Archive Category: Blog & Internet

Ugliest Product of the Year Contest

The Oops Design Awards have taken it upon themselves to do something that should have been done a long time ago -they have created an award for the ugliest, silliest and most useless product designs of the year. As you may have guessed, the lamp above is in the running for ugliest. It is the Oswine Lamp designed by Johanness Hemann. The nominees gallery actually has a few items I like, but for the most part it’s brimming with hillariously hideous items.

Link

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Smart-Kit: Seriously Fun Online Jigsaw Puzzle Website

I *love* jigsaw puzzles but haven’t had the time to put one together since I have kids. Who has the time? (Plus, I’m sure that if I even try now pieces would be eaten forthwith by said kids). So, when Smart-Kit asked me to do a review of their online puzzles, I jumped at the opportunity.

First of all, there are limitations to a Flash-based online jigsaw puzzle: the workspace is limited and the pieces are already rightside up. But the benefits far outweigh the limitations for a casual gamer like me. For one, you’d never lose a piece! Pieces virtually snap together when you get the right ones next to each other - and no rotating necessary (so I guess that rightside up pieces is actually a benefit after all).

You can select how complicated you’d like the puzzle dimensions to be: 4×3, 8×6 (the one above), 12×9 or if you like a challenge, 16×12. See the pic above? It took me about 8 minutes to complete - just the right amount of time for a little fun break at work.

We’ve covered Smart-Kit before on Neatorama (they also have many more non-jigsaw puzzles - like the SwizzlePop! and the Hidden Object Puzzle: Find the Bear, for instance), so for a quick online fun, give ‘em a try!

Link | Smart-Kit’s Jigsaw Puzzles

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Web Side Story: Internet, The Musical

What could be better than the Internet? How about the Interweb, the musical? Here’s Web Side Story (but of course), a musical by College Humor about all the good things on the Net in the style of West Side Story. Leonard Bernstein is probably spinning in his grave.

Web Side Story, written and directed by Sam Reich, produced by Eva Wong.

Hit play or go to Link [College Humor Video] - Thanks Stephanie!

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There, I Fixed It

There, I Fixed It is a blog profiling the strange and imaginative ways people rig up what they need with what they have. You’ll be forgiven if you thought this radiator repair job was supposed to be a still. Link -via Metafilter

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“Swan Flu” and Other Commonly Misspelled Search Terms of the Month

All of you Neatoramanauts know that we love tpyos here at Neatorama, but even we know how to spell Susan Boyle, MySpace and Swine Flu - those are just three of the most commonly misspelled (or perhaps mistyped) searches in Yahoo!

Vera H-C Chan of Yahoo! Buzz’ The Buzz Log has the list:

Recent Orthographic Abuses of the English Language on Yahoo!, Past 30 Days

* Swan Flu (for Swine Flu)
* Susan Boil (for "Britain’s Got Talent" contender Susan Boyle)
* Brack Obama (for U.S. President Barack Obama)
* Sonia Sotomeyer (for Supreme Court justice nominee Sonia Sotomayor)
* Rachel Ray (for Food Network host Rachael Ray)
* Paperview boxing (for cable programming pay-per-view boxing)
* Amtrack (for train system Amtrak)
* Wallmart (for retailer Wal-Mart)
* Farrah Faucet (for actress Farrah Fawcett)
* Rod Steward (for singer Rod Stewart)
* Arlene Specter (for Senator Arlen Specter)
* “Dancing With the Starts” (for ABC reality competition Dancing With the Stars)
* Bea Author” (for the late comedian Bea Arthur)
* Brittany Spears (for singer Britney Spears)
* Chris Allen (for “American Idol” winner Kris Allen)
* Configure worm (for computer virus Conficker worm)
* Mysapce (for MySpace)

Link - via USA Today

Previously on Neatorama: Swine Flu: Bacon’s Revenge

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Interview With A Capybara Owner

Capybara owner Melanie Typaldos gave a great interview about her unusual pet on the Estatic Days blog. Her pet is named Caplin Rous as in Rodents Of Unusual Size from the Princess Bride. Some of her stories about walking Caplin Rous are priceless. Read the whole thing for some great fun, but here’s a few highlights:

“In a single word, I would describe him as needy. He always wants to be with me and can “eep” loudly if he knows I am nearby but he can’t get to me. He follows me around the house and the yard and expects me to watch him while he swims or grazes. He panics if he doesn’t know where I am. When he thinks it’s time for me to come home from work, he will go to the gate and wait for me.”

“When people hear him they are always amazed. His voice is often mistaken for a birdsong. When he’s nervous he sounds like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. When he’s happy he sounds like a Geiger counter.”

Link

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Chew on This: Blog About Chewing Gums

It’s something that most of us do on a regular basis, but don’t it much thought.  Not so for Shannon and Katie of Gum Alert blog. These two girls (who obviously have a lot of time on their hands) are on their way to review just about every type of chewing gum on the market, in an eloquent, almost OCD-like fashion. 

Take, for instance, their review of Orbit Maui Melon Mint:

Flavor: No. Just, no. Is this supposed to taste like watermelon? Or Mint? Or both? Because it doesn’t taste like either. It smells peculiarly like Choward’s Violets, and I bet that’s what I’m tasting, too. The taste is completely nondescript, vaguely sweet and somewhat bitter. It leaves a gross taste in the back of my mouth that I associate with “aftertaste,” but it happens DURING the chew, not after. I don’t want aftertaste in mid-chew. Big fail. In fact - once I remove the gum from my mouth, the actual aftertaste is, in fact, more pleasant than the duringtaste itself.

Texture: Like most Orbit, the texture is fine. Starts off soft, and firms up to be the perfect chewable consistency. If this review was based on texture alone, it’d get far more gumballs.

Overall: I cannot recommend Orbit Maui Melon Mint to any sane person. There are far better melony gums on the market, if that’s what you’re craving for. I’d even suggest resorting to a sugared watermelon-flavored gum - a Hubba Bubba or a BubbleYum - if you absolutely have to. But stay away from this one. Stay far away.

Rating: oo (two gumballs)

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Spare.

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Photographic Height

If you were ever a witness to a crime, and you were asked to provide the height and weight of the suspect, would you be able to do it? Do you have any idea what 266 lb on a 6′3" frame look like?

This may help: Rob Cockerham of cockeyed.com is creating photographic chart of height/weight. You can submit your own image, given that the particular body height/weight slot isn’t taken …

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by seekshelter.

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Neatorama Update: Environmental Graffiti Interview and Twitter

Environmental Graffiti Interview

Karl Fabricius of Environmental Graffiti has just posted an interview with me about Neatorama and how the blog came to be. Actually it’s a story I’ve never told anyone online - so it’s a neat exclusive for Environmental Graffiti. Here’s the interview: Link - Thanks Karl, that was a treat!

Neatorama on Twitter!

A while ago, I posted about Neatorama’s account on Twitter. Long story short, we got the account @neatorama back amicably from a fan (Thanks Mike!) … and now am wondering what we should do with it.

Should we continue displaying Neatorama’s posts (using Twitterfeed?) or should we do Twitter only content (like mini-posts)? Or both? What do you think?

The only thing we’ve decided so far is that we should do twitter-only contests - so if you’re on Twitter, here’s Neatorama Twitter page: Link

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Wikipedia as a Book

What would Wikipedia look like if it were printed out as a traditional encyclopedia? Rob Matthews decided to make it his art project: behold, the 5,000 pages of Wikipedia (featured articles only, mind you) in book form: Link
- via Cliff Pickover’s Reality Carnival

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Koogle: The Kosher Search Engine

Orthodox jews are restricted from surfing the web in case they run across religiously questionable and sexually explicit materials. But Koogle, a search engine launched by Yossi Altman, may change all that:

Yossi Altman said Koogle, a play on the names of a Jewish noodle pudding and the ubiquitous Google, appears to meet the standards of Orthodox rabbis, who restrict use of the Web to ensure followers avoid viewing sexually explicit material.

The site, at www.koogle.co.il, omits religiously objectionable material, such as most photographs of women which Orthodox rabbis view as immodest, Altman said.

Its links to Israeli news and shopping sites also filter out items most ultra-Orthodox Israelis are forbidden by rabbis to have in their homes, such a television sets.

"This is a kosher alternative for ultra-Orthodox Jews so that they may surf the Internet," Altman said by telephone.

Link

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Missouri Family Christmas Photo Turns Up in Czech Ad

As if we needed further proof of the vast reaches of the internet, and the frightening reality that what people put on the net stays on the net, comes the story of the Smith family of St. Louis.

Danielle Smith had taken a photo of her family last year and sent it to friends, as well as posted it on social networking sites.  The photo shows her and her husband holding two kids.

About 10 days ago, one of Smith’s college friends was driving through Prague when he spotted their huge smiling faces in the window of a store specializing in European food. He snapped a few pictures and sent them to a flabbergasted Smith.

“It’s a life-size picture in a grocery store window in Prague — my Christmas card photo!” said Smith, 36, who lives in the St. Louis suburb of O’Fallon.

Mario Bertuccio, who owns the Grazie store in Prague, said the photo was from the Internet. Details were sparse, but he said he thought it was computer-generated. When told it was a real photo — of a real family — he said he started taking steps to remove it.

“We’ll be happy to write an e-mail with our apology,” said Bertuccio, who said he would send the Smiths a bottle of good wine if they lived in his eastern European country.

The Smiths and photographer Gina Kelly hadn’t authorized anyone to use the pictures. Kelly said she has asked a professional photographers’ organization to help figure out how her image wound up in Prague.

Link | The ad in question

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Geekazoid.

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Amazing Multicolr Search Lab

With Multicolr Search Lab by Idée Labs, you can browse through 10 million of Flickr’s most interesting Creative Commons images according to colors (in this case, a set of up to 10 colors). It’s quite speedy and neat!

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by McJohnny.

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The Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year 2008 Competition Winners

It may have taken some time to decide them, but the last votes have been cast and the Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year 2008 has been chosen.  This extraordinary set of images certainly puts to rest the notion that the best pictures on the internet are always copyrighted by their owners.

Photo credit: T. Nathan Mundhenk (personal website)

4chan has animated gifs of a certain kind but the ones on Wikimedia are of a completely different ilk aka education. This amazing gif shows the transformation of the cicada from its pupa to the adult form. Although the whole process took over two hours there is a gap in the middle of about thirty minutes while the cicada took a rest from the strenuous activity of becoming an adult. Other than that gap the shots are at intervals of thirty seconds and this builds up beautifully in to a record of one insect’s emergence.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by taliesyn30.

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Happiest People Ever

Happiest People Ever is a tumblr blog dedicated to preserving photographs of happy people who just happen to forget to smile when their photos were taken. Can’t you see that they’re smiling on the inside? Link - via Look At This

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Drama Button

Remember the dramatic prairie dog? Well, here’s what he knew from way back when in 2007: dramatic moments in your life need a soundtrack.

But where can you get one? Just head on over to the Drama Button. It’s for all of life’s unnecessary drama - via The Presurfer

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Twitter Treasure Hunt

Anthony Gardiner of Wellington, New Zealand bought an engagement ring for his girlfriend, but she turned him down. He can’t return the ring and doesn’t want to keep it as he considers it bad luck, so he’s staging a treasure hunt!

Anyone keen to pick up the ring, valued at NZ$5,000 ($3,268), will need to be in New Zealand’s capital city, Wellington, on Saturday to join the hunt, the Dominion Post newspaper reported.

Clues to the ring’s whereabouts will start being posted on social networking site Twitter (http:/twitter.com/donoogle_com) at 8 a.m. local time on Saturday (2000 GMT on Friday).

Link to story. Link to Twitter feed.

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Planet In Action: Ship Simulator

Wanna-be pilots have Flight Simulator, Microsoft’s iconic computer game, but what about those who want to steer a cargo ship? Enter PlanetInAction’s "Ships", an online simulation that uses Google Earth to let you get in touch with your inner helmsman and steer your own fleet of ships from barges to the cruise ship Queen Mary 2.

Link | YouTube Clip - via Kris Abel’s Tech Life

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Twitter Quote Cross Stitch

What do you get when you mix Twitter with a crafster? How about this twitter quote (michael Ian Black) put in cross stitch, by Julie Zidel of You Heart.Us:

I’m not really sure where I should begin here. I guess we should go way back the beginning, last Wednesday. I’m in the office sitting at my desk eating lunch and making my daily rounds through facebook, flickr and twitter. I take a look at my twitter favorites page. The tweets on this page. These tweets range from the the funny to the mundane to the completely absurd but they all have one thing in common. They amuse me. I thought it was a shame that people were out there living life and not even knowing what they are missing out on. Then it hit me! It is my duty to spread the joy through cross stitch.

Link - via Craftzine

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LOL Fat Cats

by Rande Daykin

Move over, LOLcats! There’s a new meme in town. Here’s LOL Fat Cats: Link (Now, why didn’t I think of this?) - via Nag on the Lake

Previously on Neatorama: Top 15 Amazingly Fat Cats

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Internet Meme Scenery

Andy Baio of waxy.org blog posted 23 photos of backgrounds from various internet memes. Like Garfield without Garfield, the result is strangely disconcerting.

Would you still recognize what these Internet memes are, well, without the actual memes?

These photos are banal out of context. Only someone familiar with the original memes would sense something’s amiss, like the set of a play waiting for the actors to stumble into history.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Christophe.

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Wolfram Alpha: Blind to The Blogosphere

Since its debut a little over a week ago, I've been playing with Wolfram|Alpha. For those of you who don't know, it is an ambitious project by Stephen Wolfram (of Mathematica fame).

Wolfram Alpha (I know, technically, it's Wolfram|Alpha, but I don't want to type in that vertical bar all the time) is not a search engine, in a sense that it returns webpages as query results like Google does - rather, it is a "computational knowledge engine." You and I may simply call it an "answer engine," ask it a question and it'll come up with the (usually right on the money) answer.

What is butter? Wolfie knows - it'll display the average nutrition facts. Ask it to convert $1 to British pounds, or the distance between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Who starred in Casablanca? How is the weather in New York on May 26, 1987? How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

Impressive, eh?

Now, Stephen is a very smart guy. Indeed, he wrote his first paper on particle physics at the tender age of 16, received a PhD from Caltech at 20, and became a professor there at 21. And to be fair, Wolfram Alpha is very young and heavily geared towards computations. Furthermore, the scope of what the engine "knows" in terms of content is limited to areas covered by trusted sources like reference libraries fed to it by its programmers.

But currently, there's one large gaping hole missing from Wolfram Alpha: it is blind to blogs. Sure it knows about the meaning of life, and it has its own blog, but it knows nothing - nada, zip, zilch - about the blogosphere.

Technorati? Maybe you meant technology instead. According to Wolfie, Gizmodo = komodo (the island, the language, or the movie - but strangely not the animal); Techcrunch = Techuchulco (a city in Mexico). Boing Boing = Boina (a volcano).

Ask it about Neatorama and Wolfie thinks that you mean Panorama (which I learned is actually a city in Greece, that, at the time of my query, has a warm 73°F weather with relative humidity of 50%, wind of 7 mph and few clouds).

At least this blog fared better than Lifehacker, which got "lumpsucker" instead.

Heck, ask what is a blog?, and it'll think you're asking about logarithms:

Still, overall, I think Wolfram Alpha is a brilliant first step towards (dare I say it) an artificial intelligence - a universal computer a la Isaac Asimov's fantastic short story The Last Question. And I'm sure the hardworking people over at Wolfram Research will rectify this oversight soon.

But whatever you do, don't get Wolfie mad. This is what you'll get.

If you don't stop, it'll probably shove you out the pod bay door ...

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Trivia Hunt at mental_floss: Win $100!

Our pal mental_floss is having another trivia hunt: over the course of 5-days, they will present a trivia challenge - the first to submit the right answers will win a $100 shopping spree in their store.

Check it out: Link - Thanks Jason!

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The Science News Cycle

Biggify at: PhD Comics by Jorge Cham

Oh, this is SO true! Jorge Cham of PhD Comics (which stands for Piled Higher & Deeper, if you must know) nailed it with this cartoon panel, The Science News Cycle, about how a scientific finding gets exaggerated and distorted as it trickles down through "The Internets" and the media.

As proud member of the blogosphere and a trained scientist myself, I’m happy to report that Neatorama works hard to wrestle and twist a lengthy scientific finding full of caveats into short (and hopefully witty) couple of sentences with the purpose of partly enlightening you, partly entertaining ourselves and, of course, driving traffic to the blog. The scientific truth be damned!

Link - via The Zeray Gazette

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Best Job for Facebook Addicts and Twitterholics Ever: $10K a Month to Tweet

Hang out, drink wine, send tweets and Facebook updates all day … and get paid for it! Can this possibly be the best job for a twitterholic ever?

Sonoma County winemaker Murphy-Goode is looking for a "lifestyle correspondent" that makes it look good, all for the sweet salary of $10K a month plus living accomodations:

We at the Murphy-Goode Winery got to thinking about the new age of communications and we figured it was a pretty good thing. So to get going, we’re looking for someone (maybe you) who really knows how to use Web 2.0 and Facebook and blogs and social media and YouTube and all sorts of good stuff like that — to tell the world about our wines and the place where we live: the Sonoma County Wine Country.

In exchange, we’re offering you a “Really Goode Job” — a six-month job paying $10,000 a month plus accommodations!

We want to hire a social media whiz (your title will be “Murphy-Goode Wine Country Lifestyle Correspondent”) who will report on the cool lifestyle of Sonoma County Wine Country and, of course, tell people what you’re learning about winemaking.

Did we mention that the compensation was $10,000 per month Plus accommodations in a beautiful home in picturesque Healdsburg, a popular vacation destination in our neck of the woods. Working hours are flexible. And all you have to do is experience wine and good living, and then tell people about it. (Do you play Poker, or Liar’s Dice? Don’t worry; we’ll teach you.)

Here’s where you’d sign up: Link - via SFoodie

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Junk Shop Photos

Take all those photographs you’ve got collected in treasured photo albums and imagine them suddenly discarded in a dusty old box in the corner of a junk shop and removed from any context that might explain just who the people in them are or what the heck they were doing when those pictures were taken. Photographer Wesley Treat has made a hobby out of sifting through these orphaned snapshots from other people’s lives and plucking out the most unusual and enigmatic, and has recently launched a blog titled Junk Shop Photos so other people can enjoy them and mock them with their own captions.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by RR.

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Three Wolf Moon Shirt

Sales of the “Three Wolf Moon Shirt” are up 2300% after word got out that it was getting priceless customer reviews on Amazon. Hundreds of reviewers are vying to be the funniest. The first one says, in part:

This item has wolves on it which makes it intrinsically sweet and worth 5 stars by itself, but once I tried it on, that’s when the magic happened. After checking to ensure that the shirt would properly cover my girth, I walked from my trailer to Wal-mart with the shirt on and was immediately approached by women. The women knew from the wolves on my shirt that I, like a wolf, am a mysterious loner who knows how to ‘howl at the moon’ from time to time (if you catch my drift!). The women that approached me wanted to know if I would be their boyfriend and/or give them money for something they called mehth. I told them no, because they didn’t have enough teeth, and frankly a man with a wolf-shirt shouldn’t settle for the first thing that comes to him.

It gets better from there. The manufacturer is not exactly pleased with the reviews. Link to story. Link to reviews. -via Fark

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What Makes A Meme Successful?

You know you’ve made it as a meme when someone put a giant mural up …
Josh Zubkoff did one on the Invisible Bike LOLcat in a building in San Francisco: Link - via MySA Blog Favorite office Time Wasters

John of The Zeray Gazette asks this interesting question: what causes an Internet meme? What gives some web sensation staying power?

What makes some video, idea, or motif a predominant meme? Why do people blog about bacon, zombies, and lolcats, but not so much about pork shoulder roast, mummies, and parakeets? Why does one guy mouthing the words to Numa Numa in front of his PC become famous, while almost all others who do likewise do not?

John went on to explain his theory, which includes penetrability (i.e. how a successful meme crosses niche web communities) and instantaneous comphrehensibility (how easily it can be grasped in under 10 seconds).

Actually, I can answer that question with one word: 4chan.

What do you think? Link

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Facebook Justice: Fighting Crime with Facebook

Stupid criminals who love to brag about their crimes aren’t new, but add social networking to the mix and police have a new tool to bust them. It’s a new kind of justice … Facebook justice!

Asylum has a nifty post about the 6 crimes solved by the popular social networking website. For example:

Lesson #1: If you spray paint a special tag all around town, you might not want to brand it to your Facebook page.

We totally get the need to broadcast talents to friends on Facebook — that’s what it’s for, right? But unless you’re Banksy, your masterful tags probably won’t go over too well with the feds. That’s why, when specific tags were appearing all over Winnipeg, officers received a tip directing them to Facebook, where they found the same designs on an 18-year-old’s page.

Lesson #2: If you get caught on surveillance camera, just because you don’t have a mug shot on file doesn’t mean your face isn’t already out there for the finding.

Smile! … Or not. The Queenstown police of southern New Zealand nabbed their first Facebook crook after they caught a good shot of a burglar looking directly at the security camera after removing his mask. Quickly after posting the shot to their two-month-old page, tipsters sent suggestions and they identified the 21-year-old thief.

Link

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Got $15,000? You Too Can Intern at HuffPo!

Want to "jumpstart your career in the blogosphere" with an internship at one of the world’s largest blogs? Arianna Huffington’s blog Huffington Post, currently ranked #1 by Technorati, has an opening. But there’s a catch: you have to pay at least $15,000 …

Forget a paying internship. Forget working for free. You’re going to have to fork over more than $13,000 if you want to intern at HuffPo.

Oh, and did we mention you’d only be there for two or three months? At least you get to pick which office you’d work at — New York or D.C.

Incredibly, so far 10 people have bid on the internship, which is "valued" at $500, on online auction site charitybuzz.com. HuffPost founder Arianna Huffington donated the internship.

Link

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