Archive for January, 2010

Your words are your thoughts. True enough some people write without giving much thought to their words and those make some entertaining word clouds, too. What is a word cloud you ask? Simple enough – it is a “cloud” created from all of the words in a particular document.

Back in the day before the internet was inter or net a word cloud was simple called a word repetition count and there were done, gasp, by manually counting the words in a document and creating hash marks for each word. Not those hash marks, real hash marks.

Wordle counts the words on any text you paste into the form and can count the words in an RSS feed and creates a graphic representation of the words contained in the document or the feed. Click the thumbnail here to see the Wordle for the RSS feed for Twitterbits.

Give it a try and see if your message is coming out loud and clear!

http://www.wordle.net/

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Of course the majority of you reading this know better but there are a few who will be fooled and fall for this. I find the most interesting thing here is this was sent from a Hotmail account! If you ever get an email from your email company or your web company asking for you to “confirm your details” and they are asking you for your user info and password you can rest assured it’s not legit.

from Google Team <acctndetailscrewnms@gmail.com> to date Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 4:36 PM subject Notice mailed-by hotmail.com

hide details 4:36 PM (22 minutes ago)

Plagiarism. So easy to copy and paste. Right click and save.

How about a few tools to help you find your absconded pixels? How fortunate you are to be reading this little post about how to find out who is using your photos or who is copying your blogs. After all, it is a question that hits everyone when they copy someone else … “who is copying my blog?”

Photos and images are easily taken. While embedded watermarks help visually they don’t do much digitally. Digital signatures can be embedded in images to help track them but there are holes even in that protection. Many people who work in copy protection employ multiple tools.

TinyEye image identification technology

Here is a very simple one, free to use, to see if someone else is using your image even if they have changed the name. While not perfect it can point you in the right direction: http://www.tineye.com

With TinEye you simply upload your original image and the system searches for matching images in their database. From the website, “When you submit an image to be searched, TinEye creates a unique and compact digital signature or ‘fingerprint’ for it, then compares this fingerprint to every other image in our index to retrieve matches. TinEye can even find a partial fingerprint match. TinEye does not typically find similar images (i.e. a different image with the same subject matter); it finds exact matches including those that have been cropped, edited or resized.”

There are many interesting facts about the Idol auditioner General Larry Platt you may not know. Platt has amused us all for the last 48 hours as we have watched him on YouTube. Long before there was an American Idol show Larry Platt was already quite famous as a Civil Rights activist.

• he was shot in the eye as a child and has been attacked by police dogs and suffered beatings in past civil rights efforts
• made the news during former Mayor Bill Campbell’s federal corruption trial
• marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma
• he was a teenage crusader for the Civil Rights Movement in Georgia
• was even honored with his own holiday in Atlanta, Larry Platt Day, on September 4, 2001, for his “priceless and immeasurable contributions to society”

Platt sang his song as the judges watched in interest, amazement and -- evidently according to Simon Cowell’s lack of humanity -- disgust. The lyrics to the song Pants on the Ground are:

Lookin’ like a fool with your pants on the ground
With the gold in your mouth, hat turned sideways
Pants hit the ground, call yourself a cool cat
Lookin’ like a fool, walkin’ to the town
With your pants on the ground!

Resources:

http://new.music.yahoo.com/blogs/realityrocks/301708/general-larry-platt-a-real-american-idol/

http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2010/01/general-larry-platt-pants-on-the-ground-highlight-american-idol/

http://www.accessatlanta.com/atlanta-music/274897.html