Information Takes Over

While walking round the Business park, some time ago now, Richard and I got to talking about enquiries that you get in libraries from the great unwashed book reading public.   One I mentioned was the classic:

“I borrowed a book three months ago.  I can’t remember who wrote it or what it was called, but it was blue.”

So we got to thinking about how you could construct a search in a modern online catalogue to help with this query.  And that is how www.colourphon.co.uk was born.

We are building what will become a service, to take an image and return the most frequent colours in both a human readable and machine readable form.  If you have a look at the example links below, you will see results of our weighted ’scan’.  This analysis attempts to add weight to colours that it finds most frequently toward the centre of the image.

Need an example?  These examples will take a moment or two to calculate…

Try this one: Test number one. An ISBN lookup.
This one: Test number two. A Weigted URL
Or this one: Test number three. Another URL

Thought provoking? We’d welcome your comments over on the colourphon blog.

Just came across this useful looking data while looking for Haringey Central Library. Visions of people “lost in carparks”. Is this a prank? or is it a determined effort to come to the aid of people who never seem to be able to get out of carparks without going round twice?

The real answer may be that it is deliberate data or errors to act as a fingerprint so that any infringements of rights can be traced…

Technorati Tags: car park, google maps, google, GPS, Haringey

It’s been some time since I last had time to write a quick blog post.  In the past month, we have moved to Wolverhampton and finally found a cinema with more than one screen; been to the Isle of Wight and visited as many National Trust and English Heritage properties as possible; One of us has started a new job, and is looking for a folding cycle to play on the trains with; the other of us is painting anything that stands still long enough.

But we are back online, Broadband is enabled, and wireless rules.

So what have you been up to in the last month?