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Have you ever wondered what your online life was like a year ago? Well then, Timehop might just be for you. Just enter a bit about yourself and the program will email you a summary of everything you posted on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Foursquare.
Link Via Laughing Squid
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If you are reading this at work, then you may actually be boosting your productivity. At least that is what one study claims. I think a group of researchers was just looking for a way to surf the web and have a good excuse when their boss catches them. What is your take on it? Are you more productive in an office environment that isn’t constantly monitoring your computer activity?
“Browsing the Internet serves an important restorative function,” according to a report from the National University of Singapore.
So-called cyberloafing can refresh workers mentally after long periods of work, researchers said at the annual meeting of the Academy of Management in San Antonio this week.
Surfing the Web is even better for productivity than talking or texting with friends or sending personal emails, the study found.
And smart bosses would stop snooping, researchers said: Excessive Internet monitoring and surveillance only makes employees do it more, they said.
Good magazine has a post entitled The Eternal Shame of Your First Online Handle, in which people share how they selected their first internet pseudonym. In the last few years, more and more people are using their real names online instead of anonymous identifiers.
Those of us who came of age alongside AOL must contend with something even more incriminating than a lifelong Google profile: A trail of discarded online aliases, each a distillation of how we viewed ourselves and our place in the world at the time of sign-on. The dawn of the Internet was an open invitation to free ourselves from the names our parents gave us and forge self-made identities divorced from our reputations IRL.
Here at Neatorama, every author either uses their real name or a made up name that sounds like a real name so they don’t have to explain it (except for me, which means I am a dinosaur in internet terms). However, the majority of our commenters use pseudonyms. Would you like to share with us the story of how you selected it -or the story of some abandoned name you once used? Link -via Metafilter
When you order a pizza online, a lot of the places have a text area for you to include any special instructions you might have, like extra sauce or a code to get in to your apartment complex. When the blogger who writes for Awesome Robo got to this section on the Domino’s online order form though, he decided to ask for a drawing of Yoda riding a tauntaun. Surprisingly, the Domino’s staff was happy to oblige with this little doodle.
Writer Evan Ratliff pondered the same question while writing an article for Wired magazine about people who for various reasons had tried to start over with completely new lives . A few months later he found himself a willing volunteer to find out firsthand what the experience entailed. With a 24 hour head start, $2000 cash stuffed in his belt and a fake office to set up in Las Vegas he drove his Honda Civic across the Bay bridge, then out of California in a bid to disappear entirely. Leaving behind family, a girlfriend, and any semblance of a normal life for a month while assuming an entirely new identity.
The magazine periodically published clues and made accessible to their online community all the information a private investigator might be privy to, as well as placing a $5000 bounty on Evan’s head. His travels took him across the country a few times, his disguises changed almost daily and online groups spontaneously emerged to track and document his every move. Amateurs and professionals from coast to coast took to the chase disseminating all the details they could uncover, staking out airports and bars, even trying to glean details from acquaintances as varied as his cat sitter.
In the end it wasn’t nearly what Evan had expected when he began.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by 
Many of you have heard the phrase “Knowledge is Power,” but what about
“Knowledge is Philanthropy?” At freerice.com, your intellect and breadth of vocabulary allow you just that, the opportunity to give.
By simply playing word games, freerice.com gives you have the ability to donate an unlimited amount of rice grains to the United Nations World Food Program (WFP.) The process is simple. For every correct answer you submit 20 grains of rice is donated, for every 5 correct answers 100 grains are donated, and so on and so forth. No risk, just reward.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by whitespace.
