One of the previews before Quantum of Solace this weekend was for 2012. It was a good teaser of a surreal apocalyptic scene, but what struck me was their Internet tie-in. Where many movies have scrambled to find a domain, or setup shop on studio or social networking sites, they simply offered “Google Search: 2012″.
That seemed to be a pretty bold claim of their search engine prowess, since even casual SEO gurus like myself will write blog entries just to see if we can bump them Yet none of the first page results are an official movie site; they seem to be leaving it to the existing pages to build buzz with speculation on what will happen in 2012. (The political pundits must still be hungover; there weren’t any partisan predictions, either.)
Will it work? Would you go see a movie based on the strength of apocalyptic Internet speculation?
In the spirit of Halloween, I decided to have some fun with Digital Photography School’s “What’s in your bag?” Assignment this week. The idea spawned from the Ansel Adams quote,”The single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it.” It was a full evening’s worth of work, but a very entertaining challenge!
Of course, the real fun comes in explaining the process behind the shot. Or shots - this is actually a composite of one of the bag and one of my head. To keep it believable, I kept the same lighting in both and marked the position of the bag so everything would line up. The bag went first, since it was easier than the self-portrait!
After Amazon, Google App Engine is the next big contender for mainstream cloud computing. The power of Google’s infrastructure will spin up as many instances of your app as needed, and they’ve provided a simple Python framework with Django templates for development, with additional languages to come. Basic accounts will always be free, and after the current preview ends, a la carte pricing wil be similar to Amazon’s services.
I consider myself a good listener, but really missed the mark last week. One of the cloud computing talks was being given by Joe Gregorio from Google, who I chatted with beforehand. He mentioned working on the Atom protocol, which I immediately took as an opportunity to ramble off about using it as the API for a previous project.
I looked him up afterward, and found out that he actually wrote the spec! For as many times as I read the thing, you’d think I would’ve noticed the name, or at least picked up what he was telling me before launching into my own story. Of course, being a good listener himself, he indulged me before getting into his talk on Google’s App Engine.
Thanks to Lee Torrens of Microstock Diaries, I got to attend PhotoPlus in New York this week and ask my question of microstock superstars Yuri Arcurs, Andres Rodriguez, and Kelly Cline. It was an interesting panel discussion that touched on many aspects of microstock and its impact on the industry and photographers.
The answers to my question, “What aspects of microstock photography do you find most personally satisfying?”, were that you can shoot what you like (as long as it’s marketable), and that it can provide overall business success and residual income.
The photographers I’d most like to meet aren’t the big names in commercial or fine art photography, but the ones whose blogs and books have taught me the most about the subject. David Hobby, the Strobist, is definitely at the top of that list, so it was great to meet him at PhotoPlus this week!
I ran into him at the Lumiquest booth, where he was snapping a picture of an ad he shot for them featuring himself and his son. He’s a really friendly guy; he asked what I liked to shoot and gave me a few lighting tips, like adding in a random bit of light to keep things interesting. I asked him about his own plans after building up Stobist and leaving the Baltimore Sun, and it sounds like we’ll see some exciting things from him in the future.
My video skills are pretty lacking, though I suppose I could just tell you the abrupt ending is a nod to the Sopranos. I exported the photos as 480px JPGs from Aperture, added a last frame with credits, and loaded the image sequence into QuickTime Pro.
Finding the music was an interesting exercise; I went looking for music licensed under Creative Commons and found Jamendo. A few songs by Convey had good strong openings; I settled on a 12-second clip from View from Above.
The second cloud computing track was on massive data processing in clusters and 15clouds, including a presentation by Facebook on their use of Hadoop and custom development of Hive to facilitate their own operations.
Data mining the 180 TB of Facebook data, which grows at 2 TB a day is no small task, so the team uses a cluster of 350 8-core machines to crunch data and figure out which popular features deserve further investment, demographics, and whatever else they can fish out of the sea of personal information users provide.
Another cloud computing talk introduced Google Docs and showed a few cool ways to collaboratively use spreadsheets “in the cloud”:
Data management - Google Checkout pulls merchant information live from spreadsheets, allowing non-technical folks to do updates without needing their own administration screen.
Form entry - Generate a form from a spreadsheet and embed it in an email for higher survey response rates and easy tallying of results. Bonus: as long as you don’t change the POST URL or the names of the input fields, you can customize the format the form or split it into multiple pages.
Map your data - Many “gadgets” are available to act on spreadsheet data, including displaying it in Google Maps with another column as the tooltip.
MagicFill - Use the power of Google Sets to generate related words.
I attended a few talks on cloud computing last week, including an overview of Amazon Web Services. My previous view of Amazon’s mission was that they’re out to commoditize everything, from books to products to computing. In fact, they actually do have 3 lines of business:
The extent of their web services is testimony to it’s standing as a main pier of the company: it includes a variety of inexpensive a la carte services for data storage, messaging, and raw computing power. Web service traffic actually surpasses that of the retail site. Of course, the real proof comes in some of their success stories:
The New York Times TimesMachine split and completed optical character recognition on 130 years work of newspaper scans in less than 24 hours for a few hundred dollars
Animoto launched their viral video application on Facebook, and quickly scaled from 50 virtual servers in Amazon’s cloud to 3500
Yet none of the first page results are an official movie site; they seem to be leaving it to the existing pages to build buzz with speculation on what will happen in 2012. (The political pundits must still be hungover; there weren’t any partisan predictions, either.)
del.icio.us/mbotos
