I had a lot of fun playing around with the image generators this week. The one I liked the best was the "Hockneyizer" on bighugelabs.com, which turns any picture into a photo collage á la David Hockney. I did one of my house in Portland, I think it turned out pretty well, though I imagine it would work better for things like landscapes. I think I will use this one in the future, it will be an easy way to create some fun pictures for people.


In terms of Rollyo, I seem to have had the same problems that a lot of others had. After waiting for the various pages to load, I decided to give up. Later that day, I was doing reading for another class and came across a discussion of "bailout rates", or the rate at which people leave a site before it loads, which gets higher and higher the longer it takes a page to load. Definitely true, if the page doesn't load quickly, I'm out of there, no patience most of the time. However,the concept behind Rollyo is great. I can imagine myself creating a couple of these personalized search tools for different categories of things for which I constantly search. I'm surprised I hadn't heard of this before.

I also thought Library Thing was pretty cool. I love books. I have hundreds of them. Sometimes I sell them when I'm done, but if I really liked it I keep it, or if someone gave it to me or even if I only liked it a little bit, oftentimes I keep it. I also read them over and over again. Some of my favorites I have definitely read upwards of 5-10 times. Again I have a lot of them, a whole bunch of boxes in a storage space in San Diego, a couple of boxes in my mom's apartment, and I recently left a few in my sister's basement in Portland; my carry-on suitcase on the way to New Jersey was full of, you guessed it, books. Often I use amazon to look for new books to read. Usually I'll just type in a title or author I like and click on, "people who bought this book also bought..." or also "people who viewed this book also viewed..." and go from there. Amazon also has an application where people can create lists of books and categorize them for people to look through to get ideas. I think that Library Thing could be a good way for me to find new things to read. I created a personal catalog and added a few all-time favorites. It was also kind of funny to see the amount of books that some people have added to their catalogs, I don't think I will be adding all of the books I've ever read, maybe only the ones I think others should read too.