The Hint Caravan

Understanding the Internet is more than reading a book or playing Farmville. This, the five guys that wrote the Cluetrain Manifesto understand. While they admit they don’t understand the true purpose of the web – “telephones are for talking to people… what’s the web for.”

This ten-year anniversary addition almost doubles the original book published in 2000. IT contains new information discovered since the before our Web 2.0 generation. Back in 2000, before the popularity of the social web, before Facebook, MySpace or Twitter had taken over the bandwidth this book said something outrageous. “Markets are conversations.”

This simple idea was a revolution in 2000, and the Internet was the best driving force behind these conversations. Today, we take this idea for granted. The idea that outside of a barbershop or store aisle we the consumers can have a true conversation regarding the products or policies of our favorite providers.

Unlike some of my other posts, today I felt this book is too important to pick apart. It’s an Eastern philosophy of the internet. The authors looked at the Internet how an Amish person might design an Internet scheme. I read earlier this month how the Web increases our hand-eye coordination but decreases our critical thinking. This book is fantastic for those who have never thought critically about webspace. For those of us that who have, it becomes more of a How-to-explain book. It’s more of a crash course of more of an eastern school web.

Mind Is Blown, Then Content-Aware Filled

Adobe Photoshop CS5 was recently made available to the public. After watching this video…

I downloaded the CS5 free trial and played with the new content-aware deletion and spot-brush features. Needless to say, I was absolutely excited and amazed.

I spent about 10 minutes playing with various photos and then downloaded a random Facebook photo from a friends feed and began to see what I could delete. 20 minutes later I had deleted 10 or 11 things from the photo below. Can you spot them all?!

Click on the image to zoom

The mind-blowing thing here is, I am not a Photoshop Expert. I’ve never taken a PS class. I’ve played with it for many years, but always considered myself at an Intermediate level. If a mid-level untrained photo editor can remove items from a low-quality Facebook photo, what kind of creations could a professional make?

Now thinking about the future… *KABLOOIE!* Mind. Is. Blown.

I’ll Be Creative In A Minute

“I jumped, the sound hit ting me like a ton of bricks, drop ping my hot cof fee on the cat’s tail who ceased curl ing on the floor by my desk. I stood up from my office chair think ing I was lucky to be work ing from home, and went to investigate…”

OneWord.com is a recent discovery. My co-worker was using the StumbleUpon tool and literally stumbled upon this website. The site presents the user with a simple creative task. When you click the “Go” button, you’ll see one word at the top of the follow ing screen. A timer starts and you have only sixty seconds to write about it. The idea is not to think about what you’re writing, but to just flow onto the page (er… screen?).

The Photo, Made Creepy

By now many of us have heard of DailyBooth, but for those that haven’t… DailyBooth is a social networking/media site that allows users to upload a photo (similar to a visual status message).

With this in mind, were a Clark Kent impersonator to step into DailyBooth he would emerge not as superman, but as Robo.to a strange/creepy version of DailyBooth. Robo.to’s website self-describes it as gathering “the latest about you into a tiny, easy to update, video-enabled calling card.” These calling cards can then be embedded and used in place of some photos you see around the blogosphere.

Verdict? Creepy? Cool? Or a bit of both? To view my Robo.to go to: http://robo.to/td501