So me and James decided to take the summer off Chinposin.  I think we needed the rest. I think we *all* needed the rest.  But while we have been on holiday, the chins have continued to roll in.  Even scaryer is being at a conference and hearing someone shout “Chinpose” whenever someone gets a camera out.  Brings a huge smile to my face.

So back by popular demand this Friday 17th October, Chinposin 2.0 is launched.  Get your avatars ready, and be sure to take chinposin photos and tag them chinposin on flickr.  That’s authority.

OK So this is a late post, but it deserves capturing on the chinposin blog. This is our lead developer Chris Dalby, aka yellowpark. Last week’s Chinposin theme was A Younger You. It generated some great pictures of the community. But Chris really won with this effort-both a younger him and a younger chin!

Today is the first day for a few weeks that I have released updates to the chinposin platform. Today we implemented a new way for archiving and resizing your images.

If you visit your homepage, like mine, you will see that each avatar now has it’s own embed widget, and there is also an Ambient Avatar widget. Your Ambient Avatar is your current avatar. So if you change your twitter picture, your Ambient Avatar will be updated wherever it is embedded.

Your original image is now downloaded and this image is then used to create a 100 x 100 thumbnail that is used for the widgets. If your original image is smaller than 100 x 100, your widget will look distorted.

The next chinposin release will generate images at the following sizes:

512 x 512, 256 x 256, 128 x 128, 100 x 100, 48 x 48, 32 x 32, 16 x 16.

You will then get the ability to embed any of your images in your avatar timeline, at any of the image sizes, anywhere you want.

This poses a few questions for us technically, but more so for the community. Looking though the growing archive of avatars, it is not common for people to upload images sized as big as 512 x 512. A lot of people upload thumbnail sized images smaller than 100 x 100. So it is clear that avatar standards require a change of thinking for both service operators and users.

So in terms of sizes, always upload the largest image as possible for your twitter picture. This will then give you more flexibility for circulating you image. We will then center and crop and size your image to all the sizes.

We have been planning to implement this for a long time. My only defence is that I have a day job, and until some angels find us, the updates are happening as and when.

When your community does the work you have to respond. So here finally is some chinposin bloggery. The theme for today – al fresco chinposin came from our chief chinvangelist ThinGuy/ChinGuy. And when Andy Scherer jumped in with this beautiful head in the clouds image what could I do… blogged!

For those of you with short memories Andy also gave us this classic image a few weeks back.

The chinposin crew really needs to get those t-shirts done. Your creativity needs rewarding people!

I don’t know where these themes come from. Really. Today’s is model behaviour. These days when I am walking around I try and capture any good chinposes on whatever camera is to hand. Like this one.

Which became an avatar like so:

So we have had some great examples of model behaviour/the line of beauty… The best so far, imho, come from suki:

One reason I like it a lot the echoes of an earlier fantastic chinpose by Oliver. Annoyingly that was before we had a timeline… As soon as i get a copy i will post it here.

That’s Andy Scherer, giving Den a run for his money. More New Jersey than Costa Del Crime though.

Its not every year you come across a stylish geek, so when you do you want to capture the moment, like our soul mates over at DFOF. In that spirit check out @aneel today. Just check out that hat. Smokin! Where’d you get the shades, man?

And when we grow up we want to go to the same kind of chindigs:

Today Josh Porter posted a great little avatar.

But he wasn’t wearing shades, so we asked him in the back channel for an update. Aces!

@dahowlett tells me that steve gillmor doesn’t get chinposin. Well alrighty.

This is what I think:

	monkchips I mean how can you look at @marilynpratt’s image today and not “get” chinposin? http://tinyurl.com/3adbag less than a minute ago from web
	monkchips a backchannel for the semantics of emotion and play. gesture. 3 minutes ago from web
	monkchips ambient avatars enable new modes of ambient intimacy. its all about the gesture. its all about the raised eyebrow, the shrug, the grimace 3 minutes ago from web
	monkchips when i use an ambient avatar i don’t interrupt your stream with a link, or tinyurl. semantics in flight, in one nice neat thumbnail. gesture 5 minutes ago from web
	monkchips stevegillmor will understand chinposin when he realises its all about the gesture, rather than the link. active ambient avatars are gestural 6 minutes ago from web

We’ve called out Marilyn Pratt here before, but its worth doing so again. A gillmorian gesture, a macleodian social object, this image is… deep. As is Marilyn.

Johnnie turns the lights out with authority. Snoozechin.

Over at his blog I also noticed this bonus pic which I hope he uses for a chinposin avatar one day. Its kind of scary. The authority of secrecy. shhhhhh…..Or he could just use it as his “confidentiality” pimping avatar.