Archive Category: Blog & Internet
Learn Something Every Day
Submit a fact to the website Learn Something Every Day and you may see it turned into a brightly-colored poster. There’s a new fact posted each day. They don’t even have to be factual facts, since Mel Blanc was not allergic to carrots. Link -via Everlasting Blort
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What 20 Websites Looked Like When They Were First Launched
Image: Daily Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph has an image gallery of twenty websites when they were first published. It includes Google, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Craiglist. The image above is of the White House’s website when it was launched in 1994.
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Happy 4th Blogiversary, Miss Cellania!
Oh, where are me manners – with everything that’s been going on with preparing for the new baby and all, I’ve been neglecting doing my usual round of visiting my favorite blogs, including those run by Neatoramanauts, for quite a while.
So happy belated Blogiversary to Miss Cellania, who celebrated her fourth year blogging on August 25! Her blog just passed two million hits, too.
Here’s her post marking the occassion: Link – it’s definitely worth a read because she posted a link to her wedding photos … and why wasn’t I told that the photos were up?
Does this mean that we have to start calling her Mrs Cellania? And since mr. Wonderful wanted to remain anonymous, perhaps we should start calling him … Ed Cetera. Sorry, I blame sleeplessness for the pun.
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9/9/09: A Day Without Cats on the Internet
(Video Link)
The pop culture blog Urlesque has called for next Wednesday, September 9th, to be a day in which cats are absent from the Internet. Ostensibly, Urlesque seeks to end the meme-driven exploitation of cats, but I suspect that it may find broad support for the movement among those who weary of lolcats, piano-playing cats, and other examples of feline ubiquity on the Internet.
What do you think? Should September 9th be a day without cats on the Internet?
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When was the Internet Born?
It was 40 years ago today, September 2, 1969 that scientists connected two computers at UCLA with a 15-foot cable and the machines were able to communicate with each other. The test data was meaningless, but the breakthrough eventually led to the formation of the internet, but there were plenty of other milestones. Which date is the birthday of the internet?
September 2, 1969: First time two computers communicated with each other.
Oct 29, 1969: Message sent from computer to computer in different locations.
1971: The first email was sent.
Jan 1, 1983: ARPANET adopted the standard TCP/IP protocol.
March 1989: Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web.
April 22, 1993: Mosaic became the first web browser.
Which date should we designate as the birthday of the internet? Link -via Buzzfeed
(image credit: Flickr user lemonfridge)
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Doodurls - Oodles of Doodles
Got doodles? Here’s a blog called Doodurls that wants to display your doodles. Most people doodle during boring meetings, interminable classes, while waiting on hold… Doodurls wants to show them off, and they aren’t picky about your talent level either. On Doodurls, everyone’s got talent!
It’s easy to submit your latest margin masterpiece – take a pic of it or scan it, upload it somewhere (anywhere) and tweet the link to them on Twitter. They do the rest. It’s a lot of fun to send your own in or just see the weird things that go on inside people’s heads when they’re bored!
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by 
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Tee Virus: A Nifty New T-Shirt Community
Our good friend Rommel Santor (who coded the Neatorama Upcoming Queue) and Brian "Dag" Houston of VideoSift have just launched a new venture: Tee Virus, an online community where you can create your very own T-shirt design, submit it to the community for feedback, and – if it passes muster – get it printed and sold through the website. Best of all, you’ll earn cash with every shirt sold.
I’ve got my TBIF T-shirt and am happy as a clam with it 
Check ‘em out: Link
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Bacon Photo Contest
Do you have a special connection with bacon? Can you get it to pose for you in sexy positions? The Official Bacon Contest at Mr. Baconpants might be your chance to win all kinds of glorious bacon prizes. Categories include:
Most Creative: This is a photo that shows a creative way to use bacon. Think bacon AK-47 or Waken Bacon. Funniest: This is a photo that incorporates bacon that will make us laugh. Think Lol Cats or Fail photos. Sexiest: This is a photo of bacon that will make us drool for two reasons. Think bacon babes.
To enter, send your photo to jmosely@mrbaconpants.com and use “photo contest” as the subject line.
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Personas
Personas is an application that searches your name on the web and returns a profile of what it finds. Mine is pictured.
Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently on display at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab. It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.
I was surprised to see I had more “sports” in my profile than anything else -must’ve been the Olympics. And it’s nice that my “legal” was bigger than my “illegal”! But the most interesting part was seeing all those things people said about me while it was processing. The one that stands out was “Your inquiry ‘Miss Cellania is an idiot’ did not return any results.” Ha! (Of course, now that I’ve written it out, there will be results for that query.) Try your own name and puzzle over the results. Link -via the Presurfer
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Insert "The Cheeky Squirrel" Into Your Own Photo
The "cheeky squirrel," originally posted at National Geographic and made famous by Neatorama’s own Upcoming Queue, has now gone viral on the internet.
Hundreds of photos, including many famous ones, have been modified by adding the ground squirrel. Now you can do so with your own photo or one of your favorites from the web.
The simplest generator I’ve encountered is "The Squirrelizer." You cannot, however, upload an image from your computer; you will need to
use one that has a url (stored somewhere on a blog or in an
image library such as Imageshack).
After that, the generator is intuitive. If you don’t have an online account where you can store the image, just take a screen shot of your creation.
Link – via lutralutra
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by 
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Dinosaur Twitter
I’ve had some fun today with this generator that marries random Twitter updates with the graphics from Dinosaur Comics. The generator was created by Idefex, who enlarged upon an idea from Bing. Hit the link, then refresh to get new text with your dinosaurs. Link -via Metafilter
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How Secure Are Your Private Photos?
The Found Photos project consists of a collection of private photos which file-sharing users have unknowingly made public when installing P2P software.
The result is a pastiche of modern life upon which you can’t feel at least slighty guilty for intruding:
The Found Photos project started in 2004, while searching for mp3’s using a filesharing program.
After downloading a folder of mp3’s, I came across a folder named ‘pictures’ inside of the album folder, and found a handful of digital camera photos. This made me wonder what else was out there, what people are publicly sharing – after a few quick keyword searches I came across thousands of them publicly shared.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by 
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Hackers Hacked by Fake ATM
At the recent DefCon hackers’ convention in Las Vegas, a fake ATM deceived many hackers in attendance:
An organizer for the conference said security authorities seized the device. It’s not known how long the ATM was in the hotel or whether it was placed there by a DefCon attendee to catch his fellow hackers or simply by an outside criminal group trying to target conference attendees.
Witnesses say the kiosk was well-placed to avoid surveillance cameras….
Markus said it was clear to him the ATM was fake when he looked at the smoked glass on the front of the machine and noticed something funny about it. When he beamed a flashlight through the glass, instead of seeing a camera behind it, he saw the PC that was set up to siphon card data.
The ATM had been placed right outside the hotel’s security office.
Link via Crunch Gear
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Analyzing National Moods Through Song Lyrics and Speeches
Christopher M. Danforth and Peter Sheridan Dodds, statisticians at the University of Vermont, analyzed song lyrics, blog posts, and speeches for certain emotional keywords in order to discern the collective moods of the American people over time:
Still, the University of Vermont study presents what could be a complementary measure, and it provides a few decent cocktail-party nuggets along the way. Dr. Dodds and Dr. Danforth downloaded the lyrics to 232,574 songs by 20,025 artists released between 1960 and 2007, from the Web site hotlyrics.net. From another site, wefeelfine.org, they pulled more than nine million sentences that used some form of the verb feel — as in “I feel relieved” — from 2.3 million blogs from 2005 to 2009. They also analyzed State of the Union speeches going back to George Washington’s. They then rated the psychological charge, or “valence,” of a significant subset of the words on a 10-point scale: from triumphant (8.82) and love (8.72) down to disgusted (2.45) and suicide (1.25).
Some of the findings were expected. Sept. 11, 2001, was rock bottom, for instance. Others were less so: the day that Michael Jackson died also lowered people’s mood significantly. The high-water mark was the day President Obama was elected, when the word “proud” was predominant.
Christmas and Valentine’s Day regularly popped as positive times, although words like “guilty” were associated with Christmas and “waste” and “lonely” with Valentine’s Day.
Dodds and Danforth’s Peer-Reviewed Article
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Don't Judge My Hair
From the people who brought you There, I Fixed It, Don’t Judge My Hair is a photoblog of disasterous hairstyles, cuts, and colors.
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The OMG-WTF Spectrum
This spectrum (I take it) is supposed to classify Internet memes by whether they provoke OMG or WTF reactions by netizens — and all gradations in between. Bacon vodka, for example would be OMG, whereas human-eating robots would be WTF.
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Music Royalties for Dummies
With all of the confusion recently on the internet about music and copyright, you may not know what’s what. Here’s something to help you learn about how music royalties work.
Considering how much “education” about music and copyright is out there (”downloading music is stealing!” ads and the like), most people have no idea how it actually works in terms of who owns what and who should get money from what kind of use. And lately, with issues like confusion over Pandora royalties, songwriters trying to collect royalties from blogs that post YouTube videos, and even arguments that video games may constitute a public performance of music, it’s just been getting increasingly complicated.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by 
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AskMen's Great Male Survey 2009
AskMen has just released the results of their second annual Great Male Survey, involving more than 50,000 of their readers worldwide, to find out what the modern man is thinking about.
As with their first survey last year, some results are interesting and some are quite unexpected. For instance, here are the top 100 most interesting answers:
10. 38% – Own more than seven pairs of shoes
9. 78% – Require more than $1 million to retire comfortably
8. 77% – Think moral standards in business are on the decline
7. 84% – Think it’s important that a girlfriend have "wife potential"
6. 83% – Are actively environmentally friendly
5. 48% – Would dump a girlfriend if she became fat
4. 78% – Exaggerate in the sex stories they tell to friends
3. 36% – Are scared of terrorists
2. 83% – Surf the web on their phone
1. 91% – Believe in marriage
Check out the full survey result here: Link – Thanks Daniel!
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Adam "Ape Lad" Koford at Shirt.Woot
Woot! (literally) Our pal Adam "Ape Lad" Koford is curating this week’s excellent T-shirt selection over at Shirt.Woot to help celebrate the second anniversary of the site’s launch.
Along Adam himself, Shirt.Woot will feature three exceptionally talented artists: Mark Frauenfelder of Boing Boing and MAKE Magazine, R. Stevens, creator of the Diesel Sweeties webcomic, and Mitch "Spacesick" Ansara (of the "I Can Read Movies" series fame).
The first T-shirt is The Evil That Men Do Except Instead Of Men It’s A Kite, by Adam Koford:
Check it out here: Link – Thanks Adam, and good luck!
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Three Keyboard Cat Moon Shirt
It had to be done. Threadless member Oxen married two recent internet memes, the Three Wolf Moon Shirt and Keyboard Cat together in this t-shirt design. Link -via Everlasting Blort
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10 Quickie Quotes About Twitter
For more Bizarro, definitely checkout Dan Piraro’s website and blog
Love it or hate it, Twitter has certainly taken the web by storm. In just a few short years, the social networking/micro-blogging website has grown to be one 50 most popular website in the world.
As much as I am fascinated with Twitter (though I’m a bad Twitterer, Neatorama’s Official Twitter is not as frequently updated as the blog), I’m more interested about what other people say about Twitter.
Here’s a quickie 10 most interesting Twitter Quotes (some are from people who, ironically, don’t tweet):
"oh this is going to be addictive" – Dom Sagolla, Twitter co-creator
“The qualities that make Twitter seem inane and half-baked are what makes it so powerful” – Jonathan Zittrain, Harvard law professor and Internet expert (Source)
“Twitter lets me hear from a lot of people in a very short period of time.” – Robert Scoble, blogger (Source)
“Using Twitter for literate communication is about as likely as firing up a CB radio and hearing some guy recite ‘The Iliad.’" – Bruce Sterling, science fiction writer and journalist (Source)
"Whoever said that things have to be useful?"
– Evan Williams, Twitter co-founder and
CEO
"For the uninitiated, here’s how Twitter works – I have no f***ing idea. I have no idea how it works – or why it is." Jon Stewart, comedian and host of The Daily Show
"Facebook is to 2007 as Twitter is to 2009. It’s the most open communication platform out there" – Roger Kondrat, social media consultant (Source)
"The people drawn to Twitter are people on the cutting edge, the real nerds who are resentful of the fact that the general population have found and taken over Facebook" – Steve Dotto, host of Dotto Tech (Source)
"HI TWITTERS . THANK YOU FOR A WARM WELCOME. FEELING REALLY 21st CENTURY" – Oprah, yes that Oprah, on Twitter
"Ummm . . . I don’t think it’s as big of a dilemma as people seem to think. We haven’t focused on it yet and I can’t say for sure how it’s going to work." – Evan Williams, Twitter co-founder and CEO, on how Twitter will make money
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Meeting Cost Ticker
Ever wonder just how much that meeting will cost your employer? By entering the estimated average salary of everyone in the meeting, the number of employees and when the meeting started, you get to watch just how much money is wasted on these pointless get togethers. I can’t wait until this becomes an iPhone app you can stealthy bring to the meeting with you.
Link Via BoingBoing
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Trend Hunter Founder Filed Trademark Violation ... Against Himself!
Jeremy Gutsche, the founder of Trend Hunter blog, wanted the blog’s Facebook Fan Page to be /trendhunter but the website doesn’t allow users to switch their username. So he came up with a brilliant solution: he filed a trademark violation … against himself!
So, I personally squatted on the /trendhunter username to make sure nobody else registered it…
The problem with this approach is that Facebook does not let users switch their username. So how could I get the Trend Hunter Fan Page to be /trendhunter?
This week I noticed that trademark owners could file trademark violation reports and secure back their trademarks… So I did.
Specifically, I filed a Trademark Violation against myself, and within a day, Facebook relinquished the username back to the trademark owner… Which, of course, is also me.
Oh and by the way, we do have our very own Neatorama Facebook Fan Page, y’know!
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Doomwatch: What Do You Most Need to Be Terrified Of?
In a busy life, it can be hard to find the time to peruse news sources for the latest things that journalists want us to be panicked about. That’s why you can save time by using Doomwatch, which indexes terms used in the UK newspaper The Daily Mail and tells you what to freak out about. Content warning: strong language.
Link via The Presurfer
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Hosting Bills Killed the Internet Star
The issue of monetizing a website (through ads, or in Neatorama’s case both ads and e-commerce*) is something I continually think about. As many of you know, the blog started out with no ads whatsoever and throughout its growth (thanks, Neatoramanauts!) we’ve added text and banner ads to keep up with the hosting and bandwidth bills**.
So I really wasn’t surprised to hear the news that SilkTricky, a Portland interactive studio behind the web hit The Outbreak (posted on Neatorama before here), had to shut down the popular website because of hosting bills.
Todd Denis of Jawbone.TV interviewed Lynn Lund of SilkTricky about the decision to pull the plug:
Put aside for a moment the internal costs that a boutique design studio or maddened creator racks up in producing original production of a consumable magnitude (for the Outbreak, figure three months full-time for the writer/director/producer team, plus a system admin, a Flash guy, and hard costs for actors, props, equipment, etc., and it’s easily into the hundreds of thousands of dollars). The real killer, as endless lines of bankrupt indie filmmakers will attest, is ‘out-of-pocket’ expenses.
“We’ve been spending anywhere from $500 per month to $4,500 per month, depending on the traffic,” claimed Lynn Lund, Producer at SilkTricky. “As you can imagine, it adds up. We’ve spent about $20,000 in hosting alone since we launched in September [2008]. Since we funded this project out of our own pockets, it’s been tough to keep the site afloat.” [...]
For Lund, the equation was simple. “With the economy as it is and no means to monetize what we did with the Outbreak, we had to find a way to save some money so that we could put it towards a new project … we had to pull the plug.”
*Undoubtedly, many bloggers are familiar with instability of ad revenues for publishers, which forced some to be creative. Om Malik of the excellent tech blog Giga Om started a subscription-based Giga Om Pro, which features exclusive in-depth content geared toward IT professionals. We opted to open an ad-independent stream of revenue, the Neatorama Online Store.
**I’ve had many conversations with bloggers who don’t understand why it’s so expensive to run a large blog. After all, they could run theirs for a few dollars a month. Indeed, that’s how this blog started, but as traffic grew, we got kicked out of our shared hosting plan, and had to upgrade to VPS, then a dedicated server, then multiple servers in a load-balanced environment with content delivery network to serve images. As you can imagine, the cost of hosting and bandwidth increase very rapidly. The cost of running this blog runs into the five figures every year, and growing.
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Karmawish: A Social Networking Site for Doing Good Deeds
Karmawish is a new social networking site that hooks you up with other people who need help. Helping them earns you karma points, which gives you access to help that you need from others as life trips you up.
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WalMart Fails At Twitter
If you, for some weird reason or another, have any interest in signing up to WalMart’s Twitter feed, be prepared to agree to a 3,379 word long (lord only knows how many characters) Terms of Use.
Personally, I’m not a big fan of Twitter myself, but I do understand that the main attraction is the simplicity of limiting things to 140 characters or less. It kind of defeats the purpose when you have a TOS this long.
Link Via BoingBoing
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Homage to Fail Whale
Fail Whale is the delightful image of a flying whale that Twitter uses when the site is down for one reason or another. The whale, designed by artist Yiying Lu, became so popular that folks made their own versions, ranging from sculptures to tattoos to comics. Pictured is one of the several Fail Whale cakes in this extensive collection of Fail Whale tributes. Link -via Metafilter
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The Worst Landlord Ever?
Landlord of the Flies is a blog about Gabe and his dealings with his landlord Gary. Gary sends emails and leaves notes and is in quite a bit of trouble with the police, all seemingly for our amusement. When Gabe received the above note, he wasn’t sure if this was a good thing or a bad thing. This blog is only two pages long, so you’ll want to read the whole thing. Link -via reddit
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My Boss Is Michael Scott
Does your boss insist that everybody in the office think of himself as a friend first, and a boss second? Do his attempts at humor often end up inappropriate or even downright offensive, yet without malice? You may be working for a "Michael Scott" – the kind of boss played by Steve Carell in the TV series The Office.
In the blog "My Boss Is Michael Scott," an office worker realizes that the company owner and boss is, in fact, so much like Michael Scott that working there is akin to living in the show (but with worse pay, I’m sure) and blogs about the experience:
After generously allowing us the right to work on the 3rd of July, Michael decided to celebrate by buying the whole office KFC. Never mind the two vegetarians in the company, they can make it on their own.
The sales people have no one to call because all the offices they would normally cold call are closed. The rest of the company slacks off excessively to meet with the sale’s peoples productivity levels.
Michael decides to give himself a pat on the back by allowing us an hour long lunch where we can watch a movie in the conference room with him. Naturally, he expects everyone to really love him for allowing us to work today, feeding us and giving us a longer lunch. Instead, I have chosen use the time to write about him on the internet.
Then with all of us sitting around wondering why we are even here, he leaves two hours early from work. Oh Michael, how does your mind work?
Link – Thanks Anon! (Photo: Kumar Appaiah [Flickr])
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