THING 37. PHOTO TALES

For the giraffe picture on the left, I used Tiltshift. This creates photos that look like model miniatures. You do this by making some parts of the picture in focus while other parts are softer. This picture didn't work too well to get the effect. I didn't have the right kind of picture to use. The giraffe's legs are out of focus, but it doesn't look like a model miniature.

I used Image Mosaic Generator for the photo on the right. Same picture, different effect. This generator uses jillions of tiny pictures to create a mosaic. The mosaic is more interesting when it is big. Then you can see the little pictures that make it up. I couldn't upload the big size to my blog. When I changed the zoom from 100% to 25%, it worked.

THING 36. COMIC RELIEF--GENERATE SOME FUN

I liked this Thing. It was a change from the last two which were mostly reading. I tried several generators. I liked the Tiny Tags, the talking squirrel in Newspaper Front Page (talking cats and talking owls are also available) and the Tartan maker. I even liked the forms generator. I couldn't get the stripes to work.

I don't know how I would use these beyond adding them to my blog for fun.

THING 35. BOOKS 2.0

The next time I get the question "What can our book club read next?" I can go to Reading Group Choices (in addition to suggesting my library's Book Club in a Bag). The Top Book Club Favorites has titles for 2002-2008. Featured Books has summaries and reviews of titles published in 2009.

I tried watching three of the video interviews in BooksVideos.tv, but they kept starting and stopping, so I gave up.

I don't have an iPod or MP3 player so I didn't spend a lot of time on Audio Books. I did find an interesting article in Open Culture called "10 unexpected uses of the Pod." One professor has used his iPod for storing the entire 3 human genome (3 billion chemical letters).

I looked at a few of the video reviews in One Minute Critic. I was surprised by how much could be said in one minute. I didn't find a way to search books by title or author.

Lookybook sounded promising but is gone because of the economy. I looked at Storyline from the Screen Actors' Guild foundation. Busy parents can park their kids in front of a computer screen while actors read books to them. The list of stories available is buried in the FAQs. I watched Me and my cat by Satoshi Kitamura, read by Elijah Wood. Pictures from the book are displayed with shots of Wood every now and then.

BookCrossing sounds like fun-- but also a time waster.

What's the future of reading? Judging by the traffic in the library, the popularity of book clubs, the summer reading program, and the rise of Amazon, books and reading are still here. The article "Literacy Debate: Online R U Really Reading?" discusses how many teenagers spend more time reading online than reading print. Is the Internet the enemy of reading or has it created a new kind of reading? What I wonder is what happens when these teenagers grow older and they take on more responsibilities-- family, job, a home. Will they spend as much time on the web? Will they get tired of the web? Will they look elsewhere to spend their time? In 10 or 20 years will they join books clubs? Will book clubs even exist? Will the Internet be vastly different?