Realized by Animator Jacques Khouri, Vice Versa is a 3D short featuring the fight between twins who have a different point of view on their environment. Enjoy!
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Have you ever wondered what you’d look like if you had a different racial background?
How about seeing yourself as a different gender?
And how will you look in your later years?
Well, now you can find out thanks to a project by a British university. Staff at the Perception Laboratory, based in the University of St Andrews, have published several tools on their site (www.faceofthefuture.org.uk) as part of a study into the social implications of facial recognition software.
The site includes a demonstration of how face detection works, a tool for morphing one image into another, and a face averager. This works by first stretching and resizing the images so that features are in the same place, then working out the average color of each pixel across the two images.
However, by far the most interesting tool is the face transformer. You simply upload a photo, draw a rectangle around the facial area, drag icons to the eyes and mouth, then choose from a range of transformations.
As an example, here’s a picture of me:
Were I of an East Asian background, I might look a little more like this:
One chromosome different and I could have looked like this:
(Disturbingly I’ve been told this resembles a great-aunt.)
Meanwhile the technology suggests I have this to look forward to in the future:
The technology is similar to that used for by an advertising agency last November to show an African American John McCain and a Caucasian Barack Obama to put across the message that voters should make decisions based on policy rather than race. (Ironically the images proved too successful with many posters, which were quickly torn down by souvenir collectors.)
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Alex Russell comments on "perspective" for judging open source (and calls me "Ben" ;) http://alex.dojotoolkit.org/2009...
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Machsend the P2P sharing app using Y! Browser Plus has gone public http://leadthinking.com/186-mac...
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A new study by the email marketing firm Return Path shows that nearly a quarter of the permission-based email sent to Gmail never gets there.
No, I’m not saying it goes to a junk box. Most of it doesn’t get delivered at all. No bounce message. No spam folder. Just . . . gone.
(This is not spam I’m talking about, either. It’s email you asked to get, which Gmail decided not to give to you.)
This is why people think email marketing is dead. Hotmail, MSN, Comcast, and AOL all have similar practices. They decide what their subscribers should be allowed to request, and delete material that they don’t think you should have asked for in the first place.
A lot of what gets deleted mentions taboo subjects like, say, how to find more customers. How to make money online. How to attract targeted traffic to a web site.
Stuff that, as it happens, I write about all the time in my email newsletter.
But my open rates are great, usually around 75-80%. (I got 96.4% one time, which was neat.)
Not only are my messages getting delivered, they’re getting opened, read, and people are acting on what they read. What makes the difference?
Most marketing is self-centered, bragging about how terrific the business is instead of focusing obsessively on what the customer feels, wants, and needs.
My email content (like my blog content, my Twitter content, and any white papers, special reports, or autoresponders I create) is all about the reader. I give lots of advice, links (and not only to my own stuff), and useful information. Once I sent my readers a recipe for chocolate cream pie.
Do I promote? Absolutely. And when I do, it’s effective. But promotion is about 5% of what I do. The other 95% of the time, I’m giving value and solid information.
This is really the same issue as the previous one.
Self-centered content is dull. It’s like getting cornered by that awful friend of a friend at a party. You know the guy.
“But enough about me. What do you think about me?”
It’s hard to ditch the guy at the party. It’s very, very easy not to read or open an email.
I get dozens of messages every day that are so boring and self-centered I can’t be bothered to unsubscribe. I just set up a rule to automatically throw them in the trash as they come in. Or I let them pile up in the spam filter until I feel like deleting 20 or 30 at a time without looking at them.
And I’m one of the nice ones. Many people will just mark you as a spammer for the crime of being boring.
And my guess is that those are the folks who are getting caught in Gmail limbo — people who failed one too many times to engage their readers, and got unfairly marked as spam.
Now that’s pathetic.
For awhile, it looked like email was old-fashioned anyway. RSS was where it was at. We were going to create amazing connections with our blogs. Not only could we have terrific conversations, but our content was linkable, findable via search engines, and part of a global dialogue. Who needs boring old email?
But here’s the secret that smart online marketers know: When you want to move from conversation to commerce, email just works better.
Email lists are more responsive than RSS subscribers. They’re more engaged. They’re less likely to drift away and forget you. And they’re more profitable.
Email is a more intimate medium than RSS. If RSS is a networking event, permission-based email is a dinner party. (As opposed to mailing to an email list you purchased, which is some jackass cold-calling you to sell life insurance during your dinner party. Don’t do that.)
The Direct Marketing Association consistently reports that the ROI on email marketing remains far above that of search or other marketing channels. That’s in line with what I see and hear in online business.
And guess what? Smarter email marketing = better results.
If people have trouble receiving my email, I hear about it.
They use the contact form on my blog. They Tweet me. They try signing up with another email address. They send a carrier pigeon if they have to.
My readers really, really want what I’ve got to send them, because they know it’s going to give them something they desire, and fix problems that are painful to them.
They trust me to send them good stuff. And if they don’t receive it, they’ll do whatever they have to do to fix the problem.
That is the way to address deliverability in 2009. Not with a technology solution or going with a great email provider or avoiding certain words. I use “forbidden” words all the time. (Like “free” and “make money.” Yes, I like to live dangerously.)
Sure, it makes sense to give yourself the best possible shot of getting through the first time. Rewrite a little to make spam filters happier. Use the excellent email service Brian, Jon and I use: Aweber (that’s the Copyblogger affiliate link if you’re interested in signing up).
But if you leave it at that, you’ll probably conclude that email marketing is dead. And you’ll leave a lot of money on the table.
Next week I’m going to share my best content tip for email (or any other form of content marketing). Hint: it involves treating your readers like dogs. 
About the Author: Sonia Simone is Senior Editor of Copyblogger and the founder of Remarkable Communication. She also offers a pretty darned good free class on email marketing.
Whether or not the Freelance “X” Factor course is right for you, it might be of interest to your audience. So, after making sure everything is running smoothly over the last 4 days, we’re opening up the affiliate program to Copyblogger readers.
The program is with E-junkie, and the commission is 50% of the $87 sales price.
Sign up for the affiliate program here.
And if you’re interested in the course itself, there are still a few spots open for the 3 bonus Q&A calls. Check out the details and hop on board.
Featuring a super-bright, 4.3-inch touchscreen, the Garmin nuvi 780 GPS Navigator is currently available on amazon.com for only $199.99 (70% off), shipping included.
As with all nüvis, you get Garmin reliability, the fast satellite lock of an integrated high-sensitivity receiver, a slim, pocket-sized design with a gorgeous display, an easy, intuitive interface, and detailed NAVTEQ maps for the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico with more than 6 million name-searchable points of interest. All of the 700-series navigators also feature a rich array of features including spoken directions in real street names, integrated traffic receivers, MP3 player and photo viewer, and an FM transmitter that will play voice prompts, MP3s, audio books, and more, directly through your vehicle’s stereo system.
[Garmin nüvi 780 4.3-Inch Widescreen Bluetooth Portable GPS Navigator - $199.99, shipping included]
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This sequence is an excerpt from a 20 second X-Ray film showing a female subject pronouncing the swedish word “både”, meaning “both” in english.
[Via]
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The math for handshakes is difficult. You have to stand, look, squeeze, time and end in just the right way or it's weird. Skip the handshake or do a six-second version and people look at you funny.
Interpersonal relations have had thousands of years to develop. Online, there's been no time.
There are people who tweet in a way that rubs you the wrong way. Marketers who build businesses that seem scammy to you, or build websites that feel wrong. I get plenty of email from people that just doesn't feel right, whether it's in ALL CAPS or just difficult in tone or approach.
How do norms get formed? I think it's simpler than it looks: we interact with people who use the norm we use. We follow or read or hang out with people who use the same social constructs we do.
There might be people at the party down the street who are quite comfortable with each other and the things they're doing with or to each other... but you'd hate it. So you don't go.
Cliques form, which become communities and then, eventually a norm arrives. People like us like people like us.
If you're not attracting the people you want to be attracting online, perhaps you're not acting the way they do.
Many bloggers, web designers have websites/blogs which are developed no further & does not mean anything to their owners anymore. There is an easy-to-use option to monetize them:
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From SiteRedeemr FAQ:
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The process is very straightforward:
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To findout how much you can get for your website at SiteRedeemr, click here.
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