Phillip Lenssen who hails from Germany and runs Google Blogoscoped is sharing a dynamic list of blogger mug headshots that rotates from a pool of 138 bloggers (and growing) based upon the 40 most recent posts displayed. He calls this mini-pictorial construction: fortyfaces.

I call it a clever way to reach out and get in touch with bloggers you may/may not know directly. If he had wanted to make this at least semi-automated he could have thrown up a form and put a little GD or ImageMagick voodoo on the backend, but perhaps wisely, he went the 1995 route: email.

Forty Faces started with the same cliched list of 50 or so popular bloggers that Lenssing cropped their photos by hand from various sources. I feel like it’s high school all over again when I see some of these sites/programs start with the same 50 or so bloggers all the time. Why doesn’t somebody do something really creative and start their new program with the list of 50 bloggers that are good and not overexposed?

I’m not sure if he got permission to use any of these pictures from any of these original sources or used pictures that were Creative Commons Licensed but his about page sort of indicates he got permission. Doubtful anybody would object either way as his site will drive traffic just like Google does — if enough people find it useful to watch for their favorite (or least favorite) faces, anyway … IMO, some of these blogger mugshots look downright scary. That green shading with each picture adds a sense of madness to the montage.

To get listed you have to actually email Phillip, which I did otherwise you wouldn’t see me in the screenshot above, and after several slices of my ugly mug, I finally made the cut and became one of the initiated Snow Lenssen and 40 Dwarfs (see picture). I noticed his count of bloggers yesterday was less than 100, so he’s busy in Photoshop.

Email can still be effective.

Lenssen indicates that Forty Faces updates once every 30 minutes (though it seems to me that it is updating more frequently than that), but at that rate, sooner or later posts will be missed (if that’s not already happening), especially when up to three successive posts from the same blogger are allowed. If only 1/3rd of the 138 bloggers wrote and published something right now, then a few would already not show. However, I’ve made posts and refreshed his page and see my own hmmsical photo staring up at … god knows what.

To combat this scaling issue Lenssen indicates he may (soon?) make different categories like fortfaces.com/writing or fortyfaces.com/sports. This is a cool idea for a minute, but I’m not sure how many people will actually sit and refresh this. Staying power could definitely be an issue here.

Could be cool for a game of memory though, or perhaps some other game. Now if only I could remember what site I saw that did something like this already … anybody else remember? I recall the thumbnails being very small. Might have been in Flash.

Anybody?

Did this post make you go hmm?

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