

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