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Google Arts & Culture

Byrichard

Google Arts & Culture App

Google Arts & Culture is an app that allows people to look at Arts and culture from around the world easily and intuitively.

This app allows you to learn more about arts and culture based on your current location as well as by topic, art medium and more. With this app, you can look at 360 images of monuments and locations. You can also zoom into artworks. When we were teenagers we studied the history of art. We looked at artworks in books and in documentaries. We then went to Florence and saw some of these artworks in person. We saw Michelangelo’s Statue of David and more. As children in Europe, we went to Pompei, to the Vatican museums and many other locations. When you walk in the Sistine chapel you see this art in context and you see how large it is.

This app, by Google allows you to do the same thing. It allows you to study art from your phone as you commute or as you queue or do other things. In effect it helps to educate and inform us about Art and culture. We are no longer restricted to small pictures in arts books.

Google Arts & Culture Experiments.

Google Arts & Culture Experiments is looking at ways in which to present arts & Culture in new and interesting ways. It uses VR, machine learning and other technology to establish connections between works of art and more. It teaches people about the context of art.

We Wear Culture

Our culture is also reflected in the clothes we wear as well as the wearable technology we use. By wearing event t-shirts we tell people about culture. People wear band t-shirts with tour year and destination information and others wear t-shirts for film festivals, World VR forums and more. In this region of Switzerland you often see people with Paléo t-shirts from the years when they worked as volunteers.

Wearable culture is also reflected through the fitness tracker we wear, whether it’s a smartwatch, a step counter, breathing sensor or more. Google’s WeWearCulture project brings attention to the cultural significance of what we wear as well as provides context.

 

Google Local Guides and I
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Google Local Guides and I

Byrichard

Google Local Guides and I are mutually beneficial. I love to go up to the mountains and document their beauty and Google Local Guides needs images and reviews. I have been sharing images with Google Services for several years but it Google Local Guides is relatively recent. When I was added to the program they had already included several of my contributions.

The images that you see below are from Via Ferrata and hikes in Switzerland. They show the Leman, the Alps, the Jura and other peaks and valleys. In Summer I am among them every single weekend. Recently I have started to document these trips as 360 photographs which I then share with this service.

My goal is to contribute at least 140 more images because I want to get a terabyte of storage for my pictures, to use as an online backup. As I use an android phone it logs the locations that I have been to and when I get home or to a computer I can review my location history and write a short review of the places as well as add images. This is an easy and intuitive process.

The perks that I am currently entitled to are:
Get noticed with your Local Guides badge in Google Maps.
Connect with other Local Guides in our exclusive Google+ Community.
Lead the conversation by moderating Local Guides community channels.
Receive invites to Google-hosted events in select cities.

For now the community travels internationally but it is principally United States cities that are active with Barcelona, Edinburgh, London, Madrid, Paris and Sydney providing the international side of things.

Some would say that Local Guides will challenge other services offering the same features but as Local Guides offer one terabyte of storage for images I am motivated to contribute a further 140 photographs and reviews as the opportunities come up.

 

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The Demise of Google reader

Byrichard

Google Reader was a great tool because it made gathering and sharing content from specific sources intuitive and easy. It provided us with one place from which to do most things. Today Google have announced that they are pulling the plug on Google reader.

In my eyes Google reader had become obsolete four years ago. That’s when I moved to services like Feedly, zite and others. Each of these services was more interesting because it took our feeds but used algorithms to make relevant content discovery faster and more intuitive.

Feedly was fun for a while but eventually I stopped using it in favour of zite. Zite was excellent until they decided to downgrade the user experience to a pinterest like interface. I don’t want the kindergarten treatment when searching for information. I want headers, I want a line or two of content and I want to have a lot of information displayed in a small space. Zite fell out of the useful apps category and was deleted from the ipad and iphone as a result.

The next project I’m looking at is Scoopinion. They have a plugin which tracks which news sources you visit and which articles you read. Based on your browising habits it recommends future articles. So far it estimates that I have spent 22hrs reading news over the past month or two with over 980 articles. By this logic it should be good at recommending stories that I would enjoy but it is too tabloid at the moment. This is probably due to the relatively small user base as this is a new project by developers in Finland.

I love content aggregators that study my habits and give recommendations based on this. It makes the surfing experience more enjoyable. You also don’t suffer from RSS burn out.

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NewsRack

Byrichard

For a while I have been looking for an external feedreader for reading the items collecting and stagnating in google reader. Yesterday I came across Newsrack and what I like is that it syncs instantly with the online version. As a result I can read the feeds on the macbook air when I am at home and out and about or I can read the feeds in browser when I am at work.

Look at the sync tab in the settings and you can select to sync starred, shared and shared by friends articles according to All/week/month/3 months. As a result you control how many items come in. You can select how quickly read articles are deleted. On the laptop I have set this to immediately after reading. As long as I have the articles online I’m happy.

Sharing is to all the usual places, e-mail, twitter, instapaper, readitlater, delicious and of course google reader. In this case memorise the shortcut commands and you can do this without bothering with the mouse.

Scrolling through articles is easy. Left and right goes from the feed view to the article and vice versa. The down key lets you go through the articles, click the right arrow and you can read the article. This allows for a rapid feedreading process.

The weakness I have has to do with the way keywords are dealt with. I would like an option to hide them from the RSS feed view. I just want to see the actual feeds, not all the sub themes. I hope they give us the option of choice in future versions.

I have only used the application for a few hours but so far I am happy with it. It’s not free but it’s only a tiny bit more expensive than a coke in Geneva’s old town.

Instant translation with Google Chrome

Byrichard

One of the best features of google chrome at the moment is it’s instant translation function. The idea is simple. You surf to a page, it automaticaly detects the language and then presents the content in a language you understand.

With such a feature the advantage is that it opens up a whole new batch of knowledge and information. Surf to a Polish page about Kabanos, a Polish/eastern European speciality and the content is instantly available in English.

As a second example if you’re in Switzerland and surf to a swiss page the content may originaly be presented in English but the software will translate it. As a result there is no longer the need to hunt for that language switching part of the page.

The big picture insinuates that whatever the language you speak you will be able to read the content in many more pictures. As a result language will become transparent.

Google Chrome – a quick look.

Byrichard

It’s not often that you see me seated at a PC running windows but when Google Chrome was released that’s the OS of choice. I had to test it and so far there are a few features I find of interest.

These featres are seen when looking at the Google Chrome most visited page. Here you can see the 9 most often visited sites as thumbnails. Drag those thumbnails up to the bar above and you’ve got bookmarks for quick access at a later time. This window also displays the search and recent bookmarks tab. So far so good.

As with firefox there is site guessing text that appears for suggested URL’s and for those you may have visited. Type in your username and password and you’ve got the option to save the password once you’re logged in. Very useful for those of us spending our time on a minimum of ten websites a day.

With the tabbing feature I was able to open at least fourty tabs at a time with one minor problem. There was no manner of telling which site was on which tab. As a result they may need to think about creating a list view of tabs, or even implement what we saw in versions of operat ten years ago, the option to resize tabs within the browser. It may be of value.

In the search and URL bar there’s the star, click on it and you can bookmark a page, add the title you want. The usual shortcut keys do the same thing.

Click on the page tab at the right of the search bar and you’ve got one option of particular interest. “Create Application shortuct”. Select this option and you’re given thre options, Desktop, Start Menu and Quicklaunch bar. There, now you’ve got the app as a shortcut link, great for getting straight to the web application you want in one quick move. That may be for twitter, your blog, twitter or any other website you find of interest.

The final feature is the task manager. It allows you to see which websites are open and how many resources they’re using. The three collumns are Memory, CPU and network. It allows you to understand which page is slowing down your system, or if you open several tabs at once which tab has finished loading.

Overall it’s an interesting product and it’s dissapointing that I had to test it on an older windows machine rather than my laptop but so far my opinion of the browser is not that bad. I’d like to see a tab counter implemented as well as a thumbnail view of all the currently opened tabs for quick selection of the site or page I want to see.