Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,500 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 25 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

1. Search – First is the one everyone has been waiting for and that’s search. When Plus first came everyone said, “Are you kidding me no search? It’s Google for Christ sake!” Now it’s here. It is very well implemented. It is a great way to find new people to Circle.
2. Broadcast your Hangouts – Before you could only Hangout with 9 other people. This is still the case but soon many people can watch the hangout. I heard as many as 150,000 people can watch. This feature is being rolled out gradually.
3. Screen sharing – When you’re in a Hangout you can share anything in your Google Docs with others in you Hangout.
4. Notes & Sketchpad in Hangouts – You can share and collaborate with notes and sketches in Hangouts.
5. You can now collaborate and share your Google Docs in Hangouts.
6. The new Hangouts API is available for developers to get creative with Hangouts.
7. Last but not least. There is now Hangouts on your Google+ app on your phone.

The a few of these features puts Google + in direct competition with web conferencing products like GoToMeeting.

These new features have really helped to make G+ a very useful tool.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while and I’ve listened to experts and pundits. The proposal I think is best is “Let’s build it”. The cities, townships, villages, counties and states should put in fiber to every home. Sounds commy right? Here’s where the capitalism comes in. The people installing the fiber are private contractors. The governments are not the Internet Service Providers. All ISPs can connect to the fiber. By all I mean all! AT&T, Insight, AOL, Juno, Comcast, Time Warner, Earthlink and anyone else that wants to join the party. Think of the competition! What can be more capitalist? Just like the highway system, we pay taxes and we get roads. Everyone pays a tax on their low Internet bill to maintain and improve the system. This alone could create millions of new jobs. Any town that did this would become an instant target for companies wanting to relocate. This would spur construction so new jobs there. All of these people will need goods and services. We the consumer would get fast reliable Internet at a reasonable price.

I know budgets are strapped but this is an investment in the future that can help us now.

At the NAB Show in April 2010 EditShare owner of Lightworks announced they plan to transform Lightworks into Lightworks Open Source and in November 2010 released the a free downloadable version of that software.

The software is currently for Windows only but in late November 2011 will have both Mac and Linux versions. There is no reason to purchase expensive photo editing software like Adobe Premier or Final Cut.

You will see many really good photographers  shoot buildings from a low position creating a distortion called keystoning. This is sometimes desirable for a dramatic effect but I believe it is used far to often.  I will show you an example of this effect and how to eliminate it if you wish, using Photoshop.

Trey Ratcliff of “Stuck In Customs” is a great photographer. Far, far better than I but in this example I felt what I did with his image in Photoshop is more appealing, to my eye. I think Trey was shooting from this very low angle to reduce the amount of the pavement and maximize the amount of the dramatic sky. He was using a very wide 14mm lens. The combination of the wide-angle lens and the tilt of the camera contributed to this exaggerated effect. If you shoot a photo like this and you want it to have a more standard look here’s how you fix it.

[I have the original Photoshop CS so I know at least this version and the versions after that can do this.]

Open the photo in Photoshop. Click “View” and “New Guide”. Guides are just there to help you get your image straight. Create as many guides as you need. I used two for this photo. Drag them to where you need them. Do a “Control A” to select the image. Select the “Move Tool” from the pallet. Click “Edit” and then go to “Transform” and “Skew”. Click the corners and drag out to make alignment adjustments. After you align photo you may have to make other “Transform” adjustments. In this case I did “Free Transform” to make the building taller because the “Skew” adjustment made the church look squat.

I felt too much attention was given to the sky and not much to the church so not only did I straighten it out but I enhanced the definition to the art on the church by adding some contrast using the curves tool. I think that sometime HDR photos seem a little flat.

In my version of Trey’s photo the dramatic clouds are still there but there is a lot more attention to the building. The sides are vertical and the frescos on the building are brighter and show more detail.

There have been some gripes about G+ recently one having to do with Google’s ban on pseudonyms. You must use your first name and last name. No company names, handles or nicknames. Many personalities are known only by some other name. How about the singers Jewell, Pink, Cher and Sting. Very few people know Sting by Gordon Sumner. There’s also Dr. Phil. Oh they let him get by with it but not the less famous Dr. Kiki. Does Google force those people to use their real names.  Google is supposed to roll out a plan for commercial users soon.

My issues with G+ all have to do with notifications.  If you invite someone to Google+ they immediately begin to receive your post via email. A person invited needs to login to their Google+ account and turn all of email notifications. This should be the setting by default. If you don’t turn them off you get emails about all kinds of things. There also should be granular controls on what you see in notification on G+ and other Google pages. I don’t want to see a lot of chatter . It distracts me from seeing what I really want to see.

Over all it has been a great experience. I share more with other now more than ever before. News stories I’ve been reading, things I’ve been doing and places I’ve been going. I have done what some others are doing. I point my person URL to my G+ page. markmonyhan.me