Oh, go on

One of the things that interests me professionally is serendipity. How can you introduce play into search? How can you help people wade through the depths of your online collection is a way that's so elegant, so lightweight and so satisfying that they're unaware of effort, and only aware of the joy?

I played a while ago with Colr.org, which lets you build colour palettes out of selected images - the principle is, I think, that a colour image that's easy on the eye can be developed into an appealing colour palette.


This morning though I found Multicolr search lab and it's a whole new ballgame. Using Flickr's API, the tool lets you search nearly 3 million images by colour.





Now imagine that this was laid over an online collection; selecting shades of ochre, black and white would bring up McCahon, while jade and purple would give you Reuben Paterson. I could play with this thing for hours.

Images from top

Screenshot of a search on Multicolr

Colin McCahon, A grain of wheat, 1970. Acrylic on canvas. Collection of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Purchased 1978. New Zealand Lottery Grants Board. From the Colin McCahon website.

Reuben Paterson, Anticipating, 2007. Foil on canvas. From the Gow Langsford website.

What are you thinking? Take Three

Tee hee. I actually know.

Many of you are thinking - hmmm, I wonder where to find those Google Earth Glue Society God pictures?

Quite a few of you are keen to find Shane Cotton's Redshift, which Jim Barr and Mary Barr nominated as their top NZ painting in the Listener last year.

A number of you (or one very persistent person) are/is coming to Best of 3 via the search "olafur eliasson gibbs zealand". You'd be wanting this post on Over the net.

And cos I'm feeling helpful today: here's the Hoefler & Frere-Jones website, Mikala Dwyer on YouTube and the definition of 'gallerina' on urbandictionary.com.

My favourite of the keyword searches that have brought people to the blog over the past few weeks? It's either "crumpling conference" (which sounds like something Martin Creed might organise) or "art history degree Apple jobs" (Dear Apple, if you're reading: I have an art history degree. In fact, I have several. Please pick me).

What are you thinking? Take Two

A further installment in my semi-occasional series. Search terms which have brought people to this blog in the past 10 days:

Lots of people have been interested in the Glue Society's God's Eye View project

Someone wants to 'learn art for free in dunedin'. They might like to get in touch with the person who's wondering 'what use is an art history degree'.

To the searcher wanting 'everything i need to know about pheasants': can I suggest the American Pheasant and Waterfowl Association. Steer clear though of the male Reeves pheasant, apparently this is not the bird for the inexperienced pheasant keeper.

Princess Bride fans (presumably) are looking for the phrase "never start a land war in Asia", although I stick by my preference for this quote.

And finally - to all those wondering if Jussi Pylkkanen has a wife or whatever: that was a purely tangential blog mention, I can't help you with that query.

What are you thinking?*

Every so often I like to delve into the web stats for the Best of 3 blog and see what's going on.

Today I had a look through the search terms that bring people to the site, and can't resist sharing some of them:

1 October: 'tupperware dealers taranaki'

13 October: 'mug shots of steve jobs'

14 October: 'bringing sexy back christchurch council'

4 November: 'how to make money with an art history degree'

11 November: 'how to uncover the art in me'

As an added bonus, here's a simple-but-useful Google search technique. If you can't find what you want on a particular site, but are pretty sure it's there somewhere, try typing this into the Google search box

search term site:http://www.sitename.com
e.g. venice report site:http://www.creativenz.govt.nz

Putting quote marks around your search term will make it search for an exact phrase.

*The other logical question being, of course, - what am I writing?

Blog buzz

I've been playing around a little with blog search engines, and I think I've settled on IceRocket. It's got a nice lay-out (strongly reminiscent of Google), not too many paid ads, you can search MySpace separately, and clicking the search results takes you directly to the blog, not to another page of advertising.

And remember Google Fight? On IceRocket you can measure and graph 'blog buzz', and generate results like the one at the top of this blog: Painting (in blue) takes on Relational Aesthetics over the past month. Stats don't lie.