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  • CSSGram: A tiny library for recreating Instagram filters with CSS filters and blend modes (Source: http://una.im/CSSgram)
  • Lisa Charlotte Rost's Google Search History (Source: http://lisacharlotterost.github.io)
  • Tangram Bendy Map (Source: http://meetar.github.io/bendy-map)
  • The Convolutional Neural Network helps you to identify the best selfie (Source: http://karpathy.github.io)

Insights

Our Top 5: Learn More About Selfie Optimization and Your Google Search History

Who would have imagined the iPod becoming the most popular “mp3 player” back in 2001? Or have you ever analyzed your Google Searches and found out more about the documentation of your life? Our top five of this week will show the wide range of amazing and amusing world wide web discoveries.

1) A hike through flat maps and high curves

The “Mapzen” blog enriches us this week with a map visualisation inspired by the film Inception and Here&There a horizonless projection in Manhattan. The Tanagram allows you to see cities all over the world as a bendy map. The graphic is a standard top-down web map view where the same imagery is reused and tilted for the display of a world without a horizon. Have a look at this world that seems upside down and get the real Inception feeling.

2) What does your Google search history tell about yourself?

Have you ever wondered how much your “Google footprint” matches your real life? What is there to know about you by looking at your search history? Lisa Charlotte Rost found out and shared the results on her blog. She analyzed data from 40.000 searches queries within the time span of fives years. Find out what where Lisa Charlotte lives, what her master thesis was about or how to see what google knows about you.

3) Self(ie)-optimization

Most of us know Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) as face or voice recognition from Facebook, Google and other online services. The blogger Andrej Karpathy trained a CNN to filter and evaluate the best selfies from a number of 2 million images. Karpathy graded the pictures by followers, likes and tags and transfer this grading system onto the CNN. If you want to know more about your own selfie skills, click here.

4) So many different ways to differ

Instagram is nowadays THE social media platform for presenting your pictures in the best light. What if you could polish up your photos by yourself? CSSGram enables the usage of 14 different filters, usually used on Instagram via web service. Through the library you can upload your own photos to apply filters in simple CSS. Find out more about how it works and try it yourself.   

5) Apple’s new thing

“What are they thinking?” This and other sceptical thoughts on the first iPod released in 2001 can be read here. Our last link, as usually the most amusing one, shows comments in an Apple user forum about the iPod. The leading question seems to be: Is this really something the world can’t live without? If they had known...