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Interwebs enthusiasts are no doubt familiar with the phenomenon that is Tumblr. This once miniscule network now has their sites plundered and pored over daily by thousands of sites netwide, and for a good reason- many Tumblr blogs are full of great content!
Sure, there’s some junk thrown in with the rest, but the gems are surprisingly good, and fun to explore. Flavorwire has just put together a collection of their favorite Tumblr blogs from 2011, so take a gander and be entertained as we say hello to 2012.
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From the idle fertile minds behind Geeks Are Sexy comes a new site that focuses on the world of IT professionals and the funny stuff they encounter in their work. FailDesk has, of course, those clueless co-workers, resourceful workarounds, and clients that will surprise you.
I had a very nice lady call me completely in tears one day because she had spilled an entire can of soda on her keyboard and it had quit working properly (aside from being just nasty – lol). One of the tricks I had learned was to have the customer put the keyboard in the dishwasher, after which, they should let it dry for a day or two. I explained to her this was perfectly safe to do and she was elated that it could possibly be so simple. Several days pass and she calls me back in tears because it didn’t work and NOW her computer won’t even turn on! After a few minutes of interrogation I determined that I needed to overnight her a new replacement computer.
What tripped me off? It was at the moment when she stated that she was able to get her keyboard AND box (CPU) in the dishwasher but the monitor didn’t fit so she had to remove the top shelp of her dishwasher and run a separate load just for it!
You’re invited to send in your IT stories, pictures, and other funny stuff and share it with those who will understand. Link
You’ve heard of First World Problems, but now here’s a site for cat problems. The problems of pampered, indoor cats with permanent homes, that is. After all, misery is relative. Link -via I Can Has Cheezburger
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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
The folks at I Can Has Cheezburger have launched a new site called Superheroes! which gathers funny stuff involving your favorite comic book heroes all in one place. See Spiderman with a baby carriage, Wolverine preparing lunch, and of course, lots about Batman. Link
It’s nice work if you can get it. Last year, Ed Casabian began moving around New York City, living in a different neighborhood every week. He writes about his experiences, and is booked up through October already.
I’d like to stay with people of different ages, races, religions, sexual orientations and economic situations. I’d like to hit the five boroughs (Staten Island eludes me but its on the calendar!). I’m trying to do 52 neighborhoods. I’m at around 40 right now depending on how you define them. Ultimately though, I’m looking for different perspectives and ideas. So far, I have stayed with some of my best friends, friends of friends, relatives of friends, former coworkers, complete strangers through some of the recent press I have received. It has been difficult, scary, interesting, and exciting. Most of all, it has been immensely rewarding, which is what I expected when this idea first popped into my head.
Casabian was granted a SoundCloud Community Fellowship to underwrite his adventures. Link -via Laughing Squid
Maru, the Scottish fold YouTube star who lives with his human, mugumogu, in Japan, is getting his own book. Published by HarperCollins, I am Maru promises a little insight to the cat’s “low-key” lifestyle.
“This…cat may be an internet sensation, but he knows how to keep his celebrity status from going to his fluffy head…mostly…See all his favorite hiding places—trash cans, cupboards, cereal boxes…if it’s cozy, he’s there—meet his treasured toys, and learn what it means to wield just the right amount of cat-titude.”
I am Maru will be available August 23, 2011, but if you can’t wait until then, his blog of the same name updates frequently.
Now, here’s a blog on an extremely narrow subject that many will find fascinating. Fashion It So is all about the clothing and costumes seen on the TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation. Charlie and Anna are having a good time capturing screenshots and coming up with commentary on the fashions of the 23rd century. For example:
This episode opens up with Worf having trouble getting on his Starfleet formalwear:
You know, I think Worf probably could take a Mr. Universe pageant. And by take, I mean UTTERLY DESTROY IN THE FIELD OF BATTLE. In fact, why isn’t that part of the Mr. Universe pageant?
Link -via @JohnCFarrier
See the rest of the comic at Doghouse Diaries to see what happens. Works every time! Link -via the Presurfer
Shiro loves small baskets the way Maru loves boxes. And 9-year-old Shiro has a patient zen attitude for wearing hats and other materials on his head, which leads to many photo and video opportunities. See photos and videos of Shiro and his feline family at the Basket Cat Blog. Link -via Metafilter
Maddox created an entire blog as an April Fool joke and filled it with annoying things bloggers do, like taking pictures of meals, apologizing for not posting, and adding tons of sharing buttons to each post. He received a lot of mail from people who took it seriously. Most messages were criticism, but there were people who wrote and said they liked it. Link -via Urlesque
The picture blog Scaffoldage uses the tagline “Skeletal Archiporn.” It’s another project from Shaun Usher of Letterheady and Letters of Note. Some of the scaffolds shown are almost works of art; others can frighten or even make you feel woozy. There is no text, but each image is linked to its source. The scaffold shown here was used during construction of the Water Cube built for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. Link -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Flickr user dominique bergeron)
Comments Off Well, of course a humorous sign could never be posted on more than one blog, could it? This video was labeled as a “Fail”, which may be true for the contestant, but it’s a win for Jason Kottke. I wonder how much it would cost us to get someone to guess “Neatorama” on Jeopardy? -via Kottke
A Los Angeles based blogger by the name of Paul V. has created an interesting, sort of, online photo essay. The Born This Way Blog is a space where gay men and women are encouraged to post childhood photos and stories of themselves. The goal is to show that they were born this way.
“People need to realize that 20 and 30 years ago they were just awkward kids who were struggling in their junior high and high schools. Even if they didn’t know they were — quote — ‘gay’ at the time, they knew they were different,” he says.
Jennifer Smith of CNN has more: Link
Reading science articles can be much more entertaining when you start with the most ridiculous sentence therein. The blog Out of Context Science finds those lines for you, and provides a link to the original article as well. I may spend the entire weekend reading these. Link -via Nag on the Lake
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For the fifth year, College Scholarship.org is offering the $10,000 Blogging Scholarship. If you are a college student with a weblog, get your entry in by October 21st!
* Your blog must contain unique and interesting information about you and/or things you are passionate about. No spam bloggers please!!!
* U.S. citizen or permanent resident;
* Currently attending full-time in post-secondary education in the United States; and
* If you win, you must be willing to allow us to list your name and blog on this page. We want to be able to say we knew you before you became a well educated, rich, and famous blogging legend.
The winner will be announced on November 2nd. While you’re on site, check out the blogs of past winners. Link -Thanks, Cindy!
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Today is a particularly special day in the blogosphere, as two sites that supply great links to their readers are marking ten year anniversaries. Gerard Vlemming’s site, the Presurfer first began publishing on September 24, 2000. On the same day, Everlasting Blort was founded. Both sites still update, bringing you the newest, strangest, and quite interesting links from all over the web.
The Presurfer International Headquarters is closed for today. I’m having a party right now! It’s not a big party because there’s just me. But I’m wearing a funny little hat and there are meatballs. Because today marks the 10th anniversary of The Presurfer.
The Presurfer began 10 years ago and has evolved from a personal link page to what it is today. Is that really something to celebrate? Yes, I think it is. According to The Internet Archive the lifespan of the average web site is 44 to 75 days. The Presurfer has been here for 3,650 days.
Happy “blogiversary” to both sites from your friends at Neatorama! Link
(Image generated at Image Chef)
The Hair Hall of Fame is a blog that pays tribute to bygone but unforgettable hairstyles -and some modern styles, too! Shown are actresses Lynn and Vanessa Redgrave in the big hair days of the ’70s. Link -via Everlasting Blort
Photo: Shutterstock
Inspired by the slow food movement, a growing cadre of bloggers have abandoned the rapid-fire style of blogging (yes, employed by this blog you're reading right now) in favor of "slow blogging."
Sharon Otterman explains in this article published in The New York Times back in 2008 (still highly relevant today, and I suspect will still be highly relevant a few years from now):
... slow bloggers believe that news-driven blogs like TechCrunch and Gawker are the equivalent of fast food restaurants — great for occasional consumption, but not enough to guarantee human sustenance over the longer haul. [...]
Some slow bloggers like to push the envelope of their readers’ attention even further. Academics post lengthy pieces about literature and teaching styles, while techies experiment to see how infrequently they can post before readers desert them.
This approach is a deliberate smack at the popular group blogs like Huffington Post, the Daily Beast, Valleywag and boingboing, which can crank out as many as 50 items a day. On those sites, readers flood in and advertisers sign on. Spin and snark abound. Earnest descriptions of the first frost of the season are nowhere to be found.
In between the slow bloggers and the rapid-fire ones, there is a vast middle, hundreds of thousands of writers who are not trying to attract advertising or buzz but do want to reach like-minded colleagues and friends. These people have been the bedrock of the genre since its start, yet recently there has been a sea change in their output: They are increasingly turning to slow blogging, in practice if not in name.
“I’m definitely noticing a drop-off in posting — I’m talking about among the more visible bloggers, the ones with 100 to 200 readers or more,” said Danah Boyd, a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies popular culture and technology. “I think that those people who were writing long, thought-out posts are continuing, but those who were writing, ‘Hey, check this out’ posts are going to other forums. It’s a dynamic shift.”
Burnout is a big factor, as Andrew Sullivan of The Daily Dish explains:
He said in an interview posted on the magazine’s Web site that during the election, his readers became so addicted to his stream of posts that he sometimes set his blog to post automatically so he could go to lunch. When he took two days off to make sense of “the whole Sarah Palin thing,” his audience flipped, thinking he was dead or silenced.
“You can’t stop,” Mr. Sullivan said in the online interview. “The readers act as if you’ve cut off their oxygen supply, and they just flap around like a goldfish out of water until you plop them back in.”
More at the NYT: Link - via TYWKIWDBI and kottke
Unfortunately, in this case it isn’t Neatorama. Kristjan asked The Daily What to post his proposal to Alexandra on the form of a meme comic. Only a portion of it is shown here. Commenters are waiting not-so-patiently to hear her answer. Link
Update: Finally, an answer. Link
Just like video killed the radio star, are Facebook and Twitter killing blogs? Here’s an interesting article over at The Economist about how the growth of blogging has slowed down and, in some countries, even stalled:
ONLINE archaeology can yield surprising results. When John Kelly of Morningside Analytics, a market-research firm, recently pored over data from websites in Indonesia he discovered a “vast field of dead blogs”. Numbering several thousand, they had not been updated since May 2009. Like hastily abandoned cities, they mark the arrival of the Indonesian version of Facebook, the online social network. [...]
Blogs are a confection of several things that do not necessarily have to go together: easy-to-use publishing tools, reverse-chronological ordering, a breezy writing style and the ability to comment. But for maintaining an online journal or sharing links and photos with friends, services such as Facebook and Twitter (which broadcasts short messages) are quicker and simpler.
Charting the impact of these newcomers is difficult. Solid data about the blogosphere are hard to come by. Such signs as there are, however, all point in the same direction. Earlier in the decade, rates of growth for both the numbers of blogs and those visiting them approached the vertical. Now traffic to two of the most popular blog-hosting sites, Blogger and WordPress, is stagnating, according to Nielsen, a media-research firm. By contrast, Facebook’s traffic grew by 66% last year and Twitter’s by 47%. Growth in advertisements is slowing, too. Blogads, which sells them, says media buyers’ inquiries increased nearly tenfold between 2004 and 2008, but have grown by only 17% since then. Search engines show declining interest, too.
I’m Remembering is a blog of “Pop-Culture Nostalgery From The 80′s & Early 90′s.” That seems like just yesterday to me, but if it was the period of your childhood, you’ll enjoy the photographs, toys, TV shows, and other blasts from the past. Link
The about page at the Animal Review blog simply states "This site reviews animal species objectively". This is an understatement.
On their blog and in a soon to be released book, Jacob Lentz and Steve Nash evaluate members of the animal kingdom with a wry mix of fact and just plain silly. They even go so far as to give the animals a letter grade. Their current review subject, the jellyfish, recieved a C-, which is actually quite good, as Lentz and Nash point out, since jellyfish literally have no brains. At all.
Now, one probably wouldn’t be very afraid of a shark that didn’t have a brain. Or a snake without a brain. Or a bear. Indeed, it might be entirely hilarious if a brainless bear was trying to attack you. There’d surely be a website called watchthisbrainlessbear.com and it would be ‘dedicated to providing the most recent videos of brainless bears trying to do things.’ But yet we all intuitively sense that a jellyfish – even a brainless one – is a different matter altogether. And that intuition turns out to be completely correct.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by timcanny.
So someone leaves a phone on a bar, someone else picks it up and plays with it, and the next thing you know Gizmodo is taking it apart and declaring that this disguised iPhone is a test model of the not-yet-released iPhone 4G. The blog then outlined all the phone’s new features. Apple is taking the accidental leak very seriously.
In a blog post on Monday detailing how it obtained the phone, Gizmodo said it was left by an iPhone software engineer at Gourmet Haus Staudt, a German specialty store and beer garden in Redwood City.
The person who found the phone peddled it to Gizmodo, which bought it for $5,000, Nick Denton, chief executive of Gawker Media, which owns Gizmodo, said by instant message.
His company’s sites have had a longstanding practice of paying for scoops, and the windfall was tangible. Traffic spiked on Monday, and at midday more than one million visitors stopped by the site in one hour to see pictures of the coveted gadget.
By late in the day, reports began to surface on the Internet that Apple’s chief executive, Steven P. Jobs, had called Gizmodo to get the device back. Mr. Denton declined to comment, saying any conversation between Mr. Jobs and Gizmodo would most likely have been off the record.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by tylerthevideoguy.
Gerard Vlemmings, whom you know as the Presurfer, recently retired from his real world job and is now devoting his time to blogging. He’s launched a new project called Popular Coffee News which is, unsurprisingly, devoted to coffee and the people who love it. Some of the early posts include coffee science, coffee art, coffee making tips, and a video of a bird stirring a coffee cup! Link
I collect links to bizarre niche blogs. This one takes the cake for sheer randomness. Selleck Waterfall Sandwich delivers exactly what it says -a collection of images all combining actor Tom Selleck and a sandwich on a background featuring a waterfall. The site even has a theme song, if you can call it a song. The picture here stars a Spam sandwich. Link -via mental_floss
Mary and Holly are Michigan librarians who are really into “weeding,” meaning they strive to keep their books relevant and “weed” out dated, damaged, and just plain wrong titles. Recently featured on Jimmy Kimmel Live, the two bibliophiles created a submitter-based blog from library-goers all over.
These books are just odd, outdated or maybe should be reconsidered under a current interpretation of collection policies. In no way should the opinions of Mary and Holly be interpreted as a standard for every library. We just want to have a few chuckles and talk about library collections.
There are lots of curiosities besides the one I chose above. I really got a kick out of this one, as well as this one. All around, a fun site! Link.
Lovely Listing is a collection of user-submitted finds in the the real estate world. Sometimes you just have to wonder what people were thinking, whether it be the agent’s choice of photo, the seller’s interior decor, or the builder themselves, as exemplified above:
Dude. Check it out. The weirdest thing ever is going on here. You see? You see it? So bizarre: the toilet paper is hung on the shower stall door. Crazy!
There might be something else wrong here, too.
(Photo: Netti Asunto)
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 ...
