Blog2Book - Transforming Blogs into Photo Books Employing Aesthetic Principles

摘要

For many people web blogs are the preferred means to document important moments of their lifes, e.g. a holiday trip or the year abroad. Such blogs contain photos and textual descriptions of events in a well-structured form. However, while being a perfect means to share such important moments with friends and family, blogs remain digital and thus do not provide the valuable experience of a physical souvenir of the documented event, such as a photo book. In this paper we therefore propose a solution to combine the advantages of both web blogs and printed photo books. We bridge the gap between the digital and physical world by providing a system to automatically transform a blog into a photo book. For this we employ our system for automatic page layout following aesthetic principles. The structure of the blog is reflected in the overall layout of the photo book. We also enrich the resulting photo book with additional content from the web by employing links and location information present in the blog entries. The result is a physical counterpart to the original blog in a nice layout. Our approach is implemented as a web-based rich media application.