Mindtracks

The Timeline of Art History presented by the Metropolitan Museum of Art is described on the site as a “chronological, geographical, and thematic exploration of the history of art from around the world, as illustrated by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection.”

The Museum’s curatorial, conservation, and education staff have written and researched the content for the site providing a great reference and research tool for both students an educators. You can explore the site via period, subject, theme or artist.

The idea behind Checkser is to develop and share checklists - the sort of checklist you use on projects to make sure you were not missing any vital steps somewhere along the line.

This wiki-like service for checklists is a free service developed by Braindevils

For studio based designers, artists crafts people creating and organizing a body of work to the exhibition stage always involves remembering numerous small but important tasks. This service looked handy as you could develop and use a standard check list to make sure jobs got done.

Lorelle VanFossen has written a very good piece for the Blog Herald about the experience of designing a website for artists, musicians, painters, poets, or crafters.

If you are in one of these professions is worth reading The Art of the Artist Web Design Collaboration as she teases out what the issues are from a web designers view point and if you ever go through the process you may better understand some of the issues.

On slightly different note check out the winners of What is Graphic Design? Poster competition announced over on Veerle’s Blog.

For those of us who spend a good portion of our working week in a studio podcasts are a real pleasure. The latest site to get me through a day of repetitive tasks is the podcasts from Museum of Modern Art in New York. These are discussions with artists, and curators who talk about their reactions to works of contemporary art

The university comes alive again as students return to campus and our teaching block starts today.

The links ahead are for a presentation to my students on Web2.0 which I am giving this morning

The term Web2.0 is disliked and disputed but was coined by Dale Dougherty of O’Reilly Media.
In his now famous article What Is Web 2.0 Tim O’Reilly mapped out the key aspects of Web2.0 technologies and after much debate he refined his ideas in Web 2.0 Compact Definition: Trying Again

A Definition of Web2.0 in Wikapedia Web2.0 has also been referred to as “participatory Web” and the “Semantic Web”.

The term refers to a set of second-generation Web-based services which include social networking sites, blogs, social bookmarking and wikis.

Jared Spool in Web 2.0: The Power Behind the Hype points out that

Web 2.0 isn’t a ‘thing’, but a collection of approaches, which are all converging on the development world at a rapid pace. These approaches, including APIs, RSS, Folksonomies, and Social Networking, suddenly give application developers a new way to approach hard problems with surprisingly effective results.

These services emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users.

Often organised and categorized by tag based folksonomies.

Creating and distributing Web content is based on a model/philosophy which is characterised by open communication and decentralization of authority.

In Now It’s Your Turn Time magazine suggests that

… individuals are changing the nature of the information age, that the creators and consumers of user-generated content are transforming art and politics and commerce, that they are the engaged citizens of a new digital democracy.

Also see Nicholas Carr’s critical piece The amorality of Web 2.0

Richard MacManus and Joshua Porter have teased out the implications for web designers in Web 2.0 for Designers. They say that Web2.0 is:

a vision of the Web in which information is broken up into “microcontent” units that can be distributed over dozens of domains. The Web of documents has morphed into a Web of data. We are no longer just looking to the same old sources for information. Now we’re looking to a new set of tools to aggregate and remix microcontent in new and useful ways.
These tools, the interfaces of Web 2.0, will become the frontier of design innovation.

Class discussion pointing to visual artists and designer makers who are using blogs.

• Craft Monkeys Check out the print shop area
• Design Sponge check out the shop
• tsk tsk
• Danny Gregory’s site Every Day Matters
• Loobylu
• Drawn artists who blog
• Strobist David Hobby has focused on a blog about photographic lighting.
• Indie Fixx

For finding other blogs check out Google blog search

Other discussion examples

• Flickr and here is a success story from flickr
• YouTube This is a good news story for anyone interested in using web2.0 technologies to promote their work BBC signs YouTube gadget reviewer Susi Weaser, posted regular 2 minute technology reviews to you tube and it won her a position with the BBC
• Technorati
• Etsy Take a look at this video about Etsy

Resources for artists

• DeviantArt is an artist community many students already know of or use. If you have not already investigated it do so, as they have a free and premium account options. Both allows you to view and submit artwork.
• Renderosity is a community for digital artists. There are loads of resources on the site but you can also display and sell digital art.
• Artmajeur.com You can sell art directly through their online gallery for free. A free account gives you access to an artists gallery, your own mailing list, upload up to 1000 images, visitor stats, guest book, search engine indexing and a lot more.
• ArtistPortfolio.net is an online portfolio and directory for artists. The service includes free art directory listings, free webspace, free email accounts and online portfolio creation
• The Untapped Source Online gallery interested in emerging artists. They sell high quality prints of artists work and split the proceeds.
• The Vision Grove combines social software tools to aid networking and promotion of your work. However you are only allowed 5 images
• AbsoluteArts.com Is a database for artists worldwide. They offer free and premium plans for building an online portfolio. The Free plan allows 4 images but since the site is also a rich resource site I have listed it here.

I would like everyone to read Seth Godin’s Small is the New Big

With the start of the academic year in Australia I have been taking note of internet research tools that are useful to students. Here is the start of the list.

TechTracer2.0 has written 10 Most Amazing Google Search Tricks.

Top search tip when teaching in an Art school is showing students how to use Googles Image Search and introducing them to Google Scholar

With Google’s glossary search engine you can look up a word or a group of words in many of the glossaries online. To use it, add the define: operator in front of your query. In other words if you wanted a definition of Surrealism In Google’s search box type define: Surrealism

In 1996 the Wayback Machine began cataloging the internet. Often if the article you are looking for is no longer available you can find it archived there

The Art School Library has a resource page Online Images Collections and Search Engines

The Internet is a self-publishing medium which means everything must be analyzed for its appropriateness. You need to evaluate the information you have found.Ask what is the type of site and why does it exist.

Sometimes the domain suffix will help you evaluate a site. For instance education sites run by educational institutions  have a .edu and/or country code suffix. In the case of Australia it is .au. A government site has a .gov suffix. Non-profit organisations have a .org suffix Here is a list of country TLD codes and a list of Internet top-level domains from Wikipedia

Ask do they provide references or links to source material? If so what is the quality of the source material. See if the information is dated and find out if it is current.  Ask yourself who published the page? Look for authorship and the credentials of that writer. If the author is affiliated with an academic institution, or organization, check the directory on the Web site to confirm that this is in fact the truth.

If it is not clear you can use Whois Lookup to find out who owns the domain name.
As a side note: If ever you are dealing with copyright problems this is how you you trace the owner of a site.

Laura B. Cohen has produced Evaluating Web Content  which covers the topic well. It includes evaluating web genres like blogs and wikis, social networking sites, Social bookmarking sites and multimedia sites such as YouTube

Browsershots is a handy tool for web designers. You can test your web design in different browsers. Browsershots is a free open-source online service created by Johann C. Rocholl, that takes screens shots of your website in different browsers.

Hrag Vartanian has written an interesting piece about the good and bad aspects of blogging about Art and art practice. In What I Love & Hate About Art Blogging positive and negative aspects of the genre are teased out.

I found myself agreeing with 90% of the article, with the exception being that more flaming was needed in the community. I disagree as flaming closes conversations and blogging is for me about conversing and teasing out ideas. Just as Art stimulates ideas and provokes questions blogs can also stimulate and push ideas. Flaming can stop that process and runs counter to why I read blogs. I am not suggesting that we approach Art in a mindless manner but there is a difference between considered critical analysis and flaming. I know there is a strong tradition of criticism in the Art world but perhaps the model needs at least to be questioned particularly when it shifts to morphing into something else online.

Slorker has published a great post on Pictures that Changed the World. It’s a great compilation of photos that makes you think.

New British research (PDF) commissioned by the British Library and JISC, aims to look past stereotypes and examines how the “Google generation” (those born after 1993) are searching for, and researching content, asking if their behaviour is different and if so in what ways. Based on their study the report explodes a number of myths about students today. Although people of this generation are usually competent with technology, it is not true that they are “expert searchers.”
Key findings are :
“The information literacy of young people, has not improved with the widening access to technology:
in fact, their apparent facility with computers disguises some worrying problems
Internet research shows that the speed of young people’s web searching means that little time is spent in evaluating information, either for relevance, accuracy or authority
Young people have a poor understanding of their information needs and thus find it difficult to develop effective search strategies
As a result, they exhibit a strong preference for expressing themselves in natural language rather than analysing which key words might be more effective
Faced with a long list of search hits, young people find it difficult to assess the relevance of the materials presented and often print off pages with no more than a perfunctory glance at them
These points relate both to the current use of the internet by young people and, a technology generation earlier, to their use of early online systems and CDROMs. There is little direct evidence that young people’s information literacy is any better or worse than before. However, the ubiquitous use of highly branded search engines raises other issues12:
Young people have unsophisticated mental maps of what the internet is, often failing to appreciate that it is a collection of networked resources from different providers
As a result, the search engine, be that Yahoo or Google, becomes the primary brand that they associate with the internet
Many young people do not find library-sponsored resources intuitive and therefore prefer to use Google or Yahoo instead: these offer a familiar, if simplistic solution, for their study need”

Thanks for the link from  ArsTechnica The “Google generation” not so hot at Googling, after all by Nate Anderson

FotoFlexer is an free and easy online digital photo editor which enables you to upload an photos and have access to standard image manipulation tools such as crop, rotate, resize, flip and red eye fix.

FotoFlexer takes standard image manipulation a step further and it is possible to add  text draw over an image colour and erase. Smooth or sharpen an image are available and you can apply effects to images such as turning it sepia, inverting the colours, turning the image into an ink stamp, fresco or film grain. Pinching, twirling , bulging and stretching the image is also possible. It is even possible to layer images forming composite pieces.

To keep up with news about this little free web based app there is the FotoFlexer blog too!