YouTube Time Machine
Select a year from 1897 to 2010 and the YouTube Time Machine will randomly select a video from that year for your viewing pleasure. I used the YTTM to bring me back to the year I was born. This is the first video it found:
internet
Deep Reading
In a recent interview with Foreign Policy, Google CEO Eric Smit had an interesting answer when asked if there is a downside to hyper-information access?
I am worried about the decline of what I call deep reading. In other words, the sort of “here I am on the airplane, there’s no Internet connection, I am reading a book thoroughly” reading. You do less of that in a world where everything is a snippet, everything is an instant message, everything is an alert.
What is Eric Smit currently “deep” reading? Ghost Wars. If you have any interest in this subject you should read Nicolas Carr’s book: The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
Artifacting Has Been Ransomed
This “Artifacting” was created with photos of letters taken from Flickr. You can click on each letter to take you to the original flickr image. Created using the Rasomizr.
Follow Artifacting At The New Digg
The new redesigned and freshly launched Digg came out of beta. Go Ahead and follow Artifacting’s page if you’re a user.
All My Friends Are Dead (And I’m So Cutting Edge)
Way back in March of 2007 I posted a link to a cartoon called “All My Friends Are Dead” by Avery Monsen & Jory John. Back then, the cartoon was posted for all to see for free on the web – the link has since been removed. However, the very funny cartoon (and well worth the link back in 2007) has recently turned into an 96 page hard cover book. Congrats guys!
Yesterday an animated gif below, consisting of a few pages from the book, became the most re-blogged thing (of all time!) on tumblr.
Google Alarm
It’s no secret that Google is monitoring and recording tons of personal information and documenting your surfing habits as you cruise around the internet. Gmail, Google Analytics, Google AdSense, YouTube embeds, API calls… all of this data can be used to monitor & track your personal web browsing habits
The fine folks over at F.A.T. Labs have created a firefox add-on and chrome extension that visually and audibly alert you to whenever your personal information is being sent to Google servers. It also keeps running stats that give you the percentage of sites you have recently visited. Downloads of the add-on/extension can be found below:
No-sound version (workplace-friendly)
is also available: click to install
UPDATE: Chrome extension now available (beta): click to installA video showing the plugin working is posted below. If you’re interested in building on-top of this extension, you can find the MIT Licensed source code on github. More information can be found on jamiedubs.com.
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Full Double Rainbow Songs
I’m sure you have seen Hungrybear9562’s incredibly emotional and hilarious “Mountain Giant Double Rainbow” video by this point. If you haven’t, go watch it now! Trust me it’s worth the three and a half minutes of your life that it will cost.
What you might not know, is that there are a handful of musical remixes already created. Check them out below:
The Gregory Brothers of Auto-Tune the News fame have turned the new famous video into one of their clever overly autotuned songs. The ditty finishes with a vocal rendition from the band.
Double Rainbow Song
“Somewhere Over The Double Rainbow” is the best remix to date in my opinion. Created by James Urbaniak, it’s a mashup with Kermit the frog’s “Rainbow Connection”. Brilliant!
Somewhere Over The Double Rainbow
“Auto Tune The Rainbow” is a pretty horrible remix (and the only one actually trying to make a buck off this) slapped together by Mason VanValin.
Auto Tune The Rainbow
Twin Cities-based producer Gigamesh has just released a remix called “It’s So Intense.” Gigamesh pushes past the meme and turns it into a surprisingly listenable little dance jam.
It’s So Intense
The game designers over at Rockethands created Double Rainbow (All The Way). I like the 70’s rock vibe it has. It’s a lot more organic than any of the others too. Which is nice.
Double Rainbow (All The Way)
Lastly we have the youtube doubler of “Giant Double Rainbow” mashed up with porn music. It actually kinda works in a gross sort of way.
If you find Yosemitebear Mountain Giant (Paul Vasquez) intriguing, you might want to check out the short history and interview with him over at Urlesque.
Accessing The Internet (A Guide From 2025)
Philipp Lessen’s blog, “Blogoscoped”, has a scary (and tongue-in-cheek) entry about what he thinks accessing the internet could be like in the year 2025.
Many content offerings depend on the internet you’ve signed up to. If you’ve signed up with the GoogleAppleAmazon Internet, then you have one-click access to a great digital library, many movies, as well as a certain approved set of homemade web pages. If you’ve signed up with the DisneyWarnerBrosViacom internet, you get a different digital library, set of movies, and approved homemade web pages…Are you single and looking for the right partner? Based on your biometric data, your income, your location, as well as the Overall Attitude (OA) results from your Internet Surfing License, anywhere from 10-100 people in your area will be suggested to you.
The Top 100 Most Annoying Twitter Accounts
It’s difficult to separate the signal from the noise on twitter. Actually, it’s difficult to tell if there is any signal on twitter at all (but that’s a whole other blog post). There are literally hundreds of over-active accounts, mostly bots, that provide little to no value to your average twitter user. Here are a few of the most blatant abusers.
InternetRadio is the most often updated (with nearly 900,000 tweets), non-news related, active account. It’s a bot that simply lists songs being played on shoutcast.com. I’m not sure what use this is to anyone. Ill Street Lounge and Boot Liquor (almost 420,000 updates) do the same thing for soma.fm
Father Time (over 275,000 tweets) is a bot that updates every minute, on the minute, with the time. That would be 720 times a day. How could that really help anyone? But if that’s not enough for you Is It Now… (over 550,000 tweets) does the exact same thing. At least Big Ben is entertaining.
ThinkingStiff (over 430,000 tweets) appears to be an account the owner is using to climb to the number one spot on the Cursebird leaderboard. This is actually a somewhat interesting project but is still a very annoying twitter account.
Twitterholic keeps a continually refreshed list of the 100 most updated (annoying?) accounts in twitter.
Full disclosure: my incredibly annoying twitter account can be found @hubs.
Sausage Party
Haha. This is awesome. Make sure your upcoming events, parties, and celebrations don’t have too much wiener (everybody into the hottub).
Sausage Party looks at your upcoming Facebook events and rigorously assesses their respective sausage ratings on a 0 to 5 sausage scale.
Great job Aaron.