I was introduced to a site, See What You Feel, by Catherine Chanse, a student at California State University, East Bay Multimedia Graduate Program. When describing their project, she offered:

See What You Feel, is focused on exploring the visual patterns that emerge when people of diverse backgrounds (in regards to country of origin, ethnicity, age, gender) photograph emotions.

We believe that See What You Feel will prove to be an innovative project that will substantially contribute to our understanding of the visual patterns that intersect and diverge cross cultures. The project draws upon the psychoevolutionary emotion work of noted psychologist Robert Plutchik…

When looking at the website and at the project, it reminds me of Microsoft’s Photosynth project and a presentation I watched by Luis von Ahn on indexing and labelling images, which is something I relayed to Catherine. It seems like an interesting project, and I imagine that it will be quite successful.

When doing studies abroad myself, one of the topics that was introduced was a comparison of students from across the world and the common theme that resonates within that group: they are all striving for (knowledge and wisdom, of course, but more importantly) success. I have no doubt that emotions would be another common theme that spans religion, age, gender, and ethnicity. Either way, definitely worth taking a gander at.

NOTE: To ensure the clarity of the post, this is a team project being done by Laura Copenhave, Jerry Yin, and Catherine Chanse. The concept has been and is being developed by the group, but the design, which I found to be excellent, and backend development was the hard work of Laura and Jerry. 

For a company that is probably struggling to find any sort of good news, this type of a headline has to get them smiling:

Yahoo tops Google in quality of searches, study says

While Google dominates market share, Yahoo gets more users to click on results

While the article notes that Google is, by far, the search leader, it does suggest that Yahoo!’s results may be performing better in comparison. Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team, points out that Google’s results often don’t require users to actually click-through for the desired results, from an advertisers point of view, click-through is probably the way to best gauge results.

Yahoo! is in the tail-end of their restructuring in the post-Semel era of the company. An article by Om Malik talks about the 100 days since co-founder Jerry Yang took the reigns.

Yesterday, I was reading an article talking about a new kind of blog comment spam, something that I have definitely come across lately, and was intrigued by the comments responding to the article. The individuals reading the blog were all aware of the situation, and had some good suggestions as to why this new type of spam would be used; my suggestion was the simple URL that would be included on the comment is still a link back, and if you can easily copy and paste a generic message into thousands of blogs that probably won’t get removed, it will have the desired effect. I would have thought little of it, but when I was looking for information on a post I made for Superb, I stumbled across this article on Layered Tech’s blog. I was already interested in the information, and seeing 3 comments, I decided to find out what other people had left about the article.

1. Wow cool site! to be honest, I am surprise of the power of Wordpress!

   keep it up and hope you post more ! So that we benefit from it!

2. Thanks for the post and updated Info!
3. […] You can read the rest of this blog post by going to the original source, here […]

The first comment is obviously this new type of comment spam, and the last comment is a trackback, but looking at the second comment listed, it’s difficult to know for sure whether or not it is legitimate. Having looked at the link on the comment, it is almost definitely a spam comment, but for the untrained (too-busy-to-be-bothered) eye, it seems like a valid comment in response to the article.

It does make me wonder if the average person will remove these types of comments, or if this might be a successful/beneficial method of linking.

Normally I probably wouldn’t post about this and would simply enjoy the thought of some turkey who stole computers getting caught without even knowing, but the local connection cannot be ignored. About a week ago, some laptops were stolen from Workspace, a shared work environment in Downtown Vancouver. Crimes like these are typically difficult to do much about, I’m sure, but this one has a unique spin; one of the laptops had the Flickrbooth application installed, and suddenly, someones image has started appearing on the company’s Flickr stream. Although the tattoed individual, who has suddenly become an overnight star in the blogosphere, cannot be charged based on this alone, it will hopefully help with the recovery of the stolen property, and more importantly, highlight the fact that stolen computers are not the safe bet for thieves (and potential buyers) that they used to be. Two more articles about the incident here and here. Hat tip to Rob on this one.

UPDATE: The individual shown in the picture has returned the computer. See this article for more information.

Tipped off by Jordan Behan’s article on Tell Ten Friends, I’m happy to announce (and promote) the release of the Top 30 Canadian Marketing & Advertising Blogs on Scott Weisbrod’s blog, Experience Planner. From the post:

AdAge started tracking the top 150+ marketing and advertising blogs. As of today, they were tracking 427 blogs. Read about the methodology here to understand how rank is determined. [...] In the spirit of Mack Collier’s Top 25 marketing blogs, I’ll post the top 30 Canadian marketing and advertising blogs once a week here on Experience Planner.

Congratulations to Jordan and the rest of the bloggers for making the initial listing. Although I have to disagree with updating the list once a week (as mentioned in the article, Scott is hoping to automate the process, which might make more sense, but I’d opt for a monthly rather than weekly listing), I think it’s a great resource for those less adept on the web who need help with their web presence and need help finding that help. Definitely a perfect way to showcase Canadian talent in the marketing and advertising arena.

1. adgoodness
2. One Degree
3. Canuckflack
4. Twist Image
5. Pro PR
6. My Name is Kate
7. Leo Burnett Toronto
8. chroma
9. Common Sense PR
10. Buzz Marketing with Blogs
11. Crap Hammer
12. PR Works
13. Buzz Canuck
14. Student PR Blog
15. Transmission Content + Creative
16. social media group
17. The Client Side Blog
18. The Praized Blog
19. Experience Planner
20. Canadian Marketing Blog
21. BPWrap
22. The New PR
23. ADS-Links.com
24. Blogging Me Blog You
25. Mutually Inclusive PR
26. FlackLife
27. The Other Blokes’ Blog
28. Tell Ten Friends
29. Happy Pixels
30. Youngblood PR & Marketing