Recently Myspace has expanded again. One of the new features is Books. I recently took a quick tour of this new area to see what it had attracted since launch.
It was a typical Myspace good and bad experience.
Some of the bad came about due to the amount of space given over to advertising, then again Myspace is always heavy on the advertising so it’s no surprise to find it here. The good point though is that the books on sale seem to be found by counting the number of references to them in Myspace Blogs. That’s an interesting move.
Moving on to the good.
The meat of books are the book groups. These are simply groups whose members are expected to talk about books or post some of their own work. There is at least one group that is calling for members to post their poetry. That’s good. It helps potential writers work together. It’s simple and to the point; what we’re talking about is a basic place to meet people, exchange ideas and perhaps buy some books. Sounds ok to me so far.
But…
The down point is this. At the moment it doesn’t seem that well integrated into the expanding Myspace universe. The books link doesn’t yet exist on the menu and it’s hard to see more than the featured book groups. Doesn’t mean that it is impossible, just at this stage its all very awkward.
All this is a great shame. Writing is one of the worlds most common and popular activities, and this could have been a great place to showcase new writers. As it stands its all bit awkward and a bit like a bad library book club. The hope of course is that Myspace will sort this out and really help the authors wandering unseen amongst us.
The School of Digital Media - Swansea has announced a screening of their animation graduates work at the Moving Picture Company in London on July 19th 2006. The screening will graduates work from the schools B.A. and B.S.c 3D computer animation programme. Both technical and artistic work will be screened.
The screening room at the MPC only holds 70 people. Given this limited space two screenings will be held back to back. If you are interested in seeing this work please contact Lori Renert at the School of Digital Media immediately.
Please note that we cannot publish Lori’s personal details here, but the school can be found at http://www.sihe.ac.uk/sihe/digitalmedia/sch_home.htm
Eefoof.com is a new web site making some waves in the tech news. It’s fundamentally a video, animation, image and music sharing site. In other words another place for you to post such work for the world to see. The big difference between eefoof and it’s notable predecessors such as YouTube and Flickr is that you may stand a chance of making a little money here.
It works like this - each piece of content is shown with ads. The content owner gets a share of any income generated from that advertising.
The principle of sharing of payment of advertising revenue for content is a good one. It helps solve the two big problems for anyone trying to break through into the artistic fields - monetisation and marketing. Although the down side is that it is doubtful that large incomes can be generated this way on a per creator level.
Another negative point is that right now Eefoof doesn’t have a good community or ‘cool’ feeling to it. I’m hoping that is due to it’s beta nature and these are just early days blues. Content sharing needs cool so I hope that eefoof can address that. Also a lot of the image content isn’t that cool, but then it will take time to get the word out and attract more material.
Of course since there is limited content and a lot of publicity going the way of Eefoof it’s a great place to post to as an early adopter, since you could benefit greatly from the lack of competition.
So the verdict .. great potential, but early days yet.
I’d like to draw your attention to Gliffy. Gliffy is a new web based diagramming service. Essentially it’s a diagram and floor plan designing tool that runs in your web browser. All the work you do is stored online and is the case with many such services it has a collaboration option that enables you to share your work with named friends.
I’ve spend a short amount of time with Gliffy and I have to say that it impresses. The load time is short, and the tool itself is very intuitive and easy to use.
Why am I recommending it here? Well it’s got great application for form design, set designing, and using a diagram for almost any form of planning. I can see it being very useful for any one working remotely as a part of theatre or film project, and very handy for prototyping web pages. Of course that means if I can think of a couple of applications then there are probably more at hand. Don’t forget that is collaborative, and all sharing tools have a place in the heart of Shared Creation.
Bellamax is giving away free copies of it’s photographic work flow software – Upshot.
This is a real give away.
However the offer does not last long and closes on July 4th. So if you want this freebie – hurry!
The software itself is aimed more at the casual photographer than professional, but still gives a great feature set for cataloging and adjusting photos. Although it is better used with the lower end of photographic resolutions - it has been noted to slow down in operation with pictures with prosumer SLRs.
To get your free copy visit http://www.upshotphoto.com/index.php
