Slashdot Mirror
Clouds, The Collaborative Photo Mosiac
jaric writes "Over at peffis.com users post their cell phone photos to a shared photo blog. The creator of the open source site now has invented what he calls Clouds. It is a combination of all the posted photos into one cloud, or mosaic. The result is quite fascinating. You can see the current cloud."
My girlfriend participates in something a little more structured than this, but similar. Sito has a number of projects such as (descriptions taken from Sito) -
Hygrid: "This collaborative art project has been evolving since December 1995. The idea behind this project is to create a "hyperlinked grid of visually interlocked images". Each square on the grid is a small image created by a participating artist. Each square is adjacent to another artist's square in the structure, appearing on the top, right, bottom or left side."
Gridcosm: "Gridcosm is a collaborative art project in which artists from around the world contribute images to a compounding series of graphical squares."
Those are the two most active and interesting ones. For those that enjoy recursive acronyms, you'll definitely like Gridcosm (like a recursive acronym.. FOR YOUR MIND). Some of the levels can be outright beautiful, some are crappy.
The way it works is this: after having an account, you "reserve" a piece to work on. You have a set time limit to turn your piece in before somebody else gets it. As an example -- and since she reads Slashdot, she's gonna kill my ass -- you can also view individual pieces and jump from there.
The most interesting behavior I've seen, though, is that work breeds work -- when one or a few people decide to bounce in, the entire community picks up, contributing to an almost organic growth and decline of the various levels and sub-projects.