Information Takes Over

timhodson.com has been revamped with a new look and more stuff.  I am working on putting more content on there, so things will grow over time, but for now there is a taster in all but one of the areas.

Highlights might be…

• The Langdale Heights page
• The scripts section
• Some poetry
• A few photographs

And, of course, I eat my own dog food… Several sections of the site are powered by my increasingly popular wordpress plugin blog-in-blog (over 2000 downloads and counting)  that allows you to show posts on pages as part of the content. I use it for the ‘Writing’ subsections, and for the updates on the home page.

Enjoy

A few folks have pointed out the Lookybook beta. Some though have slightly missed the point. This is an interesting example of an online store that allows you to have a look at exactly what you get if you buy. It has links to del.icio.us, and other social sharing sites that allow you to spread the word-of-mouth that will sell their books.

I am sure it is not, as some people seem to think, a source of free books to view online.

However, it is rather a nice example of what you can do if you take a bit of a risk and open up your content.

Now imagine the lookybook interface as the interface to your junior library catalogue!

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.