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Image: Police News - via Telegraph
This is very neat: the British Library, in collaboration with brightsolid online publishing, has digitized 4 million newspaper pages published in the UK since 1800, comprising of some 65 million articles. And they're not done yet: more than 650 million articles and 40 million pages are expected to be digitized when the project is completed in 2020.
You can search by keywords and types of articles, including family notices, obituaries and advertisements, at the British Newspaper Archive. It will, however cost you a money to gain access (you can get 48 hour access for £6.95 or an annual subscription for £79.95).
The scanning process is quite interesting:
Over the past year our team has been scanning up to 8,000 digital images per day from original bound newspaper pages. One benefit of being able to access the original bound volumes of newspapers and periodicals is that, unlike many other newspaper digitisation projects, we have been able to scan some of the rarest and most fragile newspapers in the collection.
We have even scanned single pages more than two feet wide! These publications are now not available for public view or access through the Library's reading rooms; however, they will be available to view on this website.
Our scanning uses five Zeutschel A0 scanners that create very high quality digital images of 400dpi in 24bit colour.
Some of the newspapers already scanned have resulted in single page image files being as large as 400MB! This is due to the very large physical size of the original newspaper pages, particularly around the turn of the 19th century.
Check it out: The British Newspaper Archive - via Telegraph
Carolyn Eakins has a goal to lose 100 pounds. To accomplish this, she is copying the diet of wartime rations from the 1940s. For a year.
The 1940s Experiment is a personal journey and social experiment living for one year on a wartime ration book diet to conquer obesity. 100 wartime recipes will be recreated with photos as well as experiences of living on a 1940s WW2 ration diet… 1 authentic wartime recipe will be re-created for every 1 lb lost.
My highest ever weight was 345 lbs… I started the 1940s Experiment at 315 lbs and today I am 277 lbs. I’ve had a few stops and started along the way but now I’m committed to seeing this through…
My goal is to shift 100 lb in one year using a 1940s ration diet as my foundation….. at the moment I am also vegan.
Eakin is now two months into the experiment. You can follow her progress and learn more about the wartime diet at her blog. Link -via Nag on the Lake
I don’t know about you guys, but my parents are terrible at computers and still use IE5. That’s why I think Update Your Parent’s Browser Day is a great new holiday we all should take advantage of:
This year, though, do something different. Don’t just explain to Grandpa or Mom or your father-in-law that there is a whole world of secure web browsing out there. No, take a firm stand. Tell them they won’t be able to watch funny fishing videos on YouTube with IE6 anymore. Usually, by this point, most parents are begging for help and you can extract excellent perquisites for your labor.
There you go kiddos, it’s just that easy to improve your parent’s online life.
Internet
meme is all fun and games until someone uses it to rob a convenience store.
Here's what happened when the criminally-inclined use social media to
organize the thievin' version of flash mobs: "flash robs."
It’s a fad that started in Washington, D.C. back in April, when around 20 people filed into a high-end jeans store in Dupont Circle and quickly made off with $20,000 in stock. Since then, the practice has spread — Dallas, Las Vegas, Ottawa, and Upper Darby, Pa. have all reported incidents since then — though the targets have gotten a bit more downscale, with most of the thefts taking place in convenience stores.
The latest crowd theft took place Saturday night at a 7-Eleven in Silver Spring, Md., and it fit the familiar pattern. Kids pour into the store, calmly help themselves to merchandise, and then stream out again.
Incredibly, in a poll taken in August, the National Retail Federation reported that a full 10 percent of businesses surveyed had experienced a “flash mob”-style theft.
Because many of these crimes remain unsolved, we don’t really know much about who these kids are, and how they get together. In Upper Darby, after around 40 teens hit a Sears at a shopping mall, the police were able to arrest 15, and the superintendent said they told him the event was planned out “earlier in the day on a social-networking site.”
Bill Wasik of Wired's Threat Level has the story: Link
Despite of what you may hear, cats are not the King of the Interweb. According to a new study of shared links by Bitly, dogs are still the top dog of cute animals on the Web:
While cats have a respectable lead, the winner is clear — dogs are 37% of the total results in the cute animal set, and feature in 50% more pages than cats!
Link - via ReadWriteWeb
You are now that much closer to Kevin Bacon. A recent study showed that Facebook has reduced the "Six Degrees of Separation" - the distance between you and any other person on Earth - down to four:
Using state-of-the-art algorithms developed at the Laboratory for Web Algorithmics of the Università degli Studi di Milano, we were able to approximate the number of hops between all pairs of individuals on Facebook. We found that six degrees actually overstates the number of links between typical pairs of users: While 99.6% of all pairs of users are connected by paths with 5 degrees (6 hops), 92% are connected by only four degrees (5 hops). And as Facebook has grown over the years, representing an ever larger fraction of the global population, it has become steadily more connected. The average distance in 2008 was 5.28 hops, while now it is 4.74.
Thus, when considering even the most distant Facebook user in the Siberian tundra or the Peruvian rainforest, a friend of your friend probably knows a friend of their friend. When we limit our analysis to a single country, be it the US, Sweden, Italy, or any other, we find that the world gets even smaller, and most pairs of people are only separated by 3 degrees (4 hops).
What
makes a viral video go viral? While cats certainly helped, the secret
sauce of making viral videos is a highly sought after knowledge. After
all, every advertising agency and their grandpas want to know a sure-fire
way of making their next ad-masquerading-as-viral-entertainment be seen
by millions of eyeballs.
Well, marketing professor Brent Coker of the University of Melbourne, Australia, came up with a recipe of viral videos. All you need, he says, are four things:
According to the algorithm, the four ingredients required for a video to go viral are congruency, emotive strength, network involvement, and something called "paired meme synergy."
First, the themes of a video must be congruent with people's pre-existing knowledge of the brand it is advertising. "For example, Harley Davidson for most people is associated with Freedom, Muscle, Tattoos, and Membership," Coker explained on his website. Videos that strengthen that association meet with approval, "but as soon as we witness associations with the brand that are inconsistent with our brand knowledge, we feel tension." In the latter case, few people will share the video, and it will quickly "go extinct."
Second, only viral-produced videos with strong emotional appeal make the cut, and the more extreme the emotions, the better. Happy and funny videos don't tend to fare as well as scary or disgusting ones, Coker said.
Third, videos must be relevant to a large network of people — college students or office workers, for example.
And last, Coker came up with 16 concepts — known on the Internet as "memes" — that viral-produced videos tend to have, and discovered that videos only go viral if they have the right pairings of these concepts. "When combined, some combinations appear to work better together than others," he told Life's Little Mysteries.
Natalie Wolchover of Life's Little Mysteries has more: Link
Here’s an idea I can really get behind! Flattr proposes a new holiday -Pay A Blogger Day on November 29th.
Flattr, a startup that seeks to motivate Internet users to pay for content they love, is launching the first Pay a Blogger Day Nov. 29. The team hopes inspired Internet users will send some monetary token of appreciation — by buying a song, ebook, t-shirt or giving them a “Flattr click” — towards their favorite songsters, podcast creators, open-source software developers and bloggers.
“We think that many blogs are insightful and witty and people just expect them to be free even though there are a lot of effort and love put into them,” Flattr co-founder Linus Olsson told Mashable. “It’s about time to try to give them something tangible back, at least one day of the year.”
Olssen knows that bloggers won’t get rich, but it may provide some needed encouragement.
“If you’re an amateur blogger and get one beer from your readers it could be the best beer you ever had,” Olsson says.
Link to story. Link to website.
Ben Mendelsohn gives us a look at “The Physical Underbelly of the Internet.”
The video is meant to remind viewers that the Internet is a physical, geographically anchored thing. It features a tour inside Telx’s 9th floor Internet exchange at 60 Hudson Street in New York City, and explores how this building became one of the world’s most concentrated hubs of Internet connectivity.
Read more about the film at Brain Pickings. Link
When you take the idea that a mustache can double for hair on the head, you get Moustair. It’s weird, I know. The tumblr site has quite a few examples of both famous men and submitted pictures. This one makes Hulk Hogan look a little bit like Captain Kangaroo, don’t you think? Link -via Breakfast Links
How many internet memes are in this song by the GAG Quartet? All of them! Well, according to the YouTube page, there are forty -in case you want to try to find them all. -via The Daily What
Neatorama readers might have a bit of a leg up on today’s Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss. In the wake of the “do a barrel roll” frenzy, they’ve looked up more neat tricks from Google and made some up from imagination as well. Your challenge is to determine which is which. I got 10 out of 12 correct, as I did NOT open a new tab to quick-check the answers. That would be too easy. Link
File this device under unique and useless, perfect fodder for blog posts! The device is the one and only analog Twitter client, Tweephone, and you must use the rotary dial to enter the letters, one turn at a time just like the old days.
If you have money to burn and love to Tweet then your house needs this decorative device. The rest of us will be more than happy just reading about it, i’m quite sure of that.
I learned this morning from reddit that the Google search page will do a barrel roll if you tell it to. That’s far from the only neat tricks Google has embedded in their sites for those who have the time to find them. For those who don’t, Buzzfeed has a list of ten you might have fun checking out. Link
Let’s get right into it, shall we?
Mark Your Territory is a new system that lets individuals check-in to foursquare by physically urinating at the actual location.
Social networking has gone too far. Because, you know, it’s just a matter of time before Facebook tries to duplicate this. Then it’ll be everywhere.
Please let this be a hoax. Please.
Mashable has a neat post listing the Halloween edition of Google Doodle since 1999: Link
If you like that, you can take a look at Google's official Google Logo page and see all the variations throughout the years.
Happy Halloween, everyone!
A group of Ohio University students urges you to be sensitive in your costuming decisions this Halloween. Don’t generate cheap laughs at the expense of other cultures, including vampires, My Little Ponies, mimes, and the cast of Jersey Shore. You’re better than that.
Link -via Boing Boing
This Twaggie, illustrated from a Tweet by @charstarlene, really hits close to home. My daughters are 13, 13, and 14, and their computers are in my office so they can feed off my modem. Purgatory, indeed! Link
Maybe. Parts of your brain, anyhow.
According to new research, those who are most active in social media have
larger brain parts than others (even when compared to those who are social
in real life):
How social you are on social networks may depend on the size of your brain, according to new research. Or, at least, the size of your superior temporal sulcus, middle temporal gyrus, entorhinal cortex and amygdalae.
The research, from University College in London, discovered that those who are more social in general tend to have larger amygdalae than their peers, but that those who are more social online also have increased sizes of the right superior temporal sulcus, the left middle temporal gyrus and the right entorhinal cortex. For those curious: The superior temporal sulcus is known to give cues about others' emotions, while the middle temporal gyrus helps us react to said social cues. The entorhinal cortex, meanwhile, has been linked to our memory.
Researchers are uncertain what this information means or, more interestingly, whether the larger brain sections are the cause or the result of the size of the subjects' social networks.
Graeme McMillan of TIME's Techland reports: Link
TODAY IS INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY. THE OFFICIAL CAPS LOCK DAY SITE LISTS OCTOBER 22 AND JUNE 28 BOTH AS CAPS LOCK DAYS. OTHERS CELEBRATE ON AUGUST 22. I DON’T KNOW WHO IS RIGHT. Agh, that is exhausting, especially since my caps lock key does not work. Link to official site. Link to Wikipedia. -via Metafilter
Shakespeare Schmakespeare. The YouTube Insult Generator, the brainchild of Adrian Holovaty, farts in the the general direction of the Shakespeare Insult Kit (sorry, John!)
Wired explains:
The simple tool, created by EveryBlock founder Adrian Holovaty, is a search engine that takes a term, then uses the YouTube API to find videos relevant to that term and grabs the latest 50 comments. From those 50 search results, the generator finds the ones that start with a number followed by terms such as “people,” “nincompoops” or “youtubers” (key aspects of quality comments), then replaces the number and the word “people” with the word “you.”
So far, Holovaty’s act of “poor man’s data mining,” which he said took about 45 minutes to build, only finds comments about 50 percent of the time. But some of its findings are pretty good (try “Tom Cruise,” “Michael Jackson” or even “Wired” — the results are amusing, but a little too blue to republish here).
The results for "Neatorama" insults are oddly amusing. Apparently, we are peace-, peanut butter jelly-, and penguin-hating vegetarians and tooth-fairy non-believers who fell off our unicycle and broke our bagpipes and jumped whenever a toy Xylophone is played. Oh, and we bred a pitty with a cat (huh?) and didn't get chicks. LOL!
What insults did the YouTube Insult Generator create for you?
Trolls are, of course, never a problem at Neatorama, for all of our commenters are of a genteel, refined, and learned sort. Also: good looking. But this Saturday Night Live clip does apply to some darker fora on the Internet.
-via Boing Boing
Occupy Wall Street is taking over all the news networks these days, but the truly important movement these days is the Occupy Sesame Street cause. Check out some of the key Tweets from the front lines over on BuzzFeed.
Grammar.net is holding a contest to determine the Best Grammar Blog of 2011. How many grammar blogs could there be? More than you think …there are 75 different blogs in the running! Although you shouldn’t vote for blogs you haven’t visited, there are links for each entered grammar blog so you can check them out. You might find a regular source of grammar help -or maybe even entertainment! Link -via TYWKIWDBI
We've got Books on Wheels, so why not the Internet on Wheels? Here comes the Google Internet Bus, a free, mobile cybercafe that roams the backroads of India, bringing the joy of the Interweb to many:
LIKE the travelling fairs that still roam India, a snazzy white bus trundles along the subcontinent's B-roads, stopping in small towns for a few days at a time and inviting locals into another world. But in place of tightrope-walking girls and performing monkeys, its main attraction is access to the internet. For some visitors, it is their first time online.
The Google Internet bus is a free, mobile cybercafe dreamed up by the search giant and run in association with BSNL, a large state-owned internet service provider (ISP). It has covered over 43,000km and passed through 120 towns in 11 states since it hit the road on February 3rd, 2009. Google estimates that 1.6m people have been offered their first online experience as a result. Of those, 100,000 have signed up for an internet connection of their own.
There is, however, a dark side to the project:
Like a high-school drug dealer, though admittedly less nefarious, the idea is to hook them young and keep them coming back. In return for its efforts, Google says it gains a better understanding of their needs. That, in turn, lets it develop products for the potentially huge local market.
Who knew that driving a street sweeper all over town, cleaning streets and stuff, wouldn’t make for a good video game? Probably everyone who has ever played a video game and doesn’t work as a street sweeper. Heck, I’d venture to guess that even a professional street sweeper wouldn’t want to go home and play a game involving street sweeping!
So, the question I have as an avid gamer is this- how do these awful video games keep getting made and released upon an unsuspecting public? My guess is an anti-video game conspiracy bent on turning gamers against their favorite pastime. Stop shaking your cane at me!
Cats doing invisible things are funny enough, but if you know someone who just doesn’t get it, plenty of folks are willing to explain it by Photoshopping the missing props into the pics. The results are not only unnecessary, but pleasingly odd. Link -via Rue The Day
If you’re a big fan of American Psycho then you might remember Dorsia, one of Patrick Bateman’s favorite spots to hang out. Of course, just because it’s an imaginary place doesn’t mean it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have its own Yelp page.
Judging by the reviews, it’s almost impossible to get a reservation and even if you do, it’s still a pricey meal (four dollar signs). That said, the sea urchin ceviche is great and New York Matinee hailed the peanut butter soup with smoked duck and mashed squash as a “playful, but mysterious little dish.”
This wouldn’t be nearly as sad if everyone who ever used YouTube couldn’t attest to the fact that it’s totally true.
Link Via Laughing Squid
If you are a fan of community, you may have seen their parody of Doctor Who on an episode a few weeks back. If not, here’s a link.
So why am I bringing this up now? As it turns out, the internet is even geekier than most of us imagine and the show’s parody, called Inspector Spacetime, now has it’s own fan page on Tumblr filled with speculation about who will play the next inspector and what the fan’s favorite episodes are. Now that’s something even a sitcom writer couldn’t have predicted.
Link Via The Mary Sue
