Photoshop TV’s Matt Kloskowski highlighted a great tip for soft focus, based on a sharpening technique.

Basic idea looks like:

1. Create a copy into a new layer
2. Apply the High Pass filter (use more radius than usual for sharpening)
3. Inverse the layer
4. Set the blend mode to Soft Light
5. Adjust the layer opacity to taste

Without step 3, the photo is sharpened. With step 3, you get a lovely soft focus effect. The advantage to this approach is the effect can be selectively removed by painting on the layer with 50% grey.

This was an a ha! moment for me. I use high pass filter sharpening, but it simply never occurred that it would also work for soft focus.

After a year or two of watching Photoshop User TV, I’m still learning heaps. Thanks guys!

Brilliant, brilliant article. Go. Read. Now.

Some highlights:

So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project—every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in—that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads.

Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn’t know what to do with it at first—hence the gin, hence the sitcoms. Because if people knew what to do with a surplus with reference to the existing social institutions, then it wouldn’t be a surplus, would it? It’s precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society.

In this same conversation with the TV producer I was talking about World of Warcraft guilds, and as I was talking, I could sort of see what she was thinking: “Losers. Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves.”

At least they’re doing something.

The cost of participating in social media seems like small change given the cognitive surplus from turning the TV off.

If you didn’t listen before… Go. Read.

Social media is the latest buzz phrase to describe the trend in normal people creating content. Something previously the realm of professional journalists.

In a recent article, Nina Simon investigates how much time is involved per week for different types of participation:

I’m considered fairly involved as I participate in a number of services, including this blog, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook and monitor a forum here or there. Some of my friends are participating with Twitter alone, as Twitter dropped the barrier of entry to virtually nil.

This raised a question of how journalists are allocated time for social media. The trend in traditional media is to attempt to integrate social media into the news process. This includes using user generated content in the print product and on the web. But it also involves journalists becoming members of the community.

The obvious implication is that more time is required. However, with newsrooms shrinking and with print and online operations attempting to converge, available time is reduced.

Until time is allocated to social media, the voice of the traditional media will continue to broadcast rather than participate in the conversation.

Business and technology news is awash with the latest rounds of M&A.

Amidst the noise, Fred Wilson adds some perspective:

The Internet is decomposing into a vast array of micro-services that we, the end user, stitches together to make our own unique web experience.

And yet, these large behemoths are trying to do their normal consolidation play on the Internet. First of all, it’s not going to work. They are destroying value with all of their M&A efforts and the bigger they get, the more value they will destroy, for them and their shareholders.

And:

Here’s the problem. The company/web service creation process needs some kind of end game. The entrepreneurs who spend years and risking a ton need a way to get paid for that effort.

… if you can’t take a company public, how do you get out? M&A has been the primary answer in the web/tech sector for the past eight years. And it’s been a great period to sell companies.

But if you look deeper, I wonder. Delicious grew nicely for a while under Yahoo!’s ownership but recently the user base has fallen off pretty dramatically. I double checked this chart in compete and alexa and they all show the dropoff.

But who am I to complain? We got paid right? So sit down and shut up.

Except I am also a user of these services. I see what happens when a company gets purchased. The service languishes. The team leaves. It stops getting better. And often gets worse.

Fred sees this from both sides, as a VC looking for liquidity and as a consumer of web services looking for quality.

The problem with consolidation is in how large companies typically innovate. To get a new idea through requires either skunkworks, acquisition or sixteen layers of approval to risk people’s time. It becomes a problem of permission.

On the flip side, for a start-up you have two options: innovate or die.

Large companies are trying. Google’s 1 day a week program gives explicit permission for people to tinker. Microsoft invests big dollars in R&D and the start-up community. Unfortunately, it isn’t enough.

Fred is quite right. There needs to be a better path to liquidity. Or stated differently, start-ups need a way to become companies, not food for dinosaurs.