Webcurios 03/05/13

Image by Remi Rebillard

Advermarketingprinternetextravaganza:

Google:

• I promise that I am going to stop including the Google Glass stuff soon – it’s just that the novelty hasn’t quite worn off yet, and I am still fascinated by the sheer scifi oddness of the whole project and the circus that surrounds it. Anyway, this week the first in-depth user reviews started coming in suggesting, shock horror, that the semi-prototype technology isn’t ABSOLUTELY PERFECT. There was quite a lot of dismissive “Well, it’s obviously RUBBISH then” muttering on the internet around this, which is what the internet is wont to do – I won’t labour the point, but there’s something quite dreadfully wonderful about a collective, entitled, sigh of dismay from the Western middle class at the fact that the first iteration of their space age face-wearable-computer-visor-thing isn’t ABSOLUTELY PERFECT. Jesus Christ, what do you people WANT? Anyway, here’s professional technology fetishist Robert Scoble writing about how he will NEVER TAKE THEM OFF, here’s some stuff about people tweeting through their glasses (a phrase that sounds so ridiculous when you say it out loud – try it in your head) – and here’s a very angry piece about the whole thing, which may get your blood running with righteous ire.
• Google+ Overtaking Twitter: Or at least that’s what the numbers apparently say, and who are we to disregard the numbers? Noone. OBEY THE DATA. I don’t doubt that lots of people have an account to G+, but I’d also hazard a guess that lots of people doing so may not really know or remember – not, I suppose, that that matters if you’re Google and you’re still in the process of trying to stitch the internet together using a thread made of your own sinew (unpleasant, but I’m in a hurry here). But seriously, WHO IS USING THIS REGULARLY? Really, I am intrigued, I want to know. I know it’s photographers and techy people, but beyond that? I would love to see the venn diagram of, say, Mail Online readership and G+ use. 

Facebook:

• Everyone’s Leaving!: It’s over, go home. All you Facebook community management specialists, start packing your bags – NOONE CARES ABOUT THE FUNNY ANIMALS IN HATS ANY MORE. Let’s all go and try and sell people stuff on G+ instead. Obviously this is hyperbolic rubbish which was massively overplayed this week – if you’re interested in making money and owning all of the data, which Facebook is, it’s more important to have LOADS of people using a service than it is to be cool-yet-empty.  
• But Facebook Is Still Incredibly Rich!:…which is basically what this article says. Go on, read a PROPER newspaper validating my point of view.
• Another Week, Another Advertising Product: Blah blah promoted Like worldwide rollout blah blah. 
• Facebook Studio Award Winners: A collection of award-winning pieces of brand work on Facebook. Worth a look for ‘inspiration’, and so that you can scroll through sneeringly saying ‘mediocre, mediocre, rubbish, dull, pedestrian’ whilst secretly being bitter than you have never won any professional awards, ever, JUST LIKE ME!

Twitter:

• A Decent Look at Twitter’s Ad Offering: A look at developments in Twitter’s advertising, with particularly interesting stuff about keyword-based advertising, and a glimpse into a terrifying future where EVERYTHING YOU SAY OR THINK is used to serve you contextually appropriate advertising.  
• Retwact: It’s always good to know that the internet LISTENS to me. Not a week since I DEMANDED (well, linked to an article demanding, but you know what I mean) a service allowing people to make post-publication edits to tweets then here one is. It does have the admittedly appalling name of Retwact, which is almost unforgivable, but I can overlook that because it’s actually a very good idea. This might be to go back through your timeline and amend anything incriminating / offence – I’m sure that the hasty addition of the suffix ‘JKG!’ will suffice.

Foursquare Is About To Turn Your Whole Life Into Advertising Data: In similar fashion to the Twitter stuff above, this is Foursquare’s latest attempt to make a success of itself (I say that relatively – obviously 4sq is more successful than, say, me, but it’s certainly never come close to troubling the mainstream) and make all of the money in all the world by selling advertisers the opportunity to offer you discount paracetamol the night after you checked into 5 bars in a row. Or something like that – just use your imagination, it’s not hard.

Instagram Now Lets You Tag People, Brands, etc: You know how much you’ve been waiting for the opportunity to tag that can of Coke Zero in your painstakingly multi-filtered collection of moody urban realitysnaps? YEAH! Well now you can. Lucky you. I look forward next week to bringing you the first wave of poorly-conceived-but-it-doesn’t-matter-because-FIRST! brand-led competitions which force users to tag brands in all sorts of CRAZY or CREATIVE pictures in exchange for the right to…er…becoming a cheap advertising drone for a major multinational corporation. It will be great.

On ‘The Internet of Things’ and Search: A hugely interesting piece about what the future of search might be like when you can look for individual things on the internet. Which, it turns out, you sort of can thanks to incredibly techy and not insignificantly Gibsonian search engine Shodan. Take a look, have a think about what it could potentially do, and then slip into a reverie in which you’re imagining the plot of every single variant on a spy/terrorism thriller for the next decade or so: “Mr President! They’ve hacked the Hoover Dam! It’s going to open in 10 MINUTES!”. Thanks, Hollywood, you’re welcome.

Campaigns Of Note (or, more accurately, that I have seen):

• The Best Marketing/Advertising/Whateverthisiscallednow Video Of The Week: Sanremo is not only Italy’s PREMIER song contest; it’s also, it seems, a brand of industrial espresso machine. This video isn’t anything hugely original – song made from various machine noises – but it is really nicely executed and a bit more lively than these things usually are. 
• The Buddy Cup: You’ve probably seen this already as Rich Leigh posted it earlier in the week, damn his eyes, but if not it’s a cute thing from Budweiser in Brazil – cups with embedded NFC chips which, when ‘cheers-ed’ (Dear God, what is the word for the act of banging two cups together in convivial fashion?), causes the two people toasting (THAT’S IT) to become Facebook friends. Notable not just from a tech point of view, but also because last I heard you weren’t allowed to do this sort of thing as part of Facebook’s T&Cs. Not that it matters if you are Budweiser and spend $25million+ on advertising with FB a year, of course. IT’S ONE RULE FOR THEM, etc etc.
• Coke Happiness Project AGAIN: I know, I know. But again, it’s a nice mix of emotion and cute and happy and tech. This is another audiomashupy thing, in which a Japanese DJ goes round Tokyo recording the sounds of the city in a special coke bottle and then mixes them to suitably pleasing effect. Not included so much for technical brilliance as for its excellence in evoking the whole ‘happiness’ thing. Damn them.
• The HemingwayJacker: This is a Facebook thingy produced by the Hemingway Foundation – a museum in the US dedicated, unsurprisingly, to Facebook. This allows you to donate your Status Updates to the programme, which turns you into ‘Hemingway’ for a bit. Interesting more in concept than execution; there is quite an interesting idea in here somewhere, though, about creating something like this with multiple fictitious personalities, all with a prescripted narrative which interlocks and interconnects in seemingly reactive fashion – it would be rather fun for, say, 5 people to donate their Facebook Updates for a week to something that is in effect puppeteering them through a soap opera whilst their friends look on unknowing. Did that make sense? Oh, sod it.
• Most Incredibly Expensive Marketing Thing I Have Seen In Ages: Actually maybe it’s not THAT expensive, but it certainly looks like it might have been. To promote something about mobile working through Office, Microsoft included MINIATURE WIFI HOTSPOTS in copies of Forbes Magazine. Yes, that’s right, THEY PUT THE INTERNET IN A MAGAZINE. Amazing.
• The Benefit Experience: Finally for this section, a brilliant video. Benefit is apparently a cosmetics brand (I am not target audience). They decided, as is now de rigour for brands who want to do ‘content marketing’ and ‘make a viral’, that they were going to do something to ‘surprise and delight’ random passers-by, liberally inspired by that bloody ‘Push Button To Add Drama‘ thing, and the Skyfall Coke thing. Cue pink phonebooth, members of the public, and an impromptu makeover followed by…erm. well, followed by the frankly horrific prospect of being forced up on stage to sing in front of a bunch of students who’ve been roped in by the events company for the day to comprise an ‘audience’ and are probably bored and baying for blood. The brilliant thing about this is the many moments in the video when the ‘lucky’ punters look simply TERRIFIED by the prospect, and you can see the organisers’ panic flaring behind their irises as they desperately smile and mug whilst attempting to mask everyone’s sense of slight unease about the whole project. Brilliant.

This is from that Open Switzerland thing which I mention down there

MUSIC! Why not listen to this rather brilliant mashupmixthing, pointed out to me by Joel Golby on Twitter? Or maybe this one?

A Miscellany of Interesting Things, pt.1:

• Jess & Russ Get Married: Or, in fact, got married. In any case, this website which they built for their wedding and which tells the story of their relationship, is (despite my general lack of sentimentality) really very sweet and heartwarming and (from a geeky perspective) very nicely built indeed. I have no idea who Jess & Russ are, but I hope they are very happy.
• Killswitch: Of course, statistically speaking it’s more likely that Jess & Russ will end up locked in the throes of an acrimonious divorce which will sap both their will to live and their bank balances, leaving them drained of energy and emotion until they’re inert and loveless. At that point, they could do worse than check out Kill List, an app which removes ‘every trace’ of your ex from your Facebook Page. Likes, pictures, comments, etc – all gone. This is sure to be bought / replicated by a brand soon, no?
• Sound Art in NYC: Opening this week at NYC’s New Museum, Streetscape Symphony is an ambitious project which looks to create an audiovisual portrait of each of New York’s 5 Boroughs within the gallery space. Combining cutting-edge technology with the ideology of the ‘found sounds’ aesthetic, the show will allow visitors to experience the wonderful, overwhelming, baffling and often profane sounds of New York. I would like a London one, please. 
• The Colors News Machine: Colors is a brilliant magazine. Brainchild of famed(then)  Benetton creative Oliviero Toscani, the ‘magazine about the rest of the world’ tackles a different theme in every issue, and comprises some of the best photojournalism and intelligent writing you will read. The magazine’s latest issue looks at ‘Making the News’ – and to launch it, Colors created the News Machine and put it on display at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia. The machine looks at the manner in which information is filtered, reinterpreted and distorted by multiple channels of dissemination.
• There Once Was a ‘Like’ Button for Radio: Well, sort of. This was an invention from the 1930s called the ‘Radiovoter’, which was designed to gather binary feedback from listeners to questions. The inventor imagined its eventual use as part of participatory democracy, envisioning a terrifying future in which listeners to the radio were asked to vote on questions like (actual cited example) ‘Should we go to war?’. Incredible,
• BDSM Accessories for Geeks: There’s a lot of truly odd stuff on Etsy, not least this collection of sci-fi themed paddles, whips and the like. I always thought there was something a bit…well…silly about certain aspects of BDSM; how anyone is supposed to administer corporal punishment with a paddle shaped like an NES controller and maintain a semblance of authority is beyond me, but then what do I know?
• iFont Maker: An app which lets you use your iPad to draw fonts. Simple as that, but I imagine it might be quite nice to make your own personal typeface.
• Retrovector: Slightly related to the above (but only very slightly), Retrovector is a potentially useful site which contains a whole load of free – and seemingly not dreadful – graphic elements for designers to use as they see fit? Are you a designer? ARE YOU? Well go on then.
• Crapcha: Pointless, irritating and strangely satisfying – Crapcha is a fake Captcha service which allows you embed an impossible – and non-working – ‘prove you are human’ task on any website. Someone somewhere in control of a company intranet can have a whole Friday afternoon of fun with this – come on, you know you want to. 
• Futurology from 1982: There’s so much of this starting to be unearthed at the moment – this is at least the third of these sorts of things I’ve seen in the past month. This time it’s the New York Times, reporting on research by the National Science Foundation with the rather wonderful headline ‘Study Says Technology Could Transform Society’. Could. Love that. Anyway, it’s pretty much bang on – and even picks up the privacy thing which we then promptly went and forgot about until about 2 years ago.
• Iconic Photos: I generally tend to hate the term ‘iconic’ in terms of photography (a legacy of working around – otherwise lovely – people in sports marketing whose response to EVERY SINGLE BRIEF was to say ‘iconic photography’ until their heads span round and round like that kid from The Exorcist), but I will make a exception for this site as a) the photos really are very good indeed; and b) they bother to explain why said photographs are iconic, and provide a degree of context that you don’t always get. Instructive. 
• Wearable Foods: Yeonju Sung is a Korean artist who makes clothes out of food (or who makes clothes that look like they are made out of foodstuffs). If this hasn’t already been used in an ad campaign / promo photoshoot then it will be imminently.

Image by Kevan Davis

A Miscellany of Interesting Things, pt.2:

• Behind The Scenes on The Empire Strikes Back: These are really rather nice, whether or not you are a Star Wars fan / obsessive. Note, by the way, how Carrie Fisher flirts with Anthony Daniels and in fact pretty much everyone on set.  
• Walmart Paintings: Brendan O’Connell paints pictures of scenes from the inside of Wal-Mart. They’re oddly affecting. Part of me quite likes the idea of supermarkets having artists in residence, and part of me thinks that it would end up being used for crappy PR. Mind you, the sort of hallucinogenic stuff you might get someone to pump out after spending 24h straight in the giant Tesco’s in Slough (a building so large that walking past it is a bit like that moment in sci-fi films where the camera pans past the spaceship and it just keeps on going) could be quite interesting. Tesco’s PRs – that’ll be £10 please. 
• Black Playing Cards: I know that thinking that anything in black is ‘cool’ is horrendously teenage, but nonetheless I do think these playing cards are rather good. Anyone wanting to buy me a set is most welcome; thanks.
• Fighting Game Backgrounds: A collection of animated gifs of backgrounds from fighting games of the 90s and early 2000s. I’m sure that this might be useful to someone out there, though I’m baffled as to how or why.
• HuffPo Spoilers: A Twitter account which links to RTs the Huffington Post and explains what is hiding behind such click-tempting headlines as “Which Marvel Movie has the most Oscar-friendly cast?”. Can someone do this for the Mail, please, in such a way that it shares links to Mail stories and tells people exactly what they are supposed to be angry about in each case, or perhaps which group of people the paper is decrying in each article? Thanks.
• If You Were To Make Kaledoscopic Animations From Pictures Of Popes They Would Be Called KALEIDOPOPES!
• Short Films By Louis CK: Before Louis CK became arguably the best US standup of the decade (arguably – Dave Chapelle might have one or two things to say about that) he was, it transpires, making these odd, arty shorts. Very New York, not very much like what he’s doing now, certainly interesting.
• The Wipe Shirt: This is such good design. Quite want one of these too. 
• Musicians’ Riders, Photographed: The food and drink requested backstage by gigging musicians, as photographed for VICE. The Foo Fighters one made me laugh.
• A Comic About 1950s Hipsters: This is a BRILLIANT slice of the past. A comic strip from ’57 which tells the story of some hipsters starting a club, and the ghosts that try and stop them (bear with me). It’s incredible on many levels, but mainly because of the incredible language. If you can start sprinkling your day-to-day diction with gems from this, you will earn the respect and admiration of your friends and peers – FACT.
• Open Switzerland: A project by a Swiss design agency looking at notions of Swiss identity and inviting people to make posters which explore the Swiss idea of nationhood, etc. There are some great examples in there. 
• Reductress: A new(?) site doing for the women’s magazine industry what The Onion purports to do for news. It seems well-written and funny, though I do wonder how may gags you can get out of an industry that seems to repeat itself on a 3-monthly cycle (although regular readers will by now have worked out that I am not a satirist and therefore know not whereof I speak). 
• Inside One Very Creative Man’s Brain: Glitch was a cute-but-ultimately unsuccessful browser-based multiplayer game which shut down last year.  These are a selection of the random ideas which Keita Takahashi cane up with during the game’s development, and is a fairly unique insight into the brain of a very creative individual indeed. 

Videos Which For A Variety Of Reasons I Am Not Embedding Below:

• Lego Breaking Bad Videogame: I have never played one of the LEGO videogames. I have never watched an episode of Breaking Bad, though I feel as though I have what with everyone incessantly telling me that it is the best thing ever and the internet falling over itself to hamfistedly try and meld it with every other element of popular web culture ever. That said, this is EXCELLENT and makes me really want to play this game. 
• Two Chips: Adam Patch is an animator whose wife came home drunk one evening and wanted to tell him a joke. He recorded the audio and made this lovely animation to accompany it. Makes drunk people telling jokes seem cute rather than unspeakably irritating, which is nice. 
• Teddy Has An Operation: You’re probably one of the several million people who have seen this by now, but in case not then have a slice of odd from Ze Frank. It’s creepy in a way that doesn’t really hit you until a little while after you’ve finished watching it. 
• Pacific Rim Trailer: I don’t normally post film trailers, but this one is mental. Also, as a little kid I always used to watch Japanese giant robot cartoons when I went on holiday to Italy (there are maybe 3 people that are likely to read this and appreciate the link which is hyperlinked right here) and this takes me right back to that in a pleasingly nostalgic, near-ASMR way. 
• The Magic Box: This short film has a lot of the John Lewis advert about it. It may make you cry, and then you will probably feel bad that you’re so easily manipulated. 
• Home-Made Machine to Steal From Vending Machines: This is brilliant – a French kid made himself a great robotic contraption to thieve cans from vending machines (OBVIOUSLY stealing is wrong. Obviously).
• Awesome Japanese Toy Drone Thing: The protective cage thing is brilliant. Christmas 2013?
• Dear God, These SHOES: Wow.

Image by Paul Ruigrok van der Werven

The Circus of Tumblrs:

• Eat Shit Winnie Cooper: One woman’s irritation with the ‘Wonder Years’ actress, who unaccountably crops up twice in one Curios this week (foreshadowing). 
• The White House: Could any other world leader get away with (or actually have some rationale for having) a Tumblr? I can’t see it, somehow. They really are very good a this stuff, damn them (or is it more that this stuff is good for them as a result of Barack’s popular perception as being a touch more down with the kids than your average President? Hmmm?)
• Gitmo Books: Books (and occasional other things) available from the library at Guantanamo Bay. There are, I am sure, people who will point to this as evidence that it can’t be that bad. 
• Berlin Underground: One of those odd, obsessive projects that ends up being weirdly charming, this Tumblr takes photos of all the subway stations in Berlin, one line at a time.
• Cosmarxpolitan: Again, this one’s been everywhere this week. Mixing Karl’s politics with the breathless style of everyone’s favourite insecurity bible. 
• Shorties In Adidas: I don’t think I’ve ever typed that word before, and I’m not sure I ever will again; nonetheless, a Tumblr of pretty women wearing Adidas clothes, just because.
• Jesus Christ Silicon Valley: I linked to this all the way up *there*, but it’s worth mentioning again – this is deliciously angry about all aspects of tech/startup pretension. Real coruscating rage here, which is very enjoyable. 
• GTAV Trailer Comments: The latest trailers for Rockstar’s imminent videogame behemoth came out this week. This collects some of the more baffling / depressing YouTube comments from the dark places below the line. 
• Dogshit Selfie: Self-taken photographs which include defecating canines. Yes, that is a *thing*, it would seem.
• White Men Wearing Google Glass: Pretty much exactly the sort of people that that Tumblr up there is railing against.
• All Things Sloth: Lots and lots of sloth-based imagery.
• Dick’s Doodles: My friend Sarah doodles on the tube, and posts them here. Spot yourself, and then pay her lots of cash for the drawing.

Games! Everyone Loves Games!

• Ninja Slash: Like Temple Run, but on desktop. Fun.
• Odd Japanese Keepy-Uppy Game Which I Don’t Really Understand: But it’s quite fun nonetheless.
• Drop: Notch, the genius behind Minecraft, probably knocked this up in about 24h. It’s a minimalist typing game with an electro soundtrack and it is BRUTAL.
• Sacrilege: Interactive fiction about clubbing and sex and friendship and being on drugs and all sorts of other things. Really rather good, I thought. 

LONGSTUFF (A bumper crop this week, which if the weather is as nice as it is right now NONE of you will read):

• I Love Winnie Cooper: I told you she’d be back. Lovely nostalgic piece looking back at The Wonder Years and not actually really about Winnie Cooper at all. (I just did an image search for Winnie Cooper and it was a bit odd)
• On Having Your Photos Go Viral: A really interesting article by a photographer whose photos of Amazon warehouses went everywhere on the internet. Contains good thinking on creativity, ownership, attribution and creation, and made me feel slightly bad about the fact that I never email the people whose photos I use on this blog (although I do name and credit and link). I will start next week, promise.
• Amazing Facebook Data Analysis: This is truly jawdropping. Stephen Wolfram of Wolfram Alpha fame has taken people’s Facebook data, gained through their participation in the Facebook Data Project, and has crunched it a bit. Just look at this – and this is SUCH a small sample, and doesn’t even begin to touch the tip of the smallest bit of the surface of everything that Facebook knows about people, their connections, their habits, their friendships, their use of language, their interpersonal interactions…JUST THINK ABOUT IT. It’s quite datawonky, but it really is worth looking at – not only for the data, which is interesting, but also because of the domino rally of ‘where will this end?’ thinkking which it will probably set off in your head. 
• The Voynich Manuscript: This is huge, but the tale of the Voynich Manuscript will appeal to anyone interested in cryptography, mystery, secrets and Da Vinci Code type stuff. It’s properly baffling, and makes me wish I was good at maths.
• The Great Boards of Canada Music Mystery: Speaking of codes and mysteries (SEAMLESS!), this may be the start of some sort of ARG by the band Boards of Canada. Or they might just be throwing this out there to see exactly how far their obsessive fans will go to unearth CLUES. Who knows? Interesting stuff, though, and as ever the willingness of people online to go down rabbitholes is startling.
• AMA With A Man Who Liberated Dachau: Or, more accurately, his grandson who was sitting with him at the time. Amazing, sad, and why the internet is remarkable.
• Jason Collins on Coming Out: You probably saw the news about NBA star Jason Collins coming out this week, and stating that he wants to continue playing. The piece in Sports Illustrated which he used to announce his sexuality is a great interview and well worth a read.
• The History of Kids: Ah, 1995. Were you horrified and appalled by the teenage behaviour exhibited in Harmony Korine’s ‘Kids’? Or were you a teenager yourself and wishing that your life was that gritty and exciting (but without the HIV)? Either way, this look back at the cast of the film, and the NYC skate culture which spawned them, is a great piece of writing and evokes an era before videogames made skateboarding cool again. 
• In Which A New York Times Author Tries Being A Hipster: Much, much less sneery than you would thing, I promise, and comes out making you laugh and feel oddly hopeful.
• A Year Offline: Paul Miller took a year off from the internet; this week, he came back. This is his piece about what it was like, and what he learned about himself along the way. If you believe that we would all just be happier if we stopped using the internet, this may not be the article you want to read.
• Creepy Things Kids Say: Thanks to Josh, Alex and Dan for putting me onto this. CHILDREN ARE TERRIFYING (well, these ones are).

Image by Jens Ingvarsson

1) All that talk above about Facebook data leads nicely onto this first video, which is a beautiful little short which uses Google Autocomplete to poignant effect. This is our life, as Google sees it:

2) A man, dressed in weird papercraft drag and Sailor Moon costumes, dancing camply to ‘Do My Thing’ by Estelle and Janelle Monae. No idea why, but there’s something about this that makes me rather like the fellow:

3) Socially conscious hiphop alert! I featured an Akala freestyle on one of the FIRST EVER Web Curios back in the day, back when I had some semblance of editorial control and these things were 1/4 as long as they are now. Great times. Anyway, this is the man’s third go at Fire In The Booth, Charlie Sloth’s freestyle segment on his 1Xtra show, and it is BRILLIANT. Really worth properly listening to this:

4) Really nicely stitched walkthroughs of Google Maps using Streetview in this one – Strip Steve with ‘Hood’:

5) This is a Japanese animation about, I think, what it feels like to have a stutter. It actually becomes really quite hard to watch at the end – there’s a sense of frustration and yearning that’s really quite uncannily well-evoked. Also the art-style is awesome:

6) This reminds me of that advert for some camera firm from a few years back with frames becoming pictures and the whole thing zooming in and out of itself in a fashion that was both clever and massively disorienting – you know the one I mean? No? Oh. Anyway, this is all the more impressive for apparently involving no digital manipulation. Will make your head hurt, but in the best possible way:

7) I was in Mexico recently. This isn’t set in Mexico – it’s Bolivia, fact fans – but really makes me want to go back there. This is so beautifully shot, the song’s good and the video doesn’t quite go where you think it will. Landshapes with ‘In Limbo’:
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8) Penultimately, this is a glorious song (I think) with an equally lovely video about an unlikely romance between two misfits. And some lovely dancing too. Everyone’s a winner! Young Galaxy with ‘Pretty Boy’:

9) Finally, we close out with this EPIC multiple-SpyvsSpy extravaganza from Vitalic. This is the very stylish promo for ‘Fade Away’. BYE!!!:
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