S7659 Gallery
Originally uploaded by sandritocat

Today’s random digitised ephemera is from the “Vintage Patterns” pool on Flickr (which has 885 members, 4266 images, so is a pretty impressive archive based on community input).

One of the reasons I love Flickr is the way it encourages groups of interested individuals to pool images of their collections together – creating hundreds of micro online museums/archives, many of which provide detailed and sometimes exhaustive metadata about the type of items which normally go under the institutional radar.

I love not only the history of fashion element to the vintage patterns pool, but the history of graphic art and design.

The WWW may be 15 today. Or it may not be.

Anyone for cake, anyway?

I’m really enjoying http://photoshopdisasters.blogspot.com/

Have you seen a truly awful piece of Photoshop work? Clumsy manipulation, senseless comping, lazy cloning and thoughtless retouching are our bread and butter. And yes, deep down, we love Photoshop.

If it is commercial and awful then please let us know!

Twistori is a nice little social experiment site that pulls the feed coming from twitter, highlighting posts that have the words love, hate, think, believe, feel, and wish in them. Oddly compelling.

Interesting blog post about a recent Ted Nelson (he who coined the term “hypertext”, amongst other things) lecture at Oxford Uni:

Xanadu and Nelson are perfect and unworldly. The web is imperfect and worldly… [link]

(If you are unfamiliar with the whole Xanadu saga, its worth checking out this Wired piece from a few years ago).

1930s advice on how to use the dial telephone. Lovely.

…the book is submitted, and already in production. We’re already designing the front cover, which is always fun. Before I go onto (or back to) other things, here’s some interesting factoids about digital images:

• There are more than 14 million digital images uploaded to Facebook every day [source]
• The most common tag used on Flickr is “me” [source]
• The phrase “picture element” has been used to describe the individual points in a bitmap since 1927, and this wasnt shortened to pixel until 1965, using the popular abbreviation “pix” used by hollywood gossip columnists [source]
• Images could be sent over telegraph in 1843 – only three or four years after the discovery of “photography” itself. There is a hidden history of electronic, and digital images, which stretches back as far as the invention of the film camera. But you’ll have to buy the book to read up on that one.

I’ve been treating myself to lots of goodies to help with finishing up the book (which means buying things online when I meet targets, and waiting for the postman each morning with a look of glee on my face). Interesting background story (including video) to the opening of the new Amazon distribution center in Wales – and the beeb has provided some good behind the scenes pics of the distribution centre, which just shows the scale of such operations.

Other online retailers are available, natch. [link]

ps – I think the Ark of the Covenant may be hidden in a crate in there, somewhere….

… I finished a draft of the book! all 103,616 words of it. Then promptly went up to Scotland for a few days r+r. Good to see some snow and some real scenery.

Now I’m knee deep in formatting, before I send it to the publishers at the end of the month. It seems that for the bibliography, when citing online references, they want the date of original publication online, the date last updated, and the date I accessed it. *sigh*. The formatting guidelines are a few years old, from back when the web was spangly and new-ish and proper academics didnt really quote from online resources.

I have over 500 online references to check…. back down the salt (silicon?) mines, one last time….

From “Overheard in New York”:

I’ve decided I’m going to write a pop-up history of the ancient world, based on Herodotus. Should be great for babies. [link]