Geotagging

I upload some of my sketches on Flickr. One of its most attractive features is the map: you can geotag your photos –in general, all your material– to show where they are taken. Unfortunately this map can not be easily embedded on websites, thereby I have been maintaining my own urban sketches map in Google Maps for the same purpose.

Each blue flag on the map represents a different sketch. When a flag is selected, a thumbnail of the sketch and a link to the blog entry are shown. There is also a zoom in option, so it can be explored the area where the building, landscape or urban element is located. And even the street view can be used when the link view larger map is followed!

View Larger Map

A bunch of awards

Vinyl Eraser has been nominated for several awards recently. I am very honored for it. I want to say a big thank you to Debbie Addams and Kellie See.

It was nominated for the Hope Unites Globally Award by Debbie Adams. Thank you, Deb. The award was produced by Connie Wayne at A Hope for Today promoting hope, love, peace, equality, and unity for all people.

And it was nominated for the Kreativ Blogger Award by Debbie Adams. Thank you again! Probably I am or at least I try to be a creative person.

Finally, it was also nominated for the Top Recent Commenter Award by Kellie See. Thank you, Kellie. This award was created by Cindy L Riemersma.

I don’t know how to decide which blogs should be nominated for which award. I love and enjoy every blog that follow and visit and all of you, my usual visitors and commenters, are very encouraging to me. I am not an artist and my job is not related to the art community.

As I wrote in the about page I started to draw when my girlfriend, who is my muse and the most important person in each activity in my life, gave me one of those Faber Castell boxes with pencils and crayons. It was on December 2010. Previously I never drawn. I had used oils and ink for technical drawing in my school days but I was not able to make a simple doodle. I enjoy drawing and exploring new things. I guess that is important.

So, please, visit the blogs that I have mentioned above, the authors are great artists and writers and also all of them are art related blogs with fantastic pieces of art and texts that authors share with us. All of them deserve the Hope Unites Globally Award, all of them are absolutely Kreativ bloggers, and almost all of them are usual commenters in this blog.

Update: Here is the list with my nominations for the three awards. Congrats to you all!

• 30 Minute Art
• A Doodle A Day
• A Point Of No Return
• Butterfly Hands
• Carl D’Agostino
• Debbie Adams
• Dontchawannadream
• Elena Caravela
• Hanneke Koop
• High River Arts
• Incidental Learner
• Kellie See
• Les Personnages
• Leslie White
• One Mind Many Detours
• Pencils and Paints
• Salmon Brook Studio
• Sandrine Pelissier
• Wayside Artist

Sunshine Award

Some days ago Vinyl Eraser was awarded the Sunshine Award by Cindy L Riemersma of One Mind Many Detours. She has a nice blog, in which she shows personal experiences as well as wonderful ideas. Visit her blog and enjoy her reflections.

This award comes with the typical list of questions. I will try to answer them briefly although each one suggests me a different post. For example, it is not a good idea to ask about favorite colors to people that works with colors!

• Favorite color: Prussian blue.
• Favorite animal: Bengal tiger.
• Favorite number: 7… sometimes 111.
• Favorite non-alcoholic drink: Tea (Earl Grey, Irish Breakfast), rooibos (with green mint).
• Facebook or Twitter: WordPress. I use Twitter for quick comments and for publicizing the posts. If I find some spare time I will explore Facebook. Keep you informed.
• My passion: To have many passions.
• Getting or giving presents: Giving.
• Favorite pattern: Any Arabic pattern in the Alhambra.
• Favorite day of the week: Any without interval training.
• Favorite flower: Iris, mainly these species: setosa, versicolor and virginica.

Now my nominations. The rules indicates that the award must be passed on ten blogs. I have recently nominated many blogs, thus I will pass it on new ones that I have not nominated before. They are only five blogs.

• A Doodle A Day – awesome doodles and many more
• Debbie Adams – great illustrator, a very recent discovery
• Don’t Cha Wanna Dream – amateur painter from France
• Elena Caravela’s Blog – visual artist and illustrator of children’s books
• Hanneke Koop – watercolors and stories, another recent discovery

Liebster Blog Award

Vinyl Eraser has been nominated twice for the Liebster Blog Award! Thank you very much to Kellie See who runs one of the most creative blogs that I follow. Kellie is currently studying illustration and publishes her exercises and thoughts on the blog. Check out her latest post where she experiments on different mediums for drawing and painting. Very, very interesting blog. I love it.

And also thank you very much to Melody who nominated this blog for the award on the same day. Melody is studying for a Master’s Degree in Teaching Early Grades and runs the blog 30 Minute Art. The idea is simple: she has been able to find 30 minutes in her schedule for art that uses to draws, write poems, and even produces videos! She always puts a smile in my face with her posts.

Concerning the Liebster Blog Award. It is a chain award, so when you get it, you must pass the award on to more bloggers, in this case five bloggers. The Liebster Blog Award is given to bloggers who have less than 200 followers in order to generate some traffic for them. Liebster is a German word that can be translated as beloved or nice. The rules for accepting this award are as follows:

1. Show your thanks to the blogger who gave you the award by linking back to them.
2. Reveal your top picks for the award and let them know by leaving a comment on their blog.
3. Post the award on your blog.
4. Bask in the love from the most supportive people on the blogsphere – other bloggers.
5. And, best of all – have fun and spread the karma.

These are my nominations (it is really hard to choose only five blogs, I have tried to select blogs with less than 200 followers that have not received this award previously):

• A point of no return – arts, music and food for thought
• Creating from the heart – look at his watercolored berries… they almost smell
• High River Arts – the perfect site to find inspiration
• Les Personnages – fashion design… vê se pões a gargantilha…
• Wayside Artist – her deers and horses seems so real…

Versatile Blogger Award

A couple of days ago I received a comment with the nomination for the Versatile Blogger Award. After some research, I found out that it is one of those chain awards: when you get it, you must pass the award on to more bloggers. It seems pretty funny and I guess it is a good and clever way of increasing the traffic and posting some of our favorite blogs.

And I also guess it could be very interesting to observe the nominations propagation and if the process converges to a fixed number of blogs or if this number grows exponentially ad infinitum. I did read that, after some time, every blog on Internet could be nominated with these chain awards. I think it is not possible, otherwise Achilles could overtake the tortoise.

Anyway, the rules for receiving the Versatile Blogger Award are as follows:

1. Thank the person who gave the award and link back to them in your post.
   Vinyl Eraser was nominated by A point of no return. Very interesting blog. If you haven’t done it yet, take a look at it. Many thanks!
2. Share 7 things about yourself.
   I have run seven marathons and I will be running my eighth in three months.
   I play guitar and piano although I consider myself a bass player.
   I am philatelist.
   I build scale models.
   I enjoy photography.
   I have a lot of hobbies.
   Ich spreche ein bisschen Deutsch.
3. Pass this award along to 15 blogs and let them know about it.
   Butterfly Hands
   Deidra Alexander’s Blog
   Electric Penguinland
   From Koegas To Paris
   Grenobloise
   High River Arts
   Jenny
   Kellie See
   Leslie White
   Linda Halcomb’s Blog
   My Photographic Wanderings
   Ruth’s Artwork
   The Daily Dose Photo Blog
   The Post-Software Movement
   The Slipcover