Information Takes Over

Libraries do of course like to group things together into collections and make sure that like is with like. So it comes as no surprise to see that Bradford Metropolitan Borough Council Libraries have been doing just that…

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!

I was just looking at a camp-site from space - where we spent a happy week last year - and noticed that the road had two little bus symbols next to it. Turns out Google is knowing where the bus stop is and what sort of buses stop there! Looks like they have harvested data from transportdirect.info.

… you download and burn to disk a linux distro such as Ubuntu Studio, and then load it into the drive of your PC ready to give it a whirl, only to be faced with a black screen and the slow dawning that the disk the laptop quietly burnt without any hassle was a DVD, and the drive in the PC ain’t.

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.