Archive Category: Blog & Internet
VaroCMS-Powered Upcoming Over at NextRound.net
I’m happy to see that VaroCMS, the engine behind VideoSift and Neatorama Upcoming Queue, continues to gain wider use on the InterWeb. Rommel Santor, the brainy genius and all round nice guy behind VaroCMS has just told me that NextRound.net now has its own “upcoming” feature: Link
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A Surfing Photography Legend
Brian Bielmann
51-year-old Brian Bielmann has been photographing surfers for over three decades, and has quite an impressive portfolio. Some of his greatest shots are featured today at the New York Times Lens, including one depicting other surf photogs diving for cover, which effectively communicates the strange, dangerous world these people work in.
From Daniel Slotnik’s article:
Getting the shot in surf photography is “all about reacting and having confidence, and not thinking too much,” Mr. Bielmann said. He’s had many close calls, and has drowned 10 cameras by his own count.
An episode at Pipeline, an infamous break off Oahu, stands out. Mr. Bielmann ran out of film and signaled for a water patrolman to tow him to shore on a boogie board behind a Jet Ski. It was the water patrolman’s first time pulling a photographer out of large waves. Instead of waiting for a break in the set, he charged forward into a head-high wall of whitewater. The Jet Ski hit the whitewater and went vertical, meaning it was perpendicular to the boogie board — and Mr. Bielmann.
Link to article | Link to Brian’s website
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Translating Moby Dick Into Emoji
Image: Fred Beneson
Emoji are pictographs and emoticons common to text messaging in Japan. The scale of this language has grown so much that Fred Beneson of Creative Commmons wants to translate Herman Melville’s Moby Dick into emoji. The novel has 6,438 sentences, and he hopes to crowdsource the translation project out to people interested in completing at least one sentence of the novel.
Link via BoingBoing
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The New Literacy
New technologies are often blamed for the “dumbing-down” of new generations, but it’s hard to see that any generation is “dumber” than the one before it in a historical context. Professor Andrea Lunsford of Stanford University studied college students’ writing and how it changed from 2002 to 2006.
The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That’s because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.
It’s almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they’d leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.
On the one hand, you may look at YouTube comments and chat rooms and think literacy is going into the dumpster. On the other hand, those are millions of people who would otherwise never communicate a thought in public if the internet were not available to them. Writer Clive Thompson says the new technology has changed the meaning of writing for younger people.
The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it’s over something as quotidian as what movie to go see.
Of course, not every young internet commenter will go on to be a Stanford student. Do you see the internet as an aid or a hindrance to literacy? Link -via Metafilter
(image credit: Mads Berg)
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Authors as Drawn by Artists
(L) Neil Gaiman by Leigh Gallagher (R) Jules Verne by Ted McKeever
Steven Gettis of Hey Oscar Wilde! It’s Clobberin’ Time!!! website has been collecting artists’ interpretation of their favorite literary figure/author/character since 1998. So far he’s got over 300 drawings done (wow!). I particularly like the drawings of Neil Gaiman and Jules Verne above.
Not to be missed: Link
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Keyboard Cat Art Auction
Image: Rick Watson, Kitten Rescue
Kevin Pereira of G4’s Attack of the Show solicited contributors to a Keyboard Cat-themed art show and auction. Proceeds will go to the no-kill cat rescue shelter Kitten Rescue in Los Angeles:
In July, G4 sponsored an art competition, asking amateurs and pros alike to come up with their best masterpiece based on Fatso and his song. After selecting 18 winners, the network turned the works over to Kitten Rescue, who’s auctioning them on eBay this month to raise money for their animal rescue efforts. Ranging from New Yorker-inspired covers to Warhol-esque shots, the works of art are definitely unique – and adorable!
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20 Strangest Craigslist Advertisements
The Daily Telegraph has assembled what it considers to be the twenty strangest ads ever placed on Craigslist. These include a chair that Ralph Nader once (possibly) sat in, a drunk clown, and a woman who would like to rent out her bathroom. Here’s one for a vast collection of papal mitres — Pope hats:
“Because of this terrible economy, I’m having to shut down my business. I have OVER 1300 Pope hats (replicas) that I REALLY need to get rid of. The pope hats came from China and are a little too small for most adult heads and are also irritating to the skin, so you would need to have long hair or wear a smaller hat underneath (just like the REAL POPE). Dogs do not like to wear these pope hats, but maybe a large cat or maybe a nice dog would wear one.”
Image via flickr user Beechwood Photography used under creative commons license.
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The Five-Word Acceptance Speeches at the Webby Awards
(YouTube Link)
The Webby Awards have been given by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences since 1996 for achievement on the Internet. Winners are limited to five-word acceptance speeches. The above video is a compilation of some of those concise and occasionally funny speeches. If you had only five words to say to the world, what would they be?
Via The Presurfer
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Old Robots Website
This is just about the coolest thing I’ve seen today: a giant online collection of vintage educational and toy robots from the 1980s. It made me miss my old Tomy Omnibot … Link – via swissmiss
If you like that, don’t miss the Old Robot YouTube channel.
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If You Printed the Entire Internet
Printing the entire internet is a ridiculous idea, but in the event that you actually wanted a printout of the entire internet today, then you would have to have started printing back in 1800BC. And if you wanted to read it all it would take 57,000 years, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, non-stop! A series of infographics at Creative Cloud gives us even more statistics about the mind-boggling size of the internet.
Link – via geeksaresexy
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Modern Observations of Young People
Bang It Out posted this list of 55 “Random Thoughts of People Our Age” that contains a lot of true, yet funny things about the age of blooming technology, and the social awkwardness of living in that world as a blooming person. A few gems:
#11. I think everyone has a movie that they love so much, it actually becomes stressful to watch it with other people. I’ll end up wasting 90 minutes shiftily glancing around to confirm that everyone’s laughing at the right parts, then making sure I laugh just a little bit harder (and a millisecond earlier) to prove that I’m still the only one who really, really gets it.
#25. While driving yesterday I saw a banana peel in the road and instinctively swerved to avoid it…thanks Mario Kart.
#29. Shirts get dirty. Underwear gets dirty. Pants? Pants never get dirty, and you can wear them forever.
#32. Whenever I’m Facebook stalking someone and I find out that their profile is public I feel like a kid on Christmas morning who just got the Red Ryder BB gun that I always wanted. 546 pictures? Don’t mind if I do!
#44. I like all of the music in my iTunes, except when it’s on shuffle, then I like about one in every fifteen songs in my iTunes.
All people have little truths about modern life they like. Any of these strike your funny bone, or any to add?
(Image: Wikipedia) Thanks, Jared!
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Website Exposes Fake Hotel Photos
Have you ever gone to your hotel room and thought "hey, this rinky dink room wasn’t at all like the photo on the website!" (I’m looking at you, Boston Omni Parker House Hotel). Well, a website named Oyster has stepped up to the task of taking actual honest-to-goodness (not photoshopped for brochures) photos of hotels. Surprisingly, a lot of the hotel rooms – especially the expensive ones I never stay at – are really nice looking, so it’s kind of a fun way to gawk at hotels you’d never stay at …
So far Oyster only has a limited number of hotels in just a few cities* but photos of the one I’ve stayed at, the Embassy Suites Hotel on Paradise Road in Las Vegas looked exactly like what I remembered. They should step it up a notch and maybe accept user submitted photos (this being Web 2.0 and all).
Link – Thanks Leah!
*Too bad they didn’t have photos of the rinky dink room I stayed in at the BOPH – it was literally the size of a closet! And actually the experience is quite useful: whenever I read reviews of a hotel at TripAdvisor, Expedia or similar websites, I always look up the Omni Parker – that way, I can gauge how much of the review is plain BS.
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Psychologist Says: Facebook Makes You Smarter, Twitter Makes You Dumber
Or to be more precise, Dr. Tracy Alloway of the University of Stirling in Scotland says that in a study, Facebook users showed increased working memory, whereas Twitter users showed decreased working memory. She concluded that Facebook has more mentally intensive activities, but Twitter’s communications are too brief to require substantial brain activity:
Dr. Alloway has developed a working memory training programme for slow-learning children aged 11 to 14 at a school in Durham, and she found out that Facebook did wonders for working memory, improving the kids’ IQ scores, while YouTube and Twitter’s steady stream of information was not healthy for working memory. Also, playing video games, especially those that involve planning and strategy, can also be beneficial.
Link via The Presurfer
Image: U.S. Department of Energy
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How Google Street View Works
(YouTube Link)
Google’s Japan division released this stop motion film explaining (in a rather fanciful way) how Street View works. It features a cute little robot puttering around town, taking film photographs and painting over license plate numbers with a marker. The video is part of an effort to make the practice less appear less invasive of individuals’ privacy.
Via Boing Boing
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The 10 Funniest Cat Videos Of All Time
If you are not thoroughly familiar with the history of cat videos on the internet, this collection of funny cats will get you up to speed. If you are, it will be a walk down memory lane. Either way, you’ll get a laugh on a day (supposedly) without cats! Link
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Fifty Things Being Destroyed By the Internet
Matthew Moore of The Daily Telegraph has a list of fifty technological or cultural features being eroded or eliminated by the Internet. Here are a few samples. What would you add to the list?
1) The art of polite disagreement
While the inane spats of YouTube commencers may not be representative, the internet has certainly sharpened the tone of debate. The most raucous sections of the blogworld seem incapable of accepting sincerely held differences of opinion; all opponents must have “agendas”….3) Listening to an album all the way through
The single is one of the unlikely beneficiaries of the internet – a development which can be looked at in two ways. There’s no longer any need to endure eight tracks of filler for a couple of decent tunes, but will “album albums” like Radiohead’s Amnesiac get the widespread hearing they deserve?…22) Enforceable copyright
The record companies, film studios and news agencies are fighting back, but can the floodgates ever be closed?…
Image via flickr user William Hook used under creative commons license.
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11 Firsts In Internet History
Have you ever wondered what the first item sold on eBay was? Or who ran the first banner ad on the internet? Or what the first spam massage tried to sell? 11Points has those firsts and more, including this picture, which was the first image on the internet in 1992. It was uploaded by programmer Silvano de Gennaro in Geneva at the request of World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee.
Berners-Lee asked Gennaro to scan some photos from a CERN party and post them on that page. Gennaro didn’t really get what he was talking about but scanned in the photos, FTPed them to the server and linked them to a page. The picture of the four women, complete with their early ’90s “Don’t Tell Mom The Babysitter’s Dead” fashion sense, was the first one ever viewed in a web browser.
Link -via Unique Daily
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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
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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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