DIY: Storytelling

John Howe, Beowulf battles Grendl, john-howe.com

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In the immortal words of Rod Serling "picture, if you will," a storyteller silhouetted by the great fireplace of an ancient hall. His audience leans forward with rapt attention as he tells the battle of Beowulf and Grendl. He knows that his listeners have heard the story before and will call him on any deviation from the story as they know it. He also knows that his duty is to pass down the accumulated wisdom of his people. Beowulf's adventures are some of the few mythic tales that have been committed to the written page; other tales were passed down by word-of-mouth exclusively.

It's different today. We have books, films, recordings, and even collections of ancient manuscripts. Most of us can read. And we have Twitter, Instagram, and email. Yet storytelling continues, although its form and intent have to a large extent changed. There is literature and recounting personal experience. Not to mention fabrication and corporate spin (see new rhetorics).

Now each of us is a storyteller, or potential storyteller. An article in Time Magazine by James Murdoch discusses our new roles in Storytelling—both fiction and nonfiction, for good and for ill—will continue to define the world. In his article he says,

In 2016 and beyond, those who wish to create a better world will have to make storytelling the center of their efforts, not an afterthought. It’s clear that economic and military might will always be the key levers of statecraft. But more than ever before, swift and dramatic change is being driven by powerful narratives that crisscross the world at the speed of a click or a swipe.

Underlying this change is the empowerment of ordinary people: citizens, mothers, sons, all of us. Once, consumers had limited points of access to information and content, and powerful state and commercial institutions guarded the gates. That time is over.

In 2016, from Lhasa to Tehran to Odessa, people will continue to seek and find forbidden things. In this connected world, the game is up. Censors cannot hide, and their victims have decided, and are empowered, not to take it anymore. Italo Calvino had it right in If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler: “In the decree that forbids reading there will be still read something of the truth that we would wish never to be read.”

-- Marge

Science: possible new route to fusion

Tri Alpha Energy plasma accelerator, Physics.org

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Time Magazine recently published an intriguing article about man's quest for clean energy in the form of fusion: Inside the Quest for Fusion, Clean Energy’s Holy Grail (subscription needed).

In Lev Grossman's very readable article, he reports that startup Tri Alpha Energy is using two linear plasma accelerators pointed at each other to achieve results that larger and far more expensive tokamaks have yet to produce. Furthermore, Tri Alpha Energy will use hydrogen nuclei and boron-11, not the conventional deuterium and tritium, to fuel the reaction. Boron requires a temperature of 3 billion degrees Celsius to fuse. So far Tri Alpha has produced a ball of superheated hydrogen plasma for five milliseconds, a record in the fusion effort. Before I move on, here's Lev's description of attempting fusion:

The heat and pressure necessary are extreme. Essentially you’re trying to replicate conditions in the heart of the sun, where its colossal mass–330,000 times that of Earth–creates crushing pressure, and where the temperature is 17 million degrees Celsius. In fact, because the amounts of fuel are so much smaller, the temperature at which fusion is feasible on Earth starts at around 100 million degrees Celsius.

That’s the first problem. The second problem is that your fuel is in the form of a plasma, and plasma, as mentioned above, is weird. It’s a fourth state of matter, neither liquid nor solid nor gas. When you torture plasma with temperatures and pressures like these, it becomes wildly unstable and writhes like a cat in a sack. So not only do you have to confine and control it, and heat it and squeeze it; you have to do all that without touching it, because at 100 million degrees, this is a cat that will instantly vaporize solid matter.

News (with a skeptical tone) of Tri Alpha's recent milestone was published by Physics.org in Tri Alpha Energy reportedly makes important breakthrough in developing fusion reactor. It's important to note that the physics community has a lot of tokamaks and funding to defend. Here's the link to Tri Alpha Energy's website.

For information on plasma acceleration, take a look at Oxford University's page on plasma accelerators. Note that a laser beam qualifies as a particle beam. Overturned scientific explanation may be good news for nuclear fusion (2011) talks about new information on the hydrogen-boron reaction.

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Electron injection ramp, Oxford University-Physics Dept.

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-- Marge

Medicine and the C-word

Isabel Bishop. Two Girls (1935), California Digital Library

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Since October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, it seems to me that some information on the topic of breast cancer, published in Time Magazine, bears consideration. At base the article--Why Doctors Are Rethinking Breast-Cancer Treatment--presents evidence that DCIS, classified as Stage 0 of breast cancer, is often over-treated. The article also contains some compelling arguments and I recommend buying a hard-copy of the issue (October 12, 2015). Time online has 2 additional articles: Choosing to Wait: A New Approach to Breast Cancer at Its Earliest Stages and A Major Shift in Breast Cancer Understanding.

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There were a couple of points made about our perception of cancer and the resistance to change rooted in medicine's standard of care that particularly struck me.

One,

Cancer has a language problem–not just in the way we speak about it, as a war that drafts soldiers who never signed up for it, who do battle and win, or do battle and lose. There’s also the problem of the word itself. A 57-year-old woman with low-grade DCIS that will almost certainly never become invasive hears the same word as the 34-year-old woman who has metastatic malignancies that will kill her. That’s confusing to patients conditioned to treat every cancer diagnosis as an emergency, in a world that still reacts to cancer as though it’s the beginning of the end and in a culture where we don’t talk about death until we have to.

And two,

“I hear people say that medicine is so important that we can’t be too quick to change, and I would say the opposite: Because it’s so important, we need to innovate,” says Dr. Laura Esserman, a surgeon and the director of the Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center at UCSF. “If we were doing so well and no one was dying, I would agree we don’t need to change. But patients don’t like the treatment options, and physicians don’t like the outcomes.”
Esserman and Hwang, now chief of breast surgery at Duke University and Duke Cancer Institute in North Carolina, are leading a number of studies that they hope will fill in some of the knowledge gaps that make change such an uphill battle. DCIS now accounts for about 20% to 25% of breast cancers diagnosed through screening. Before routine screening, which went wide in the mid-1980s, it was 3%.

The treatment proposed is called "active surveillance," a term often used for prostate cancer.

Again, read the articles for a more complete picture.

-- Marge

Wrong hands

Recently my issues of Time Magazine have contained delightful cartoons by John Atkinson. Here's a sample.

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John Atkinson, Wrong Hands

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John Atkinson, Wrong Hands

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John Atkinson, Wrong Hands

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John Atkinson, Wrong Hands

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John Atkinson, Wrong Hands

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You can find more at his Wrong Hands site.

-- Marge

DIY: build your own battery

Environmentally compatible organic solar cells (in development), Physics.org

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Home installation of solar panels is growing fast:

A new solar-power system is now installed on an American roof every three or four minutes, often through leasing deals that require no money down and lock in lower electric bills for years. Wall Street behemoths like Bank of America and Goldman Sachs are pouring cash into rooftop solar, as are giant corporations like Walmart and Google, while a range of new financing mechanisms are making solar investments even more attractive. The installer SolarCity has begun to bundle customer leases into solar-backed securities, which could be as transformative (though hopefully not as dangerous) as mortgage-backed securities. And while the panels are now amazingly cheap–down from more than $75 per watt 40 years ago to less than 75¢ per watt today–the solar industry is just starting to drive dramatic reductions in “soft costs” like permitting, marketing and installation. (The Green Revolution Is Here, Michael Grunwald, Time Magazine)

But, unless you want to use environmentally unfriendly batteries that must be replaced and require maintenance, such as the ones sold by Wholesale Solar, you have to connect to the grid. If you decide to build or purchase a battery bank, be aware that there is a risk of explosion and the bank must be scaled to your system.

The push is on to build a better battery and a promising concept is a water-based organic one being developed by a team of scientists at the University of Southern California (USC).

In the meantime here are some batteries you can build yourself.  Check out the aluminum can, saltwater and charcoal battery made by egbertfitzwilly with charcoal from the backyard barbecue. To demonstrate battery basics here are 3 ways to make a homemade battery from WikiHow.

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Hand-Powered Battery, WikiHow

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Similar and related projects are a gummy battery holder by Andrea and a USB travel charger from Electro-Labs.

Who knows?  Maybe you can beat the USC team to the goal of a better, rechargeable, scalable battery.

-- Marge

Eugene Goostman, the chatbot

Eugene Goostman, PrincetonAI

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Gizmag reports, "Eugene Goostman chatbot passes Turing Test." O.K.  Why does a chatbot have a full name and how did it pass such an important-sounding test?  Here's more on the Turing test.

The entry for Eugene in Wikipedia says:

Eugene Goostman is an artificial intelligence chatterbot. First developed by a group of three programmers; the Russian-born Vladimir Veselov, Ukranian-born Eugene Demchenko, and Russian-born Sergey Ulasen in Saint Petersburg in 2001, Goostman is portrayed as a 13-year old Ukranian boy in an effort to make his personality and knowledge level believable to users.

Time Magazine has published an "Interview with Eugene Goostman," in which the author notes:

Chatbot Eugene Goostman supposedly passed the legendary Turing Test on Sunday, tricking 33% of a panel of judges into believing he was a real boy during the course of a five-minute chat conversation.

The milestone conveniently occurred 60 years to the day after Alan Turing passed away; Turing bet that by the year 2000, computers would be intelligent enough to trick humans into thinking they were real 30% of the time.

You can talk with Eugene yourself by surfing to his homepage at Princeton ai (Artificial Intelligence).

Searching on 'artificial virtual assistant', you'll find a number of companies that offer their services.  IKEA features one, Ask Anna, on its Customer Service Contact Center page.

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Anna, Automated Online Assistant, IKEA

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-- Marge

Photography: charting the coral fields

Google's Ocean Street Views give you a good idea of what the Seaview SVII underwater camera can do. If you want to know why the Catlin Seaview team is doing it, here's an article by Bryan Walsh at Time Magazine, titled "The Last Coral Reefs."

In addition to Ocean Street Views, Google sponsors the Google Cultural Institute which presents art, culture, wonders of the world, and more.  Here's a view of the Great Barrier Reef:

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Heron Bommie, Heron Island, Catlin Seaview Survey, Google Cultural Institute

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Below are two scenes from Ocean Street Views.  These are just still shots, taken by screen capture.  To see a full 3D panorama--looking up, down, and rotating 360 degrees laterally--mosey on over to the link above. 
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Emily's Pinnacles, Google's Ocean Street View

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Mary Celeste Wreck, Google's Ocean Street View

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And, Google Earth is available online, in case you didn't know.  You can "go anywhere, on any device for free."

-- Marge

Art: We consume

This statement by artist Brendan O'Connell caught my attention the other day:

...consumerism isn't a bad word. To consume is human, something to which brands are incidental. "Buying a piece of art is a form of consumption. Looking at a piece of art is a form of consumption. Me walking into a grocery store and taking pictures is a form of consumption," he says. "There's that aspect of the zest of being alive. In order to be vibrant, you have to take things in."

Read more: Brand Name Painter - TIME (subscription required)

A fair amount of O'Connell's work is what he sees in Walmart:

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Brendan O'Connell, "Walmart Paintings: QuakerOats"

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About the same time I came across this video, "Food Chain," extracted from the film Samsara by members of the cast--Lisa Gerrard and Marcello De Francisci.

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Here are some other shots from the Samsara film.

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Samsara, Miami.com

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Samsara, FEELguide.com

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So, what do you think.  Do we consume?  Where does appreciation fit in?

 -- Marge

Cartoons: Extreme weather and El Niño

Believe it or not November 2013 was the warmest year on record globally, according to a TIME magazine article (subscription needed to read the full item), "El Niño Is On Its Way:"

For many Americans, 2013 ended with an unusually bitter cold snap. Late November and December saw early snow and bone-chilling temperatures in much of the country, part of a year when--for the first time in two decades--record-cold days will likely turn out to have outnumbered record-warm ones. But the U.S. was the exception: November was the warmest ever globally, and the provisional data indicates that 2013 is likely to have been the fourth-hottest year on record.

Enjoy the snow now, because chances are good that 2014 will be even hotter--perhaps the hottest year since records have been kept. That's because, scientists are predicting, 2014 will be an El Niño year.

With the coming heat in mind, here are a few cartoon celebrating (sort of) cold and snow.

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Dave Granlund, Cagle

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Jimmy Margulies, Cagle

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Randy Bish, Cagle

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Had enough?

-- Marge

Art: how do you construct the world by looking?

Artist William Kentridge explores perception with his images -- and promotes fighting against entropy. As he explains in an interview with Belinda Luscombe in TIME (requires a subscription to read):

What did you mean when you wrote in your new book, Fortuna, that the job of the artist is to fight against entropy?
Entropy in its simplest form refers to the tendency of everything to collapse. If you smash a vase and throw the pieces in the air, they won't reland in the shape of the perfect vase. But the job of the artist is to smash the vase and then fashion something coherent out of those shards.

Artist Kentridge is definitely a thinking person's artist.  Look for it in the works below. To see an extended collection of his works, take a look at this MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) presentation of  his works:  "William Kentridge: Five Themes."  Click on Explore Themes to see the works (It's a flash presentation, so hard links aren't always available or don't work as expected).  Here's a sample from within the exhibit: "Thick Time/Soho and Felix: Sobriety, Obesity, and Growing Old."

Here's a glimpse of the artist in his studio and the piece he's working on, titled "Breathe":

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This next video, titled "Return," is part of a larger project, "Repeat."  Two things that are interesting about this work -- he designed it knowing it would not be watched (the video explains) and, as the piece rotates, now you see a recognizable form, now you see just pieces moving around.

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Artist Kentridge says about perception at Art21:

I’m interested in machines that make you aware of the process of seeing and aware of what you do when you construct the world by looking. This is interesting in itself, but more as a broad-based metaphor for how we understand the world.

-- Marge

Underbelly of the web

It's called the Deep Web:

Mike Bergman, founder of BrightPlanet and credited with coining the phrase, said that searching on the Internet today can be compared to dragging a net across the surface of the ocean: a great deal may be caught in the net, but there is a wealth of information that is deep and therefore missed. Most of the Web's information is buried far down on dynamically generated sites, and standard search engines do not find it. Traditional search engines cannot "see" or retrieve content in the deep Web—those pages do not exist until they are created dynamically as the result of a specific search. As of 2001, the deep Web was several orders of magnitude larger than the surface Web.

Time Magazine recently reported on it in a cover story titled "The Secret Web: Where Drugs, Porn and Murder Live Online."  The white paper, "The Deep Web: Surfacing Hidden Value (Bergman, Michael K., Journal of Electronic Publishing)," offers some unbiased information about the Deep Web.

To access the Deep Web you need Tor --

...free software and an open network that helps you defend against traffic analysis, a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security.

Developed to ensure privacy online,

Tor protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location.

Tor's about page offers some history and the site offers a wealth of information on how to set up the browser. Here's an example of a Tor network:

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Rezonansowy, Tor network map, Wikimedia Commons

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There are a number of reasons why the Deep Web is invisible; BrightPlanet offers a primer.  One of the reasons is dynamic web pages.  To get an approximate idea of how a page is dynamically generated, try Hypergurl's HTML generator; but keep in mind that a page on the Deep Web would be generated by code using data from a database, when the destination address is touched.

Be careful out there -- you may see more than you want to.

-- Marge

Digital art up for auction

A recent article in TIME Magazine, "Digital Art Clicks on the Auction Block (subscription needed to read the whole article)," clued me into a new phenomenon -- selling digital artwork as, well, art with a capital A. Curious, I checked out the artists and pieces mentioned.

Rafaël Rozendaal, who could be labelled 'internet denizen', does screensavers, web sites, haiku, and more.  'If no yes.com' is the site that was offered for auction (be sure to click on the page to see it interact).  Apparently the artist has been selling sites for a while: "Artist Rafael Rozendaal Sells Web Art Through Domains." And apparently 'If no yes.com' was purchased by Benjamin Palmer & Elizabeth Valleau.  You can find a report on this purchase and past exhibits of digital art at NPR. 

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Rafaël Rozendaal, ifnoyes.com, NPR

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More about the auction is on the Tumblr page for "Paddles On," where the other artists and their submissions are listed.

Another one of the pieces being offered is a YouTube video via webcam, titled "rgb, d-lay," by Petra Cortright.  According to the TIME article in the magazine, she

markets her work with an equation: video's current view count x amount per view = total current price. That encourages collectors to keep circulating the artwork online to increase its value.

The video is not available for showing here, but you can find it at YouTube.

An artist of note is Wade Guyton, who prints his digital art with an Epson ink-jet printer for showing in a gallery.  According to the Wikipedia article about him --

As of 2013, Guyton's works regularly sell for more than $1 million at auction and privately.  An untitled Epson UltraChrome inkjet on linen of 2005 established an auction record for the artist when it sold for $2.4 million at Christie's New York in 2013.

Here it is.

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Wade Guyton, untitled (2005), Petzel Gallery

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Now, if I can just convince myself that I can do art for money.

-- Marge

Twitter: soundless sound, meaning evolving

Tomas Castelazo, "Birds on the wire," Wikimedia

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Linguists are finding untold treasure in the twitterings of Twitter.

According to an article (subscription needed) in TIME magazine, "What Twitter Says to Linguists:"

For researchers studying the use of language in today's networked world, social media is an invaluable tool.

...Gone are the days when a language researcher had to interview subjects in a lab or go door to door in the hope of gaining a few insights about a limited sample of people. Academics in the U.S. and Europe are using the seven-year-old microblogging platform to put millions of examples under the microscope in an instant. "It's unprecedented," says Ben Zimmer, the executive producer at Vocabulary.com "the sheer amount of text you can look at at one time and the number of people you can analyze at once." Hidden in tweets are insights about how we portray our identity in a few short sentences. There are clues to long-standing mysteries, like how slang spreads. And there is a new form of communication to study. If language is the archive of history, as Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, social media should get its own shelf.

If you're fascinated by language and how it evolves, take a look Ben Zimmer's (producer of the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com) Language Log, which documents and discusses Twitter's lingual developments and news about the phenomenon.  For a primer on Twitter usage, there's Lauren Hockenson's article, "The complete guide to Twitter’s language and acronyms."

And speaking of language, how about Pixar's "For the Birds:"

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-- Marge

Cartoons on the economy, info on the Federal money-maker

This came across the wire today from Reuters:

U.S. consumer spending barely rose and inflation was tame in July, offering a cautionary note on the economy as the Federal Reserve weighs cutting back its massive bond-buying program.

According to this article buying stuff "accounts for more than two-thirds of U.S. economic activity."  For more information on why the Fed is cutting back and how the Fed's cutting back on bond-buying may affect us, take a look at "The Effects of Tapering Off the FED’s Stimulus Program" at InflationData.

If all this gab about economics is a big yawn for you, you're not alone.  Keep in mind, though, that these factors do affect our quality of life.  How about some cartoons to ward off the blahs? (Warning:  they're a bit depressing, too.)  All of the artwork below was found at U.S. News' economy cartoons section.
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David Horsey, US News.com

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Chris Britt, US News.com

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David Horsey, US News.com

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Drew Sheneman, US News.com

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If you get as confused about the Federal Reserve and what it does as I do, this video from Time Magazine might help  -- might not.
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-- Marge

DIY: troop therapy

Despite lack of support from the Veteran's Administration, soldiers returning from war are finding a way to help themselves and each other.  And it's heart-warming to see how they're doing it.  You can find a detailed description of some groups' efforts in an article at Time online (open to the public) by Joe Klein, titled "Can Service Save Us?".

Quoting from Joe's article:

This self-help ethos stands in stark contrast to that of the more traditional military-related charities. Eric Greitens, the founder and CEO of the Mission Continues, is notoriously tough on veterans who come to him with service-related excuses. “People understand the tremendous sacrifices that veterans have made — and they instinctively want to do something for them,” he says. “And that sometimes leads people to give veterans an excuse: Oh, you didn’t show up for work on time. It must be that you have posttraumatic stress disorder. Oh, you’re disabled. Don’t even try. Or, you’re being a bad partner to your husband or wife, or a bad father or mother. It must be that you lost a bunch of friends. We simply do not accept those excuses.” Jake Wood has little tolerance for veterans who see themselves as victims. Posttraumatic stress is, he believes, a condition that can be battled and defeated. “If you’re out doing disaster relief,” Wood says, “you’re less likely to be thinking about yourself and more likely to be thinking about the people you’re helping. You’re also presenting yourself, and other veterans, as a model, as a potential community leader.”

My favorite group of volunteer veterans is Team Rubicon. These guys put muscle and skills where needed.  They helped clean up after Hurricane Sandy, the recent Oklahoma tornado, and other disasters -- as shown in this video.
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The Mission Continues and Team Rubicon are not the only service-oriented groups out there.  There's also All for Good (geared to local needs), ServeNet.org (offering youth opportunities to help and funding for projects), VolunteerMatch  (a portal for matching volunteers with local causes), and Catchafire (a portal for professionals to volunteer their skills).

In case you didn't know there's currently an epidemic of suicides among veterans and active duty military.  Whatever we can do to help diminish these harsh numbers, we must do.

From Forbes comes this thought for the day:

“ The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing. ”                                        — Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

-- Marge

Cartoons: Boehner and fellow Republicans

A recent poll, sponsored by NBC and the Wall Street Journal, places House Speaker "John Boehner's Favorability Rating Just Above George Zimmerman's, Edward Snowden's" according to a report by Ariel Edwards-Levy in the Huffington Post.  According to NBC New's First Read the poll shows "Faith in DC hits a low; 83 percent disapprove of Congress."

According to Michael Grunwald, writing for Time Magazine, Republicans have become the "The Party of No."

Since it's hard to take such childishness seriously (even though what's done in the Capitol can be serious business), let's have a laugh on it.  What else is there to do?

From the Times-Tribune by John Cole, "Adult Supervision:"
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From Stuart Carlson's website, "On Immigration:"
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From The Week/cartoons by Mike Keefe, "John Boehner's Sob Story:"
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Also from The Week by Mike Luckovich, "A Grand Old Accusation:"
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Found in the Boston Globe archives by Mike Luckovich, "Herding Cats:"
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One last note: on July 17 the Washington Post reported "House to vote, yet again, on repealing Obamacare."  This will be the 38th vote.

-- Marge

DIY worlds

Minecraft: King's Landing, Time.com

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Pixel block by pixel block you can build your own world in Minecraft.  Creativity is the keyword here, only possibly rivaled by building in Second Life.

Up close Minecraft looks like a "World of 8-bit LEGOs."  However, there are mods to change the appearance; the article "Adding Texture Mods" explains how they work and gives links to some sites that offer the mods and textures.  You can download the game and many addons and variations at Softpedia by searching on 'minecraft' in games. The game itself costs 26.24 USD and you buy directly from the creator.

But appearance isn't the appeal of Minecraft -- it's the creative potential.  As an article in Time (for subscribers only) -- "The Mystery of Minecraft" -- puts it:

Now, insanely addictive video games, it's fair to say, usually don't have fabulous reputations among the unaddicted. At best they may be regarded as irritating time sinks (Farmville), at worst as potential threats to society (any violent game allegedly played by someone who turns out to be a mass murderer). Minecraft is different. The deeper you get into it, the more it looks like a form of self-education masquerading as entertainment, which is why parents tend not to see it as a scourge and teachers are bringing it into the classroom. "It follows rules, just like the real world," says Mark Frauenfelder, the editor of Make magazine, the bible of the do-it-yourself hobbyists of all ages who make up the thriving maker movement. "You put together materials with varying properties. You have to be aware of physics. You have to understand levers and ramps and can even build electric circuits."

Time also has a section on Minecraft that is open to the public.  Be sure to take a look at the "15 Best Minecraft Creations." There I found this video of a Minecraft creation called "Razul Adventure Map," also available on YouTube and by Block Fortress.
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Time to start building a world...

-- Marge

DIY: Wear your brands, make money

In a recent article in Time Magazine, titled "The Human Billboard," writer Roya Wolverson wrote about a relatively new phenomenon -- microcelebrities.  The claim-to-fame of the microcelebrity described below, Jordan Reid, is a fashion/food/home decor blog known as Ramshackle Glam.  Quoting the opening paragraph of Roya's article (you must be a Time subscriber to read the whole article) --

Jordan Reid seems to be having a morning much like any other young mother's in suburban New York. "I'm really sorry, but I'm covered in spilled milk," she says as she steps out of her blue Subaru Outback after having tended to her 18-month-old son. Yet her catalog-ready appearance--Reid is wearing a leather bomber jacket, polka-dot ankle-rolled jeans and pink patent-leather flats under that spilled milk--is a tip that she isn't quite like her fellow moms. On any given day, after dressing and feeding her son, Reid spends an intensely regimented half hour cleansing her face with Moisturizing Facial Wash by Simple, washing her hair with Dove Color Care shampoo and riffling through a wardrobe chock-full of TJ Maxx clothing to compose a boho-chic outfit. She grabs one of her four Timex watches and one of three pairs of Ann Taylor sunglasses and scrambles down the stairs in her sunny three-bedroom home to eat breakfast on her new Noritake china collection (an eclectic mix of the Rochelle Gold, Hertford and Yoshino patterns).

If you're wondering whether this type of blogging is worth the effort, take a look at this second quote from the same article:

For enterprising bloggers, the lure is simple: income that can range from $100,000 a year to hundreds of thousands more. For marketers, the calculus is more complicated. Yes, they can target audiences, and the price is relatively low compared with already cheap online advertisements. And bloggers can offer a more authentic connection to brands for consumers who are weary of varnished sales pitches from Madison Avenue. But companies are also putting their brands in the hands of untested spokespeople and, in some cases, running into controversy about the blogger-sponsor relationship. Leery consumers prefer that bloggers' opinions be independent. Just last month, the Federal Trade Commission introduced tighter regulations for social-media advertising. Though there are clear successes, it's far too early to tell if the approach drives more sales than traditional marketing.

Other bloggers named in the article are Kelley Framel of the Glamourai,

Jane Aldridge of Sea of Shoes,

and Brit Morin of Brit + Co.

Eric Savitz writes more about Social Media Clout: The Rise of Micro Celebrity Endorsements at Forbes.

So how do you get started?  First, blog well and often about topics that the majority of internet users are interested in.  For ideas take a look at Pinterest, particularly the popular page.  Googling "blog about brands" will yield a good number of resources available.  A number of the sites look like freelancing portals.  One site I checked out -- Bloggers Required -- looks legit.

A word of caution for those who want to sign up for brand blogging at a site offering services -- the internet is full of entrepreneurs that will return little substance for your money.  When you find a site that seems to be what you're looking for, check it out before you sign up.  The service should be free for the blogger/freelancer.  Take time to read the terms of service; you are, after all, contracting with this company.  And keep in mind that many people want to make money freelancing -- be prepared to compete for assignments. 

-- Marge