Applying The "Ken Burns" Effect to Your Photos

johnmont — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 21:00:00 GMT

One of the things that Popfly does well is take photos from one place (e.g. Flickr, Live Image Search, Facebook, Live Spaces) and display them in another (e.g. your blog) in pretty ways. Tim on our team created a really nice block called "MovingSlideShow" that takes simple photo display a step further: it pans around the photos, much the way Ken Burns (the director of the documentaries The Civil War and Baseball) did to make static photos from historical archives seem more alive.

As a demonstration: if you recall my wife and I bought one of the Seattle Pigs -- Puerco Vaca -- who is still sitting in our back yard. (Yes, "who," not "which." He's a family member now.) Previously I'd used the phototiles block to display photos of Puerco. In this blog post you'll see what the same photos look like using MovingSlideShow.

So what does this mean to you? If you like what you see and want it on your own blog for your photos, just Tweak the mashup. From the Popfly Tweak screen you can change search terms or even go into the full editing mode to change data sources. For example, instead of just pulling photos from a Flickr search, I built a mashup that pulls photos from a Facebook photo gallery and a Flickr search as well. As my subject matter, I used Robert Scoble (a relatively safe subject since there is a substantial amount of content on the Internet by and about Robert) and the book "Naked Conversations." The result is actually a moving slideshow of some of Robert's more recent activities.

Technorati Tags: Popfly, Mashups, Robert Scoble, Naked Conversations, photos

We Bought a Pig

johnmont — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 01:03:00 GMT

Yesterday, at the Pigs on Parade auction we purchased a pig. If you've spent any time around downtown Seattle you've probably seen one of these illustrious beasts hanging around looking porcine. If you haven't spent any time around downtown Seattle, suffice it to say that the they are large (4-foot x 5-foot) fiberglass pigs that local artists have decorated in a variety of interesting ways. The auction was yesterday and, since my wife is a big fan of pigs (insert joke about yours truly here) we decided that we'd buy a pig.

Enter Puerco Vaca, a pig created by local artist Colin Reedy. It's... interesting.

Technorati Tags: PigsonParade, Art, Seattle

A View from Elsewhere : Pigs on Parade

Applying The "Ken Burns" Effect to Your Photos

We Bought a Pig