In less solipsistic news, we learned that London is really quite odd sometimes, that apparently this is considered to be a job in 2013 (I am so overqualified), that people do this on the subway in New York, that romance is finally dead and that the internet killed it, that we finally have the cross-dressing superhero we’ve been calling for, and that The Guardian’s now beyond parody…AND A LOT MORE BESIDES. Gird your loins, loosen your limbs, regulate your breathing and RELAX as we submerge ourselves into the blood-warm infoliquid that is this week’s Web Curios…

Image by Mark Kilner

STUFF FOR PEOPLE WHO MIGHT LIKE TO REFER TO THEMSELVES AS ‘MEDIA PROFESSIONALS’ (A PLEASINGLY SMALL SELECTION):

FACEBOOK

• Facebook and Misogynistic Content: So I’m sure you already know about this, what with it having been MAINSTREAM NEWS and all over the past week or so. Facebook are making appeasing noises at people, promising to do more to eliminate ‘hate speech’ from the site. Obviously this is A Good Thing – but can we all just be clear that it wasn’t popular protest which led to this, but instead the threat advertisers made to withdraw their spend? Will be interesting to see the extent to which this works and how it’s implemented – at the very least, watching people try and define the slightly grey and fuzzy boundaries of what constitutes hate speech will be interesting. Also, is this some sort of a mini-watershed in terms of the unregulated internet? Oh, I don’t know. 
• Facebook Offers Verified Pages: Erm, that. Taking a leaf out of Twitter’s book, and pandering to the desire of brands and celebrities to be defined as a SOMETHING by the faceless internet behemoth du jour. It’s unclear as yet what perks beyond a smug feeling of validation this will give to Pages; and of course if you’d like a TICK then be prepared to shell out on ads (just like Twitter). Here’s a fun game – try and work out what Facebook can sell next! The options, terrifyingly, are near-infinite.
• Facebook Music Data Visualisation: Oh look, here’s a thing! This is actually a rather nice idea, taking information about what people are listening to on Facebook over time. Currently US-only (although I don’t think there’s any reason why this couldn’t be extended elsewhere), and the ability to watch the spread of a track’s popularity over a geographical area is oddly compelling; you can imagine how artists and labels could use this to target promotions, etc, geographically (in a weird, unpleasant future). 
• Target Adverts by Recency of Activity: This should have been in last week’s. SORRY. Anyhow, another flavour of Facebook ads is now available, allowing brands to target users based on when they last did a certain thing on the site. So, for example, if you want to target people who are technically fans of your Page but who haven’t visited it in over a year with a message which says ‘WHY DON’T YOU LOVE US ANYMORE?’, you can. Actually, someone should do that. 

A Selection of Other Things Which Have No Real Commonality Other Than That I have Chosen To Group Them Together:

• Slowmo YouTube Videos Automatically: You can now turn any video you upload to YouTube into a slowmo version. Which is a nice thing in theory, but in practice will lead to a whole load of brands making interminably tedious shorts which they attempt to ART UP by making them reeeaaaaalllllly slooooooooooow. I reckon food brands will be the first ones to really, really overuse this – O LOOK IT’S A CREME EGG CRACKING IN SLOWMO OMG AMAZE *stab stab stab*
• Look! It’s The First Trailer for ‘Pornography’ On Glass!: Totally SFW, but utterly creepy; raises the horrendous question of whether EVERYONE you are speaking to in the future is only half-listening to you and instead devoting the remainder of their attention to watching people in various states of undress rubbing mucous membranes with each other. Basically in the future we will all only be able to devote at most 40% of our attention to anything at all, due to the ruinous amount of hardcore we’ll all be able to consume, in secret, 24/7, beamed direct to our eyeballs. There’s a gag here about Google Glass turning you blind, but it’s not funny.
• Google, Big Data and TV Advertising: Interesting thinkpiece exploring what Google could do with all the data at its disposal to ‘disrupt’ (hate that word) TV advertising and TAKE OVER THE WORLD (more). Basically what it’s all about is a greater degree of data-driven contextual advertising, targeting you with sales-messages in between episodes of whatever mind-draining crap it is that you choose to watch. Everything you search for will be used to serve you EVEN MORE advertising. GREAT! 
• Buzzfeed Partners With CNN: I’m sort of amazed that more people aren’t squawking about Buzzfeed’s seemingly inexorable (but quiet and stealthy) ascent to the top table of ‘news’ media, and the inevitably deleterious effect that this is going to have on the quality of what is often-laughably called ‘reporting’ in the 21st Century. This deal is all about Buzzfeed producing videos for CNN which are designed to be ‘shareable’ – or, if you want to put it another way, designed for people with an IQ in double-figures to gawp at in slack-jawed, like-clicking amazement. You want to watch ‘7 Reasons Why Genocide is Bad – IN KITTENS!’? I hope you die. 
• Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends: Mary Meeker is a bit of a hero to a lot of people who work in advermarketingpr, what with her annual gift of helpful statistics packaged in an authoritative-seeming slide presentation. This year’s set of data is upon us, and as ever it’s a combination of the interesting, insightful and soul-shatteringly banal. If you want a bunch of peer-ratified numbers with which to justify your campaign, though, you need look no further. Oh, FYI, I was saying the ‘sound’ thing 18 months ago – and yet here I am sitting in my pants in my kitchen, writing a blog to literally TENS of webmongs, whilst Mary is an internationally respected expert in her field. WHY, GOD, WHY??? If you’re interested in this sort of stuff (the stats, not my own professional failure), you could do worse than watch her presentation here.
• Hyperbolic Adidas Video: I saw this on Twitter, being touted as THE FUTURE OF ONLINE VIDEO, and I got almost sort-of excited (in a very low-key way). Imagine my disappointment when I saw that it was just A N Other branded video but with the addition of embedded in-vid links to external sites. I mean, really, no wonder Nike is winning.
• Ford Branded Content: Whoever it was first started that whole ‘content marketing’ bandwagon, I do not thank you. Thanks to you, we now have stuff like this – Ford spending God-knows-how-much to badge a regular live online broadcast from Sports Illustrated. WHY ARE THEY DOING THIS??? Either it’s going to be the online equivalent of brand sponsoring TV shows, with an ‘amusing’ ident to open and close the show, or it’s going to be a hideous mismash of poorly executed brand-focused links designed to ‘place the brand at the heart of the viewer’s sporting experience’. Either way, will it make anyone buy more car? Oh I don’t know, leave us alone. 
• Korean Flying Online Shops: That’s a really crap description, for which apologies. Once again via Robven comes this rather nice execution from Korea, encouraging people to buy stuff through online shops via the medium of floating, roaming wifi signals. That doesn’t really make any sense, I realise, but take a look at the video and let PROPER STORYTELLERS explain it to you. It’s smart. 
• The Book That Made Me: This is a really nice project by Waterstones, inviting people to discuss books which had an impact on their lives. No more, no less – just a lovely use of digital to enable people to have conversations about stuff they care about, in a loose, brand-affiliated sort of way. To be honest, if this were anything other than books I would probably hate it, but I’m a snob like that. Sorry. 
• Free Storyboard Illustrations: Need to sell a creative idea to people who won’t understand anything unless you’ve drawn them a pretty picture? This may be a useful resource, in that case.
• The 90s R&B Guide To SEO: I’ll be honest with you, this might be the worst advice in the world – but it’s all delivered via the medium of 90s music, and it ticks a massive nostalgia box, so in it goes. If you ever had your own dance to ‘Two Can Play At That Game’ by Bobby Brown that you used to perform at Cairo’s nightclub in Swindon when you were 14 (oh, what, only me and my mate Phil?) then this will make you very happy. 

Image by Manuel Alvarez Bravo

WHY NOT LISTEN TO SOLID STEEL’S ‘AUDIO DOCUMENTARY’ TO CELEBRATE THE 25th ANNIVERSARY OF DE LA SOUL’S 3FT HIGH AND RISING? GO ON!

AN ASSORTMENT OF ‘INTERESTING’ MISCELLANIA, PT.1:

• Beauty Recovery Room: South Korea is one of the plastic surgery capitals of the world (along with Venezuela, fact fans). This is a photoseries capturing images of women post-surgery (not in a creepy way), and is both an arresting collection and a really compelling argument for not wanting to ever go under the knife (until I get fat, at which point I am totally having liposuction). 
• The Fast FT: An interesting move from the Finanical Times, who’ve created this version of their site which takes a Twitter-style approach to the moving news agenda, with live breaking stories updating in short-but-expandable form. It’s really nicely done, and a clever service – now can everyone else in news launch a similar service, and can we aggregate all the feeds onto one page? Thanks, everyone!
• The Disney ‘Magic Band’: Another week, another bit of wearable tech. This week it’s Disney’s turn, announcing the MAGIC BAND which will, apparently, track your progress around Disney parks, allowing you to sign into rides, buy food, etc, with contactless stuff. And, apparently, they will also somehow alert the staff at Disney resorts as to what your kids are called, allowing Mickey and his permagrinning chums to address your LITTLE ONES by name. Er, hang on, what? How? Anyway, this is all very weird and future, but becomes sort of interesting if you extend it a bit and imagine the way in which this can be applied across Disney’s entertainment propertiies; expanded benefits at Disney resorts for people who, say, have played a certain number of Disney XBox games, or who’ve sat through Finding Nemo more than 30 times with their children without killing either themselves or their offspring. Welcome to a future in which brand loyalty can TRULY be rewarded. Isn’t it nice? Eh? Oh. 
• Recovering The Classics: A wonderful project which seeks to crowdsource new, original cover art for out-of-copyright ebooks which are no longer owned by publishers. There’s some great design in there, whether or not you’re of a literary bent. 
• Bicycle Wheel LED Display Art Thingy: This is very cool indeed, or at least it will be when the Kickstarter gets its funding. Using the same tech which you can see on these high-tech pois, this will let people display LED art on the moving wheels of bikes. There’s all sorts of very cool performance things which could be done with this, leaving aside the inevitable advertising applications.
• Someone In Brazil Made A Judo Font: No idea why, though. 
• Chrome Rollit: Another in the long line of clever, technically astounding Chrome experiments – this time a game that seamlessly crosses from your computer to mobile and back again. Have a play (if you can – you obviously need an Android phone) and marvel at how well-made this is. Kind of like the same sort of concept behind the Wii-U, except something that people might actually one day use. 
• The Mood Recognition Lamp: SO CLEVER! Using a combination of face recognition technology and an IKEA lamp, this piece of design/art takes a standard light fitting from the ubiquitous Swedish retailer and couples it with a camera to make a piece of furniture which responds to how happy/sad you are. Smile, and the light becomes more pink; frown, and shades of blue dominate. Obviously this is incredibly simple, but I can’t help but see it as a first step on the road towards the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation and lifts which make small talk with you and react to your moods. God, that sounds ghastly now I come to think of it. 
• Twitter Exquisite Corpse: Twexquisite corpse! AHAHAHA. Ahem, sorry. This is taking place as of tomorrow, as part of the London Literary Festival, and is a nice experiment in online storytelling and interactive narrative. Taking the base premise of exquisite corpse (‘consequences’ to the uninitiated) – or at least a variation on it – this will see Twitter users given a daily starting point for a story which they can then take wherever they want – these daily collaborative stories are then massaged into coherence by a team of professional writers and  placed on Storify. There’s a nice combination of the crowdsourced and structured here; will be interesting to see what the output looks like.
• Vertigo Pictures of Hong Kong: Remarkable photographs, gazing up at the sky through the urban jungle of Hong Kong. You will get a small crick in your neck looking at these, but it will be worth it – vertigo-inducing and very cool.
• The New Rijksmuseum Website: This got a lot of love online this week, and rightly so. It’s not so much that it does anything spectacular, but rather that it doe everything it needs to do so damn well. Clean navigation, great visuals, the opportunity to create a personalised museum experience online…it ticks all the boxes. Not flashy or showy, just really, really good. 
• Dual Purpose Jewellery: Have you ever wanted to buy a ring which also doubles as a masturbatory aid? OH GOOD! Now, I’m obviously not a woman (OBVIOUSLY) but I must confess to being a little confused by these. I mean, really?
• Most Shared Pictures on Weibo: A clever website scraping Weibo for the most-shared posts containing images over the past 24h. An interesting look at what is occupying the minds of the Chinese people at any given time (or, at least, the stuff that they can share online without fear of reprisal), although obviously my lack of even a passing understanding of Madarin or Cantonese means that I have no context whatsoever for any of the stuff on there. I am particularly puzzled as to why, at the time of writing, a picture of Margaret Thatcher is the 99th most shared picture of the day. Anyone?
• My Privacy: Federico is a New Yorker. Like many of us, he has realised that there is an awful lot of his personal data on the web, which other people are making an awful lot of money from. Federico has therefore decided to try and monetise his own data – you can buy all of it directly from him. Information about where he’s been, the websites he’s visited, everything you can quantify – all available. He’s compiled all of this into a truly lovely series of web projects – go ad check them out, they really are beautifully crafted (it may not surprise you to learn that Federico lives in Brooklyn). 
• What’s My Startup Pitch: Have a startup? Need a pitch? This may help.
• The Abandoned Sanatorium: Absolutely the creepiest set of photographs you are likely to see today, these are of an abandoned TB sanatorium outside Berlin. Hitler was once treated there, apparently – in any case, it’s the greatest setting for a videogame I’ve seen in ages. Oh, and here’s a whole other set – again, creepily impressive with some rather nice effects applied. 
• The Giant Kinder Egg Birthday Surprise: This is what happens when you attempt to make your girlfriend a giant Kinder Surprise for her birthday, but don’t really have the adequate skills or equipment.
• Nike Ballet Shoes: I was sceptical as to whether these were a real thing, but I’m assured that they are – really gorgeous design from Nike, although I’m in no position to judge their quality when it comes to performing a perfectly-executed pas-de-deux (as obviously I perform all my ballet barefoot like a purist). 

Image by Sayaka Maruyama

AN ASSORTMENT OF ‘INTERESTING’ MISCELLANIA, PT.2:

• Who Wore It Better: Depending on your point of view, this is either ‘an ongoing visual research project presenting associations and common practices in contemporary art’, or a really interesting look at the massive degree of plagiarism inherent in the art world. Quite incredible at points. 
• The Social Radio: Have you ever wanted to have your tweets read back to you by a disembodied robotic voice, while tinny muzak plays in the background? No, of course you haven’t. And yet, now you can thanks to this bafflingly-pointless-yet-endearing little web project. What would make this better would be the ability to select voices – I personally would like to have Beyonce’s tweets, for example, read to me in the style of the lead singer of Napalm Death. 
• Glitched Google Maps: A collection of Google Maps images which are glitched so as to show contradictory seasons within the same frame. Someone really should do an exhibition collating all the examples of accidental art created by Google (OR IS IT ACCIDENTAL??? Jesus, it’s so hard to tell. Maybe it’s all just one big conceptual art project, like some sort of infinitely wealthy, all-knowing Gilbert & George).
• One Mexican Town’s Fight Against The Cartels: A great series of pictures depicting the Mexican town of Cherán, which a few years ago threw out its council and police and opted to stand up to the drug cartels independently. An astonishingly ballsy thing to do, well-documented in this great piece of photojournalism in Wired.
• You Think Your Favourite Bar Is ‘Cool’?: It really isn’t. This is something SO hipster that there isn’t even a name for it yet. The most secret bar you will ever see, from NYC. This will doubtless be replicated in Deptford within the year, except our version will have more dead pigeons and will almost certainly be accompanied by a bloody pop-up chicken shack because those are the RULES in 2013 London. 
• Matches With Faces Drawn On Them: I’m sure that if you’re Japanese this makes some sort of sense, but I’m baffled. Someone appears to have made a whole website featuring images of books of matches with tiny faces. THIS IS SOMEONE’S LIFE, RIGHT HERE.
• The Perfect Present For Your Loved One: Have you ever wanted to suprise your partner with a gift which speaks to the unique romantic bond you share, and which acknowledges the coruscating passion you have for each other? Have you considered putting pen to paper and writing your very own piece of erotica dedicated to them, but are unsure where to start? HELP IS AT HAND! This is a remarkable service which will, for a nominal fee, produce one of a series of cookie-cutter ‘erotic’ novels featuring the names of you and your significant other. There are so many things wrong with this, not least the fact that a cursory explanation of the site suggests that you’re not even getting proper bongo for your money – at best there will be a few heaving bosoms and perhaps a desultory reference to ‘his firmness’. Disappointing, but almost certainly comedy gold for the right couple (you’re out there somewhere). 
• A Pinterest Board Collating Crap Quotes People Post on Pinterest: Erm, that. If you have any stupid and annoying colleagues who are fans of the meaningless, inspirational aphorism, this will keep them happy and distracted for hours while you fetch the waterproofs and the flensing knife. 
• Beautiful Pictures From The Upper Nile: A blog collecting pictures from an aid worker’s trip to the Upper Nile. Some gorgeous photography.
•  La Petite Melancholie: A blog collecting pictures of vintage (and not-so-vintage) nudes and other assorted ephemera. NSFW, but, y’know, it’s ART. Tell them that as you’re escorted from the building.
• #なぜ描いたかわからないイラスト晒: So this is a Japanese hashtag trend, apparently. The characters to the left apparently mean something like ‘Stuff I drew for no reason that I can adequately explain’ – searching for this throws up some baffling examples of Japanese doodling, some of which is really impressive and others of which make you want to go and have a bit of a lie down as you contemplate the mysteries of the inscrutable orient (not a euphemism). 
• I Haven’t Been Fully Honest With You: What would you do if some random famous person on the internet suggested that you text this to your significant other and then not respond, whatever they do / say, for an hour? You’d do it, of course, and hang the consequences! The responses are occasionally funny, but you do wonder at what sort of people will do things just because the internet told them to. These people, amongst others. 

Le Dernier Homme, by Francois Bard

NOW WHY NOT LISTEN TO THIS MIX BY DIPLO AND IMAGINE THAT IT’S NOT REALLY MISERABLE IN THE UK EVEN THOUGH IT’S NEARLY JUNE OH GOD I WANT TO EMIGRATE

The Circus Of Tumblrs:

• You Were Here: A nice idea by creative agency Creature in the US, posting pics from a photobooth direct to this Tumblr. I sort of think that there’s a nice tourist promotion thing to be done with something like this, maybe on the banks of the Thames opposite Parliament or something. Maybe.
• Animated Albums: Album covers, animated.
• Awkward Poses: People posing, awkwardly.
• Cat Tonging: Cats being prodded (gently) with tongs. Definitely not tongues. The cats don’t seem to mind, although you do wonder whether they are simply biding their time to exact some sort of terrible revenge (of course they’re not; they’re cats, for crying out loud). 
• Bad Advice: Terrible (but in many cases strangely honest and true) responses to real letters to magazine advice columns. 
• Screenshots of Despair: A series of existentially bleak screenshots / pictures of the blankly unemotive utterances of machines. Guaranteed to  empty your soul.
• Cops & Nobbers: On the one hand, this is a one-note gag stretched to paper thinness which also makes light of some unpleasant instances of extreme police force against protesters. On the other hand, it may be puerile but it did make me laugh. 
• Local People With Their Arms Crossed: Remarkably consistent selection of photographs from local newspapers. From the same series as angry people, grumpy councillors, etc.
• Just Another IKEA Catalogue: NB THIS REALLY ISN’T SAFE FOR WORK, UNLESS YOUR EMPLOYERS HAVE A LIBERAL ATTITUDE TO WORKPLACE BONGO CONSUMPTION. I really, really wish that this was official marketing by IKEA – after all, they are Swedish and therefore obviously have no problem with pr0n. I don’t think it is, sadly. Anyway, this is a blog collecting gifs from pr0n movies in which IKEA furniture features in the background. Is there a piece of furniture in the IKEA catalogue called ‘bongo’? There should be.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG:

• Do You Ever Listen To Full Albums Any More?: A short piece on the NPR website posing the question as to whether anyone really sits down and listens to whole albums from start to finish any more. The comments, though, are where the meat is – interesting comments on how people listen to music nowadays, along with a host of recommendations of music which deserves to be listened to in a single sitting. 
• In Defence of Small Talk: Fascinating look at what it is that small talk actually means, and why we as a species sort of need it, mentally and emotionally, and what it means in terms of commonality of terminology and therefore communication. It quotes Heidegger and everything, so it must be smart.
• The Transformational Power of Spice: If you’re into food, this is brilliant. An in-depth look at spicing and cuisine, and how proper spicing can have a transformative effect on flavour. Will make you want to go and have a really, really good dinner. 
• The Final Days of ‘Macho Man’ Randy Savage: This one’s probably only worth reading if you know who Randy Savage is. If you do know (Hulk Hogan! Legion of Doom! Ultimate Warrior! RIC FLAIR!!!! (OH MY GOD I HAVE JUST FOUND HIS WEBSITE IT IS AMAZING CLICK ON THIS NOW), then this will be an awesome trip down memory lane. He had a very weird life, did Savage, and this is a rally interesting look at the oddity of the wrestling scene in the US at about the point when it started getting really big. 
• The Oddly Poignant Story of 3d-Printed Sad Keanu: This is obviously really silly, but perhaps I’m feeling a bit hormonal or something as it made me feel a little bit *funny* (not in a sex way). 
• How The Internet Is Using Us All: A piece from the London Review of Books looking at the central theses of the recent books by Evgeny Morozov and Jaron Lanier. A nice, gentle introduction to a couple of texts which it really is worth reading if you have even a passing interest in internet culture (sorry, Evgeny – ‘internet’ culture. 
• Behind The Lines With The EDL: Really interesting blogpost by a woman who, attending an anti-EDL protest near Downing Street, found herself in conversation with an EDL member. She recorded the conversation and transcribed it – makes for fascinating reading, if obviously a little unsettling. 
• Twi-Fi: SORRY! This is a great little short story about a Twitter bot. Read it. 
• How Social Mobility Got Stuck: So obviously I like and agree with this because I’m a pinko liberal leftie. Nonetheless, this is an interesting-if-obviously-partial look back at the growth in income inequality in the UK since the Thatcher years, and the quiet emergence of an underclass who, whilst not on the breadline, are increasingly economically incapable of engaging with society in a manner which might be described as fulfilling.
• The Unexotic Underclass: In what almost sort-of works as a segue, this piece looks at that very section of society (from a US perspective), and asks why it is that entrepreneurs seem unwilling or incapable of focusing their innovative efforts on solving problems which apply to anyone other than reasonably privileged people (clue: MONEY!). 
• Spine-chilling Reddit Thread: Reddit users share anecdotes and reminiscences about the scariest things they have ever experienced. Don’t have nightmares (you might, though). 

The beautiful work of Alana Dee Haynes

NOW, FINALLY, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1) We kick off with some unusually high culture (don’t worry, we’ll get back to smut and oddities shortly). Wednesday was the 100th anniversary of the premiere performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, apparently – below is a gorgeous visualisation of the piece. Whack it in fullscreen an relaaaaaaaaaaax:

2) I have just learned that ‘rapper’ in French is spelled ‘rappeur’, which made me very happy. Anyway, this man is called ‘Flynt‘ – his latest single is called ‘Mon Pote’, and I have literally no idea whatsoever what it’s about. I hope it’s nice and not about murdering people or anything. The reason it’s featured is that the video’s a wonderful selection of classic film clips into which Mr Flynt has placed himself. Slickly done – see if you can name them all (and watch it now before the inevitable copyright police clampdown):

3) As part of my continuing commitment to bringing you ODD THINGS OFF THE INTERNET, I feel sort of compelled to include this; can I add, though, that I’m not 100% sure about this one, and it just strikes me as a little gratuitous and bottom-heavy, without the wit it needs to properly stand out. The first minute, though – WEIRD. Major Lazer – Bubblebutt:

4) As I’ve been writing this I’ve started to realise that there’s quite a lot of smut in here this week. Sorry about that. Continuing the theme, though, here’s a great little video – real lesbians watching lesbian pr0n. Totally SFW (everyone is fully clothed) though the audio isn’t, and very, very funny – you may be surprised to learn that what’s peddled as lesbian pr0n is *whispers* actually just made for men! I KNOW!!!:

5) I absolutely adore this. Lipsynching and choreography and just some great face acting, along with a lovely little pop song AND OH LOOK THE SUN’S OUT! This is Holy Roller, by Thao and the Get Down Stay Down:

6) Ricky Hil is a rapper, apparently. His slurry delivery on Sarah’s Song, combined with the lyrics, is very unsettling. Erm, enjoy!:

7) Back to the summery stuff now – Lou Marco is a French musician, this is apparently his debut single which is called Don’t Care, and the video for it is pure Saul Bass. Enjoy:

8) Whether Die Antwoord are/were a band, an art project or some sort of weird hybrid of the two, they’ve certainly been one of the more visually interesting projects of the past few years. This is collaboration between them and Gary Baseman called The Buckingham Warrior – to quote them: “The Buckingham Warrior [is] a tale inspired by Gary Baseman’s father Ben Baseman who survived the holocaust, fighting the Nazi invasion in Ukraine’s birch tree forests for almost 4 years. Baseman and Director David Charles transformed his father’s harsh reality into a whimsical story of survival and hope”. So there. Watch:

9) Last, and possibly least, we have this tourettic audio/animation combo by these people (the French are dominating this week). Enjoy, have fun, and have a LOVELY weekend. You especially:

That’s it for now

See you next week. Please forward this onto as many people as your mail server can physically handle. If you’re reading this and have yet to subscribe, visit the Imperica newsletter page to do so.
 

Oh.

Navesh Chitrakar/Reuters

The Section Which For Some Of You Will Actually Be Of Some Small Professional Relevance But Which For Others Is Mogadon And Of Which There’s Quite A Lot This Week Sorry:

Twitter!:

• Twitter Adds Lead Generation: What it’s technically done is add Lead Generation Cards, but you (and indeed I) don’t need to know that. This is a very significant innovation, in what has been a whole week of pretty big innovations from Twitter. This means that, in time when it’s rolled out to everyone, brands will be able to pay to have lead generation stuff attached to their tweets. Which means, in practice, that if you see a Tweet from, say, a restaurant talking about an exciting new menu item, if you click on the tweet it could give you the option to get access to a discount or free sample next time you visit. Which is, obviously, also giving said restaurant (potentially) your contact details (email, etc) and the tacit right to contact you about WHATEVER IT WANTS for perpetuity. The potential really is huge, though, and a very big thing indeed. The fundraising applications for charities in particular are huge, as they are for political parties (as pointed out by someone cleverer than me). Watch that space. Yes, that one there. 
• Also Adds TV Ad Targeting: This is also HUGE, I tell you. They’ve also added the functionality (which is really clever and not a little spooky) to track what is being advertised on TV where and when, and serve content on Twitter to people tweeting about the programme within which the ad aired. So, to give a THRILLING EXAMPLE, imagine you are at home watching Jeremy Kyle in London; Twitter could know that London viewers were served an advert for the new Danny Dyer film; it could also know that you tweeted about the Jeremy Kyle show during the programme, thus meaning you were an ENGAGED AUDIENCE MEMBER who’d probably seen the ad; it could then serve you a tweet relating to said cinematic masterpiece. Which is amazing really, and if you combine it with the idea above leads to a situation where the Danny Dyer people could tweet discount coupons to users who had probably seen the ad for the film. Or, alternatively and if you’re more dystopian in your futuregazing, a future in which we get served horrifically intrusive contextual adverts based on ANYTHING we do or see. Ho hum.
• Use Twitter to Record TV Shows: In Brazil, at least. I can’t be bothered to explain the tech here – click the link, go on, if you care that much – but by syncing your Twitter account with your Sky account you can record shows by using the hashtag #Skyrec. The mechanic involves RTing content from the Sky feed, which makes it not only technically smart but also a nice, in-built promotion. 
• 2-step verification: It’s a security thing. Not that exciting, but if you run a branded account or if you’re concerned about EVIL people thieving your online identity then you should turn it on. Also, this should at last put an end to the ridiculous ‘oh, our account was hacked’ excuse from brands and sportspeople. No, it wasn’t hacked. You just said something you regretted, or tweeted from the wrong account. NO ONE HERE IS FOOLED. Hear that, Sky? DO YOU???
• Charts For Music: You can now see charts of what people are listening to through the Music service. Which is interesting from a media point of view – there’s surely a story in ‘within minutes the leaked Daft Punk album was the most-listened to music across Twitter’, etc. Or maybe it’s not, it’s quite hard to tell right now. 

Pinterest Adds More Stuff For Brands Too!: Tell you what, all this extra brand stuff on the internet really is going to make our day-to-day interactions with each other so much BETTER! This is a small-but-big addition to Pinterest which allows brands to attach more information to images they pin – so perhaps info about which particular shop an article of clothing is sold in, fore example. 

4sq Search Changes, Now More Like Tripadvisor: Erm, what it says there. Effectively you can now search for stuff near you based on all sorts of parameters – food which it serves, price, how many of your friends have been there (or, perhaps more interestingly for those conducting illicit affairs, places where noone you know has ever checked in), etc. Let’s see if this helps make the service socially acceptable to the mainstream of humanity (it won’t). 

An Interview With David Karp The Tumblr Man: So that was a big thing this week. This interview’s from 2009, and is a nice look back. He seems like a nice man, for what it’s worth (nothing at all, fact fans). This is also worth reading – it provides an explanation as to why the deal happened, why it cost so much (CLUE: advertising to The Kids!), and why it might not actually work. Which neatly segues into this rather wonderful piece by The Onion on why branded content really is what we ALL want more of *feeds biscuit to machine*. 

Facebook (SADFACE)

• Teens Hate Facebook: This did the rounds a lot this week, under a variety of headings which mostly took the angle that teenagers were deserting The Social Network in droves as they tired of the DRAMA surrounding their interactions on it, and the fact that too many of their older family members were now on it and harshing their buzz (I believe this is how The Kids talk). Actually bothering to read the bloody research, though, shows that teens aren’t actually leaving the site – they are just diversifying their presence across multiple networks. Oh, and the survey was of a MASSIVE and doubtless statistically significant 804 people. Oh (again), and does anyone really believe that all teenagers don’t have secret profiles with aliases which their family members know nothing about? 
• Everyone Hates Facebook: Year on year use in the UK is down 9%, say YouGov. My favourite part of this research is this, which I reproduce in full here: The number of UK internet users who have quit social media sites because of social media marketing promotions is up 28 per cent points from April last year. 
• Brands Getting Flak For Ad Placement: Heaven forfend that I defend brands on here, but this really isn’t their fault. Hey ho. People have been getting upset about ads for reputable companies showing up on pages containing questionable content and suggesting that the brands should be ASHAMED for advertising on these pages. Which fundamentally misunderstands the way in which advertising online works. Well done, people.  
• As a bonus, have some more stats about Facebook (and other platform) usage amongst teens here and here.

Google:

• Creepy Sentient Computers Get Closer: Google can now tell what things are in photos. No, seriously. IT CAN RECOGNISE CATS AND JEWELLERY AND STUFF WITHOUT BEING TOLD. I don’t think anyone is getting as scared / freaked out by this as they perhaps ought to be. OH HELLO NIGHTMARE DYSTOPIAN SURVEILLANCE FUTURE (NB – I am not actually a mad, paranoid conspiracy theorist, although I accept it might read like that sometimes). 
• And Closer: Google conversational search lets you talk to the search engine and ask it stuff (the same tech as used in Glass, I imagine). This examination of how it works is impressive, particularly its ability to contextualise questions and remember the sequence of queries and make inferences based on said sequence. 
• Google Trends Visualisation: A slightly pointless but hypnotic and compelling ever-shifting visualisation of the top search terms on Google where you are at any given time. This week it makes for slightly depressing reading, in the UK at least.
• Google Knows Everything: This is an internal parody by Microsoft, a company famed for being loving and caring and cuddly. As such it’s scaremongery, but not actually untrue.

OTHER THINGS IT’S NEARLY OVER I PROMISE:

• A Nice, Simple Look at The Internet Of Things: If you’re not 100% sure what all that internet of things stuff is about, you could do worse than read this rather clear explanation. Useful.
• What Amazon Might Do Next: Clue – sell lots and lots of information about our buying habits to third parties. Maybe.
• How Stuff Spreads – Gangnam vs Harlem Shake: This is by a new agency and as such is a piece of linkbait (which I have totally fallen for). In fairness there are some interesting observations there as to some of the qualities which can affect the manner in which a piece of content is shared or otherwise; it totally fails to mention the MASSIVE amounts of cash invested by record companies in promoting Psy’s global earworm, though. 
• Why Your Fan Count Doesn’t Matter: A decent presentation by Mat Morrison on what you should be looking at instead of fans on social media (really, we’re still having to talk about this?)
• Bespoke Ballads: By Barclays. Can we all agree that we are bored of the ‘here’s a bespoke thing made JUST FOR YOU by a brand on social media’ thing, please? Please? I know there’s no such thing as a new idea, but it’s been 3 years now and I’m tired.
• Coke Stunt #1: So, so clever – giving teens the opportunity to help each other out by donating battery life to each other via th medium of a little Coke-branded dongle. This is excellent because THEY MADE A REALLY COOL THING. Learn, people.
• Coke Stunt #2: Again, clever – giving the opportunity for people in India and Pakistan to interact with each other thanks to Coke. Taps into the whole ‘teach the world to sing’ schtick which they’ve been doing since forever, as well as the happiness thing. And, if you leave aside the fact that it’s still just a stunt to shill sugarwater, another Basically Decent Thing to do. 
• Day Off Generator: This is also very smart indeed; an app for an outdoorsy magazine which works to help fool people you work with into thinking you’re sick when instead you are doing OUTDOOR PURSUITS. What’s cleverest about it is the newsfeed takeover stuff which it does through Facebook (although it does make me question how many people actually go to the hospital with a cold). 
• Anti-crack PSA Billboard Thing: The billboard gets eaten by insects to demonstrate the destructive effects of crack. Oh, bum, I totally ruined the surprise. Nontheless, take a look – the execution is very good indeed. 

Don’t ask

HAVE A HIPHOP MIX BY SADEAGLE TO SOUNDTRACK THIS NEXT BIT IF YOU LIKE

• A List of Crowdfunding Sites: A useful overview of places on the internet where you can persuade people to give you money so that you can make that model of Chewbacca out of cat hair like you always wanted.
• Justice League Families: Very cute and pleasingly whimsical illustrations of superheroes with their kids. Nice illustrations for a child’s bedroom, perhaps. Just a suggestion.
• The Perceptive Radio: I really, really like this. Very clever project by Mudlark (who have made some really good stuff in the past) and the BBC, to create a radio which can take data about the environment around it (relating to location, say, and local weather) and then modify the content dependent on that data. In the test example, they created a radio play in which details changed depending on whether the listener was, say, somewhere where it was raining or not. This is kind of like the benign flipside of some of the Twitter/Google stuff up there – imagine the possibilities in terms of bespoke storytelling you might explore with this stuff. Plug in the internet of things idea and it becomes really, really interesting. Or maybe it just becomes horrible – maybe your fridge will tell your radio that it doesn’t have any Coke in it, and then the people on the Archers will start ostentatiously DRINKING Coke really loud to make you want it and then you will go out and buy some and OH GOD IT’S ALL GOING TO BE HORRIBLE ISN’T IT? *cries*
• Make 360 Degree Videos On iPhones: What it says there <—–. Quite a cool looking little toy, although due to the endless reports about kids being ruined by exposure to pr0n on the radio this morning, I can only think of this in bongo terms. Thanks, radio!
• Add Clippy To Your Website: Remember Clippy? He was fun, wasn’t he? Well now you can bring back the 90s EVEN MORE with this excellent little pointless webhack which allows you to add Clippy (or any of his helpful chums) to your website. I don’t think I can stress enough how much I want someone to combine this with the farting scroll hack from a few weeks ago in a massive, blaze-of-glory IT’S MY LAST DAY act of idiocy. Please?
• 90s Island: Speaking of 90s revivalism (SEAMLESS SEGUE KLAXON), this is a website promoting a (doubtless dreadful) novel all about the era. However bad the book looks (and I can’t stress enough that it looks really, really bad), the website’s a spot-on parody of bad early web design.
• ReverseGif: Leaving aside the tedious non-issue of the pronunciation of the bloody word, this is a cute (and pointless) little tool which allows you to reverse the animation of any gif; amusing results, particularly when you take stuff of people eating.
• A Great Collection of Behind-the-Scenes Film Shots: I’ve just realised how horrifically inconsistent my capitalisation is. Sorry about that. Anyway, some cast and crew shots from a whole load of films. The one of Joe Pesci and Macauley Culkin is weirdly chilling.
• University of Reddit: So apparently this has existed for a few years now. WHO KNEW? Perhaps my ignorance of it is due to the fact that I don’t move in the same glorious, rarefied circles as its graduates. Perhaps. There’s some really esoteric knowledge on here, in any case, if you fancy having a root around. I’ll let you know how I get on with Shamanism 101.
• Taxheaven: A nice website to accompany a petition against tax havens, made by Torchbox.
• Odd Digital Art Project #1: The Pirate Cinema takes frames from the most popular files being downloaded on torrent sites and streams a collage of them, formed out of the choices of entertainment being made by the faceless and unknowing mob. There’s an interview with the creator at the link; his observation about how much the project has taught him about the aesthetic similarities between pr0n and mainstream media is sort of chilling in a casual, throwaway fashion. 
• Odd Digital Art Project #2: A clever music remix-y website to accompany Haroon Mirza’s current installation at the Lisson. Move the images around to affect the composition, and upload your own in collaborative fashion.
• The Pentagram Bikini: Know any female goths who like sunbathing? They might like this, then (NB – Web Curios accepts no responsibility if in fact they really don’t like it at all). 
• Typewriter Robots: Jeremy Mayer makes robots out of old junk and they are really rather cool.

“Marilyn Monroe at Philippe Halsman’s Studio” (1959), by Philippe Halsman/Magnum

Other Things I Have Found Interesting This Week, Pt.2:

• Dumbsto.re: This is really good. A mobile app development platform which allows you to code for non-smartphones. There’s not a whole lot there at the moment, but the potential is huge – there’ a weather app and a directions app, and if you start thinking about the potential to develop tools to enable people without internet access to take advantage of online information then it gets very exciting indeed. Charities working in the developing world should definitely take a look.
• Nazi Hunter Alan: I don’t know why this exists, but am quite glad it does. I don’t think Alan is real, but the music on his website is strangely soothing.
• Time Magazine’s Top Websites of 2013: Not quite sure as to the criteria by which they select these, but there are a few interesting ones, and it’s nice to see This Is My Jam getting a bit of big media love. 
• Google Earth Faces: There’s a lot of interesting stuff being done around machine facial recognition at the moment; this project uses that tech to look at Google Maps and pull out faces from cityscapes, natural geography and the like, with pleasing results. 
• CloudParty: Remember Second Life? IT WAS GOING TO BE HUGE (until all of a sudden it wasn’t). There are still a lot of people who use it, though, with their funny avatars and virtual marriages and real-life affairs and STUFF. Anyway, CloudParty seems to be like SL, except browser-based. I’m only mentioning it because they are running a $1000 virtual art prize, of which more details here, and frankly I reckon there will be about 3 entries so you’ve got a pretty decent chance of winning if you’re into that sort of thing.
• I Love Your Work: My favourite webarty thing of the week, this project has collected over 2,000 ten-second video clips recorded by adult film actresses over a 10-day period. The footage is available to watch, for a fee – each day ten ‘tickets’ are sold to access the video, for $10. No more. It’s not pr0n, although it might feature some; it’s a lot more interesting than that. Watch the trailer-type video on the website; it really is very good.
• Visiting The Shot Locations of Album Covers: No more, no less. Lovely little project.
• Nothing But A Movie: A superb piece of storytelling merging comic art, animation and sound to excellent effect. In particular the audio is brillant. Takes 5 mins, do take a look.
• More Interactive Storytelling: Another nice piece of digital work, showing how you can use video in slightly more creative ways online to improve interactivity, enrich content and just narrate a bit better. Sadly this example’s about the US healthcare system and not exactly scintillating, but it’s worth a couple of minutes’ play just to get the ideas behind it. 
• A Deflatable Sex Cube: Surely one of you will want to buy this, won’t you? SFW, just so you know. 

Madonna of the Squid, by Chris Shaw

 

The Circus of Tumblrs:

• Sexts From Marxists: Combining the dialectic with come-to-bed-eyes.
• Mansplained Marxist: A look at some of the sexist things said to one particular female academic. With Gifs.
• Baguette Me Nots: I don’t really understand what’s going on here, but there appear to be a reasonable number of moderately famous people (Matthew Broderick!) posing with bits of French bread. Whatever makes them happy, I guess.
• Web2Hell: Some of the more egregious taglines of digital ‘businesses’ in the Web 2.0 era. 
• Des Hommes Et Des Chatons: A Tumblr of attractive men and cats. Oh, and it’s French too. I’m sure there are some of you for whom this will probably be the best thing on here this week, so ENJOY. 
• Eagles That Look Like Arsene Wenger: Yes, really, there are LOTS of them. 

Games! Free Games! To PLAY!:

• Cardboard Box Assembler: So obviously this sounds like the worst game ever, but let me reassure you that the amount of time you will spend actually assembling cardboard boxes is in fact very small, and instead you’ll play a very clever braintwisty 3d puzzler instead, which has elements of Fez. 
• Canon: A very small, very simple, very hard music/rhythm game. You will hate it, but it will compel you to play it. 
• You Must Escape: Atmospheric and scary and based around echolocation and trying to find your way in the dark. Play with the lights out for extra effect (at nighttime. It won’t really work if the lights are off but it’s broad daylight, OBVIOUSLY).

Image by Denis Darzacq

 

LONG THINGS OF QUALITY AND DISTINCTION:

• On Music Cloning and Spamming on iTunes and Beyond: A brilliant exploration of how people game the system on music sites and get you to listen to dreadful knock-off covers rather than the real thing. On which point, you really, really need to hear this example of someone scamming Macklemore’s Thrift Shop. Personally prefer it to the oiginal.
• On Consent and Acceptable Behaviour: Very smart piece in the Atlantic about the degree to which certain sexual behaviour should or shouldn’t be acceptable, even between consenting adults. Particularly pertinent in the UK in the light of all the Spanner Trust stuff. Obviously this is not about whether you’re into this stuff or not – it’s about whether people who are should ever be stopped from doing it.
• Benji Lanyado’s Startup Blog: Benji Lanyado is doing a startup, and blogging about it. Interesting even if you’re not in that sort of space; doubly so, I would imagine, if you are.
• Prospect on Farage: A really good profile of omnipresent grinning jackanapes Nigel Farage by novelist Edward Docx in Prospect. Makes me almost feel sorry for Nigel, almost, nearly. Certainly shines a spotlight on the unique horror that is being a professional politician. 
• Street Children: Not a happy read, this one, but worth reading; a look into the plight of street kids worldwide. The pictures will make you sad, in particular.
• On Cats and Japan and the Internet: An incredibly in-depth look at the internet’s obsession with cats, and the peculiar manner in which in Japan they appear to be used as a mask behind which their owners can hide. It certainly does seem that many of the owners of YouTube’s most famous felines are little more than life support systems for their more famous pets. 
• Looking Back at Biggie: I was never that into hiphop when Biggie was…er…big, and even now I’m not a huge fan, but this piece is an awesome slice of oral history, piecing together quotes from those close to him across his career to paint a very vivid picture of a talented artist and the odd soap opera that surrounded him and his death.
• The Best Thing About Poker You Will Ever Read: Speaking of oral histories…this one pieces together the tales of the main players in 2003’s World Series of Poker, widely credited as the event which took the game to the masses like never before. It’s a truly incredible tale, featuring as it does the story of an unknown amateur who went from having $39 to his name to winning $2.5million. You don’t even have to understand poker (although it will help) to enjoy it. Get a cup of tea, this is filmic.
• The Women Who Painted Pinups: A fascinating look back at the life stories of the women who invented the American pin-up as we remember it. Also, loads of great illustrations. 
• Visiting A Competitive Scrabble Tournament: If you liked Spellbound, you’ll love this. The weird, weird world of the people who are PROPERLY good at Scrabble. Contains far more allegations of cheating than I would have expected.
• Why The New Star Trek Film Is Crap: An exhaustive and completely spoiler-ish examination of every single thing (and there are LOTS) that is wrong with the new Star Trek film.  
• American Assassinations For Dummies: Mark Ames is one of my favourite journalists, and this is some sterling reporting for NSFWCorp. Particularly pertinent given the recent debates in the US about drone use, this is a slightly scary investigation into the fact that the CIA has been assassinating people around the world for years. Proper journalism, done well.
• Playing In A Band Noone Likes: Finally, the poignant story of a man deciding to call his band quite because noone liked them. They weren’t dreadful, apparently, just unlovable. An interesting look at when perseverance in the face of adversity just isn’t viable any more; sometimes, giving up is the only option. POSITIVITY! Anyway, you can hear them here.

 

 

 

NOW, FINALLY, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1) First up, 60 seconds of animated brilliance in the form of the aptly-named Aliens In 60 Seconds which is…er…the film, Aliens, condensed into a 60-second animation. Cute, and makes me want to play it as a videogame:

2) Bit more of a sombre tone for the next one, which is a remarkable video made using 600+pinhole cameras and a lot of painstaking effort. This is London Grammar with ‘Wasting My Young Years’:

3) This is a gorgeous animation about a sad-eyed robot escaping a factory. It is called Obsolete:

4) If you have ever been a little boy, this video will make you regress hugely. This is basically what you wanted car chases with your toys to be like, and they NEVER WEAR and so childhood was always fundamentally disappointing. No matter – this is awesome, you should watch it:

5) I don’t know who’s responsible for this or what it’s about other than that it features a lot of melted icecream and that it unsettled me to an extent that I now want to inflict that on you too:

6) Hiphop slot this week is here more to illustrate quality than because I think the song is anything special. The track’s by a guy called Lyrican, and it’s a bit generic-UK-scene overall, but the guest verses from Web Curios favourite Harry Shotta really are impressive:

7) I haven’t featured anything by High 5 Collective for a while now, but they are still churning out brilliant, filmic videos for other artists’ songs. Am slightly amazed that they’ve not been picked up to make something a bit bigger. In any case, this is their short film (music video seems a bit reductive) for Tokimonsta’s song ‘Go With It’:

8) Ai Wei Wei is, it would appear, not only a legendary visual artist and political campaigner but also a musician. This is the obviously hugely allegorical and political video for his new song ‘Dumbass’ – I’m not sure I quite ‘get’ Chinese rock music, but I applaud the man’s creativity:

9) Finally, we have out-and-proud gay rapper Nicky da B, with his video for the song ‘Go Loko’. It’s…well…it’s certainly memorable, and I don’t think I’m likely to have cause to write the phrase ‘bum kaleidoscope’ again any time soon. WATCH:

 

 
Anyway, as is now tradition let’s take a look back over the past week in RECORD TIME. We learnt that academia’s finally starting to take bongo seriously, that the definition of what is considered art is getting broader by the second, that the law really isn’t totally equipped for some of the ‘creative’ uses people are going to start making of new technologies, that it’s truly remarkable exactly how dreadful people can be when given the opportunity, particularly when they are reacting to NEWS on the internet, that sometimes it’s quite sad what happens to people in the aftermath of the internet turning its spotlight onto them, that we are probably more prejudiced by nature than we might like to think, and that people really are afraid of love.

There was probably more, but I need to go to Brighton this afternoon so don’t really have time for much more of this. With little further ado, then, let us undertake our very own FANTASTIC VOYAGE amongst the viscera of everything good (and, frankly, mediocre) that the web has had to offer this week. ONWARDS!

Confessional Embroidery by Iviva Olenick

Quite A Lot Of Stuff About The Internet And Social Media, For Which I Can Only Apologise And Promise That There Is Better To Come Below, Honest, Really There Is, Trust Me, Don’t Walk Away, COME BACK: 

Googlestuffs:

•  – So there were a load of announcements made about Google products and services at I/O this week. They are all interesting and worth knowing about, though as yet they probably don’t affect you too much (whether or not you work in advermarketingpr). You can read about some of the highlights here, or if you’re so inclined you can get a slightly more comprehensive rundown here, and you can read a reasonably decent bit of speculation about what it all MEANS here. In the unlikely event tht any of you give a flying one about my opinion, I think that this is all continuing the work Google’s been doing for the past few years since the advent of G+ – that is, building out its product suite so as to create an online ecosystem that means it’s increasingly hard not to be plugged in to their data gathering network. On the one hand, this has huge potential benefits – after all, Google’s ability to intimately know what you want, when you want it, and to be able to serve you stuff based on its gargantuan database of information about your travel/shopping/music/work/etc habits could be incredibly useful; on the other hand, Skynet. Hey ho. Oh, and the stuff about creating composite photos automatically is INCREDIBLY scary and weird and raises all sorts of questions about what we can and should consider ‘real’, if you care to consider them. 
•  – YouTube Is Now A Shop: No one seems to have thought this as significant as I do; maybe I’m an idiot. Who knows? Nonetheless, this strikes me as very significant. Brands on YouTube can now sell products through their YouTube channels (I’m as yet uncertain as to how it will work with embedded videos), through retail partners or through their own sales channels. Now the initial example is haircare brand Tresemme (I know it’s meant to have an accent on the end, but I’m completely flummoxed as to how one types those), which is maybe why no one appears to have given it much thought, but this is very big news. If you were Nike or Adidas, surely you’d want to give people the opportunity to buy Messi’s/LeBron’s footwear as they watch a highlights reel of your brand’s athletes? Oh I don’t know. Anyway, basically in the future everything will be a shop. GREAT!
•  – YouTube – New Channel Design: File under dull-but-practical – this is a useful primer on how to configure the new designs for YouTube channels.
•  – Why Are YouTube Videos So Terrible?: An interesting thinkpiece which discusses whether only a subscription model will save us from the neverending parade of truly dreadful YouTube content (the answer, by the way, is ‘no’ – I think that the depressing truth is that we live in a world in which people will watch literally anything if given the opportunity and the apparently-inexplicable popularity of the thousands of poorly made ‘comedy’ videos and the rest is simply a result of this. This is a society in which shopping channels actually exist and make money, for God’s sake – are we really surprised?).
•  – Obligatory Google Glass-gasm: After last week’s brief respite, the hype is BACK. A few weeks ago I mentioned the possibility of a terrifying future in which face recognition tech was embedded into wearable computing – OH LOOK HERE IS THAT TERRIFYING FUTURE. I also said something about how incredible Evernote could be when integrated with Glass – OH LOOK AT MY NOSTRADAMUS-LIKE PREDICTIVE ABILITY (although in actuality the Evernote thing’s quite rudimentary as it stands). Anyway, this week we also got a users-eye video of what using Glass currently looks like, a video showing what people think it will look like in a few iterations’ time when they’ve added some bells and whistles (anyone else slightly scared by the constant focus in this video on how much money you have? This would give me the PROPER FEAR)…oh, and we got confirmation that the skinflick industry’s looking to get its mitts on a pair to make intimate, close-up bongo. Oh, technology!

Facebook Stuffs:

•  – Facebook Is Now (even more of) A Shop: See It Shop It is a Facebook thing which allows brands to sell directly from within the newsfeed. They’re trialling it with Littlewoods. Really? Was no one else interested? Seems odd. Anyway, I think that this is all very prototype-y at the moment but it will be interesting to see if it catches on.
•  – Facebook Sections: This is a bit techy, but worth knowing about. Facebook Sections allows Facebook apps to integrate better / deeper with a user’s timeline – giving people the opportunity to further customise their timeline with dedicated sections for things they like / care about, which in turn allows Facebook to do more with the data which people give it through apps. Oh, God, that’s a really horrid description – go and read this for a proper journalist’s slightly less ham-fisted take. 
• Vanity Fair on Facebook: A long but interesting look from a recent VF at Facebook, it’s culture and its ambitions. Not revelatory, but a decent read if you’re so inclined. 

A Little Bit of Twitter:

•  – Peanuts Estate Hires Vine Artist: An interesting step by the estate of Charles Schulz, who have picked a kid who’s made really good Vine shorts to make Peanuts-themed work for them. I think this is a really positive thing, and a nice change from brands expecting punters to make content for them for free, or for the chance to win an underwhelming BRANDED EXPERIENCE. If someone’s good, pay them for their work – can we make this a trend, please, content people? Thanks.
•  – Speaking Of Vine, Here Are Some Good Ones: Some of these are really impressive. PROTIP: stop-motion really, really works on Vine. 

Other Things Gathered Together In A Slightly Flabby Final Section:

•  – Social Media Is Bullshit (Again): This is a post by author of ‘Social Media is Bullsh*t’ BJ Mendelson which takes a short, smart look at why the concept of ‘going viral’ (as often understood by clients) is utter rubbish. Read it (and then go and hire a bunch of Indian workers for 21st Century sweatshop work!). 
•  – Some Quite Good Examples of Decent Work: There’s some dreadful trendwatching language in this blogpost, but there are also some very clever examples of decent online advermarketingpr work on there, which I personally hadn’t seen before. Take a look, if that’s your thing. 
•  – BuyCott App: I am glad that this exists. This app allows shoppers to scan items and learn about the ethics of their making process, which parent company eventually owns them, etc. Incredibly good idea, particularly in this age of brands, sub-brands, etc, and something I would like to see developed further and made international. So someone do it, please. 
•  – Domino’s LIVE: Domino’s has taken the final, inevitable step in the post-bogeygate world, giving customers the opportunity to watch their pizzas being made LIVE (well, not their pizzas specifically, but you get the point). Which is all well and good and stuff, and an admirable commitment to TRANSPARENCY and all that, but does rather make me feel for the poor staff who are effectively now under potential constant on-the-job surveillance. Do we realise that what Domino’s are effectively doing with this service is outsourcing – for free, might I add – their production line monitoring to us, the customer? Do we even care? Oh. 
•  – Coke Mother’s Day Thing: Another week, another bit of impressive marketing from Coke. This is one of the now-hackneyed ‘hey, interact with us on Twitter and we will make you a personalised thing, just for you!’ wossnames (pace Old Spice et al) – nicely done, though. Oh, and this one from Coke in Denmark is absolutely inspired, even if not digital. Bloody Coke *waves fist*. 
•  – Jaguar Made A Short Film: It’s 10 minutes long, and must have cost SO MUCH MONEY. I don’t imagine Damien Lewis comes cheap in this post-Homeland world. Can anyone seriously explain to me what the point of this is, really? The only reason I’m linking to it is because I am a little bit in love with Shannyn Sossamon who is LOVELY. 
•  – Puma Dance Dictionary: Nicely made website, allowing people to stitch together short messages conveyed via the medium of DANCE which they can then send to friends/people they want to sleep with (judging by the tenor of the possible messages you can send). Loses points for the relatively limited number of potential options, and the fact that you can’t seem to turn off the bloody music. 
•  – The Abercrombie Thing: So you may have Abercrombie getting all sorts of (well-deserved) flak, particularly on its Facebook page, for comments made by its (notoriously unpleasant – seriously, I know someone who worked for them in the US at head office and OH MY DAYS THE STORIES) CEO. He’s since issued a pseudo-retraction which no one in their right mind would give any credence to – not that I think it will really hurt the brand that much at all. Anyway, a video did the rounds this week of a guy giving Abercrombie clothes to homeless people as a CLEVER PIECE OF ANTI-BRAND SATIRE. It made me very uncomfortable, and remarkably the best explanation as to why comes from this rather odd Christian website. Have a read.

Untitled by Jesus Leguizamo

SOUNDTRACK THE REST OF THE AFTERNOON AND INDEED THIS BLOG WITH AN ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT 5-HOUR MEGAMIX OF 90s HOUSE & GARAGE!

Things of Potential Interest Which You Are By No Means Obliged To Click On, Pt. 1:

• Algoraving: Apparently this is a thing. Procedurally-generated music in clubs, creating some sort of weirdly unreplicable organic dance experience MAN. Obviously HUGELY Nathan Barley, but also quite interesting from a mathematical / programming point of view. If this sort of thing interests you, you might like to have a bit of a play with this Turing Music Generator, which is sort of the same thing on a smaller scale. I have yet to create anything that doesn’t sound like depressed robots as imagined in 1976 having deeply sad revenge sex, but you may do better. 
• Yoko Ono, Designer: This is incredible. Yoko Ono is a famous polymath, but I had no idea her unquestionable talents stretched to clothes design. CHECK OUT THE HAND TROUSERS! I fully expect to see someone in Clapton wearing these over the Summer.
• Reclaim Your Digital Life: This is an interesting idea, but only really that at the moment. The premise is that the site collects everything you post/share across all your online profiles in one place, with a view to one day creating saved, downloadable copies of everything. Obviously almost certainly massively illegal, but I think there’s a big thing here in terms of the creation of personal archives – I know most of what we throw into the gaping maw of the internet is ephemeral and deserves to be forgotten, but I for one (narcissist that I inevitably am) would quite like to be able to go back through all my internet blatherings over the years. Maybe that’s just me though. 
• StrongBox: I think that this is hugely important. Strongbox has been launched by the New Yorker to offer whistleblowers and others a near-untraceable way of passing on information or stories. Every single news outlet in the world should have a similar system. 
• The Reddit Map: Reddit is BIG. I mean really, really big. This is an attempt to map it in some sort of way, looking a connections between the individual sub-Reddits based on cross-postings, links, etc. Interesting not only as a visualisation of an information network, but also as a navigation portal to some of the odder, murkier sections of the site. CAUTION: there are some subReddits you really, really don’t want to click on (at work or indeed anywhere else). Just saying.
• Arne Svenson is a Voyeur: And also a photographer. This photoseries consists of pictures taken from the window of his apartment into the apartments of his neighbours. His neighbours, it would appear, are less than happy about the fact that he has been doing this and that these pictures are now being sold / exhibited.  
• The Human Readable Type Font: This is an interesting idea. In a move to attempt to baffle Google and other spider/crawler-type programmes, this typeface is meant to work so as to be readable to humans but utterly confusing to machines; meaning anything written in this, in theory, can never be picked up by search and the rest. Nice idea in theory, but I’m not wholly convinced that it nails the ‘readable by actual people’ part of the equation.
• The Ultimate Masochist’s Gloves: Take a look at the close-up picture of the inside of these and try not to wince. 
• Created Equal Photos: A photo series by Mark Laita which looks at the gulf between individuals in the US through the medium of diptych photographs. There are some truly gorgeous portraits in here – take the time to have a look, it really is worth it. 
• Petswitch: You’ve probably seen this already, but in case not…you can now superimpose your features onto those of an animal. You may enjoy it, you may not. It’s not my problem. 

London Diorama Map by Sohei Nishino

Things of Potential Interest Which You Are By No Means Obliged To Click On, Pt. 2:

• Abandoned Geography: A website collecting photography of abandoned places. There are some lovely photos, and the whole site is oddly peaceful. Makes me want to go walking in one direction and not stop for about 2 months (not in any sort of suicidal way, though). 
• Post-Punk New Wave Super Friends: A series of posters depicting stars of early-80s music (Morrissey, Jon Lydon, etc) as superheroes. These are pretty cool, and also available as tshirts if that is your THING. I would love to see what Morrissey thinks of these (probably not a fat lot, to be honest). 
• Teenage Diaries Revisited: So this is a bit like our very own Up series of documentaries (but different); NPR in 1996 gave US teenagerstape recorders on which to record audio diaries. This year, they went back and did the same to see where they were in their 30s. Not a new idea, but there are some brilliant (and sad) tales in here – also I think that the audio-only aspect gives a greater degree of authenticity than on-camera interviewing, though that may just be me. 
• Being A Food Stylist On Hannibal: The truly fascinating blog of the person who does all the food for the US TV series ‘Hannibal’ (no idea if it’s any good). I am quite into food so possibly slightly overindex on how interesting this is, but I had no idea about the insane levels of detail and preparation that go into this stuff. The bit about the grapes is mind-bogglingly obsessional, for a start.
• A History of Public Transit in San Francisco: No, wait, come back! This is a lot more interesting than it has any right to be – the city’s past, as told through the tram, bus and BART network, and all delivered through a really slick web interface. As much about the design as anything else, this is an object lesson in making something ostensibly dry really quite sticky and stimulating (the end of that sentence, I’ve just realised, has ended up sounding oddly sexual. Sorry).
• The Geography of Hate: A clever-but-sad project, mapping the use of hate speech on Twitter across the US. Obviously this is a bit of a blunt-instrument study, and you can only draw so many conclusions, but it’s a bit sobering. Also shows quite how much of America really doesn’t use Twitter at all (I refuse to believe that the blank spots on the map are there because noone’s saying anything unpleasant, nice as it would be to think so). I laughed darkly looking at Idaho, given what day it is today (see opening para). 
• Live Map of Wikipedia Edits: This is oddly compelling. Does what is says in the description, by offering real-time(ish) geolocated indications of which pages on Wikipedia are being edited, and where from. What’s most interesting is seeing the slightly obsessional behaviour going on here – I now know, for example, that someone in Lytham St Anne’s woke up this morning with no greater desire than to spend their early waking moments making alterations to Cliff Richard’s Wikipedia entry. People are ODD.
• Pop Culture Maths: Slight-but-cute illustrations of superheroes and the like, in equation format. 
• A Brain Made From A Foreskin: Well, sort of. Ish. This hands-down takes the prize for oddest art/science project of the week, in any case. It’s quite hard to describe, so I’m going to defer to the artists’ description: this is “a speculative techno-scientific experiment that uses a stem cell reprogramming technique called induced pluripotent stem cell technology (iPS) to reverse engineer foreskin cells purchased from an online catalogue into embryonic (like) stem cells, which Ben-Ary and Hudson then transform into neurons”. So, er, there you have it. Feel free to make your own phallus-cranium jokes. As an aside, of all the things about this project that are marginally disturbing, the fact that you can purchase human foreskin cells online is probably the most WTF-ish. WHERE ARE THEY FROM??? Are mohels all over the world engaged in black market foreskin trades? WE MUST KNOW.
• Freakstarter: A collection of some of the oddest Kickstarter projects currently live on the site, and a wonderful testament to human ingenuity and, quite often, idiocy. Text-based strip poker? Really?
• The Running Gags of Arrested Development: There is a lot of hype (on my bit of the internet, at least) about Arrested Development’s imminent Netflix return. The marketing around it has been excellent, although this site doesn’t look official. In any case, it’s a rather nice visualisation of the series’ running gas, which are legion. If you don’t know the series, it really is worth watching (promise). You can probably find it on certain websites, should you not desire paying for DVD boxsets (NOT THAT WEB CURIOS IN ANY WAY ADVOCATES PIRACY). As a bonus, have this rather nice Tobias Funke microsite which showcases everyone’s favourite nevernude’s acting chops. Oh, and here’s something on the whole cult around the series.

Exhibitionists at Exhibitions, by Jerry Pigeon

The Circus Of Tumblrs (I may have been a little premature in declaring the whole thing ‘over’ last week…):

• 9 Film Frames: Films boiled down to 9 frames. Interesting exercise in boiling something down to its most minimal state whilst maintaining a degree of narrative integrity (or, er, something).
• Merchandising Is Forever: A Tumblr featuring animated gifs of old Star Wars merchandising. Hypnotic in a way that I don’t wholly understand. 
• Goldblumings: Jeff Goldblum’s face, superimposed onto flowers, for reasons which at present escape me. 
• I Don’t Want Your Fucking App: Shaming those websites which continually push you to download their app which, almost inevitably, is unnecessary and unhelpful and would be used a grand total of three times. CAN WE STOP WITH APPS, PLEASE? 99% of the time they really aren’t needed. Just design responsive websites. Go on, you can do it. 
• Anime Backgrounds: As you might expect, background illustrations from anime. Someone might find this of use, maybe.
• Your Logo Is Not Hardcore: A blog collecting the thousands (apparently) of logos appropriating the traditional hardcore design of the crossed-lines ‘x’. There is a LOT of commonality in design, it turns out.
• Women of Google Glass: See! It’s not just men!
• Obscure Videogames: A collection of gifs and reminiscences about obscure(ish) games of yesteryear.
• Private Eye: The Eye des Tumblr. Early days, and at the moment it’s basically just replicating magazine content in bite-size form, but there is so much they could do with this…
• Public Shaming: As linked to up *there*, this collects instances of people’s awfulness on Twitter around the issues of the day. US-centric, and guaranteed to make you feel really grubby and sad about the future of humanity if you spend too long on it. Enjoy!
• A Whole Massive List of Arty Tumblrs (& Blogs) To Waste Time On

Games!:

• Mondrianism: A very clever little puzzle game, based around the artistic style of Piet Mondrian, which is not only fun but, when you get it right, plays beautiful music. 
• Breakfast On A Wagon With Your Partner: Another week, another lovely piece of interactive fiction. This is a post-apocalyptic tale which you can take in any one of a number of directions. I don’t know whether it’s something to do with the medium or whether it’s simply a function of where I find this stuff, but much of the more interesting work in this medium seems to play with ideas of gender and sexuality (as does this, on a certain level). Anyway, it’s rather good. Have a play.
• Racer for Chrome: Part game, part tech demo, this is really, really clever. Play this excellent little racing game (with a cracking Giorgio Moroder soundtrack to boot) across mobile devices – up to five can be placed side by side to create massive tracks which several players can play on together. Really impressive tech, aside from anything else. 
• Emulator Heaven: It’s Friday, you can afford to slack off. This site contains links to a huge number of emulators which will allow you to play retro games in your browser. Command & Conquer’s there, which for some of you will be enough to ruin / enhance your weekend (delete as applicable).

Abbas Momani / AFP – Getty Images

LONG STUFF WHICH IS LONG:

• The Immortality Dreams of a Russian Billionaire: If you were mind-twistingly rich, wouldn’t you want to work towards a future in which you could exist forever? This piece about Dmitry Iskov and his frankly MENTAL 2045 initiative is fascinating and unsettling in almost equal measure. Proof positive, too, that sci-fi has so much more influence on the development of future technologies than we tend to give it credit for.
• The Making of Chicago Restaurant ‘Grace’: An excellent piece of journalism about a man’s obsessive drive to open a really, really good restaurant. Inspirational in a non-cloying sort of way. 
• What Motherhood Does to Bodies: A piece written for Mothers’ Day in the US, in which the author thanks her mother for putting her body through childbirth. Basically this is a fairly comprehensive look at all the *ahem* slightly  hardcore things which pregnancy and childbirth do to the human body. WARNING: if you are pregnant (or squeamish) I probably wouldn’t advise reading this.
• 50 Shades of Grey As An Allegory for Late-Stage Capitalism: A clever-if-not-100%-serious analysis of that bloody book as a cipher for aspirational culture and class differentiation in the Western world in 2013. 
• The Modern History of Swearing: A brilliant piece taking a look at the etymology of some of our favourite BAD WORDS, and introducing you to a whole host of others that you might not have been aware of. You will probably never talk about people ‘larking around’ again. (AN ASIDE: the best etymology of profanity stuff I’ve ever read came in Nic Kelman’s novel ‘Girls’ (not necessarily an easy or pleasant read at times, but an excellent book), in which I learnt that the word ‘cock’ was, in medieval times when the deity could not be invoked except euphemistically, once a synonym for ‘God’. Which tells you all you need to know about men, really). 
• The Young Man’s Guide to Shopping For & Wearing Girls’ Clothes for the First Time: The always-superb McSweeney’s has been running this column by male-to-female transsexual Casey Plett for a while now. This edition, about having to buy female clothes for the first time, is funny and poignant and thought-provoking and a bit sad and hopeful and and and and. Read it.
• How Saudi Arabia Is Monitoring Twitter: Come on, let’s not kid ourselves that it’s just those lovable guys in Saudi. 
• What People Mean When They Wear Onesies: A nice piece of writing about what the rise of the onesie tells us about how people in their 20s are feeling about stuff (CLUE: Not fantastic, it turns out). 
• Pitchfork on Daft Punk: I think we can agree that the marketing for the Daft Punk album has been absolutely stellar (and very, very expensive). This piece on Pitchfork is an excellent look at the band, the release, and Bangalter & De Homem Christo’s place in the popular culture pantheon (though personally I think that the real star of the piece is the page design, which is BRILLIANT). As a bonus, have this piece on why the album’s release is an excellent example of how the internet has ruined music criticism (amongst other things).
• The Town of Lottery Winners: In 2011, one small town in Spain one big on the national El Gordo lottery. This is an excellent piece of writing as to how it all worked out for them in the immediate aftermath.
• Sisa – Crisis Cocaine: Finally, a great piece of reporting by VICE on Sisa, a cheap stimulant which is doing bad things to Greece. I would love to see a wider piece of research about changing drug use in recessionary times across Europe – someone make that happen, please. 

NOW, FINALLY, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1) First up, a documentary. ‘Jela’ is the story of an East London resident, former drug addict and football hooligan. Slow, quiet, contemplative and sad – a brilliant portrait of the changing-and-yet-not face of the East End:

2) I hadn’t heard of Josef Salvat until about 5 minutes ago, This is his song, ‘Hustler’ – the video’s not that exciting, but the song gave me proper goosebumps and so I recommend it unreservedly (I make no allowances, as ever, for personal taste). Hell of a voice:

3) I featured Team Spirit last week as well, but make no apologies for including them here too. After the Jesus-themed clip to accompany ‘Jesus, He’s Alright’, this time they head in the opposite direction to take on Satan in ‘MRDR It’s OK’:

4) No real clue what this is about or for, but it’s a brilliantly hypnotic piece of animation from Canada called ‘The Clockmakers’:

5) I have a bit of an obsession with eyes, which oscillates between fascination and bodyhorror disgust (basically the Dario Argento film ‘Opera’ is the scariest thing I can imagine, ever). This isn’t scary at all, you will be pleased to hear – it’s simply brilliantly inventive. This is ‘To The River’ by James Wallace and the Naked Light:

6) Obligatory slightly hipsterish hiphop of the week comes from Prolyphic and Buddy Peace with their single ‘Go Green’, which is not only excellent but also features a rather cool puppet:

7) There were two videos by Young Galaxy that I had on the list this week (the one that didn’t make the cut was this one, for Blown Minded, which features beautiful glass-painted animation) – the one I went for in the end was for their song ‘Fall For You’, which song reminds me slightly unpleasantly of the execrable ‘Sunchyme’ by Dario G but has a BRILLIANT animated video:

8) Have you ever speculated as to what websites would look like if they weren’t in fact websites but were instead children’s toys of the 1980s and 1990s? Oh good, it’s not just me then. This is a brilliant concept, superbly executed – it even feels like advertising aimed at kids from the early 90s. Basically designed to appeal to anyone a little bit webmongy in their early 30s (so basically me, then), and it also reminds me of ‘We Want Your Soul’ by Adam Freedland, though I’m not totally sure why. This is Neosignal with ‘Planet Online’:

9) I can’t work out whether this is inspired or awful Lou Bega-type rubbish, which probably means it’s dreadful and I have no taste. In any case, though, it’s insanely catchy and I could imagine it getting HUGE amounts of radio play. This is Menage Quad with’Listen To The Music’:

9) Last but not least, have some fully naked people dancing! Come on, it’s Friday, why not join in at work? This is Asaf Avidan with ‘Love It Or Leave It’:

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!!!!:

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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Nothing else has been REMOTELY as exciting as the surprise election of an old white man to one of the World’s highest offices – frankly I have no idea WHAT we’re going to do to keep ourselves amused from now on. Maybe stuff like this (although I really do hope not). Anyway, there’s a lot to get through – grab your rosary and pray for divine intervention, for I am taking you deep into the godless world that is THE INTERNET (I may never have been more hyperbolic. Don’t worry, it’s still just links and stuff. Don’t be scared. COME BACK!).

iPope (Image credit: Michael Sohn / AP)

AdvermarketingPRinternetty Stuff:

TEXAS:

• SXSW Overview: I may have mentioned last week that I wasn’t at SWSX and that I was IN NO WAY BITTER. On reflection, I’m really not. Anyway, for all you other proles who, like me, stayed home and forsook barbecues in favour of frostbitten extremities, the WSJ roundup of news is worth a look (Hater is my favourite, fwiw). Regular readers of this thing (I’m talking YEARS, here) may want to send me a congratulatory email and perhaps a present given that this year’s apparently revelatory BIG THEME was all about the confluence of physical and digital, which I may have been banging on about for a while now. You won’t, though, will you? Not even a postcard. You disgust me.

FACEBOOK:

• More Actions: This is going to keep on coming, but the verb invasion on Facebook continues apace, this time with the addition of Open Graph developer actions for ‘Rate’, ‘Run’, ‘Read’, ‘want to read’, etc… I think that the ones expressing desire are particularly interesting if you’re in the business of promoting stuff / things which people could reasonably be expected to look forward to (INSIGHT!!!) but, as I keep repeating and will continue doing until the world basically shows signs of agreeing with me, is unlikely to be of so much use if you have a Facebook Page promoting, oh I don’t know, toilets or something. 
• Hashtags?: So this is nothing more than speculation, and the article rightly calls out all the functional barriers to this working (protected statuses and general FB privacy stuff, basically), but this would potentially be a useful addition to the platform (primarily – you guessed it – as a way to sell more advertising!).

TWITTER:

• More Promoted Tweet Analytics-y Things: After the Ads API thing the other week, this is another sensible move when it comes to showing advertisers quite how much bang Twitter delivers for their paid-media buck. Aside from that, though, the addition of all the information about ‘earned engagements’ (sorry) is actually very useful in terms of determining a campaign’s actual resonance and effectiveness. Depending on how good they get at drawing out detailed demographic info (which is harder for them than for FB as gathering that sort of info’s not part of the sign-up process) this could all be very powerful.
• Twitter Developing Music App(?): Not sure if it needs the question mark, as it looks like a fait accompli, but nonetheless. Details are vague, but it seems to be that it will be some sort of magical taste-determining thingy which will be powered by SoundCloud (and, possibly, by magic. Who knows? I certainly don’t). 
• Now With Added Line-Breaks: This is a brilliantly comical terrible idea. Twitter this week started to allow people to insert linebreaks within Tweets (although it’s only visible when viewing tweets on the Twitter website). What this basically means is that people can now GO HAIKU CRAZY (actually, any community managers reading this with a skill for Japanese verse and a willing client – take that and run with it. Go on. DO IT)! Oh, and really mess with their followers’ timelines by writing tweets at 1-character-per-line. Expect this to be turned off or at least modified fairly significantly in the not-too-distant future.

PINTEREST:

• Look! Analytics!: Not particularly interesting stuff, but worth knowing if you have a Pinterest presence and are trying to work out what it’s doing for you and justify why… An almost certain precursor to the rollout of ads on the platform in the next few months, I reckon. What do you mean you don’t care? Ingrates.

GOOGLE (OR “THE CYBORG MANIFESTO SECTION”)

• Apps for Google Glass: Unsurprising to see apps announced for Google Glass (and if you think I’m being wanky and hyperbolic with that Cyborg Manifesto link, take a second to think about what sort of incredible knowledgegathering / information archiving / memory augmentation a combination of Glass and Evernote can afford one. Go on, THINK. It’s absolutely incredible, and this is just the really crap alpha iteration of all this sort of stuff. MASSIVE DIGRESSION AHEAD: I recently reread Neuromancer, and aside from (as ever) being struck by the sheer density of ideas and the odd not-quite-prescient-but-certainly-pretty-good-guesswork nature of all the techstuff, it got me thinking about the interesting shift in thought about man/machine interfaces …we’ve moved from a position where we imagined plugging chips into our heads to one where we imagine being able to take the augments off at will – but potentially creating a society in which we’ll never want to…). These will be big, anyway, and the possibilities are HUGE. Wonder when the FB one will be announced which partners their nascent facial recognition technology with Google’s to create something which tells you who EVERYONE is when you pass them, what their stated interests are and how many friends you have in common? Dear God, and just imagine what you could do with Bang with Friends…
• Shopping on Glass: A look at grocery shopping in an augmented future. Now think about what I said about Evernote, above, and what an archive of every recipe you’ve ever seen and thought, “ooh, that sounds good, might cook that one day” combined with a comprehensive database of what’s in season, combined with something that tells you what shops sell what, might look like. IT LOOKS HUNGRY.

STUFF THAT MIGHT BE USEFUL:

• No-download Browser Sharing: Erm, exactly what the description says. Really useful alternative to Lync, G+ Hangouts and the like for people who don’t have them. 
• Catch-all Shared Drive Access Thingy: A career in product naming is doubtless but weeks away. This is basically a shell programme that gives you access to all your online files from one place. Draws stuff from Dropbox, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, etc, into one box. I’m describing it appallingly badly, but I’ve had a play around and it’s quite useful. Also, the people behind it were very nice when I emailed them with a suggestion, and that goes a long way.
• OneTab: This Chrome extension could have been made for me, but might also be useful to anyone else who regularly has about 150 tabs open. With OneTab, you can pull all your open tabs into a single one as a linked list – really useful if you need to stop browsing but haven’t finished looking at stuff and don’t want your browser to take about 15 minutes to start up next time. 

CAMPAIGNY STUFF! (as mentioned before, a lot of these are via Roberto Venturini’s blog):

• Renault – Lifted By Likes: This one’s Renault in the Netherlands, who set up a FB competition to win a car. Each ‘Like’ the competition app received translated into a real-life weight being added to a seesaw – at a certain point the likes would outweigh the car, which would lift up – the person whose ‘Like’ was responsible for tipping the car won said vehicle. My favourite thing about this is that, with a bit of basic maths, we can work out exactly what each ‘Like’ cost Renault. Cost of the car at retail? Say £12,000. Cost of the app? Say £7,000. Cost of all the physical stuff (seesaw, weights, people, etc)? No idea, but let’s say £2,000. Cost of the time spent by a bunch of agency people drafting a load of documents, strategies, etc, to make the case for the bloody thing, as well as the endless conference calls and meetings and frenzied calls to the designer when the client said that they didn’t feel the app logo was a red enough shade of red? Hard to say, but I don’t think £20,000 is an outlandish estimate. So that’s £41,000, very roughly, to deliver…12,000 additional likes. That’s £3.41 per like. That seems like rather a lot. AND YES I KNOW IT’S NOT ABOUT LIKES IT’S ABOUT SODDING ENGAGEMENT, BUT STILL THIS IS JUST STUPID ISN’T IT?
• Canberra’s Human Brochure: Nice work from Canberra’s tourist board, who got a load of real people to go and become the HUMAN BROCHURE to promote the area through social media. To the point above, this will also have worked out as expensive, but the outcomes seem to me to be a lot more worthwhile. Maybe I’m an idiot, though. In any case, I like the execution. On a similar note, this slideshare from Tourism Australia is a nice look at how they use digital in their communications – whilst it’s easy to snarkily say “yes, well, try that with Swindon you smartarses”, there are some sensible principles in there. 
• H&M’s Gif-y Shop: & Other Stories is apparently a fashion brand which is an offshoot of H&M. It’s probably meant to appeal to a completely different core userbase; I am sure that there are brand bibles somewhere which explain exactly who their core target consumer is, how she is different from H&M’s core consumer, and how fashion makes her feel. I don’t care about that, as I am (as has been previously mentioned) so poorly dressed as to be practically sartorially handicapped. I’m only including this link as the website has replaced some of the product thumbnails with animated gifs which gives a subtle hipster aesthetic to the whole thing (oh, maybe I do get the userbase thing after all) and is another sign that gifs are mainstream, MAN.
• Old Spice Are Making Fun Of Us:  So following in the footsteps of Isiah Mustafa and Fabio. Old Spice has another FUNNY CHARACTER to front its advertising. This has basically descended to the point where, surely, the people at W+K (or Y&R or whichever advertising behemoth is behind this one) are just sitting there laughing at us all, isn’t it? I mean, the central conceit of this appears to be that Old Spice now have a talking wolf doing their marketing (MANLY!); said wolf has a hilariously simplistic and brutal (and yet ironically sophisticated) approach to campaigning and marketing which we are meant to laugh at, whilst at the same time we consume exactly the same sort of  simplistic and brutal (and yet ironically sophisticated) maketing materials we are supposed to be laughing at OH GOD MY HEAD HURTS. The LinkedIn Page made me laugh, though. 

Young Critic Engaging with John Lavery’s “Portrait of Anna Pavlova” (1911) (Via Christopher Higgs)

BEST THING I FOUND ALL WEEK: When I was 14/15 and growing up in Swindon, Chris Morris’s Radio1 show on (I think) Wednesday nights was the funniest, most subversive thing I had ever heard (on reflection that makes me sound quite sheltered. Oh well). This is an archive of nearly all of them – I listened to a few this week, and was reminded of how much he got away with, and how much of this stuff wouldn’t be allowed anywhere near UK radio, especially the BBC, these days. Funny and silly and clever all at the same time – and, as a bonus, he played some awesome music too. If the idea of a small child telling Richard Littlejohn that he is ‘a Grade-A nonce’ makes you laugh, you’ll like this.

Stuff I Found That I Think Is Good / Interesting, Pt 1:

• CouchSeats: A website which pulls together videos of musicians’ live performances. Nothing you can’t find on YouTube, but if you like watching people live (or, more accurately, recordings of them performing live) then you might like this.
• OurSpot: This is a marketplace for people to buy and sell photography services for various events. A nice idea, and potentially a useful thing if you’re an amateur who wants to build a portfolio or something.
• Paintings-with-food: ‘Red’ Hong Yi self-describes as a painter, but makes her work with food rather than with pigments. The results are very impressive, in any case – see this on the Facebook page of A N Other food-related brand sometime very soon (turns out she’s quite famous already, in fact, so maybe I’m late to her work. Hey ho).
• Product Posters for Stuff That’s In Films: I’m having a fairly hard time describing ANYTHING today. Perhaps I’m getting ill. In any case, this site hosts a collection of rather excellent fictitious adverts for objects from popular culture – so the silly gun from Men In Black, 3 Course Dinner Gum from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, that sort of thing. There are some rather good designs on there, check them out.
• World of Classcraft: I thought we were done with gamification, but it turns out it’s still kicking its little legs in defiance of the fact that everyone’s now moved onto another overhyped buzzword trend. I’m also pretty much certain that the number of people with any connection to education who read this is pretty much 0. Anyway, World of Classcraft is an interesting concept for gamifying the classroom – applying the same sort of concept that informs the ‘House’ model popularised by Harry Potter to a fantasy-type game to be played during lessons. No idea whether it would work, but I think it’s an interesting concept and, for certain types of kids of a certain age, might be useful. Tell you what, why not try adapting it for your agency?
• How To Survive a Political Coup: It’s been a bad week for Dave, all told, which makes this blog on how to survive a political coup by former Gordon Brown SPAD Damien McBride particularly interesting. 
• Someone At The Onion Really Doesn’t Like Christopher Walken: No idea whether this will still be up by the time you click on it, but it’s a pretty punch piece of writing about Walken’s somewhat murky past. He’s still a great dancer, mind.
• A Musical Map of Paris: A lovely project, accompanying an exhibition which apparently took place last year, and assigning songs to each of Paris’s Arondissements. On a similar tip (but less digitalinteractive) is this map of which UK cities have spawned which musicians / bands. Who knew Newton Le Willows would give the world so much?
• Logos for CHARITY!: Today is COMIC RELIEF! Your main feeling at that is likely to be one of relief that you will, soon, cease being inundated with crap, unfunny CHARITY initiatives (THERE IS NOTHING INHERENTLY FUNNY ABOUT GOING TO WORK IN PYJAMAS), but it is still a good cause and this is a lovely initiative to raise money. Brand / design agency MultiAdaptor will, for a small donation, design YOU your own personal logo. If you’re one of those insufferable squawking inanities that likes to talk about your ‘personal brand’ this is your lucky day.
• If Superheroes Got Sponsorship: Not sure if I quite agree with some of these. I always thought Batman would be Audi, personally, or maybe BMW. 
• Vinyl Boombox: How Hackney isn’t already overrun by people carrying these I will never know.
• Bureaucratics: Fascinating photoseries of civil servants worldwide. I think there’s a certain similar cast to the eyes, though that might be projection on my part.
• Children and their Possessions: Another globetrotting photoproject, this one looking at children from all over the world and capturing them with their favourite things. Not only rather cute, but also a (unsurprisingly) startling look at a practical demonstration of lifestyle/value/income differentials. 

I find this really upsetting. Photo by Alma Haser

Stuff I Found That I Think Is Good / Interesting, Pt 2:

• The Global Internet Pr0n Search Habits Survey: An ostensibly SFW (no nudity, but I have no idea whether your employers will look askance at you should they see the words ‘MILF’ and ‘facial’ plastered (sorry) all over your screen) look at the top 10 pr0n searches in a variety of countries, regions and US states. My word, Romania, take a long, hard (sorry) look at yourself. 
• Pr0nstars With & Without Makeup (But With Clothes): This did the rounds early this week, but if you’ve not yet seen it it’s both interesting and heartening and sad, and illustrative of exactly how illusory (if anyone needed telling) the image of women that pr0n is peddling is.
• Creepy Sex Aid of the Week: As with many of these things, what really puzzles me is how exactly someone arrives at the point where they think “Yes! Yes, that’s EXACTLY what I need to make my erotic life perfect!”. I mean, I know that this marks me down as incredibly vanilla, but really – A GIANT LATEX EGG LIKE ONE OF THOSE OFF ALIENS???
• The Apogee of Twitter: It’s probably never going to be used for anything this significant ever again. I don’t think, in this person’s position, I would necessarily have shared the experience, but I am sort of grateful that he did.
• Selfless Portraits: A cute little FB-led art project which invites people to draw the profile pictures of complete strangers from Facebook, creating a gallery of portraits inspired by no emotional connections whatsoever. There are some rather nice pics on there, although a little too much use of cheaty photoshop filters imho.
• The Aleph: I’m going to have to take the description from the site itself, as otherwise I will just mangle it: “The Aleph is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges in which a man is suddenly able to see all things at once. I wanted to present a version of what The Aleph might look like now, designed as an endless stream of descriptive passages pulled from the web. For source texts, I took the complete Project Gutenberg as well as current tweets. I searched for the phrase “I saw.”” . Turn it to ‘tweets’ and lose yourself – I could read stuff like this forever, I must say (‘interesting’ thematic consistency – The Aleph, and Borges, are recurring themes in a later William Gibson cyberpunk novel called ‘Mona Lisa Overdrive‘, EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED).
• Let Your Emotions Choose Your Playlists: This is from SXSW, and maybe should have gone up there, but it’s too odd to bury in the dull bit about social media and stuff that people tend to ignore – this is a prototype for a music system that picks music based on your brainwaves and hence your emotional state. Obviously it’s nowhere near as sophisticated or sensitive as that makes it out to be, but still…mental (B’DUM-TISH).
• Hack Your Life With Reddit: A short, useful guide to which threads on Reddit are worth bothering with in terms of helpful tips. Although I don’t know whether I’d take sex tips from there, to be honest. 
• The Smartphone Breathalyser: Coming soon, so it says. This is either going to save lives or it is going to lead to some absolutely insane competitive drinking games where kids compete to see who can register the highest blood alcohol levels without dying. Possibly both in parallel, which may well fulfil some sort of Darwinian function for which we should all be grateful. 

That is a LONG neck (image by Hanna Antonsson)

The Circus of Tumblrs:

• TrollThread: Not so much a standard Tumblr as a home for an art publishing project, this collates trolling comments from internet threads, arranges them by theme, and publishes them as books. Odd but interesting.
• People Dancing Alone to Pony: So apparently this is a reference to a scene in the film ‘Magic Mike’; who knew? What’s even odder, though, is that there are so many people who have uploaded clips of themselves dancing to this, alone, in a variety of ‘sexy’ ways.
• Rare or Unpublished National Geographic Pictures: Some great photos from the National Geographic archives collected here. I particularly like the one of the Russian lion-tamer.
• Ants: A series of gifs showcasing the crazy, violent, brutal and short world of the ant. More interesting than it sounds, honest, though not great if you are a bit freaked out by mandibles and stuff.

LONG Reads

• Tumblr As Art: A piece commissioned by the Tumblr Art Symposium mentioned here last week (and which you can watch a stream of here). I’m not going to lie – this is VERY long and VERY artwanky, but also interesting as an illustration of how almost universal access to publishing platforms and copy culture is having a transformative effect on art in much the same democratising fashion as the mass-availability of the camera did. This quote which I stumbled across this morning seems relevant, in any case.
• Oh, And On  A Semi-related Note: This is an interview with Kenneth Goldsmith, MoMa’s 1st Poet Laureate, again looking at copy culture and appropriation, and containing this awesome, and very true, quote (I don’t imagine my approbation is that surprising): “You see, we are faced with a situation in which the managing of information has become more important than creating new and original information. Take Boing Boing, for instance. They’re one of the most powerful blogs on the web, but they don’t create anything, rather they filter the morass of information and pull up the best stuff. The fact of Boing Boing linking to something far outweighs the thing that they’re linking to. The new creativity is pointing, not making. Likewise, in the future, the best writers will be the best information managers.”
• What Makes Parody Twitter Accounts Work: CLUE: It’s not about being first to an obvious gag. This is a really interesting look at the creative process behind a few of the more successful / lauded parody accounts and what makes them successful. Quite a lot of hard work, unsurprisingly.
• Extreme Urban Exploration: You may recall these pictures from a year or so ago, taken by intrepid urban explorers who broke into the Shard  – this piece in US GQ speaks with them and other pioneers of urban exploration from elsewhere in the world. The whole political side of this stuff is fascinating, I think – the right to take risks, etc etc.
• A Very Strange Tale About Drugs Smuggling and a Potential Nobel Prize: The headline to this NYT piece is pretty much unbeatable – The Professor, The Model and the Suitcase Full of Trouble. Very clever people really can be outstandingly thick sometimes. 
• The Man Behind The Meme(s): Who invented the meme? Well, yes, Richard Dawkins. But in a slightly less obvious way, maybe this person did – back in the day when making FUNNY videos from source material involved razorblades and VHS machines and a lot of patience. A look back at how remix culture began and some perspectives on where it’s going – links back rather interestingly to the Tumblr/art debate above.
• Cypherpunk and Surveillance: You know the whole debate about privacy and how much the internet knows about us and stuff? Well it’s probably already too late. Ignore the horrific term ‘Cypherpunk’ – this is morelike social history than it is geekery, and is frankly quite scary if you look at it too closely. 
• Who’s Watching You?: Continuing this week’s (apparent) theme of ‘creepy stuff about the internet and technology’, this is a really unsettling piece on webcam hijackers and the practice of RATTING. Might make you think twice about sitting naked at your laptop (or it might not – I have no idea what you’re into, after all).
• Miss USA in Seedy, Horrible SHOCKER: I don’t imagine that anyone’s going to be all that surprised that a multi-million dollar beauty pageant business owned by Donald ‘Charming’ Trump is anything other than a bastion of moral rectitude, but in case you needed the scales pulling from your eyes then this article should do a pretty good job. Ugh. GRUBBY.
• Big Narstie vs EastEnders: So Big Narstie is a UK Grime musician who’s become moderately well known in part through his music but moreso through his Twitter commentaries on EastEnders, which he approaches with a dedication and emotional commitment that at times borders on zealotry. Even though it’s been about 15 years since I was into show (I always thought that the Mitchell Brothers’ car chase and subsequent watery escape was the series very own ‘jump the shark‘ moment) I still found this very, very funny.

Image by Bernard Plossu

VIDEOS!

1) We kick off this week with a longform documentary on Belle & Sebastian’s awesome second album ‘If You’re Feeling Sinister’, for which I offer no apologies. This is long and to be savoured (if you’re a fan – if you’re not, it will probably leave you cold and you should go onto the next one which is weird and has breasts in it). I’ve always thought that Belle & Sebastian had one of the more oddly diverse fanbases in music – from skinny, pallid betwetters like me, to people like a bloke I once knew in Swindon who was a bit psychopathic and used to keep bottles of his own urine in his bedroom (B&S were the only thing we had in common, fyi). Anyway:

2) Next, by way of a mood change, is the excellent Watsky. Watsky became famous a couple of years back thanks to this frankly incredible little bedroom recording, and has an excellent back catalogue of mixtapematerial. He’s coming to the UK in May – I saw him last year and he’s very good indeed. This is a song he’s done with Kate Nash (who I know is a bit Marmite, but I confess to having a massive soft spot for ‘Foundations‘), and it’s called

3) See, I told you – drone paranoia is RAMPANT in art. This is called ‘Seagulls’:

4) You may remember the band Smash Mouth, and their song All Star. Last time I heard it, it didn’t sound like this:

5) Just in case you don’t feel quite grubby enough as it is, this should help. This is by a band called Bot’Ox, and it’s called 2-4-1:

6) Darwin Deez is some sort of nerd music superstar. The video for his new song ‘You Can’t Be My Girl’ is composed of stock footage and is charming – enjoy:

7) The video’s a bit so-so, unless you’re a particular fan of VHS-style video, but this is a perfect 2-minute pop song. Warm Soda with Busy Lizzie:

8) The lyrics here are a *bit* iffy, I think, but the fact that the artist has a puppet of himself (which reminds me of Franklin from Arrested Development) makes it a winner in my eyes. Antwon with 3rd World Grrl (well, yes, exactly):

9) There was a lot of good animation this week, including this lovely short called ‘My Strange Grandfather‘, and this technically stunning WWII zombie short called ‘Paths of Hate‘ – I’m closing out with this one, though, as it gave me proper goosebumps. It might be a bit emo for your tastes, but the technical artistry in the animation is incredible even if the poetry isn’t your thing – give it a go and see what you think – this is To This Day by Shane Koyczan:

That’s it for now

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