Webcurios 10/05/13

Part of a series by Roberto Casinelli

Things About The Internet and Social Media (ugh) and STUFF (but thankfully not too much this week so don’t worry it will be over soon):

Google (well, YouTube& G+ – you’re spared the Glassgasming this week. Enjoy the respite while you can):

• The YouTube Paywall Is Coming: In this week’s edition of ‘Google turns YouTube into a broadcaster…’, we have the news that they are rolling out subscription channels for ‘qualifying partners’ – so now you get the opportunity to pay CASHMONEY for stuff that you have (to-date) been watching for free. Except without the annoying pre-roll ads, which is at least something. It seems churlish to complain – I have no problem paying for stuff if it’s good – but it will be interesting to see exactly what additional bonuses these subscribers will get; after all, there’s only so much EXCLUSIVE EXTRA CONTENT anyone really needs. Here’s a list of the initial channels participating –  LET THE MARKET DECIDE!
• The YouTube Trends Map: Launched this week, this gives a fascinating overview of who is watching what, where, on YouTube in the US. There are, it is whispered, tentative rumours that this is going to be rolled out to other territories, but at the moment it’s just a really interesting look at viewing habits on YT (and by extension the frightening homogeneity of consumption – despite the near-infinity of stuff out there, it seems EVERYONE wants to look at topless vampires in True Blood trailers). Obviously there are all sorts of potential insights that can be drawn from this from an advertisers/marketers point of view, so from that perspective it behooves all of us to try and mess with the data and watch at least 3 Bieber videos a day just to screw the data.
• Google+ Hangouts Now A Bit Better: Just a little change, but a significant one – Google+ Hangouts can now be paused whilst streaming in realtime, rewound, etc – making the whole live broadcast aspect of it marginally more useful / appealing.
   

KloutStuff (I KNOW! Whodathunkit? I still think it’s bunkum, mind)

• American Airlines Give Perks To Klouty People: American Airlines is giving people with a high Klout score access to its First Class lounge (for one day, at least). It’s not a stupid idea by any stretch of the imagination, but couldn’t they have chosen another selection criteria? Something like, I don’t know, people who waited in line for checkin with an unusual degree of good grace, or perhaps people who just look like they need cheering up a bit? I don’t know, I just don’t like the idea of rewarding the sort of self-obsessed digitards who bother with stuff like Klout any sort of reward whatsoever. Maybe I’m just bitter, though, because I probably wouldn’t qualify.
• And Now Klout Scores Affect Search: Well, sort-of. Admittedly it’s only Bing, but it’s still a significant step for the company – effectively prioritising content from ‘experts’ in certain fields in search results. There’s a proper explanation in the link, and it’s worth a quick read, but does anyone REALLY think this is a good idea? It’s not like this is doing anything other than narrowing search even further, and the sort of people who are likely to participate through Klout are likely to be *ahem* of a certain type. Basically ask yourself ‘Would Google do something like this?’ and then realise that it’s maybe a bit of a rubbish development.
  How To Be Good At The Internet, According To The US’ National Security Agency: This document is called ‘Untangling the Web’, it was produced by the NSA which is basically the US’ information-gathering service around foreign policy issues as well as being responsible for cryptography around US communications. So basically they’re Spooks. This is their guide to search, etc, originally written (as far as I can tell) in 2007ish, but still very interesting and more useful than you’d think. Worth having a skim through – you will learn stuff and get better at Google, if nothing else. Oh, and it’s really good for working out how to search for spreadsheets full of passwords in the oh-so-unlikely event that you might ever think of a reason why that could be useful *ahem*.

Buzzfeed Starts Agency Accreditation Programme: ‘9 Ways You Can Use Funny Cat Videos to Shill More Crap!’. Buzzfeed are taking a cue from Google, Facebook et al and beginning to work directly with ad agencies to school them in the ways of making stuff that loads of people really like on the internet. Interestingly, all this education comes for ‘free’, but there’s an expected minimum ad spend from the agencies’ clients. There are many horrid things about this – not least the vision of a future in which everything is communicated to us in numerical list format (‘376 Policy Commitments That Mean You Should Vote UKIP!’, but also because of the increasingly blurred lines this is going to create between editorial and advertorial. Sigh.

Some Campaign-ish stuff:

• Pistol Annies Album Launch Campaign: I had, I must confess, no idea who Pistol Annies were before I read this – then I listened to their music and realised why that was (what can I say? Country doesn’t do it for me). In any case, their recent campaign to launch their new album was an incredibly involved multi-channel thing which rather impressed me not only with the scale of its execution. Would love, as ever, to know participation numbers (yes, yes, I know, ENGAGEMENTZZZZZZZZZZ). 
• NYC Sex Ed App: This is just a good idea, isn’t it? App available in New York, developed by its Health Department, which tells teenagers where they can get sexual health checks, where they can get free contraception, where clinics are, gives them advice and operates as a sort of Q&A service for teens to get information about sex and related issues. Slightly amazed that this appears to be being touted as a ‘first’. 
• Coke Stairs: Another week, another annoyingly clever thing from Coca Cola. This one’s resolutely un-digital, but I don’t care. Very clever little stunt (in Spain) to persuade people to do a little more exercise – so they can then go and drink even more fizzy brown sugar water, and no one has to feel bad about it at all! Actually, there’s also a rather nice website to accompany the campaign so it is a bit digital after all. 
• Jobseekers In The Window: Campaign by a Danish marketing firm to help highlight issues of Danish unemployment (but, more accurately, to get shedloads of press for aforementioned marketing firm). Jobless people, pimping themselves out in the agency’s window in search of work. What’s beautiful / dreadful about this – to me at least – is the totally unwitting way that the article linked to makes the comparison with the shop windows of Amsterdam’s red light district. Nice!

It’s not Miranda Hart, it’s a picture by Flora Borsi

Last Saturday Was Comic Book Day! Listen To This DJ Food Mix To Celebrate.

Other Stuff Which May Or May Not Be Of Interest, Pt.1:

• Insert Rude Noises Into Your Website: This made me laugh far, far more than it had any right to do. From The Onion comes this little piece of code that, at a stroke, makes any website flatulent, producing rude noises whenever people scroll up or down the page a certain number of pixels. I make only one request in this week’s Curios – can this please, please find its way to some disgruntled web developer who’s on their last day at work? PLEASE. I want this hacked onto BP’s website (or, frankly, anyone’s – I’m not fussy) now. 
• GeoGuessr: A Google Maps mashup which shows you a randomised (I think) view from StreetView and challenges you to guess where in the world you are by clicking on a world map. Really interesting, and a terrible timesink, this is simple, but cute – and surely something that a travel brand might want to co-opt as a nice timesink to chuck on its website, perhaps with a link to buy tickets to / hotels in locations that people see and find appealing? Go on, someone make it. 
• EscherSketch: A terrible, terrible comedy name for what is a rather nice drawing-and-tesselation tool. I think that if you are a halfway-decent artist and have a Wacom or similar you could actually make some quite cool stuff with this; I was barely able to work out where the points of symmetry are, so I’m probably not the best judge.
• NASA Sending Haikus To Mars: Yes, that’s right. We’re taking people’s names and messages to Mars – messages in the form of 3-line poems. You know the drill with these sorts of things by now; people have until July 1st to submit their name and a haiku, then there will be a POPULAR VOTE to determine which three are put on the space capsule DVD thing (DVD? Really? How are we presuming the civilisation which discovers this incredible treasure will be able to play the thing?). I doubt NASA will be so stupid as to allow anything too ridiculous to have the possibility of acting as man’s poetic message to God’s creation, but you never know. Get writing. 
• Chainmail Shoes: This is a degree of next-level masochism. They encourage you to run in these things, for God’s sakes. Crazy.
• Sculptures Based on Found DNA: Next time you’re having a tab and you throw it carelessly to the floor before running back inside to the comforting warmth of the pub where passers-by don’t look at you as though you are solely responsible for all of the cancers in all of the world, be aware that you could be giving someone the opportunity to make a slightly creepy 3d-printed mask of your face. Heather Dewey-Hagborg, an artist from New York (where else?) takes fag butts, tissues, etc, found around the city, mines them for traces of DNA, and then makes sculptures of what the genetic material suggests the person who left the sample looks like. If you stop to think about this too hard you end up in a slightly scary Face-Off cul de sac of horror, which I don’t recommend.
• Google Timelapse: Should that be in the top section? Oh I don’t know, taxonomy is hard. Anyway, this is a collaboration between Google and Time Magazine, showing changes in the world’s urban centres, coastlines, etc, over the course of the past 25 years. As you would imagine, there’s a common ‘dear God, we’re absolutely ruining EVERYTHING aren’t we?’ undercurrent running through much of it. The site’s rather nicely put together, though, so that’s sort of ok then.
• Ryan Gosling Refuses Cereal: My favourite piece of pointless creativity of the week, and a rather nice use of Vine. Expect to see this joke being flogged to death until we’re making stock with its bones in a week or so’s time.
• Ming Mecca: I’m going to confess to not really understanding this 100%. I think, from what I can tell, it’s a modular videogame creation system based on the sort of analogue technology used in old audio equipment. This basically allows you to ‘mix’ games, live. I think, to create glitchy artstuffs. I really don’t know what’s going on, although if I’m broadly right about that there’s some quite nice things that you could do in terms of live 8-bit visuals in clubs, etc. Can someone more technically minded than me please explain, please? Thanks. 
• Barbie Jewellery: Ever wondered what happens to abandoned Barbies? That’s right! They get cut up and turned into hugely creepy jewellery, that’s what.
• Coupled: A cute series of design-y posters, depicting the occasionally complex relationships between objects. Some funny, some sad, JUST LIKE LIFE (/profundity). 
• The Hedonometer: I’ve long held the opinion that sentiment analysis tools are a load of bunkum (unless you’re, I don’t know, Goldman Sachs and have some sort of military-grade computing power behind market analysis and prediction, in which case I imagine you’re slightly better than Radian6), but this is still interesting. The Hedonometer is a project which analyses (some of) the English language conversation on Twitter to come up with an overall happy/sad rating for the day. Take a look – interesting correlations and data. 
• Colour Signatures of Novels: I have no idea what these are derived from (it says ‘the visual content of the novels’, but that leaves me none the wiser I must confess), but they look rather cool.
• The Beauty Face Sag Skin Stretcher: However awful that description sounds, the reality is far odder. Oh, Japan!

Couple Embracing, by Egon Schiele

Other Stuff Which May Or May Not Be Of Interest, Pt.2:

• Dipjar: A really clever solution to simplify giving tips in the age of cards, etc. Probably more use in the US given our total failure to understand tipping culture in the UK, but very smart nonetheless.
• Outsourcing Your Online Dating: Possibly the most first world job advert you’re ever likely to see.
• Heroic Words of Wisdom: Quotes from Superheroes, turned into motivational-type posters. Some of you will like these, some of you will feel sick to the very pit of your stomach at the idea of grown adults taking inspiration from the fictional words of men and women in tight-fitting spandex. Truly, we are a varied and multifaceted species.
• The Last Website: This is, apparently, ‘a new kind of immersive literature, combining aural, visual and linguistic storytelling’. Chuck in your headphones and have a go – it takes 15 minutes, tops, and it’s very nicely made – and the music is, in parts, beautiful. 
• FeedBuzz: It’s like BuzzFeed, but DIFFERENT! Obviously a parody site, but I properly laughed out loud at around 60% of the stuff on here, which is a pretty decent hit rate. Mostly better than the real thing.
• Photographs of the Sweetwater Rattlesnake Festival: If you’re scared of snakes, and blood, you probably won’t like these pictures a whole lot. Shame, though, as they’re excellent. By photographer David Kasnic, the piece also includes a selection of photos from another project of his called On The Cusp, documenting wasted teens across America. Good stuff, these. 
• A Collection of Vintage Dutch Safety Posters: My Dutch is ‘limited’, so I have no idea what these are warning against – nonetheless, they are properly threatening.
• SpaceWarps: Want to help scentists find cool stuff in space, from the comfort of your own laptop/tablet/whatever? Of course you do! SpaceWarps is a project by Zooniverse, an agglomeration of ‘citizen science’ projects, which asks people to look through pictures trying to spot massive galaxies which are warping space and time. Which, be honest, is about 348x more important / impressive than what most of us get paid to do for a living.
• Exquisite Corpse Film Project: I love this idea, and want to see the film. Five comedy writers each write 15 pages of a film, having only read the final five pages of the preceding writers’ work. They made a film out of it, and it premiered last month – here’s a sort-of-review. 
• Textastrophe: Taking a liberal dose of inspiration from the now-legendary David Thorne’s trolling of the world, this person does much the same thing via text with blameless tradesmen who leave their mobile numbers on flyers. Obviously he is massively wasting people’s time, but the results are occasionally guffaw-inducingly good. 
• Betteridge’s Law – NO!: I confess to not having heard of this before this week. In any case, Betteridge’s law states, roughly, that when a headline asks a question, the answer to that question is invariably a resounding ‘no’. This website proves that, repeatedly, and also highlights an irritating and increasingly prevalent lazy linkbait technique. 
• Make Google Streetview Animations: Simple, quick, impressive – a really nice little tool, which makes outputs similar to that music video I posted last week WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU DIDN’T WATCH IT I HATE YOU. 

The (Flea) Circus of Tumblrs (that’s meant to be a funny reference to the fact that there weren’t very many this week, but it doesn’t really work):

• Worst Rooms in NYC: You think we have it bad in London? I am very glad that I don’t need to rent in New York.
• Internshit: Interns post their experiences of what it’s like to be underneath the bottom of the pile, professionally.
• Beyonce Art History: Art world classics, improved with the addition of lyrics by everyone’s favourite image control freak. 
• The Bluth Company: Arrested Development fan Tumblr. If you haven’t ever seen it, correct that fact. It really is very good. Even if my friend Mo thinks “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” is better (she is wrong about this). 
• That’s it. Tumblr is officially OVER. 

Games:

• Overdose: Very trippy series of drug-themed minigames. fun, but really don’t play this if you’re at all epileptic.
• Brokedown: Another week, another piece of interactive fiction. This one’s got a simple but clever mechanic, where you can dial the purpleness of the prose up or down at will by using the ‘+’ and ‘-‘ icons. 
• Gods Will Be Watching: A point-and-click survival adventure thing, which challenges you to keep the crew of a crashed spaceship alive for 40 days and 40 nights. Minimalist (as befits an entrant in this year’s Ludum Dare), atmospheric and really quite sad, it’s worth a bit of your time.
• Watergate: Yep, that’s right, you get to play through Watergate. More fun than it sounds, though you will want to turn off the music unless you’re some sort of tone deaf masochist.

The Street by Dan Luvisi

Long Articles Which Are Admittedly Long But Worth The Time, Honest:

• The Truth About Flappers: With it now impossible to breathe without inhaling a huge stinking cloud of hype around the may-be-not-as-bad-as-expected Luhrmann adaptation of the Fitzgerald classic, this piece looks at the truth about the flapper movement, which is infinitely more interesting and politically significant than a few dozen articles about beaded dresses and gimlet cocktails could ever suggest. Good history, this one. 
• Brad Frost on Bullshit: Not a long read so much as a long watch, this is a 20-minute presentation by Brad Frost on the subject of noise – or, as he terms it more colloquially, ‘bullshit’. Very much worth watching, not solely because of the content but also because of Frost’s engaging presentation style – you can see the slides here if you’d rather go through it at your own pace, but they lose something without the audio.
• Hunter S Thompson on the Kentucky Derby – Annotated: This is why the internet is great. Thompson’s riotous story about him covering the Kentucky Derby (as with much of Thompson’s writing, it’s less about the event than the weirdness of the collision between him and the event), which first ushered in his career-long collaboration with Ralph Steadman, with added annotations and historical / contextual detail. If you only read one of these things, read this – man was an incredible writer. 
• What It’s Like Being A Startup Person In The Valley: A great NYT piece profiling some of the young men and women pitching theoretical billion-dollar businesses to the business angels and VCs on the West Coast. It’s mental – and worth a read not only if you care about tech, but just as an illustration of the weird economic world these businesses inhabit, and what that means for our concepts of ‘value’ and ‘worth’ and other such abstract values. 
• Nautilus Magazine: If you like science and stuff, this is your new favourite online magazine. Just launched, but full of quality writing about a wide range of topics around popular science – can we have more magazines like this, please, with proper longform writing and nary a list or piece of linkbait in sight? What? No one else wants that? Well screw all of you, in that case. 
• What The People You Went To School With Are Doing Now: A look at all the stereotypes who you shared your school days and what they are probably doing now. A better piece of writing than it probably has any right to be from VICE. 
• Raymond The DC Junkie: A couple of nights ago John Stanton started tweeting his reminiscences of DC, from the days when the city was PROPERLY tough. His tale of Raymond the junkie is captivating – not just because of the story, but the way it’s told through Twitter. An object lesson in how to tell tales in short-form bursts. 
• What It’s Like To Be A Cyborg: Google Glass? PAH! You want to take a look at this bloke who’s basically put chips in his head to cure his congenital inability to distinguish colour. It’s amazing – particular when he starts talking about the jack he’s going to have put in the back of his head to allow himself to swap implants in and out (HOW GIBSON-ESQUE). BONUS LONGREAD – this man’s been wearing homemade Google Glass for years. In your face, global technology giant. 
• Jeff Koons and his Art: Koons is a proper oddity, even by the famously odd standards of the international high art scene. This profile of him is simultaneously quite revealing and all surface – he’s rather Gilbert & George-esque, in that it’s very hard to divorce the persona from the artworks and vice versa. It did remind me of the atrocious output of his ill-fated marriage to Ilona Staller, though (you may be more familiar with her nom d’arte). 
• The Dildo Factory: I don’t normally link to Buzzfeed because, well, it’s not like they need the traffic and they never link to me, the sods, but this is interesting not only due to the subject matter, though (no really, it is) but also the photography (some great shots in here). Moderately NSFW, depending on your employer’s tolerance for large latex penises.
• Constant Dullaart, Internet Artist: A fascinating profile of the fabulously named Mr Dullaart and his thoughts on the interface between programming, the web and art.
• On Depression: Hyperbole and a Half is an incredibly successful blog (Oatmeal-ish in style), whose author has recently returned to it after severe depression. This is her blog about how she felt. It’s very good indeed, although obviously not always the cheeriest thing you will ever read (convention dictates I say something like ‘Warning: Triggers’ at this point).

Part of the Screen Lovers series, by Eli Craven

1) Segueing seamlessly from the Hyperbole and a Half post above, this is a video to accompany an edited version of Web Curios’ perennial obsession David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech to university students in 2005 (you can read the whole thing here). You may have seen this already (2.5million people already have) but if not it really is worth taking the 10 minutes it takes to see the whole thing, I promise:

2) By way of light relief, have this – Maker vs Marker, as one man’s hand fights his drawings in a StreetFighter-inspired animated short of quite astonishing technical accomplishment. You may have seen stuff like this before, but this one’s particularly strong:

3) This is so, so impressive (if very short). Just everything about it – the colours, the CGI, the weirdness – is spot on. Sadly I have just found out that it was commissioned by Adobe to promote its new thingy (BRANDS AS PATRONS, KIDS!), but no matter – it’s still good work, and credit to everyone who worked on it. Vein with ‘Magma’:

4) I’m a sucker for videos that use hands in creative ways (remember this one?), and this combines a great song (which for reasons unknown reminds me both of Hot Chip and White Town) with hands and cut-out stuff to (I think) great effect. Riva Starr with Absence:

5) I’ll be honest, I don’t really like the song and I think the artist and the people who made the video are posturing idiots who would last all of 5 minutes in the sort of warzone they’re so glibly depicting. That said, MAN’S RIDING AN ALLIGATOR!!!!:

6) Hipster hiphop! Well, yes, but this is in here because I think it’s a legitimately good song, it’s short, and I find the artist quite endearing – she seems to be enjoying herself in the video, which I like. So there. It’s MY BLOG (well, Imperica’s actually, but you get my gist). Randa, with ‘Orange Juice’:

7) The people who made this video are going to hell, as may well I be for posting it. It’s called ‘Jesus, He’s Alright’ and it imagines the Son of Man as a fratboy. Blame the band, Team Spirit, not me. SORRY JESUS:

8) The context to this escapes me. All I know is that it’s Japanese (I think), that the soundtrack is wonderful and jazzish and cool, and the animation is brilliantly surreal in a cute, endearing way. It’s called ‘We Should Make Strange Things’:

9) Finally this week, we have the OH SO CONTROVERSIAL video for Indochine’s latest single ‘College Boy’. It’s about bullying, and I will warn you now that it does not have a happy ending. HAVE FUN KIDS!!!!: