In a creative slump, try Mutapic

If you are anything like me(and I hope that you are ;) you know what its like to be in a total creative funk. Its the times that you could not think of a bright idea if your life depended on it. Your mind is a total blank and you need something that can help spin the gears in your head a bit faster.

I recently found a site called Mutapic that is an online image generator that lets you choose from a wide variety of icons, combine them in numerous ways, and create something entirely unique. A gentle warning before you go to the site, clear some time on your calender. This is one of those sites that if you are a geek like me, you waste a ton of time on.

Lets take a look at some exciting stuff that Mutapic and I created:

I imagine if I were to ever open my own restaurant and had to create Men's and Ladies bathroom signs, this is the way I would go. Combining the well known symbol for "Ladies Only" and a icon for a toilet, I have achieved communication nirvana. When someone sees this they will a)know the room is for ladies, b)it contains a floating toilet and c)is likely to induce seizures.










Not quite sure how the icon of "boy with pen through head" got into the rotation. Would you be that happy with a pen through your head?
















At this point I decided to choose 32 random icons and select every possible effect and push generate and hold my breath. I think I actually heard the internet hum while it was creating this masterpiece. It almost seems like a window into another dimension. It makes me question reality. Am I looking at the cracked window into the void or is it looking at me?

Great tool for a "virtual" tour

SO you are on vacation and you are furiously snapping away picture after picture of all the fantastic building and scenery. You get every angle, wide view, close up, with flash, without flash, and because you are an artist you get down on the ground and get that unique shot you are sure no one else has ever thought of.

Then you download all these wonderful shots and queue the slide show and soon discover that for all that effort you basically have a few usable shots that together would make a great tour of your subject. But how to get a bunch of 2D photos together in a seemless way to offer up an exciting 3D view of that quaint farmhouse by the lake with the picket fence and lone stallion standing in front?

Behold OpenPhotoVR.org. It's a new site that lets you experiment with a bunch of pictures taken of the same subject at different angles and distances. You can then weave them together to form an(almost) 3D tour of that subject. You can read more details here.

My subject was Kodak worldwide headquarters right here in Rochester, NY. I took a few photos at different angles and distances and then uploaded them to the site. Now I thought, how hard can it be to designate my angles and next pictures? Turns out its tricker than I thought. Compaired to the already done tours, mine feels lacking. What do you think?

Reaction to Real People Don't Have Time for Social Media.

Real People Don't Have Time for Social Media.

I remember when the concept of a blog first started. A co-worker of mine had one along with 2 other female friends. They posted about various life events(think Sex and the City without the sex or Mr. Big) and I read it and was bored out of my mind. I showed it to my wife and her reaction was why would someone want to broadcast their life like that?

We are at an interesting crossroads when it comes to "social media." There are generations behind us(I am 33) that think nothing of having their entire life's online. That level of transparency is still an alien concept to most people. What happens when these generations make up more of the majority of the population?

Oh and including writing this post, I spend about 2 hours a day with social media

This will change the way you view images online.

Its not often that I come across something that has a bunch of breathless reviews about it that I can actually agree with but I have recently. Its an add on for FireFox or IE called PicLens and it can change the way you view pictures on websites.

Normally you are at the whim of the designer of a particular website when it comes to seeing the images posted there. Sometimes thats a good thing and often times its a bad one. After installing PicLens, go to a site like Flickr and mouse over an image. You will see a little play button, click it and the window will change into a gallery view like this:
















This particular screenshot is a search for the term "Kodak" on deviantArt.com. At this point you could click on an image to get a larger view, or move the entire gallery to the left or right to see more images. Its a beautiful way to explore an RSS feed of images and I find myself wasting precious time using it. There are other sites you can search on like Google Images and PhotoBucket.

Have you seen any other plug ins for either FireFox or IE that you find useful?

How to find the "buzziest" images online

Since the beginning of the internet (around 342 B.C.), images have been passed around from person to person like a bad YouTube video. These images usually got sent via e-mail from one person's distribution list to another. These were the days before sites like digg and del.icio.us that provide "social bookmarking" for the masses.

With these types of sites, it's much easier to find out what pictures are out there creating a buzz (and you would likely find sitting in your inbox from your annoying uncle who just got online last Tuesday).

The best site I found that will aggregate only the pics from the top social bookmarking and sharing site is Picurls. This site takes the top pics as voted by users from various sites like Digg, Reddit, Wired etc and presents thumbnails of them as well as links to the original. One of the best features of the site is the special RSS feeds they provide so that you can just isolate the images from the other content that's posted there.

This site is like holding up a mirror to society and having society say "Does this make me look fat?"

There are things like this that make you just wonder how that even came to be. Or this that makes me think there are people with way too much time on their hands.

And to think before we had the internet we had to either photocopy an interesting image (which rendered it dark and un-interesting) or *shudder* actually talk to someone in person and describe it.

This made me want to look through my extensive collection of photos for something "buzzy." I came upon something interesting on a recent trip to the Buffalo Botanical Gardens in Buffalo, NY. They had an exhibit of garden railroads and here is a pretty typical scene from the trip:

How cute, a train! And look it goes through the indoor gardens! Well then I zoomed in on one of the stations on this particular railroad.
















Now take a look at this scene of Americana. Looks innocent enough? Makes you want to start humming "Small Town" by Melloncamp right?











Well here is a closeup. What exactly are those ladies doing? What makes it even more disturbing is the obviously uncomfortable old woman sitting between them. She is probably thinking "gosh where did I go wrong with the twins to push them into this life of moral decay and sexual debauchery and where the hell is the 4:15?"






If you like the idea of finding conversation starting images don't forget to check out the Kodak Picture of the Day. I am pretty sure those ladies of the garden railroad will not make an appearance there.

Post a comment with your favorite sites for finding images.

A List of Fun Photo Sites

It's always nice when a talented group of programmers decides out of the goodness of their hearts(or maybe the rush of caffeine) to create wonderful free sites that provide hours of photo fun. It's amazing to think that some of the things these sites do for free in seconds, people used to pay for and wait whole minutes to get(you remember "software" right?).

Here are just some of the sites I've come across that let you do things to photos and make the world a better place:

ReflectionMaker.com - "A little tool for all your reflection needs!" is the tagline for this site which allows you to upload any image(or point to an online one) and define the reflection size and background color.

Here I used a photo of myself that was taken while I was watching a Golden Girls marathon. With that reflection at the bottom of my picture I have now created a cool image to update my Facebook profile image, which guarantees all my "friends" will yawn in excitement at my coolness.















Photo2Text.com - With this site you have the opportunity to upload a photo and have it seamlessly turned into ASCII text. Thats right your image will be turned into something only a true geek could love. For those of you who are not computer nerds, ASCII stand for American Standard Code for Information Interchange and your can read all about it here.

So still using the above picture(which may have been taken while I took a brake from writing my book about a man with a phobia of post nasal drip), I ran it through the site and here was the result:

I had to post a screen shot of the "image" that was generated since its a pretty big file and we want you to actually come back to this website after reading these posts and not flee in terror.

The site also lets you choose different character sets, adjust brightness levels, and if you don't want to use letters and numbers there are shades of grey. Now if someone could tell me why one would want to do all this that would be helpful.




Picnik.com - This is a site that is pretty amazing, since its offering some handy photo editing tools all in the browser so there is nothing to download. There are various things that you can use to just touch up a photo like red eye removal, color adjustments, etc. There are also fun things like adding frames, little images and of course text. Even with all these wonderful options the following is what I came up with:

If you need an explanation look here. Or don't and take it at face value that I need to step away from the computer and walk outside.











Dumpr.net - Last but not least is the oddly named Dumpr.net. When I said this name out loud I thought it was relationship advice, but actually its a collection of interesting photo tools in one place. Some of these are pretty bazaar. Take this one for example:

The source picture was the same one as above(I was modeling for my "before" picture for a botox infomercial).

I'm not quite sure what I would use this for, I mean who doesn't want to see their facial features morphed into a nightmarish circular flesh-ball? I think I will make an ornament for this years tree so the kids are guaranteed to stay away from it, as would everyone else.











Here, using the Easter Egg function, I turn into something disturbing. Almost like Vince Vaughn, but not the cool slick version from Swingers, more like this version.















There are plenty of other sites out there to create masterpieces like the above. Tell me about your favorites so I can go in and misuse them.

The Top 5 Scariest Photos Ever Taken

You’ve all seen them. Those grainy old photos of ghosts and other unexplained visuals that are often forwarded by someone with an AOL account and a lot of time on their hands. You look at them and at first see almost nothing, and then you read the description of what you are supposed to see and viola! There be the ghost of Saint Sir Lord Devonshire the Third Duke of PoppyCock something or other.

So in the spirit of poking some fun at this idea I present the top 5 photos of super scary ghosts:

The Ghost of Boothill Cemetary - Terry Ike Clanton (TombstoneArizona.com)

In this photo, it seems that Wilfred Brimley has a sordid past tied to the bandits of our imagination in the old west. Or maybe this was a picture of him during the actual old west. Behind him is the ghostly image of what I can only think to be Orval Redenbacher circa 1955 still miffed over Brimley’s damming quote “Popcorn?!? I only do oats!”



#4

In this series we see smoke from a fire. In the first shot there is smoke. In the second, closer shot there is…more smoke. Finally in the third and closest shot there is…even more smoke. If nothing else this photo proves the existence of smoke.












#3

This is one of the harder images to see the ghostly apparition. If you concentrate and look just above Scooby’s head, you can barely make out the translucent figure of what seems to be a “spirit” or “phantasm.” Legend has it that only after multiple Scooby snacks and hours of rehab did Shaggy recover from this encounter.




#2



I know this is supposed to be about photos only but I had to include this gem. The best part about it is it’s in Japanese, so I have no idea what’s being said. I mean they could be saying anything but the announcer has that evil Vincent Price voice going on. He could be reciting what he ate for breakfast that morning and I still would need to change my shorts. Oh yeah the video shows a ghost looking for her keys or something.

#1

The Brown Lady

This is supposedly one of the most famous ghost photos ever taken, well I didn’t just take Google’s image search results as proof. I zoomed in real close to examine every pixel on this one and below is what came up:






Needless to say a truly scary result.

THIS IS SPARTAAAAAAAAAAAAA

A bunch of random pictures with the THIS IS SPARTA photoshopped everywhere.

read more | digg story

MorphThing.com - yet another way to waste time online

Slowly waking up this morning and actively trying to figure out what time it was and how late I will be to work, I had an epiphany.

The next thing I need the internet to do for me was to give me the power of a god and be able to morph any two faces on earth into one human being.

The stars aligned and I went to check out the latest from del.icio.us and low! I found MorphThing.

This addicting site lets you take 2 photos of faces and morph them into one. All online and in seconds(which is impressive since the site is probably getting a ton of traffic from del.icio.us and others).

The images get automatically saved to your account(after you create one) and they give you plenty of options on how to share the images. There are tons of celebs on the list and you can upload your own photos.

Here is a gallery of some of my creations:

Audrey Hepburn & Dali Lama - "Practice silent mediation, in drag"

Harry Potter and Elvis Presley - Its Rowling's worst nightmare...

Dubya and Jason Lee - one plays a good ol boy on TV, guess which...

Denzel Washington and Hilary Swank - this one makes me squirm a bit.

Gwyneth Paltrow and Gwen Stefani - Gwyneth vs Gwen...names only a dungeon master could love.

Jude Law and Palpatine - I just wanted to knock Jude down a level here...

Just couldn't resist...

Usually don't post pics on here but this one I just could not pass up.

I hope all the current NY Mets take a look at this face and know who their biggest(smallest) fan is.

Lets Go Mets!

Compubeaver case mod: the PC-stuffed beaver

And this, my silent friends, I give you this lazy Friday afternoon...a working computer stuffed into a formally working beaver.



read more | digg story

BritePic - what? why??

The first thing I thought of as I awoke this morning was "boy I wish I could not only look at pictures online, but easily click on ads within the pictures I look at!" That is so brilliant!

Thats the business model of BritePic. You take your already boring shot of your pet sitting in a pot(oh how cute) and add even cheesier comments within the picture. In return for that "value" you are presented with a CPC add at the top of the pic.

WTF?

Why do people need this? Was there an outcry from the masses about not seeing enough advertising on the web? Does BritePic actually believe that its even remotely intuitive for people to think that the photo they are viewing should contain an ad?

Also I love the picture they choose as an example. Its a freaking puppy in a pot on a stove!

This site deserves at least a 4 out of 5 on the craptacular scale.

A redesign and a new direction

I upgraded my Blogger account to the new beta version which forces one to assimilate into the Borg..oops I mean your Google account to log in. No big deal but it feels like one of these days I will wake up and have to inform Google as to what I feel like eating for breakfast, actually they probably will know what I want.

I am forgoing the focus of my posts on online advertising and marketing and instead looking at the more interesting world of (WARNING: buzzword alert) Web 2.0 sites (gasp).

The reason for the change? Well there is more innovation in that part of the web universe right now. I read through the articles about online advertising & marketing and yawn and realize that there isn't going to be a heck of a lot of "innovation" in the near future. There are still articles like "Should you advertise on Podcasts?" and "How to maximize your RSS feeds" blah blah blah.

That's not innovation, its confusion. Its the outcry of hundreds of marketing people who have a scant knowledge of the web wanting to "do something different" without a real thought into why.

So I am moving away from that world for a while and looking instead to the new generation of online apps that are pushing the limits of what people think of as web sites.

I test these apps out and most of the time a voice in my head keeps screaming "WHY?" as in why is this new site/app in existence? Why would anyone use this? Why do I need to do this or that task in a new way in the first place? I like taking a pragmatic, practical approach to this whole idea of Web 2.0 and break it down.

Hopefully I will rattle enough cages on my way there ;)

I don't know what it is with me but so far I have been a complete grump this new year.

It started a few days ago and has lasted until now. I've never been this down on the new year before and I have a few theories why this may be happening:

• Another year older - the new year is a stark reminder of the passing of time. Its even worse than a birthday since you can pretty much ignore your own birthday if you wanted to but with new year's everyone is talking about it. Its an official holiday, there are parties and fireworks and people saying happy new year. Its unavoidable, which makes it worse on your psyche.
• Holiday stress - there is a stress with the holiday season that for me starts about 2 months before Christmas/Hannakuh. This is the time I have to start shopping for the gifts. If you want to stress out a guy to his limits, tell him he needs to find a gift for his wife/girlfriend that she will love. It can't be a cope out gift like a gift certificate to her favorite store, it has to be an actual planned out gift. Then watch as the guy goes from store to store in a mindless stupor looking in sections he doesn't even understand and reading labels written in another language. Is there really a difference between bath gel and shower gel? Is a new oven mitt an actual gift or a subtle instruction to cook more? It doesn't get any better once you find the gift because then the stress builds because the question of "will she like this?" keeping pounding in your head like a sledgehammer.
  
• Back to work - the last 2 weeks or so of the year at most workplaces are like a scene from any of the living dead movies. It includes a lot of people with a glazed look in their eyes just shuffling around without a real purpose. Then one of the zombies mutters the magic word "lunch" and the other zombies follow him out the door. Anything that happens or tries to happen during this dead time is automatically pushed to the "wait until everyone is back after the holidays" mental folder. Then all of a sudden its today and everyone is back and the "woah I've been on vacation for too long so it will take me a while to get to that" mental folder is opened and gets all the work. At some point, around March, everyone realizes that its time to get to work again.

So I'm sure you have some other great reasons why this time of the year gets you down, post some so we can waste even more time on my blog.

Why can't people just know?

You know the situation, you are guiding a project and parts have to be completed by other people, you get their work and it just looks like crap.

I know that I can't expect everyone to get it when it comes to marketing but people use some common sense! If you were to step back and look at the thing you just created would you take the next step and fill out that form?

A simple usability test is just close down all browsers, wait a few minutes, open up that page again and pay attention to where you are looking. Pay attention to your gut reaction, is it one of pride?

It’s just so frustrating when tech people have the mindset of a robot and think "this is my task, complete task, on to next task" rinse and repeat. You need specific instructions, fine but for the love of god think outside that little task box and react to things!

Don’t give me the excuse of “well you’re the marketing expert; you have to tell me exactly what to do.” Should I include breathing in the project request? Why not? Since you are following the task list to the dot how can you include something as complicated as inhaling and exhaling in there?

Ugh…I never feel as alone as when I waste time explaining ever single little infinitesimal detail to everyone involved so something incredibly simple can get done.

I am on to my new gig...well I am officially starting at Kodak on February 27th. I am going to be the Online Marketing manager in their Graphic Communications Group. Leaving LogicalSolutions.net will be hard and I am not looking forward to these next 2 weeks.

So how did it happen? All I did was answer and ad posted by a company called Datrose a few weeks ago. They did not mention who the company was in the ad but I fit the skillset they were looking for. A recruiter called me a few days later and gave me more details on the position.

Turns out it was a contract position, yikes...

My first reaction was, what about health insurance? How long is the contract for? Is this going to work for me?

Well the Datrose recruiter answered all those questions for me and it helped.

Then I had the interview. Got a good rundown of the need and the expectations, things were looking better and better.

Went in for the second interview, this time with other team members. That too went well. I was really feeling it after that. That voice inside your head that tells you "this can work, I can make this work." There are risks involved, but without risk there is no reward. I was comfortable with the level of risk.

After sorting out a few details I officially gave my notice last week. It was very hard to do. Getting the position at LogicalSolutions.net enabled us to move out of NYC and eventually get a house and have our kids. That's a lot and I appreciate that. Even so, its time to move on.

I am starting to work out this years Get Found seminar. We decided the topic for this year is going to be Local Online advertising because I feel like there are more opportunities out there for local businesses, they just need to learn more about them.

I am thinking we can attract a larger group to this years event. Any business who spends almost any level of marketing dollar to market locally would find this event interesting.

John Battelle's searchable: Joel on AdSense

Why wouldn't click fraud be a problem? If the internet is anything at all its the biggest petri dish of human folly that exists. The simple fact is that if there is a way to make money with a given system, then someone will try and figure out how to rip that system off.

CPC is a big money making machine and that guarantees it a spot in the radar of scam artists. Those people will always try and find new ways to beat the system and make a buck doing it.

So now that we are all reminded of human nature, lets see the parties involved here: advertisers, publishers and Google.

For many advertisers its a tough pill to swallow that they just paid Google $10,000 to drive 845 people to their site and 10 people "converted." So where to point the finger? Well it must be fraud! Why else would someone get to our site and not buy our solar powered flashlights? Its never the sites fault right? We spent $$$ to redesign our site and we have flash!! I could go on but you get the idea. I think that a big part of this issue is that advertisers are driving people to very bad websites and can't see the pink elephant in the room, nor do they want to see it.

So is fraud the answer here? Are all those 845 clicks real people? I think most of them are but there is a percentage that are not. What that mix is I don't know.

From the publishers point of view the more fraud the better. Keep clicking! Be it a person, a script, or some poor soul in India working for 3 cents a day. They collect checks and have no legal or fiscal responsibility to their user base or to the advertisers that appear on their sites. If there was fraud, they can just turn around to Google and say "Hey take care of this."

So now Google's point of view. Do we acknowledge this "click fraud" thing or push it off? They seem to be following the M.O. of our esteemed presidents. Deny it until someone has proof, then push blame somewhere else and maybe fire someone. Until there is proof of click fraud that Wall Street will pay any attention to, Google will not have to deal with that subject.

CPC can work well, I've seen it over an over but to deny the issue of click fraud is denying the bigger human nature issue here. There are people scamming Google right now, what will they do about that?

Announcing the unofficial Loquine Glupe SEO Contest Blog

Its been a long while since I last posted here...It's good to see my PageRank has gone up since then. Maybe Google is happier when i shutup instead of blog...

Google has released an API for the AdWords program. While I will probably apply for one soon I don't anticipate getting any programming time to develop anything from it. I am hoping that some smart companies out there can develop some new features for the AdWords program that makes my life easier. Here is my...

Google AdWords API Wish List

• True media planning tool - Let me input a bunch of core words and give me the average searches a month over the last 12 months, the highest month and the lowest month. I know there is seasonality data out there but its a bear to find it(if not impossible). I want to show my client key phrase specifc data that we can build a real media plan around.
• How many advertisers are bidding on a word - show me how many are bidding on that word in quotes, in brackets and just the general buys(like eBay). Overture gives out this info(to an extent), why not Google? *Bonus wish* who those advertisers are.
• Alert me when my ad is offline - I can't tell you how many times I needed to explain why an ad was offline and for what reason. Make an app that alerts me to when and why so I can see patterns and assure clients that their ads are at least running through lunch time.
• Report on more than impressions - let me know how many unique users saw that ad and the avg number of times a user sees it. These are metrics that are being ignored by CPC engines and there is value there.
• Allow time specific buys - dayparting! Kanoodle does it...

These are pie in the sky wishs but hey what are Friday's for?