iPhoto

I have been fiddling around with iPhoto for some time.  I like it, but now that I have been exposed to Photoshop, it seems pretty primitive.  Here is a shot I took at the British Invasion.  I had left the date on, so I had to crop and blend a little.  I also blended out my own reflection and adjusted the color.

Photoshop.com

This version seems to be less complicated than the store bought one, but it was fun to play with.  In this example, I used the sketch effect after I enriched the color some and increased the contrast.

FotoFlexer

FotoFlexer was a cross between photoshop and iPhoto with some cutsy effects thrown in.  What made it different from another site, Pixir, was that I could change the opacity of a layer.  I did a little composition that was not quite what I wanted, but gives the idea.

What's Wrong with Blogs?

When I was a kid, my mom told me a story about her first year at Vassar.  She was getting acclimated and finding the work a bit overwhelming at first.  One of her assignments was to read a book and be ready for an exam.  It was particularly difficult reading and she struggled through the exam, feeling very dissatisfied with the result.  To her surprise, she got an A while every other single person in the class failed.  It seemed that the cliff notes of the book had a bit of storyline that did not exist in the original.  One of the questions on the exam made specific reference to that bit of story and my mom left it blank.  She was the only one that read the book.

I was talking with a friend of mine who is a retired literature professor.  He was telling me that it used to be that an educated person would at least have to be familiar with all the bible stories, the classics and Greek and Roman mythology.  She would have to be versed in all the themes and characters.  Before she could presume to call an idea her own, she had to be aware of the whole range of ideas that had come before.  When it came time to publish an idea, there was a process of editing and review, by someone else.

Nowadays, anyone with the even the faintest notion can push a few buttons and spew it all over the universe.  Someone who has never gotten out of their barcalounger is now having their opinion on world politics featured on CNN.  Social media and, yes, blogs have inundated the human race with a flood of useless nonsense.  The exaltation of the self that I mentioned before, along with exponentially progressing technology have enabled the huddled masses to publish without having read the book.

What is a blog?

A Blog (noun), a condensation of “web—log”, is the twenty-first century e-version of what used to be a newsletter or journal.  Similar to a website, it is a place with an address on which to disseminate various information and media on the World Wide Web.  What makes a blog unique is that it is mainly comprised of entries, or posts, that are updated frequently in chronological order and are archived in such a way as to be easily retrieved.  Another feature, differing from regular websites, is that each post becomes its own permanent link to the web, making it more readily available to search engines.  A blog also usually allows for visitors of the site to contribute comments.  It is fluid and up-to-the-minute.

What are some types and examples of blogs?

The most popular blog on the web is The Huffington Post, created by Arianna Huffington, an adroit media sensation in her own right.  It imitates a traditional newspaper format, but is laden with political opinion and editorial license.  Other types of blogs include how-to or instructional, cultural or lifestyle, and reviews of products, food or the arts.  The second most popular blog is TMZ, which stands for the thirty mile zone around the Los Angeles area.  It is a cultural phenomenon, covering all the latest happenings of the stars, but is also stingingly satirical, another form of blog altogether.  There are collaborative blogs and ones that take on the form of personal diaries or, even, temper tantrum rants.

Why do people blog?

I found the word, Meme, used to describe a blog and it may be a good way to illustrate why people use blogs.  Coined in 1976 by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, “meme” is a derivation of ancient greek, related to “mime” and analogous to “gene”.  Just as a gene transmits biological attributes from one organism to another, a meme is a unit for passing cultural ideas, symbols or practices from one human being to another through imitable forms of expression.  Some examples Dawkins gave were melodies, catch-phrases and fashion.  Blogs could be viewed in this way as part of “cultural evolution” with their own natural selection determined by popular interest.  They have, in a very short time, become woven into the fabric of international human interaction.