The Blog of No Return: 02/01/2010

Sunday, February 28, 2010

Bird homes : the nests, eggs, and breeding habits of the land birds breeding in the eastern United States ;

What makes this book particularly interesting is that is full of photographs. As the book is dated 1905 it is bird photography that is over 100 years old. I've only included a few photos there are a lot more here

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Pakistan at the end of the 19th century

Courtesy of the Library of Congress

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Saturday, February 27, 2010

The illustrated work of Errol Le Cain

via errollecain.com

Lots of nice book illustrationson this website by Errol le Cain http://errollecain.com

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Stories from the Arabian nights

Published in 1907 and illustrated by Edmund Deluc, the book can be found here

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Friday, February 26, 2010

British WWI Posters

Courtesy of the Library of Congress' Digital Collection

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Thursday, February 25, 2010

Do I need all this lifestreaming?

photo by Spookygonk Some rights reserved

One of the main complaints I see on Buzz is that Tweets and posts from Friendfeed look bad and come all together after many hours. Some people seem to see Buzz as yet another lifestreaming and aggregating service. I've come to the conclusion that it is not and above all it should not be, at least that is not the way I want to use it. Most people I follow use Friendfeed to dump anything they do elsewhere which goes from Flickr's favourites, Google Reader's shared items to last.fm favourites. I'm fine with that and I do more or less the same. They also tend to post to Twitter anything that comes from Friendfeed and here we start to see some duplicates but I can live with that as I don't spend much time reading Twitter.

I find it a bit weird though when they also import tweets into Friendfeed when they are not much more than posts coming from Friendfeed in the first place. But now comes Buzz. For instance, most people will connect Google Reader's shared items with Buzz and will have Friendfeed import them directly, some also connect them to Twitter. Then they might send the stuff they post and import in Buzz to Friendfeed and Twitter which they would like to import back into Buzz. I think I do not need all this duplication especially as most of this information is not even fresh and creative content in the first place, rather stuff already shared and re-shared by many other people.
I need to use services like Buzz to have access to good and fresh content with a community selecting it and adding value. I don't want to be overloaded by never-ending loops of information. I want t follow people that can help me discover new things, blogs, art, music and ideas, I really do not want to see the same ten articles again and again and well again. I am ok with anything, by all means we are all free to use these services the way we prefer, but I let the lifestreamers follow each other as I intend to use Buzz differently. End of daily rant.

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Charles Cottet

"Charles Cottet (1863–1925), French painter, was born at Le Puy-en-Velay and died in Paris. A famed post-impressionist, Cottet is known for his dark, evocative painting of rural Brittany and seascapes. He led a school of painters known as the Bande noire or Nubians group (for the somber palette they used, in contrast to the brighter post-impressionist paintings), and was friends with such artists as Auguste Rodin. Read more"