While I wait for my TinEye invitation...

When I was a kid in at Stratford Landing Elementary School, outside of Washington D.C., there were a few times that we had music classes or watched filmstrips and slideshows, that really got into my psyche. Unfortunately, despite my strong emotional ties to the artistic content of these presentation, I often have an extremely difficult time remembering key aspects of these experiences. Computers and the internet have been such a crutch to me, or at least it seems like it is the only thing I can blame for my horrendously inaccurate memory, and I have come to the conclusion that if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. So I begin a new quest of recording everything important to me in blogs, hard drives, ipods, and any other form of electronic brain-sink that I can find.

One thing that came back to me was Danse Macabre by Saint-Saëns, which Google and Wikipedia helped me to find, and iTunes allowed me to purchase for my very own. Luckily I didn't have to rely on http://www.midomi.com for help, as I was able to recall the 'death' 'dance' and 'xylophone' parts of the song.

However, for a many long years I have been hoping that the internet will provide us with a new type of useful search tool.
Google has done wonders, but it has not yet added to its arsenal anything like midomi, nor some of the other things that my heart so desires. I still hope that audio search can be improved, as there is this one song, from a filmstrip that showed something like nature or the woods, and the music seemed really melancholy and slow. But, midomi doesn't recognize my singing it. Maybe they could add a piano keyboard on their site so i could play the tune directly into the search; or perhaps it has more to do with their database not being thorough enough to include a song of such little importance.

Anyway, there is one other type of search that I have been trying to find.
A special type of search site that allows you to search for images, or fragments of images, by using...
wait for it...
the images that you upload as the search term itself.

Well I heard Amber MacArthur talking about on some podcast. (I don't remember whether it was net at nite, net@nite, ⌘-N, CommandN, or some other, but I had to find it, and luckily one of my googles finally came up with something:

http://TinEye.com

which I really like the name, and I wonder if I have a tin ear, tin eye and tin brain.

So I've signed up for an invitation. Hopefully, it will be able to provide us all with something we have been missing out on*, and hopefully it won't be too expensive to implement. Maybe Google will get involved, as they did with map searching, aerial photograph surfing, 3d model searching and the like. I also hope that Yahoo and Flickr will play along, as well as Microsoft's new image thingy, Photosynth, won't be strangers. But, I doubt it.

Coming soon,
I try out tineye.com
I compare Firefox3 to Firefox2 and Safari on a Mac.
I make a Garageband of that song I have stuck in my head.



*Remember...

No, Oz never did give nothing to the Tin Man
That he didn't, didn't already have...