bouncingboomergirlgeek: fyi & fwiw

What's Cool in the Clouds: CrowdSpring

With this post I am adding a new tag, "Cool Tools Web2". Cloud computing (where the software lives up on a server and you log in to get things done online) is spawning a zillion cool apps that do cool things simply, typically for free. Much of it is quite entrepreneurial too, since the ranks of the self-employed are swelling now like a mushroom cloud.

Over the next two weeks, I will be doing a series of posts reviewing Web2 sites I have sampled and like. A few don't seem quite ready for prime time, but are worth a look anyway since early adapters often gain an edge. But my first in line has been around awhile, and seems to be a hotbed of creativity. This one is less a tool and more a community, but it is very Web2 in offering great connections quickly.

CrowdSpring.com is a collaborative of artists and designers who compete for commissions from clients. Want a logo? Post a request, say what you will pay, and dozens of artists may sketch suggestions within a day. Pick your favorite, pay the tab, and everyone wins, including the perusing web surfer like me who just enjoys browsing some really nice graphics.

A bit of "web wow"

One of the loveliest web sites I have seen in a long time belongs to a high profile team of architects in NYC, the husband/wife duo of Diller & Scofidio (short bio here). Their projects are quite dazzling -- from converting old rail tracks to new linear parks in the sky to revamping a major music venue at Lincoln Center or placing a Swiss expo building inside a literal cloud -- and so is their web site, including the elegant ease with which you can browse the entire portfolio in either visual or verbal form. It's well worth the time to click around if you want to be inspired wtih stellar design both online and out in the world. Take your own tour here: dillerscofidio.com.

Bits & Bytes from the Front of My Brain

Hot out of my InBox and my RSS feeds, some potentially interesting snips crossed my path this week:

• WallStats site is "reborn"
  Jess Bachman, one of my favorite info-artists, has changed the whole look of his blog and web site. Page and web designers will enjoy this posting with his before and after pics, along with  detail about the reasoning behind his new format. (Looks to me like he's been spending time around the work of Steve (Don't Make Me Think) Krug.) While you are at the WallStats site, you might also enjoy his latest, a lightening-fast-forward video replay of how he built this one poster frame by frame:
  
     Flowcapping: Golden Parachutes
     from Jess Bachman on Vimeo. 

• Speaking of favorite info-artists, Jessica Hagy (Indexed) made me laugh again today:

Genes or grades. Or grades of genes.
Debate away.

Drooling At New Fonts

Back in the day when I had style-conscious clients with money to spend on good graphics, it was SOP to select s separate set of designer fonts for each project, whether the output was destined for web or print. Thus I have been poring over type catalogs for years. Nowadays, I get to drool more often than I get to purchase, but it doesn't stop me from style watching. If you watch font trends too, you may enjoy the "Best Fonts of 08" list over at MyFonts.com. This screenshot contains some of my personal faves (click on the image to see it full size.)

Tip o' The Week: Turn Your Data Into 'Info-Art'

Look at the graphic below and see what it seems to suggest before I tell you.

It's a screenshot from a chart that shows the most popular names for girl babies in Austria last year. But the point of my sharing it is not about Austria, or even baby names (and certainly not that my nom de plume is on it). I share it as a great little sample of 21st century "Info Art" in which words and numbers become something much more than the sum of their parts.

If you are familiar with "tag clouds" on blogs like mine, then you know without being told that the larger words have the most weight (in this case, popular with Austrian mothers of new baby girls). What you wouldn't know unless I filled in the blanks. is that it was made by uploading a spreadsheet of data to a free public site run by the Watson Reseach Center at IBM, where an online algorithim rendered it into this information graphic (yes, you can pick your own colors). The site, Many Eyes, is another great example of the Win-Win Web in which all participants benefit. They say their goal in offering it for free is to "democratize visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis." Not to mention it's a nice public service from IBM. Word clouds are only one of the ways that Many Eyes can take your alpha-numeric data and turn it into a nifty info graphic. Use the following links to jump into ther visualizations yourself, take a tour, or read the rest of their "About" page.

New & Neat This Week: Befunky

Another nifty "cloud app" I had lots of fun with recently is the "Cartoonizer" from Befunky.com.

You upload a picture (via a desktop file, a webcam snip or or an online link), apply the online tools (including sliders for sharpness and color), and voila, the photo is now a black and white sketch or a color cartoon or a cute little avatar.  Tweak it until you like it, then save to disk. Lots o' fun for gamers and bloggers. Only glitch: it did not play so well with my old version of IE, but worked like a charm in Firefox. (I used it for the NinaB pic here on my profile page,  while the sample at left is a screenshot of the toon-pic of Mehmet O., the Creative DIrector of Befunky.)

Thanks for this tip to Amit at the digital inspiration blog

New & Neat, No.2

My "New & Neat" Nominee this week is Clip2Net, a (free) little Windows utility I seem to be using constantly.

Clip2Net does one simple thing: screenshots. But it does it with such quick, fluid ease, I find myself getting much more visual in everything I write because what used to take a half dozen steps to snip, save and share now takes only two or three moves from me. It's a dream date for visual thinkers who like to show as much as tell.

Clip2Net does two things: (a) it turns your cursor into a temporary marquee to grab any part of what you see on screen and (b) saves that image to clipboard or disk or to a private online bin with its own URL that you can share anywhere. If you register your copy you also get control panel management of all your uploads, including a download counter and a generous hunk of storage space. You can also tag your uploads for how long you wish to keep them.

Consider the effect of simply putting the C2N logo at the head of this post. You instantly see if you already know what I'm talking about, and if so, you keep surfing. Or you have your interest piqued and decide to keep reading. So you, the viewer, can maximize the ROI on your time, while I, the author, can add visual impact, and the developers of C2N can reap more eyeballs if you decide to use it too.

That's the kind of thing I am talking about when I mention the "Win-Win Web" which is what all of Web 2.0 is rapidly coming to mean to me. But more about that in the next post and back to this handy little utility. Read on to find out more about what Clip2Net.can do.

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