ask-mark.com

OK, I admit it. I was distracting myself tonight from reading my Gillette Fusion case for Marketing by browsing through some Facebook photos. I was just clicking through a photo album when BAM! an ugmo popped up (no, it wasn’t mine, smart ass). After the initial sting went away, an idea hit me.

One of the latest features in Picasa is the ability to tag people in your photo library by using facial recognition. With just a few training photos, I have been told that Picasa can quickly identify someone in a whole library of images. Kyle tells me that Picasa was even able to tag Abraham Lincoln in a few photos from DC.

"So what?", you ask. Sure, facial recognition isn’t really anything new, but what if it could be used to tag ugmos in a web photo album? You tag a few faces that were hit with the ugly stick, and then let the facial recognition software take care of finding the rest. Instead of putting a frame around the ugmos’ faces, a blue dot is placed over the face to obscure it from view. Instead of appearing when you hover over the name or face of the tagged person, the blue dot will always be present, unless you hover over the dot for an extended period of time, say 5 seconds. At that point, the face will be revealed, and you will only have yourself to blame for seeing it.

I know, this is crude and shallow of me to even think of this, but you know you’ve accidentally viewed a photo on Flickr, Facebook or MySpace that you wish you hadn’t opened because of one super ugmo. If someone creates this mashup, once you come across an ugmo for the first time, just tag it. You may have to tag it once or twice more, but then the facial recognition should take over and save your retinas from that awful exposure in the future.

I heard about this on the radio this morning, but I completely forgot about it on my walk from the car into the office. Thanks to Clint for reminding me.

This was posted a few weeks ago on The Daily Dish, but I only just had a chance to watch it. It’s a compilation of TNG clips that shows a racier side to the show. There are parts that are a bit drawn out, so feel free to skip 30 seconds every now and then; there’s almost ten minutes of video!