No news is good news

Its term time - and my time to look at things on the web is much depreciated. But I've been having fun playing with websites I refer to in lectures. (This year, as an experiment, I've been putting all my links up on my delicious page, as I refer to them in lectures. Two weeks into term, and I've already pointed my students to 212 websites. The students seem to like it - spare minutes at the end of a lab session can be spent browsing this "extended set reading", and its a nice record of the large spread of material we cover, even just in passing).

Todays choice, in particular, is the Bridgeman Art Library website. I'd recommend it as a place to idle away those art historical yearnings. Crowding round a slide cabinet all trying to see miniature slides of Giotto all seems another lifetime away - only a few years on since I remember elbowing Zoe in the ribs to try and get a better look at the annunciation. The Bridgeman has 323 images by Giotto alone available online. (Maybe having resources like this available would have improved my student essays!)

Faking It

Results of the Worth1000.com latest photoshop contest.

The rules of this game are thus: You will take any famous painting or artwork (any period is fine) and alter it in such a way that it is obviously a forgery... As always, quality is a must.

Vicipaedia Latina

Time to brush up those primers, for a dose of trivia. In latin [link].

Books by the Foot.

Why bother reading those pesky things when you can have an interior designer choose which "style" suits you? [link]

Zoo Redux

... but I have various issues with the project, below. Because I didnt get the image, below, from the Zoo. I saw it on the BBC website, nice and clear without a huge copyright logo across it. The zoo itself features images, as above, with a large watermark.

Now, I understand that you dont want pesky people downloading stuff off the Internet and making money selling teatowels or christmas cards of your nice historic photos. But low grade, small jpegs? is there any reason to contaminate them with the ugly copyright mark? Pray tell, what are people going to do with these images? Thats right - maybe feature them on their blogs and publicise the service, like I am doing? (The images are copyright ZSL, by the way).

The ZSL print service is clearly a money-making effort for the Zoo - fair enough, they do important work, and could do with more funding. But I cant feel that they have missed a small trick here. The site concentrates on selling these images as mousemats, fridge magnets, photographs: there is very little metadata describing the who/why/where of the photographs. And branding them in this manner makes them almost unrecognisable, in some cases.

Watermarking digitised images was all the rage 10 years ago, when we didnt know if we could trust those pesky interweb users. Even then it was noted that

Safeguards are nearly always imperfect. The most realistic objective is to make misuse economically unattractive. [link]

But by now we should realise that digitisation is like making wine. Give people a free glass and they may buy the case. Show of your wares (at low res), and provide contextual information. They may leave with the mousemat. Treating people as if they are about to hack into the site and steal the images (who, me?) isnt the way forward.

We're all Going to The Zoo, 100 Years Ago

London Zoo (or more properly, The Zoological Society of London) have just put up a collection of historical photographs of the Zoo, in their print store. See what the zoo was like in 1914! Look at the zebra's pulling a cart! etc. An interesting selection, and worth a peek.

This photo: Lady with Chimpanzee, 1928. [link]

Crackbook

Had to happen. Check out the facebook spoof...

Crackbook is an addictive social utility that makes you feel you're connecting with people when actually, you're just not.