The Internet is now the main national and international news source for people ages 18 to 29, a study from the Pew Research Center reports.
In 2010, 65% of people younger than 30 cited the Internet as their go-to source for news, nearly doubling from 34% in 2007. The number who consider television as their main news source dropped from 68% to 52% during that time.
Of all 1,500 American adults surveyed, 41% say they get their national and international news from the Internet, up 17% from 2007. Sixty-six percent cite television — down from 74% — indicating the trend is spreading among other age groups.
Forty-eight percent of those 30-59 cite the Internet as their main news source, up from 32% in 2007, while television went down from 71% to 63%. Though the number of those in the 51-64 age group who consider television their main news source (71%) is about the same, those who turn to the Internet (34%) is nearly equal to the number who cite newspapers (38%). The amount of people 65 and older who get their news from the Internet has risen from 5% to 14%, but television remains the chief source for 79% of respondents.
These numbers fall in line with the rise of the personalized news stream online. Both Facebook’s News Feed and Twitter launched in summer 2006 but didn’t catch on until 2007. Both sites have seen explosive growth since 2008. Tweet counts have increased from 5,000 daily in 2007 to 90 million daily in 2010, while Facebook went from 30 million users in 2007 to more than 500 million users today.
In addition, the television viewership culture has shifted in the past few years. Between media streaming services on the web and, more recently, Internet-TV connection devices like Roku and Boxee, people have more viewing options than ever before. With the ability to personalize what news and entertainment you consume, these television watching methods have become more desirable for many.
Which is your preferred news source? Internet or television? Tell us in the comments below.
Unity Stoakes is the co-founder and president of OrganizedWisdom, an expert-driven digital media company focused on health and wellness. OrganizedWisdom is building the world’s first digital mapping of online health experts to help people easily discover and connect with credible health resources.
Is your doctor easily accessible online, or does he or she believe that the Internet isn’t a resource for accessing health information?
If it’s the latter, it may be time to find another doctor. With nearly 90% of online Americans searching the Internet for health resources, it’s likely you and your friends and family already use the Internet to research health issues. It’s true that the web has a jumble of health information, and engaging online takes time, which most health experts don’t have. The good news, however, is that the increasing number of health professionals now embracing the Internet as an important and useful tool for health and wellness is beginning to change your options as a consumer.
Read on for some ways that social media can help doctors, health experts and everyday users.
Social Wellness Trends
An exciting new social media trend is emerging that disrupts the standard view of health care delivery and will have a profound impact on us all. Thousands of doctors, nurses, allied health professionals, and health advocates are publicly engaging with people online. In fact, nearly 40% of Americans turn to social media for health information.
Patients (and a few early adopter health pros) moved online years ago to share health guidance, give support and find answers. But until recently, many health professionals have avoided using the Internet and social media as a way to help patients. This reluctance is changing, as savvy physicians, nurses, dentists and other health pros are realizing that if their patients are online, then perhaps they should be too. Health practitioners who were once too busy, inexperienced or afraid to share their expertise online, now actively share links on Twitter and Facebook, blog, write for online medical journals, engage on Q&A sites, or contribute to online health sites and forums.
For too long, health and wellness has been a do-it-yourself proposition for patients online, and people have been left on their own to determine how to effectively utilize empty search boxes. People have great access to lots of information, but they must sort through the billions of articles to determine the credible from redundant health encyclopedias, marketing web sites or sites with potentially unknown sources. Then, the task of deciding the credibility of the sources and articles has fallen on the patient alone.
While the number of health experts interacting with patients online is relatively small, there is a clear trend taking shape. A recent Manhattan Research survey of U.S. physicians shows an increase of Internet usage for professional purposes up from 2.5 hours per week in 2002 to 8 hours per week in 2010. More strikingly, while more than 100,000 doctors are using closed social health networks like Sermo.com and publishing in peer-reviewed journals online, thousands of health professionals are now blogging, using Twitter, and connecting with patients on Facebook in very public ways. So much so that this November, for the first time, the American Medical Association released a set of guidelines to direct physicians communicating and engaging with patients via social media. And earlier this year, the CDC also published its own best practices toolkit for how health professionals should be using social media.
Given that so many people now go to the Internet before, during and after their visit to the doctor’s office, the lack of guidance from credible and trusted health experts online is a growing problem. In fact, Manhattan Research shows that 61% of people now use the Internet instead of visiting a doctor. Thankfully, the tide is turning as thousands of health practitioners move online to do much more than interact with friends, family and colleagues and are instead using the social web to dispense their particular health expertise.
What This Means for Health Information Seekers
We are standing at the precipice of a new online revolution in health care. As more and more health experts embrace the Internet and increase their social media activity, health information seekers will undoubtedly benefit in profound ways. Based on conversations and surveys conducted with experts and health information seekers, here are some of the benefits associated with a robust online community of active health experts:
Interaction With Experts: In the real world, people seeking answers to important health, financial or legal matters look for guidance from the best experts. With a growing community of health experts participating in online discussions, people have access to more expertise than ever before at their fingertips.
Credibility and Trust: With doctors and other health professionals contributing information online in increasing numbers, it is important for a trust filter to separate credible information and sources from information that is not credible. The community of health professionals that is forming online will act as a system of checks and balances to separate good information and sources from the bad.
Transparency: It’s been a watershed year for increased transparency as government, big business, the financial services industry and other sectors have been shining a light into their operations like never before. Healthcare is taking a major step forward in this regard at the grassroots level, with an expert community being formed online by doctors, nurses and other health professionals across the country. As more doctors view social media as an extension of their professional reputation, you can be sure that they will treat their online interactions with the same care as they do in the offline world.
While the increase in the online activity of health experts is a welcome development, searching for crucial health information online remains an overwhelming and intimidating process for many. In the offline world, people searching for health information seek out the best experts — and now with more health professionals moving online, people will finally be able to connect with credible experts they can trust.
If enough people complete them, tiny tasks can accomplish great things. Companies like Yelp, for instance, have used the input of millions to create review databases. iStockPhoto pools images from a huge group of photographers to make a cohesive collection. Newer companies, like Waze, which leverages its user base’s smartphones to create maps, are consistently coming up with new and innovative ways to use crowdsourcing.
The art world has also leveraged the power of crowdsourcing to create some stunning works. These seven projects involve many people coming together to contribute to a bigger picture.
Sticking to its crowdsourcing theme, SwarmSketch randomly chooses a popular search term as the topic of each week’s collective drawing (this week, for instance, you can contribute to “Black Swan Movie”). Each artist can contribute just one short line per visit, after which he or she is asked to vote on how bold other users’ lines should be.
To date, the crowd has drawn about 195,000 lines in 350 sketches.
The creators of this website call it a “snapshot of our global society.” Their project is an online canvas composed of 1 million squares and they’re hoping to get people from all over the world to paint pictures that fill them. The end artwork will be printed on a giant 80-meters wide by 31-meters high canvas.
“By working towards a common goal, but having the space for individual expression, we are hoping that a collaboration can evolve that communicates a single powerful message in its numbers, yet maintains the intimacy of the individual,” the website explains.
There’s a long way to go before the project is complete, but so far about 28,300 artists in 174 countries have completed squares.
From 2002 to 2009, Learning to Love You More posted assignments from artists Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher. Participants who accepted these assignments — such as “repair something” or “interview someone who has experienced war” — turned in photos, Word documents, videos and audio clips of their completed tasks.
The collection of projects inspired a book and was presented at venues that include The Whitney Museum, The Seattle Art Museum, and the Wattis Institute. In 2009, the website was acquired by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Back when Amazon’s Mechanical Turk was a new idea, artist Aaron Koblin used it as a way to hire workers who were instructed to paint “sheep facing left.” Each sheep earned $.02. The resulting Sheep Market allows you to choose a sheep from a selection of 10,000 and watch how it was drawn.
In a paper on the project, Koblin wrote that “The inspiration for The Sheep Market project stems from the urge to cast a light on the human role of creativity expressed by workers in the system, while explicitly calling attention to the massive and insignificant role each plays as part of a whole.”
The Sheep Market was the first of many pieces that Koblin has created using crowdsourcing.
In order to earn a place in the credits of this tribute to Johnny Cash, all you need to do is submit one frame of a video that is being created for his last studio recording, “Ain’t No Grave.” The website provides a reference image, which you can practically draw on top of using the site’s custom tool, so there’s no need to be shy about your art skills. The project then combined those frames to make a moving video.
The project is directed by directed by Chris Milk, a music video director who has worked with Kanye West, U2, and directed Arcade Fire’s recent HTML5 video experiment. Aaron Koblin, who created The Sheep Market, is one of the creative directors.
Since 1996, artist Lorie Novak has been accepting family snapshots on her Collected Visions Website. Visitors to the site can search through about 1,200 submitted photos and put them together with their own text and other photos. Their photo essays are also displayed on the site.
Novak writes on the site that the project, which is sponsored by the Center for Advanced Technology at New York University, “explores the relationship between family photographs and memory.”
Which projects spoke to you? Are there any that you love and would like to share? Let us know in the comments below.
After falling off in the late ’90s, news consumption in the U.S. is on the rise again thanks to the availability of news on online and mobile channels, a new study from the Pew Research Center has revealed.
A survey of 3,006 adults found that while consumption of traditional news has decreased modestly (less than a third said they’d read a newspaper the day before, compared nearly half a decade earlier, while consumption of radio news fell from 43% to 31%, and TV remained steady), the number of people who claimed to have gotten news from an online source in the last 24 hours rose from 24% to 31% over the last decade — 44% if you include mobile devices, e-mail, social networks and podcasts. Only 9% said they received news from Internet and mobile alone.
Despite online’s significant growth, those numbers will seem surprisingly low to those who get the majority of their news online. I have personally only purchased one newspaper in the past decade, and that was to scan a full-page ad Adobe took out in The Washington Post for Mashable. It seems I’m not alone in that respect, as a mere 8% of adults under 30 said they had read a print newspaper the day before they were surveyed.
Online Adding to, Rather Than Replacing, Traditional News Mix
Significantly, online news is not replacing other traditional news forms (three quarters of those surveyed said they got their news yesterday from traditional media, and 36% said they absorbed news on both digital and traditional platforms) so much as providing additional outlets. As Americans adopt new technologies for accessing news, they consume more of it.
Although Americans are still averaging 57 minutes of news time from TVs, radios and newspapers per day, the same as they were a decade earlier, they are spending an additional 13 minutes reading news online, upping total news-reading to 70 minutes. That doesn’t even include time spent perusing news on cellphones or other digital devices.
Notably, the availability of news online and on mobile devices does not mean that more people are ingesting news — 17% of Americans still do not access news on a daily basis, the same as a decade earlier, the report found. Rather, those who already consumed news are simply consuming more of it.
Although one might expect the younger demographic to be fueling the increase in online news consumption, it’s actually those in the 30-64 age range that are pushing the growth. 44% of those between 50 and 64 said they got news through one or more digital outlets yesterday, comparable to the 18-29 group at 48%. Unsurprisingly, only 23% of those 65 and older said they had accessed an online news source the day before.
Print News Consumption Continues to Decline
Printed newspapers experienced the sharpest decline in news readership over the past decade. Only one in four of those surveyed said they’d read a printed newspaper the day before, down from 30% two years ago and 38% in 2005. The number of online newspaper readers continues to grow, however, offsetting the overall decline in readership. 17% said they had read something on a newspaper’s website yesterday, up from 13% in 2008 and 9% in 2006, meaning that collective readership is situated at 37%, just two percentage points less than two years ago, but down 6% from 2006.
However, these numbers do not acknowledge those who accessed newspaper content indirectly through secondary sources, such as blogs and aggregators, or search engines.
By and large, newspaper readers tend to be older, although the study found that the readership of some of the major national newspapers, including USA Today, The Wall Street Journal and especially The New York Times bucked this trend. More than half the readership of USA Today and the WSJ are less than 50 years old, while 67% of the NYT’s readership is under 50. A whopping 34% of the NYT’s readers are younger than 30, more than a tenth above the national average of under-30-year-olds in the U.S. The report cites the news organization’s aggressive online strategy as the primary reason for its popularity among young adults.
Additional Findings
Pew uncovered several other interesting tidbits in its study, including the fact that significantly more men (50%) than women (39%) get news on digital platforms, but that men and women are equally likely to get news via social networking sites, such as Twitter, although most Facebook and Twitter users say they “hardly ever” get news there.
In addition, more consumers (33%) are regularly using search engines to get their news, up from 19% two years ago. And although 31% of adults access the Internet through mobile devices, only 8% claim to get news from there on a regular basis.
What do you think of the findings? How have your news consumption habits changed over the last decade?
Disclosure: USA Today is a Mashable content partner.
Chatroulette, the random video chat website that became a minor pop culture phenomenon, has been shut down. The site now hosts a message saying “experiment #1 is over” and that a “renewed and updated version” will launch tomorrow.
Parker said he believed the site could be made more interesting (and that it could avoid the incessant penis problem) by automatically directing users to people who are “nexted” the least. In theory, that could reduce the hit-and-miss nature of the experience, but it would be challenging to execute it right.
How would the site’s algorithms decide who gets the interesting users and who gets the less interesting ones? Would the site be divided into ghettos of interesting and uninteresting people, kind of like the dating site OkCupid invisibly partitions matches users by attractiveness? We might found out tomorrow when Chatroulette relaunches.
Up to this point, only very small updates have been made to the site as it originally appeared, including channels and local matching. That hasn’t stopped it from birthing numerous viral sensations like Merton the piano guy.
We all know Chrome is fast, but can it also be social? We’ve already brought you a list of social media extensions for Google’s Chrome browser, but here we set our sights on extensions designed specifically for Twitter.
We’ve scoured Chrome’s extensions listings and found seven free tools that we think are worth the install for anyone who uses Twitter’s web interface.
From extensions that will help you be more productive, to those that will just let you have more fun, check out our list below and let us know about any Twitter-related Chrome plug-ins that you use in the comments.
If you want a super-quick way of sharing a URL on Twitter, you can’t go wrong with the “Twitter Share This Page” extension.
Once installed, all you have to do — when you are on the page you want to share — is hit the blue “t” icon (which appears on the right-hand side of your browser bar) and the extension will load the relevant URL in your “What’s happening?” Twitter box.
If you want the link shortened, right click on the “t” icon and select the shortening option. All shared links will be pre-shrunk using Bit.ly.
Khaled Musaied’s “Twitter Extender” also offers tidy Bit.ly URL shortening abilities with an “add URL” option inserted just below the “What’s happening” box.
There are a ton of other enhancements offered by the extension, including old-style retweeting abilities, “reply to all” functionality, quicker direct messaging and the option to load previous tweets if the tweet is a reply.
This tool is very useful for anyone wanting a lightweight way to watch keywords and topics, especially if they are topical memes.
Installing it will place a little blue “t” button on the right-hand side of your browser bar, which, when clicked, lets you manage your keyword phrases.
Once you’ve set up the words you want watched, a tiny number will appear on the “t” letting you know how many mentions the word has racked up. Clicking it again will let you see the mentions in full.
You can make Twitter streams — whether they are your homepage stream or a search stream — refresh automatically. Tweets pour fluidly down the page, saving you from having to bother with the “X new tweets” clickable bar.
This is a fun one. Other than pure nosiness, the only real reason we could see for anyone needing this data is journalistic/research purposes. Usefulness aside, this extension will let you see the date that any user joined the micro-blogging service.
Ideal for the lazy Twitterer, Twitter Photo Zoom will super-size anyone’s avatar from the home screen or sidebar lists when you run your cursor over the thumbnail.
Use this extension if you want to spice up your tweets with unusual symbols like stars, check marks and the like. If they’re supported by the browsers and systems on the reader’s end, they’ll appear in your tweets normally, and you won’t have to memorize any unusual codes or load up a character map outside the browser to make it happen.
Your profile photo is an important part of your online personality, offering a glimpse of you to the wider world. We’ve previously brought you tips for creating the perfect profile pic, and in this post we’ll be looking at some great online services that can help you create a variety of fun, vintage-looking pics for your profile.
So, for anyone who doesn’t have photo editing know-how, expensive editing software and a load of time to spare, here’s how to create a retro profile pic in a matter of minutes using some absolutely free, entirely online services.
Let us know in the comments if we’ve missed any!
The Original Shot
This is the photo we’re editing, shown here as a control pic so you can gauge how dramatic the effects we’ve picked really are. A standard snap from a point-and-shoot camera, there’s nothing wrong with this image, but read on to see how it can be made so much more fun in just a few clicks.
In film photography, the cross processing effect was achieved by switching different chemicals used to process print or slide films. This made for dramatic colors, contrast and grain.
Although the effects of cross processing have been known since the 1960s, it was in the 1990s that the effect reached the height of its popularity with photographers like Nick Knight bringing cross processing to fashion and studio work.
How to Get the Effect
It’s possible to recreate the effect using photo software by playing around with the color balance and contrast ratios (there are plenty of tutorials around the web to help). If you don’t have the time/inclination/correct software, then Phixr offers the effect at the click of a button.
Simply head to Phixr and hit “get started,” which will bring up account options. If you want to set up a free account you can do so from here, but you can also skip this step, which will give you access to Phixr (as long as you’re not on it for more than six hours straight, which, trust us, you won’t be).
You then need to upload your chosen pic from your computer (or via a URL) and hit the upload button, at which point the pic will be be resized if it’s too big.
After your photo has loaded, select the “color effects” button from the icon menu on the left hand side and scroll down one line to select “cross process.”
At this point there are options to adjust the brightness, contrast and opacity, but for the effect in the image above we kept it all at the auto levels pre-loaded by the site. The effects are previewed, however, so if you’d like to play around, you won’t be committed to the changes until you click “execute.”
Although many technical advances have been made now, back in the “old days” the colors in photo prints were made up of dyes that decay with age — especially if exposed to light — hence why so many of your parents’ or grandparents’ photos take on pink or yellow tones as the years go by.
The faded color helps to date a photo almost as much as the outlandish fashions that might be found in it, and is a great effect to give your modern pic a vintage feel.
How to Get the Effect
Drop into Picnik and click the “get started now” button. Upload your chosen photo, hit the “create” tab along the top, and select “effects” from the secondary tab menu. Now scroll down the menu on the left hand side of your display and choose “1960s” which brings up further options.
You get the option to keep the round corners (we did, as it helps achieve the dated look even more) and what color you want to fill them in with (we chose white for a subtle effect) as well as how much “fade” you want. We maxed our fade in the pic above (zero percent) but again, you can play around with a preview, so feel free to experiment before hitting “apply” and saving the photo back to your computer.
In the 1960s, cheap cameras like the Holga and Diana were mass-produced as “toys” and were predictably made of cheap construction and parts, including such photographic abominations plastic lenses.
Of course, though poorly made, these low quality cameras actually produced really interesting effects such as light flares, blurs, distortion and vignetting (darker or blurry edges) that have, in recent years, gained the cameras a cult following (best seen from the Lomography movement) by those interested in the unpredictable and often beautiful results.
How to Get the Effect
If you’re at all interested in super-simple retro photo effects then you need to head to Rollip pronto as it offers over 40 options. We narrowed our choice down to this “Styled Lenses” option which emulates the kind of effect you could hope to get from a quirky old-school film camera.
To find it on the Rollip site, hit “click here to start” on the home page and then scroll through the “more effects” option until you get to page 5/10. Click “Styled Lenses” and select the photo in the top left hand corner. Once you’ve done this, it’s just a matter of clicking to browse your computer for a photo and wait for Rollip to work its magic.
Coloring black and white photographs by hand using photo oils or tinting pencils was popular in the first half of 20th Century before the advent of affordable color film. Recreated digitally, it makes for a nostalgic effect and can increase the emphasis to a certain part of an image, such as a person, or a features like lips or eyes.
How to Get the Effect
You do need an account to use Photobucket, but it’s a simple email and password affair, so not too arduous to get set up. Once you’re good to go, upload an image from your computer and then hit “edit.” After your photo has loaded, select “effects” from the tab menu at the top of the page and choose the first option called “color splash.”
The software will then greyscale your photo to black and white, leaving you to choose which part you want to fill in with color. The actual coloring in is super-easy: Just dab the circle over the area you want the color restored too. We stuck to the standard size blob in the image above, which worked fine, but if what you want colored is smaller, or more detailed, you can change the blob size to suit.
Finally we took advantage of another free effect from Photobucket to complete our image and employed the “blur edges” tool (on the default setting) from the effects menu to give a blurry vignette feel. This helps focus the eye on the colorful figure.
Polaroid photographs are iconic and immediately recognizable as the instant photo format of choice. Polaroids ruled up to the start of of digital photography when slower, film-based formats were pushed out of the market.
Since Polaroid’s decline, nostalgia for the product has seen various groups campaigning for a revival of the format. With some success, film and cameras are now back on the shelves. It looks like Polaroid will live on for a few more years yet.
How to Get the Effect
There are various Polaroid-erizing tools on the web, the most notable of which is Poladroid, however, this requires a download and we’re nothing if not impatient. We wanted an in-browser service.
Picnik offers a Polaroid look as part of its “frames” options, but that doesn’t give the image an aged look. We countered this by using the 1960s effect (detailed above in number two) but nixing the round corners and setting the fade to 40 percent for a less dramatic effect.
Once you’ve applied that, go to the frames menu under the “create” tab and select “Polaroid.” We opted for a white background color and a five percent angle. When you’ve made your choices, it’s just a matter of saving the pic down to your computer and you’re all done!
Fad or no fad, Chatroulette’s 15 minutes of fame isn’t up just yet. An art gallery is showing “a tableau of human reactions” gleaned from the viral video chat site; the exhibit is called the Narcissus Series.
According to the gallery’s curators, “The premise of the Narcissus Series is to recreate the conditions of the myth and capture that moment of self-recognition. Bespoke software was created to divert the incoming video feed, reflect it and feed it back so that each person was confronted with their own reflected image, in place of an expected remote random partner.”
In other words, instead of being connected to another human being, the Chatroulette user on the other end of this program would just see themselves upside down, which references the mythical character Narcissus seeing his reflection in a body of water.
Between February and May, several thousand people were captured for this art project. We don’t know whether these people have given their permission for the use of their likeness; still, the results are interesting.
“Narcissus Lament” is a 10-minute video grid (excerpt below) composed of 108 separate frames displaying still shots of Chatroulette users experiencing their own “moment of self-recognition.” The exhibit also includes “Regret,” “Redemption” and “Remorse,” three prints containing 576 images each.
The artist, Liubo Borissov, is an assistant professor at Pratt Institute’s Department of Digital Arts. His work lives at the intersection of science, technology and art. If Narcissus interests you, we recommend giving his Vimeo channel a gander, too.
Kelli Shaver is freelance developer and UI designer. You can follow her on Twitter @KelliShaver and on GitHub here.
It’s 4th of July, and for those of you in the U.S., you know what that means — it’s time to grab a beer, throw a steak on the barbecue, and blow stuff up. Why not get into the spirit of things with a little explosive goodness right on your website or blog?
In this article, we’ll create a simple fireworks effect using jQuery that can be applied to any element on your web page. Use it to add fireworks to photos, backgrounds, or anywhere else you feel like blowing up a few pixels. The result is fairly basic, but it’s still pretty cool and it will provide you with a good primer on JavaScript animation.
Setting Up the Page
To start with, we’ll need a little bit of markup, mostly for demonstration purposes.
This is pretty straightforward. We’re just setting up some basic HTML, and grabbing jQuery from Google’s CDN. We’re also calling fireworks.css and fireworks.js, which we’ll create in a moment. jQuery is my JavaScript framework of choice, so it’s what I’ll be using to create the fireworks. This takes a lot of work out of animating our explosions.
Once the markup is out of the way, we can move on to our CSS. Again, it’s fairly simple. We just need to define a couple of elements, namely the container that will hold the fireworks (‘#photo’ in this case), and a small div we can use as our base particle, which we’ll be using instead of an image, so we can easily change the color.
Let’s start with the container. I grabbed a nice photo of a lake at night from Stock Exchange and plan to use that as my background.
Most of the CSS above is simply for defining the height, width, and position of the photo on the page, but there are a few things to note. We’ve set the overflow to ‘hidden’ so that our fireworks don’t shoot off the photo, and added position:relative, because we will be absolutely positioning our particle elements within the photo. As you can see, there’s no image tag in the HTML for the photo. It’s used as the div background, instead. That way we don’t have to worry about it when manipulating the contents of our photo div.
Next, we need to define the CSS for our base particle. All we need to do is specify a height, width, and tell the browser to use absolute positioning. I’m using a 3px by 3px particle, but if you’re using a larger, or smaller photo, you may want to adjust the particle size.
Now you should have something that looks like this. I added in some CSS for page body as well, but it has no bearing whatsoever on the fireworks.
Creating the Animation
With these out of the way, we’re ready to move on to the meat and potatoes of the project — the JavaScript.
Before we can begin writing our explosion function, though, we’ll need a quick method for duplicating our particles. We could always use jQuery’s built-in clone method, but since we’ll be making a lot of copies, let’s go with something a little more efficient.
Since I’m a big fan of not re-inventing the wheel, I’ll just use a handy little plug-in I found over at jQuery Minute that extends jQuery with a .duplicate() function.
The linked article above has a good explanation of how the plug-in works, so I’ll not elaborate. For now, all we care about is that we can call it on our particle element by using .duplicate(50) for instance, which will give us 50 copies at our disposal.
Alright, now let’s really get down to business and write our explosion function. Before we begin building animations and creating elements, though, we need to define a few variables that get set whenever the function is called.
Let’s go through this step-by-step and take a look at what each of these variables are for.
sky – This is a jQuery object for the element that will contain our fireworks, built by passing the element ID at runtime, like so: explosion('photo').
colors – A simple array of some bright colors to use for our fireworks. We’ll be creating single-color fireworks, and multi-colored ones.
emitter – We create a simple div object and give it the particle class. This will be the base or center of our explosion.
multicolor – A random number from 0-10 used later to determine whether or not to make the firework multi-colored.
Now that we’ve created our emitter object, we need to add a couple of additional CSS properties to it. It’s best to do this before appending it to the DOM, so let’s do that.
Once the emitter is styled, we can append it to our container. While we’re at it, let’s go ahead and make those duplicates, as well.
Whoa! Hang on. What’s with all the math? Don’t worry. We’re just creating random numbers*. This means that when our firework goes off, it will be randomly placed on the photo.
In this case, the width is a random number between 3 and the width of our photo (400), and the height is a random number between 3 and 100, because we only want fireworks to appear in the top 100px of the photo (the sky). Why 3? No particular reason at all, other than that I wanted to ensure that the explosion is always centered a bit inside the photo’s edge.
Finally, we get the background color by pulling a random color from the array.
* To create a random number within a range, take the difference of the maximum value minus one less than the minimum value, multiply that by the value from random(), which will be between 0 and 1. Then multiply it by the maximum value. Last, wrap all of that in the floor() function, to convert the result into an integer.
Great! Now we have 51 particles sitting on our canvas in the x,y coordinates we randomly determined above. All we need to do now is give them a little animation and possibly a new coat of paint.
To do this, it means we have to loop through them. That being the case, I really wouldn’t recommend making more than 50 or so particles, because it can get a little resource-intensive on older machines.
jQuery’s .each() function allows us to step through the array of elements, executing the code inside on each of them.
You’ll notice here we’re setting an x offset and a y offset. These determine which direction the particle is going to move in, and by how much. Using the same formula as above, these offsets will be random numbers in the range of -10 to 10 (for up/down and left/right, respectively).
Remember when we generated a random number above for our multicolored variable? Now let’s use it and see if we need to create a multi-colored explosion by changing the color of the current particle. I want multi-colored fireworks a little less than half the time, so I chose to use 5 as my cut-off point. You could change it around however you like.
This should be fairly self-explanatory at this point. If the value of multicolor is greater than 5, change the particle’s background by grabbing another random color from the colors array.
Now let’s put these particles in motion. We’re going to set up an animation sequence, based on the x and y offsets we determined above. To get the total length of each particles animation, we’ll multiply those offsets by 10. This gives us a nice spread between -100x, -100y and 100x, 100y, from the center point, meaning our explosion will have a maximum diameter of 200px. Depending on the size of your photo, you may want to make this larger, or smaller (Hint: If you’re making it larger, use bigger particles for a better effect).
As you can see, we also set the animation speed to 2.5 seconds (2500 milliseconds), which gives us a smooth, uniform expansion of particles out from our center point.
All we have to do now is sort out what to do with the particles once they’ve reached the end of their animation sequence. Well, what do fireworks do after they’re done fireworking? They drop a little and fade away, so we’ll make our particles do just that.
The above animation, executed after the expansion animation has completed, drops the particle by 20px while simultaneously fading it to 10% opacity. We use the “slow” duration preset, so the particles appear to “hang” slightly in the atmosphere.
That’s it! You can now call the explode() function to set off a firework on your photo, either triggering it manually, or calling it automatically when the page loads. In the example, I’m calling it every 3 seconds via setInterval.
Unfortunately, we can’t run the animation here, but you can check out a video demo below:
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