one of the multimedia producers came to me last week and explained that she had an upcoming project that has more than one language in the audio – meaning we would need to use subtitles. at the time we didn’t have a plugin available to implement subtitles. previous to this, the latest effort at using subtitles was this project on yankees pitcher chien-ming wang. it’s a really nice project and the producer did what many would do and that’s build the subtitles into the picture – literally. that means that in photoshop he overlayed the subtitle and then saved the picture. so the subtitle is baked right in.

however, you run into all kinds of problems with this implementation. the biggest is that the subtitle is then tied directly to the duration of that photo on the screen. what happens when you have several photos go by in the time of one subtitles – or more commonly – several subtitles that need to advance in the time of only one photo?

i decided to handle this by building a plugin to read a XML file that contains the subtitles and timings and to display them independent of the photo cuepoints. this way you can have timings that work with the audio, and operate independently of the photos. it also adds the ability to turn on and off the subtitles (in case you are bilingual and not interested in having subtitles cover the photos). although this feature has been called into question as being useless (but i don’t think that’s the case).

anyhow, this new feature was rolled out not in the most recent chapter in the African children feature, ‘Ghana.’ (which i find to be an incredibly moving set of pieces). let me know what you think.

every year since 2002 a guy named boris müller has been commissioned to design a visual theme for Poetry on the Road – an international festival held every year in Bremen, Germany. in the end, the theme can look however it wants, but should be generated by a computer program that bases the graphics on the submitted words.

it’s nast-a. it looks dope. it’s a fairly abstract idea, so i’ll let them explain it:

This year, our concept is based on a very old concept of encoding text. We assigned a numerical value to every letter of the alphabet. Adding the values of all letters, one gets a number that represents the overall word. (For example, the number 99 would represent the word »poetry«.)

Using this system, an entire poem could be arranged on a circular path. The diameter of the circle is based on the length of the poem. So you can see the short poems in the centre of the poster, while the longer ones form the outer circles.

Red rings on the circular path represent a number. As many different words can share the same number (»poetry« shares the 99 with words like »thought« and »letters«), most rings represents different words. The thickness of the ring depends on the amount of words that share the same number.

Finally, gray lines connect the words of the poem in their original sequence. So solid lines represent repetitive patterns in the poem.

it creates these amazingly intricate pieces of art that you can look at it forever. and then you start thinking… “i wonder what those poems were about.” then you think “i wonder what my poem would look like…”

well, don’t think about it too hard, just go to their page where you can scope your own sonnets using their interactive (make sure you catch the link at the very bottom). it’s really pretty amazing. super impressed. it’s built using a programming language called processing, which i’ve limited exposure to, but seen some amazing graphical things done with.

too cool for school.

i picked up this gem after my buddy nathan tagged it. it’s the latest jonathan harris creation, the ‘yahoo time capsule.’ it two words, it is “bad ass.”

the basic concept of the piece is that peeps can come put any of their media (text, photo, video) into the time capsule, tag it with some emotions (”love”, “anger”, etc.), and then, it 20 years or something, yahoo is gonna open it back up. by that time the internet will probably be like… embedded in our brains or something. so in 20 years this is gonna be automotically released into our brains. moving on.

i’ve always been into harris’ creations, if not his personal sentiments about the projects, because he finds incredible ways to connect the content that people are already putting on the internet. i first became introduced to him through his 10×10 work (which i still love) as well as word count. these are still two of the cooler projects on the internet. 10×10 is crazy interesting b/c it is a completely automated news diary. it scrapes rss feeds from news sites and combines them with their associated images. it’s super tight. and you could lose hours seeing the different use counts of words using word count.

i’m really interested in doing this kind of work, but with more of a journalism edge.

i have a lot to say on this subject, but this isn’t the post i’m going to say it in. not for any other reason than i’m lazy and have a couple buddies in town so my mind is not at it’s sharpest.

but, i will give an example. and that example is netvibes. i was turned on to netvibes by my man nizza who runs the homepage and it rocks my socks right off my feet. what is netvibes? it’s like a homepage that has all kinds of neat modules and tools (like blog search, todo list, etc) but mainly it does a really great job of keeping track of all my rss feeds. (read about rss feeds at wikipedia). it has drag and drop functionality and tabs, web 2.0 near it’s best. both make workflow much much quicker. and one of the best things (although i’m sure there are some kind of far-reaching security concerns) is that it stores all of this online, so it’s seemless going from my computer at work to my home computer. (well for the most part).

i haven’t tried integrating it with iCal (mostly b/c i’m not disciplined enough to use iCal) but i’m hoping to at some point.

it’s a great tool that increases productivity. it’s easy to understand and use, and quite extendible. i’m sure it will only continue to get better. good show, netvibes. i look forward to our continued relationship.

took this with my camera phone on the L train while going to the east village. beautiful.

this is a pano tool that i’m developing for possible use. it’s got some quirks, but i thought i’d put it up in case there was some feedback… i really think there’s gotta be a better way than quicktime VRs. is this the way?

a few notes:

1. this relies on the Flash 8 player for the blur. if you don’t have flash 8 player or above (you can tell by right-clicking on the pano and at the bottom of the contextual pop-up menu it will say “About Flash Player…” and the version you have). if you don’t have flash player 8 or above you can get it here.

2. this load images that total 2.6 megs. FYI

3. i am standing in the middle of bryant park in new york city. i am using a canon digital rebel xt. i am rotating in a circle. this is all taking me very little time. point being: the pictures would hopefully be better quality (ie taken with a tripod at least and paying more attention to exposure)

yo so tomorrow i’m going to washington d.c. for the online news association conference and awards that is this weekend. i’m looking forward to it for several reasons:

1. i’m going to get to catch up with some old friends including esteemed photographer ray jones (XXX) and good friend and infographics god alberto cairo. in fact ray is crashing on the floor of my hotel room. i told him if he was lucky, i’d pull in a cot. i’m also going to see my old roommate and maybe a couple other peeps. rock!

2. there are some really cool sessions that i’m looking forward to checking out including: the keynote address by marc cuban, owner of the dallas mavericks and blogger; Made for the medium: Best of the Best with alberto, seth gitner (roanoke) and ashley wells (msnbc); Automating genius through tools with adrian holovaty (washpost, chicago crime), Staffing and structure with neil chase (nytimes) and rob curley (washpost); and the State of the industry super panel with Michael Arrington (Tech Crunch), Mike Davidson (Newsvine) and Jeff Jarvis (Buzzmachine, Daylife).

really, these should be awesome opportunities to interact with the best. which is how to get better by the way.

and finally,

3. the awards are presented on saturday night. my current employer, NYTimes.com is up for General Excellence in Online Journalism which i sure hope we win, but i’m really looking forward to the student journalism category where two projects i worked on (out of five nominees) are up for the prize including Chasing Crusoe, for which i was director of programming, and The Ancient Way, for which I was a producer. i really want chasing crusoe to win, and i think it should.

anyhow, if anybody else is going to be there for the session, make sure you holla at me and to all my other peeps, i’m looking forward to seeing each and every one of you.