Top digital stories this week, incl. Google+, top people & barrell rolls!

* Featured, Brass digital roundup — By Brass Team on November 4, 2011 10:48 am

Every Friday we aim to give you the lowdown on some of the week’s most interesting digital stories. This week we’re talking barrell rolls, Google+, Twitter and vision scientists. Come join in in the conversation and share your thoughts with the comments box at the bottom!

Vision scientists restore masterpiece

George Hurrell, Digital Designer

TATE Britain decided to organise a major exhibition of British artist John Martin’s work recently. However, the Thames’ banks broke in 1928 and flooded  the basement of the gallery and extensively damaged his masterpiece; ‘Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum’, subsequently declared ‘damaged beyond repair’. In 2010 the TATE decided to attempt a restoration using the help of a ‘vision scientist’.

I was intrigued by what a vision scientist was and how this could help the restoration process. Advances in conservation techniques meant that the exisiting painting could be restored but there was a huge chunk that was completely destroyed and missing from the painting. This is where the vision scientist came in. It’s all based on psychological theories of vision and how the painting is perceived by viewers; will a crack or loss of a segment capture the viewer’s attention and how will restored sections be perceived? Will they draw attention or change how people interpret the piece of art?

Using eye tracking equipment, quite often used in user interface design to track how people scan and use web pages, the TATE compared how viewers made sense of different digital reconstructions of the painting, giving foresight into how the final restored piece is viewed by the public. The results informed the final restoration and the viewing patterns recorded meant that the lost section was restored with less distinct, more abstracted details, meaning viewers would view the painting as originally intended by Martin. The final piece was restored using Photoshop and traditional techniques by Sarah Maisey.

Take a look at the full Guardian article to view a video showing the scale of damage to the original painting and an overlay of the eyetracking that informed the final restoration.

Are you a ‘top person’?

Claire Robinson, Digital Development Director

Twitter is testing a ‘top people’ function at the moment, so when users search a topic or hashtag, the most influential tweeter will show up, as well as the top tweet – see the Mashable article for an outline of the function in more detail.

I’m interested to understand how they’ll be calculating influence – is it a little like how we calculate influence using our twitter influence tool? We measure not just the number of followers, but the network of followers’ followers, and the likelihood of that tweeter’s tweets to be retweeted (still with me? !). The next development to our tool is to ascertain influence by topic, so even the most popular members of the twitterverse won’t pop up on our leaderboard if they’re not influential on that subject.

I’ll wait with baited breath to hear how twitter have approached this problem!

Don’t discount Google+

Mark Kelly, Digital Solutions Director

I would maintain that Google+ hasn’t taken off yet – despite the huge user (trialists) numbers of c.45Million (that’s an estimate only but based on some credible looking work from Paul Allen, head of the ancestry.com network).

But that’s still a fraction (5% or so) of Facebook numbers. And the mass migrations to Google+  (despite Facebook’s constant changes to form and function and privacy concerns) haven’t really happened.

I like the idea of Google+ and of using Facebook less, but I also like the idea of Diaspora and a non-walled-garden version of social networks. I just haven’t actively done much about either due to that inertia thing. I was talking to someone the other day about my general lack of enthusiasm for it. Then I read this article and kind of did a double take and I’m back in Google+ appraisal mode.

The article details a host of compelling reasons why you should (as an individual and a brand) have a look at Google+. If you’re already an active user (I mean, really active and not just a stalled trialist like me) and are getting lots out of it I’d be interested to hear how and why…

Twitter will predict the end of mankind

Tim Downs, Head of PR

Back in 2009, Google were keen to demonstrate the power of their analytics and one of the ways it did this was with Google flu trends. They basically aggregated Google search data based around flu-related search terms in order to estimate flu activity, firstly across US states, but then around the world in near real time – pretty neat.

Yesterday, academics announced that Facebook and Twitter could be used to help detect outbreaks of diseases and ‘other phenomena’. They came to this after they gathered a database of more than 50 million geographically-based tweets and using ‘state-of-the-art technology’ they were able to figure out which key words in the database signposted elevated levels of flu. From this they built a ‘predictive model’  that would then estimate the severity of flu in a given area and predict whether an epidemic was occurring.

Whilst this is really just another demonstration of how social media is not just about how or what you communicate, but the wider data you play a part in creating, it also gives me the heebie-jeebies.

I haven’t seen Contagion yet but I’m willing to bet that this is how it starts. The phrases ‘outbreaks of diseases and other phenomena’, state-of the-art technology’, ‘predictive models’ and ‘epidemic’ should never be used in close proximity outside of a Hollywood Blockbuster in my view.

Now, has anyone seen Dustin Hoffman and that monkey?

Do a barrell roll

Leah Kayles, Social Media Editor

Causing a bit of a stir on twitter at the moment is Google’s latest meme. Type “do a barrel roll” into Google. Hours of fun! Well, seconds… but it’s still good.

The barrell roll is trending on twitter at the moment, and I’m sure doing wonders for the warm feeling towards Google. And who doesn’t like a little bit of a time-waster on a Friday afternoon?

This is a real branding coup for Google – instead of concern over privacy issues that sometimes characterise the company as a huge corporate presence malevolently sucking data from the whole world, people today are experiencing a moment of lighthearted fun courtesy of the brand.

Like!

Tags: digital marketing, do a barrell roll, google, google plus, internet meme, john martin, twitter, vision scientist