The hot topic, particularly in tech sections of newspapers is tomorrow’s expected announcement of the iPad 3. Have a look at their cover for today & their take on how to report it. So simple, yet so beautiful.

Each day a copy of the days cover is posted on the i Online Flickr account. Have a look at them & see how much work goes into producing an interesting daily paper that delivers topical stories with beautiful design.

Work

A lot of good things happened this year at work. I was part of a national project called LibraryHack to enable what I had been talking about for the past few years – opening up library collections to reuse through API’s.

• Migrated our website to Drupal
• Was part of the team that built our first iPhone app – mobile catalogue
• After 3 years in the making launched our Flickr Commons account.

Travel

This year I travelled to Portugal, Spain & London. I cycled through the Algarve in Portugal, walked the El Camino de Santiago in the north of Spain and was exposed to the wonders of Gaudi’s architecture in Barcelona. I had one of the most enjoyable meals of my life in Seville, I loved the schizophrenic space of the Mezquita in Cordoba. My goal for this year is to start learning Spanish.

Photography

I took over 8000 photos this year, but only uploaded a small amount to Flickr. I didn’t feel that this was enough. I wasn’t that happy with many of the shots I took. I tended to shoot in large bursts, and that growth and consistency you get from practising a craft on a daily basis wasn’t there. I don’t think I grew as a photographer this year.

Some photographic highlights for me were being asked to be a photographer for TEDx Canberra. This came about from last year’s photos being seen by the organisers and asking me if I would like to help out this year. you have to love the combination of Flickr & Creative Commons licenses for this.

I was inspired by watching Kim Tairi’s Flickr stream. Of all the photo blogs I follow I loved the curation of Vladimir Putin, action man from In Focus at The Atlantic.

Music

A lot of music really didn’t inspire me much this year. Triple J continued to disappoint. Most of the music I purchased was from the 1980′s. I subscribed to the Australian Chamber Orchestra series, and once again they didn’t disappoint. I always find something energetic and inspiring from their performances and interpretations of music, even if I don’t actually enjoy the music. There’s something about watching a live performance, seeing the interactions between the players, their concentration and reactions.

In May I attended what I consider to be the best concert I have ever been to – Reflections by The Cure at the Sydney Opera House. Held as part of the Vivid Festival it was The Cure playing their first three albums in their entirety followed by b-sides from the era. In addition it was an ever growing line up of past Cure members – starting with the trio of Robert, Simon & Jason, then being joined by Roger O’Donnell & finally Lol Tolhurst (the first time Lol had played with the group since leaving in 1989).

Exercise

I ran 641km. It was another frustrating year of building up my running & then getting injured. Building up again & then getting injured again. Most of my runs were short 6km runs. I finished the year on a positive note by being able to run for over an hour and recover well. Hopefully this is the start of good things.

I didn’t really do much cycling this year (besides on my holiday), my bikes gathered dust. I miss it.

I walked 841km. This was mostly just walking to & from work. It’s surprising how quickly this adds up.

I’ve finished 2011 4kg lighter than at the start of the year.

Summary

I guess when you look at it in one big list, I did manage to achieve a bit. Maybe I just always want to achieve more in my mind. I’ve got a few things on the go already for 2012 (including a much needed redesign of this site) & I promise I’ll write a bit more about them here soon.

Recently the National Library of Australia released digitized versions of the Australian Women’s Weekly. The existing way of accessing this collection is via a search box or a calendar. That’s a pretty traditional method for accessing library information, but I want to relate to the material in a different way. Back in the physical world, how do we view magazines in a newsagents? Are magazines hidden away or are the covers displayed to catch our interest and therefore purchase them? Some magazines like National Geographic are easily recognised by their iconic yellow and striking cover images.

Likewise, the covers of the Women’s Weekly are an iconic historical record of Australian society. I can remember what the covers looked like from when I was growing up, but I can’t easily remember the dates of any of the issues. How can I access this information in a visual manner?

With a bit of screen scraping I can build an alternative entry path into the collection. By extracting the relevant details for the year, month & issue I can repurpose the data into a visual timeline.

50 years worth of issues is a bit much to be loading all at once, so I’ve built this to dynamically load in another year of covers as you scroll to the bottom of the screen. I like this interactivity as it encourages exploration without being too resource intensive. Of course the covers link to the relevant issue within Trove where you can explore the content further.

I hope this proves to be an interesting way of interacting with the collection. Enjoy.

Update 24 Dec 2010: My timeline has been integrated into Trove.

Step 1. When you are viewing an issue there is an option to download the issue as a PDF.

Step 2: Once the PDF has downloaded drag it to iTunes so it is added to your books (of course you can edit the metadata to something more appropriate than the blank default version).

Step 3: Sync your iPad with iTunes & now you have a copy of the issues in iBooks on your iPad (or iPhone). A much nicer browsing experience. You can swipe from left to right to change pages and pinch to zoom in and out using all those lovely interactions we’ve become so used to.

It feels like a bit of a hack, but if the option is there to do it, and if it’s so easy to do, why not.

John & Maxine run an incredible conference & I thought this year they managed to have some of the most amazing speakers. The presentations by Scott Thomas, Michal Migurski and James Bridle were a stand out for me (and I’ve been waiting for the podcasts to come online to hear Craig Mod’s presentation which I missed due to pre-talk nerves).

I’ll be writing soon in a bit more detail about the application I built that I based my presentation around. In the meantime you can access the audio recording of my presentation at the Web Directions site.

Since building these applications I’ve been wondering, do certain topics (or tags) also relate to a colour? Does a search for Paris return the colourful images your imagination expects? Are images tagged with red really red?

With a bit of help from the Flickr API, I’ve built an application that queries the 50 most interesting Flickr Commons images for a particular tag, and displays the colours of these images. It also attempts to create a definitive colour for the tag by averaging the colours out.

As you explore the tags more & more you tend to find that most tags return an average muddy brown colour. I suspect this is partly to do with many of the images being black & white & skewing the process.

It’s really interesting to explore a few different subjects and seeing what results appear.

Formats

Can we find an colour gamut for a format?

Cities and countries

Do different cities or countries have different colours associated with them?

Objects

Do objects have particular colours associated with them? Take a bridge. Why do bridges exist? They exist to allow us to go over a river or a valley. With that logic we should expect photos tagged with bridge to have a reasonably large amount of green or blue in the image.

Sure enough, we get quite a few images with green and blue in them.

Colours

Of course colours are a natural subject to test.

Have a go

Feel free to explore the application and find some interesting results. The URL is totally hackable if the tag you want to test isn’t part of the initial tag cloud.

One thing I’ve noticed about reading the blog posts is how similar they are to Twitter posts. Many of the entries are very short and the manner in which they are written is typical of what you would find in a tweet. I went back through the diary entries to analyse their content and measure the number of characters in each entry. The average number of characters per diary entry between 2nd Feb 1915 and 21st April 1915 was 342 characters. The longest diary entry so far has been 4066 characters long, but many of the entries are less than 250 characters, and really are just short snippets of information about the events of the day. They aren’t beautifully written entries.

Reading through the diary I’m convinced that if Herbert Vincent Reynolds had access to Twitter back in 1915, he would have used it to post his diary entries. The similarities in the writing styles and structure in the methods of communication nearly a hundred years apart is uncanny. It’s also interesting to note that the Australian War Memorial is using their Twitter feed to promote the diaries.

For other collection formats like images or audio recordings, this traditional metadata is still the main method of discovering items. What I wanted to look at was the concept of a full text search for images. To do this I carried out some experiments in facial recognition and colour analysis over the photographic collection of the National Library of Australia.

Here are the slides of my presentation and a link to the search by colour application I developed as part of my research.