Orangeinks

Mind360: The Train Your Brain Social Networking Site

Mind360 is a social networking site geared towards enhancing people’s mental fitness through an online cognitive training platform. You can play engaging games that are designed to further strengthen key cognitive functions including Memory, Attention, Executive Functions, Thinking and Reasoning, and Visual Perception, in an enjoyable fashion.

The social networking side of Mind360 allows you to play with friends by challenging them to a mind game. Since studies prove that competitive brain training is an excellent way to sharpen your cognitive skills faster, having friendly challenges with your friends will further enhance your brain activity and speed up improvement while having some fun, especially when you’re beating the hell out of your opponent.

If you’re looking for some online fun and like to have little brain training session, you might want to the service, it looks great and they have some pretty cool and fun games for you. One more thing, if you have some questions regarding any aspect of cognitive science, you can submit them using their “Ask Our Psychologist” tab.

Tags: Games, Mind360, Social Networking, Train Your Brain

TinEye: The Reverse Image Search Engine

TinEye is a new search engine that exactly does the opposite of how you normally search for images. Instead of using keywords to search for images and hoping that the one who uploaded them wasn’t too lazy to tag them, you can do an image search using another image. Things just got a little easier, well, sort of.

TinEye may be used to find similar images to the ones you have. You can upload an image (or paste an image URL) and TinEye will do an image comparison using their image identification technology similar to the ones that you only get to see on CSI. Pretty cool huh! The search engine will display results similar to your images. As of now, their index is still small but it is continuing to grow and may become extremely useful in the future.

When you submit an image to be searched, TinEye creates a unique and compact digital signature or ‘fingerprint’ for it, then compares this fingerprint to every other image in our index to retrieve matches. TinEye can even find a partial fingerprint match.

TinEye does not typically find similar images (i.e. a different image with the same subject matter); it finds exact matches including those that have been cropped, edited or resized.

I believe that the TinEye search engine has a lot of potential and they are doing a great job with the image identification technology. I just wished that users are also allowed to do images searches the old fashion way. This will add more functionality to it by allowing the users to search for tagged images and use the image identification system to find similar images. I’m looking forward to the development of the software and perhaps develop it to search with keywords (like we normally do) and recognize the images through those keywords even if those images aren’t tagged.

iPhone users can also use TinEye to search for music through images. Just take a snapshot of the album art or grab them from somewhere on the web and let TinEye’s image identification system to do the work for you. It will give you links for that album on iTunes, allmusic.com, YouTube, and Wikipedia. No need to type the artist, album name or song title.

Whether you are doing research or having a little fun playing image detective, TinEye is worth checking out.

Tags: Image Search, iphone, Music Search, Reverse Image, search-engine, TinEye

Photoshop: Creating Shiny Buttons

This screencast shows how to create as shiny pill style button using a simple methon din Photoshop. The tutorial is easy enought to follow. You can start creating your personal buttons in just a few. Enjoy the tutcast.

Tags: Photoshop, Shiny Buttons, web 2.0

LoudCrowd: Music Meets Games

LoudCrowd is a social networking site where in their own words, music meets play, gaming meets people, people play with people, and encounter squirrels, cupcakes, and toast that like music. If you love music and want to have some fun while listening, better check out this cool site. They have constant music flows, guest DJs and loads of fun music related games for you to play.

You can interact with other users by playing games and performing virtual dance moves. You can also send them whispers if you want to get more personal. It’s like a virtual party place for music lovers. The game platform of LoudCrowd allows you to customize your avatar and earn character points while the dancing interaction with other users to get their attention while playing a semi dance revolution-like game is quite unique on the social networking side.

If ever you’re in the mood for some beats and games, check out LoudCrowd.

Tags: Games, Loud Crowd, Music, Social Networking

LinkWithin: A New Related Post Widget for Blogs

Are you looking for a blog widget to further increase your page views? One way of increasing page views on your blog is to offer related reading. This gives the readers an opportunity to have a glimpse of your other articles. You can install several scripts or plugins (depending on your blog platform) to feature your other posts.

LinkWithin is another related stories/articles widget that you can use on your blog. What makes it different from other plugins/widgets is that it comes with a photo thumbnail. The widget is minimally styled to blend in with your site design. The widget is free and ad-free. It will only take you just a couple of minutes to get the widget up and running on your blog. It works on most blogging platform such as WordPress, Blogger and Typepad and you will not be required to sign or register in order to use the widget.

I only get to test it on a WordPress blog and I must say that it looks great. The only thing that I am concerned with when I installed the plugin is that (as of now) it doesn’t give you any customization option. It displays 3 sets of related posts on each of my pages. It would be great if I am, as a user, is allowed to limit the number of Link Within widgets set on my blog. This will allow blog owners to target where their related posts will appear on their pages.

If ever you want to try something new on your blog, Link Within might be the widget that you’re looking for. As of now, it’s not for me. I’ll be patiently waiting for further development of its WordPress plugin. Goodluck guys.

Tags: link, Link Within, Plugin, Related Articles, Related Posts, wordpress

WhichBook: Book Recommendation Based on Your Mood

WhichBook is a book recommendation engine that allows you to adjust the level of mood or story elements you want to be in a book. This interesting tool will display a list of books that matches the strength level of elements that you have selected. All you have to do is drag the slider bar on each element and select go. Just remember that you can only open four sliders per recommendation.

Elements to choose from:

Happy – Sad

Funny – Serious

Safe – Disturbing

Expected – Unpredictable

Larger than Life – Down to Earth

Beautiful – Disgusting

Gentle- Violent

Easy – Demanding

No Sex – Sex

Conventional – Unusual

Optimistic – Bleak

Short – Long

Aside from mood elements, you can also get recommendation by selecting plots, character properties and setting. You can use their cool animated globe to choose the setting of the book that you want to read.

Whichbook is a different way of choosing your next book. It all depends on the story elements that you’ve selected and how strong you want them to be in your book.

Tags: books, recommendation, WhichBook