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Webcurios 22/03/13

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Reading Time: 15 minutes

[image missing]

A hard morning at the bus stop
Catherine, CC licence http://www.flickr.com/photos/sailor_coruscant/2951094290/

Well, it’s been another tumultuous week (aren’t they ever thus), what with the export of the very best of Western Culture into China (truly, we have nothing left to give them), the opening of the best / worst-named restaurant in the world, the International Day of Happiness (WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU DIDN’T NOTICE) and NYC Macaron Day (why we don’t have one of these in London is a source of much agitation to me), the sad cancellation of what sounded like being an amazing gig, my realisation that there exists an anonymous confessions hotline in New York (I WANT ONE HERE PLEASE), and the discovery of the all-important recipe for home-made creme eggs.

There’s also, of course, been the small matters of the Bread & Circuses budget, a little bit of chat about the regulation of the press, the 10-year anniversary of Iraq War II…oh, yes, and the small and frankly absolutely insane vision of a whole country mugging itself. The Cyprus stuff is quite scary, to be honest, and given that it might drag us all into the mire with it I’m going to stop thinking about it now and move on to talking about stuff that, by comparison, is of no importance whatsoever. I know my place.

I went to see Louis CK last night (he was very good). He does a bit about how people present the very worst version of themselves online – we were discussing this in the pub afterwards, and my friend Mo charmingly said that I was quite the opposite and was basically loads better on the internet than in real life. YOU HEAR THAT, PEOPLE? THIS IS THE ABSOLUTE BEST OF ME YOU’RE GETTING HERE. Be grateful.

 

Taken from the fabulous Scarfolk blog

Advermarketingprinternetstuff (anyone with better suggestions for this, other than ‘the bit noone reads’, please do let me know):

GoogleThings:

  • Google Keep: This is basically Google’s version of Evernote – a service which lets people do all that ‘tag, store, note-take’ stuff which they all seem so keen on doing these days. Effectively it’s them saying ‘look, we know where you live – now outsource your memory to us as well! What’s the worst that could happen, eh?’ (I imagine them mugging and winking furiously to camera as they do so, for reasons known only to my subconscious). Obviously I am (possibly) exaggerating the sinister aspects of this for effect – it will probably be quite useful. If I were Evernote, I might be a bit scared. Although of course it could all go the same way as the other stuff in the Google Graveyard (speaking of which, if you do miss Google Reader then you might like this as an alternative).
  • Google Gif Search: It’s increasingly seeming like there’s very little point building stuff if you’re NOT Google – even if you get there first, they’ll just make their own version of whatever you throw out a few weeks/months/years later and then crush you beneath their juggernuat wheels like the miniscule, insignificant whelp that you are. You may (or may not) recall Giphly, a nice little gif search engine I found a few months ago – this is Google doing that. Lose yourself in the Ryan Gosling gif universe – you know you want to.  
  • Google Unified Chat: Included more from the mistaken belief that completeness matters than from any burning sense of excitement, this is the news that Google is planning on unifying the ‘chat’ function across Gmail, G+, Google Drive, etc. Which is actually quite a clever idea, and probably has a lot of positive implications for potential customer services things if you’d like to think about them. Also, it’s rumoured to be called Babble WHICH SOUNDS LIKE BABEL. Just, you know, pointing that out. 
  • Nice Little Literary Promo for Collaborative Working: This is a very nice piece of work to promote collaborative working through Google Docs, which takes your prose and imagines what it would be like were you collaborating with a host of famous literary figures and they were editing your copy in real-time. What it would be like, by the way, is VERY IRRITATING – Shakespeare’s undoubted ability to spin a yarn doesn’t automatically give him the right to gussy-up my prose whenever he feels like it, the be-ruffed nincompoop.
  • YouTube TV Shows: I don’t really know whether there’s anyone who’s done Channels on YouTube that’s achieved proper mainstream crossover success – is there anyone? I mean, there’s big-if-niche channels like Machinima or Epic Meal Time, and I thinkk VICE are doing pretty well with Noisey, but I have no well-known they actually are. Anyway, will be interesting to see how the two new channels being punted by Ricky Gervais and Simon ‘Reality TV Sauron’ Cowell (copyright Marina Hyde on that one) fare – and even moreso to see how Reddit do with their new Explain It Like I’m 5 series, where they explain knotty concepts to actual 5 year olds (it is unclear what benefit the 5 year olds are getting from this deal. Jelly and icecream at the very least, I hope). 
  • Chrome Maze-y Thing: This is only going to work for you if you a) use chrome as your desktop browser; b) have an android mobile device which also runs chrome. If it does, this is fun-if-pointless – you can turn any website you like into a pretty fun little rolling marble game, controlled by tilting your phone. It’s a gimmick, but personally I was left really impressed with the tech and execution. 
 

Facebook:

  • Lookalike Audiences: You may recall that last year Facebook gave advertisers the opportunity to upload a database of email addresses or phone numbers and target those people via ads, whether or not they were already connected to said advertiser on FB. Now you can not only do that but also advertise to people who Facebook thinks might be a bit like the people who’s data you’ve got. I’m skeptical as to how good this ‘people like this’ targeting is going to be – then again, Zuckerberg is a billionaire and I am most definitely not. so perhaps my opinion’s less than vital. 
  • Moderation Guidelines: It’s actually unclear whether these apply solely to Facebook or a variety of sites, but they are from a third-party moderation service the like of which FB offloads some of its burden onto. Fascinating – and quite surprising – to see what you can and can’t get away with according to the powers that be.

Amazon:

  • ‘Send To Kindle’ Button: Basically a ‘read this later’ button which sends whatever page you’re reading to your Kindle (if you have one. If you don’t, it won’t). Worth knowing about – you might as well chuck it on your website’s editorial content. 

Some Campaigny Things and Other Things:

  • Win The Chance Of Maybe Working at Subway!: Subway is running what appears to be a global contest inviting entrants to create a ‘Virtual Subway’ franchise, complete a number of online challenges and get people to vote for their shop, all to win one of 5 trips to NYC & Washington DC to meet and Subway co-founder Fred Deluca. Another of the big selling points (!), though, seems to be the fact that high-achievers in this virtual contests will gain exposure to the Subway network and may be lucky enough to get picked up for a job. This is all very, very odd, although not as odd as the fact that, as things stand, about 800+ people appeared to have entered worldwide. I know that the job maket’s tough, but still…
  • BA Ungrounded: What do you think the best way in which to debate and arrive at solutions to the world’s greatest problems, such as talented people’s lack of access to opportunity, might be? If you answered “hand-picking 100 of the most forward-thinking founders, CEOs, venture capitalists, and Silicon Valley game-changers, and putting them on a flight from San Francisco to London”, with a view to then getting them to “present their ideas to ranking delegates from the United Nations”, then CONGRATULATIONS, you think just like someone from British Airways or their PR/Marketing/Ad agency. IS THIS A JOKE, BA?????
  • A Look at FourSquare Checkins in NYC & Tokyo: Mainly because it’s quite a pretty visualisation. I still don’t know any real people who use 4sq (when I say ‘real people’, I mean people who don’t work in tech or advermarketingpr – we are not real people). 
  • A 3d Map of the Internet: Having repeatedly mentioned William Gibson last week, the theme continues with this video which shows a version of what the internet look like if you were to turn it into a 3d navigable THING. It’s slightly disconcerting, and really does make me think of what Gibson imagined when he wrote about Cyberspace (an aside – I went to see Evgeny Morozov talk at the RI this week, where he spoke about how the idea of “the internet” is a fundamentally wrong-headed one. He’s probably right (although for the purposes of Web Curios I will continue to do just that – sorry, but I haven’t got the time to semantically unpack exactly what I mean each time I type that phrase, which is, I know, lazy. SORRY EVGENY SORRY) – have a read of some of his thinking here and also here).
  • Facestealer: The App: This is an app by Yahoo! Japan, which allows you to (and I quote) “WEAR SOMEONE ELSE’S FACE”. It’s creepy and horrifying and I suggest you try an download it at once.
  • Anti-Domestic Violence Video: I’m putting this up here as I’m 99% certain it’s part of a campaign for an anti-domestic violence charity, although which one (or any other linked elements) have yet to be revealed. I really, really hope it’s not a real video. Oh, and as with all YouTube videos you’re probably best off ignoring the comments. 
Domestic Camo (Image by Maria Kapajeva)
 

Listen! It’s A Mix of Rare Soviet Music by Solid Steel!

Other Things Off The Internet Which I Thought Were Worth Telling You About But I Can’t Guarantee Will Arouse Anything Other Than Moderate Interest, pt1:

  • Letters From A Private: Scanned letters home from a Private in the US Army, 1944-45. A beautiful little slice of very personal history.
  • The Future, As Seen From LA in 1988: This is awesome – back in 1988, the LA Times ran a piece looking at what life would be like for citizens of LA in 2013. Certain elements are pretty close, but the traditional robot servant prediction remains sadly unfulfilled. Sort it out, science.
  • Slavoz ZiseK Writes for Abercrombie in 2003: Slavoj Zisek is a philosopher. For reasons known only to him (and, one would presume, someone at A&F), he ended up writing copy for Abercrombie & Fitch’s 2003 ‘Back To School’ lookbook. This is brilliantly weird – pictures of tanned, healthy, beautiful (and often naked) American youth, juxtaposed with frankly surreal phrases such as ‘The naked couple without the bespectacled teacher would be reduced to two clumsy ignorants unable to perform the act’. I would love a print copy of this.
  • Overdog: This is a really interesting idea – Overdog is a US project that is seeking to set up a community where sports fans can play videogames against sports stars. It’s smart – given that most athletes are young men in their teens/20s, most of whom will likely play videogames to get over the stultifying boredom of the life of the pro sportsperson (I’m obviously just jealous of their bodies and salary), and given that there’s a large crossover with fans in that they are often young, videogame-loving men too, you’d think that there might be a market for this. It’s even reasonably easy to see how they could monetise it. Sports brands people, get on this one. 
  • Author-to-Author Fanletters: A lovely literary love-in here, with a selection of letters from famous authors in which they tell other famous authors how awesome they think those famous authors are. My favourite, though, is the Burroughs-to-Capote hatemail at the end.
  • TedX Summerisle: I would call this a hoax, but it’s unclear how many people were taken in by it. Nonetheless, it’s a really rather impressive piece of TRANSMEDIA!!!! storytelling which takes the uninspiring premise of crossing the breathless improvement-evangelism of the TED movement with the creepy fictional Scottish murdervillage of The Wicker Man. 
  • Tarantino vs Penguin Books: Designer Sharm Murugiah has created Penguin Books-style designs for Tarantino screenplays. These really should be available as prints (says the never-satisfied, demanding, needy, entitled webmong).
  • The Cat Font: A font made of cats. It is what it is. 
  • Michael Keaton: I really have no idea what is going on here, at all, in any way. Needless to say that this site doesn’t appear to be affiliated with the famous Michael Keaton in any way, but it does feature a lot of odd little comic strips and a slight-but-persistent feeling of alienation. Odd, but in a good way.
  • The Artist Explorer: Interesting little hack which breaks down artists by song data taken from Echonest and lets you play around / cross reference it. More interesting than useful, but it’s an interesting way of comparing artists’ output (in totally arbitrary and valueless ways, admittedly).
  • US Gun Deaths in 2013: A beautifully rendered animated visualisation showing data of gun deaths in the US so far this year. The ‘years stolen’ figure is gimmicky, but it does tug at the heartstrings somewhat. There’s full data for 2011 in there too, should you be interested.
Image by Ted McCabb
 

LISTEN! To Songs Which Inspired Daft Punk!

Other Things Off The Internet Which I Thought Were Worth Telling You About But I Can’t Guarantee Will Arouse Anything Other Than Moderate Interest, pt2:

  • TinyGames – A Worthwhile Kickstarter: I don’t ordinarily feature Kickstarters, but I like this one (and the people behind it). Hide & Seek are trying to get the money together to make an app featuring 100s of tiny games (you can see where the name came from), which can be played anywhere. Not videogames, mind – all sorts of different types. If I were a parent, I’d look at this and think “YES! THIS WILL BE A WORTH ADDITION TO THE iPHONE BABYSITTER’S REPERTOIRE”. I’m not a parent, though. That I know of. 
  • Casio Transmitter Watch: I can’t believe this was on the market a year before that LA futurology piece up there. THIS IS AMAZING. Just think of the fun you could have – I’m thinking particularly in terms of what you could do to freak people out in traffic jams. Am I misunderstanding this? It seems like potentially the best childish prank tool ever. Is there an iOS app that can do anything similar?
  • Mark E Smith is Funny, Grumpy: The Fall’s famously irascible frontman’s best sayings, accompanied by images of his gurning fizzog. 
  • The Imaginary Atlas: A website collecting cartography of fictional lands. You don’t need to be a geek to like this, honest – or, well, maybe you do. I think that there’s something strangely soothing about looking at maps of imaginary cities, but then again I also like playing videogames so perhaps I’m a lost cause. 
  • The Lullaby Factory of GOSH: WHY DIDN’T I KNOW THAT THIS EXISTED??? A lovely, whimsical piece of architectural design, or a playful folly, or perhaps both simultaneously.
  • The 100 Most Influential Records of the 1960s: No more, no less, but a very comprehensive rundown containing some great songs I had never heard of. Musos will enjoy. 
  • Inklewriter: After Twine the other week, this is another Interactive Fiction-creation tool, which is (early impressions suggest) very easy to use and pretty powerful.
  • Fat & Furious Burgers: This is the apogee of burgers-as-art (actually ‘apogee’ would suggest that ‘burgers as art’ is a thing – it probably isn’t, is it? Oh well) – a French website containing beautifully constructed, stunningly photographed and often totally inedible burgers. In French.
  • Incautious ‘Art’: There’s a fine line between art and extorsion…Incautious is a project which scrapes comments from pr0n and sex websites – in particular, comments that contain phone numbers. These are then painted onto canvasses and act as one-off artworks for people to purchase. So far, so internet – the slightly dark bit is that they are looking to charge 1000Euros to anyone who sees their phone number listed on the site and wants to have it removed. Which, frankly, I don’t think is very nice. Imagine me pursing my lips disapprovingly as I type this, like a cat’s bottom.
  • Mastectomy Tattoos: Photos of women who’ve had tattoos done over their mastectomy scars. I might question some of the art, but there’s something quite inspiring (sorry) about the sentiment behind them.

The Circus of Tumblrs

  • I’m Google: This is quite hard to explain, but it’s a little bit like visual word association by Dina Kelberman.
  • Noise Park: Bands and musicians from the noise / industrial scene, reimagined as characters from South Park (and frankly a load of other obscure people who I can’t really categorise). Needs a little bit of knowledge, but there’s a lot of nice attention to detail in there. 
  • Beverly Crusher’s Miniature Theatre: This is very odd. Gates McFadden played Dr Beverly Crusher in the Star Trek: Next Generation series. This is a Tumblr that she maintains, featuring the action figure version of herself in a variety of vignettes. I don’t really know what sort of effect doing this on a regular basis must have on her psyche. It’s all VERY meta.
  • Women Eating on the Tube: I’m linking to this mainly to let people know that it exists – there’s something a bit creepy / misogynistic about it, I think, although I can’t help but be darkly impressed at how many people manage to take pictures of strangers on the tube without being noticed. Although I did once take one of a woman who looked an awful lot like Marcel Desailly, which I’m not proud of. 
Image by Mash Design

Long Things Which Are Long:

  • The Age of the Expense Account: A really wonderful piece of writing, look back at the long-gone age in which well-connected foreign correspondents had their alcoholism subsidised by the 4th estate. A really good story about an era in which journalism really must have been rather a lot of fun (and very, very drunk indeed).
  • The Crucifixion of Tomas Young: The title of the piece is too good to replace. This is the story of Tomas Young, an Iraq war veteran who was wounded in 2004. It’s not, I warn you, a very happy story, but one worth remembering given this week’s 10-year anniversary of the conflict. 
  • The Czech Republic on Drugs: I must confess, I hadn’t linked the Czech Republic’s lax attitude to drugs and the never-ending stream of stag parties heading out to Prague. More fool me. This is an interesting look at what drug liberalisation has changed in the country. It sounds a bit grim – though that’s Spiegel’s editorial line as much as anything – but that’s as much due to economic factors as anything else. The meth thing’s a bit troublesome, though.
  • A Quarter-Century in Solitary: What’s the longest you’ve ever gone without talking to anyone, or being in company? This is an amazing piece of writing – the author is a convicted murderer, and obviously did Bad Things, but his account of what it’s like being in solitary for over 25 years is mind-boggling and not a little harrowing. It doesn’t, rest assured, sound like it’s been any fun at all.
  • Hislop On Media: Ian Hislop’s always good value, and this piece (admittedly from a few months ago) is worth reading in the wake of this week’s Leveson chat. His description of Blair as “a man who constantly looks like he’s playing his own character in an action movie about himself” is lovely.
  • The Tragedy of Dr Polidori: If you’ve ever seen the film ‘Gothic’ by Ken Russell, all about Byron and Mary Shelley and the rest during the laudanum-fueled week that led to the writing of Frankenstein, this piece will ring some bells; if you haven’t, it’s even more worth reading as it’s a fascinating account of some very brilliant, and very damned, young minds. The description of Polidori as someone who was basically destined to be nothing more than a footnote in his own life is brilliant and sad. Byron, though, eh? WHAT A LAD.
  • DIY Superpowers: Ever thought of slicing your arm open and, say, putting a magnet inside it and calling yourself “Magneto”? No? Thanks Christ for that. Nonetheless, this piece provides an overview of some of the options for tech-oriented body augmentation. IT’S QUITE ODD.

A Few Additional Videos That I’m Not Putting Down There:

  • Nicholas Cage In Zelda: The internet’s obsession with Nicholas Cage reaches what might be its apogee with this video of a hack applied to Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, which puts Nic Cage’s MAD FACE all over the game. Interest in / knowledge of the original title is not required to get exactly how strange this is.
  • Mad Sausage: A campaign, being supported by the Mercy For Animals charity, to draw attention to the less-than-sanitary genesis of processed meat products. Quite odd.
  • Usher vs The Afghan Whigs: Surely this must have been one of the odder things to have happened at SXSW? OLD rockers The Afghan Whigs gigged with blandest-R’n’b-millionaire-ever Usher and it was actually QUITE GOOD.
  • How Webcomics Work: Short video looking at the economics of webcomics – frankly, though, what it says is applicable to most if not all creative endeavours you’re promoting these days, it seems.
  • Take My Picture: A brilliant short looking at the ever-growing world of amateur fashion bloggers and photographers. People get REALLY excited by clothes, eh?
  • Singing Vaginas: No more, no less. Not embedding this one for obvious reasons – it’s strangely sort of pleasing and happymaking, and is about as sexual as Puppetry of the Penis (ie not at all, in the slightest). Except, obviously, it does feature real vaginas, singing. So quite NSFW, then, so you know.
  • Fist Of Jesus: This is not the Jesus you remember. A very odd short film from Spain, featuring Jesus, zombies and a novel take on the loaves/fishes incident (skip to 7:40 to get to the heart of the oddity) – they’re raising money to make a full-length version, if you’d like to see more…
  • Guitarcam: THIS FEELS WEIRD.

NOW THE OTHER VIDEOS:

1) We start with a short film from a few years back, called “Are You The Favourite Person of Anybody?”. It stars John C Reilly, and also features Miranda July, and it’s pleasingly bittersweet:

2) WendyVainity is a YouTube ‘star’ who makes the sort of odd 3d animations which are sort of pointless and unsettling which I quite like. This is a showreel of some of her self-portraiture. THIS IS ART:

3) Once upon a time, doing the sort of bullet time-type effects made famous by The Matrix would have cost A LOT of money. Now you can do it for pennies (well, almost), just like these wizards of home cinema. A great ad for GoPro, this:

4) Doing stuff to stuff in slow-motion. There’s a lot of this stuff online, but this is a particularly fine compilation. Guaranteed to put a smile on your face, for reasons it’s quite hard for me to define:

5) This week’s first ‘Blimey, that’s a bit odd’ music video of the week comes in the form of this trippy little number from Lapalux. The song’s sort of minimally absorbing, but the video’s what makes this – it’s called “Without You”:

6) Odd video of the week, part 2 – apparently Dillon Francis is “an American electronic-dance musician, known for being one of the pioneers of moombahton, a fusion genre of house music and reggaeton, and moombahcore, a sub-genre of electronic-dance music deviating from moombahton”. Moobahton? Really? Are you making fun of me, internet? In any case, this is his wonderfully strange video for “Bootleg Fireworks”:

7) James Franco apparently has something to do with this, thought it’s unclear exactly what he does in the band – probably EVERYTHING, the insufferably goodlooking polymath. God I’m jealous of James Franco. Anyway, his band is called Daddy and this is the cultish video for Ted James’ remix of their 2012 single “Love In The Old Days”:

8) You’ve probably seen this already, but I don’t care. It’s brilliantly impressive, if not wholly original, and deserves all the views – it’s called ‘Forward’:


9) Last but definitely not least comes this, from Russian band ‘Biting Elbows’. I can’t type the song title for fear of profanity filters, but this is just BRILLIANT. Again, you may have seen it before but I’m posting it due to the number of people who sent it my way this week – again, it deserves the views (another great ad from GoPro, by the way):

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.

Webcurios 15/03/13

Uncategorized No Comments
Reading Time: 17 minutes

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Dead Range Rover
Tim Parkinson, CC Licence – http://www.flickr.com/photos/timparkinson/2881061793/

So, we have a new spate of ‘parody’ Twitter accounts ushering in the new Pontiff. Thanks, everyone. It was a very surreal week in general, and one which made me incredibly glad that I wasn’t tasked with liveblogging smoke (that sounds like an analogy for something, and possibly ought to become one) – welcome, though, to Francis I from the internet and, most importantly, from the creative geniuses at Taiwan Animation (click on this, now. It features Dennis Rodman and a unicorn, and an unexpected reference to NBA Jam and references to the GAY VATICAN CABAL THAT FORCED BENEDICT FROM THE PAPACY (their words, not mine) – and still manages to be nowhere near as patently odd as the rigmarole surrounding papal succession).

 

 

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) This was sent to me and another Twitter person on Wednesday, with the accompanying message “I saw this and thought of you”. THANKS! This is apparently an advert for a Russian workwear clothing brand called “We Cum”. To be honest, it could be anything – it has a strange poetic beauty all of its own:


3) By way of an apology, have this – an incredible combination of graffiti and camerawork and animation which, I guarantee, will properly drop your jaw around halfway in. Seriously, watch:


4) This is Earl Sweatshirt’s latest, and features a lot of the traditional OFWGKTA tropes – skateboards, jackassisms, dense flow (I can’t help but feel self-consciously stupid writing that, but hey ho) and a barely contained sense of menace. It’s very good, I think:


5) You’d expect a song titled ‘Evil Friends’ to have a somewhat sinister video, and this doesn’t disappoint. The song is AWESOME, though, and the video from artists Portugal The Man is a little creepy but also does some quite cool stuff in terms of recreating the imagery of photos and gifs within moving images. Ahhh, PSEUDERY!:

 
6) This week’s slice of 80s-film-inspired Goonies/Mad Max-esque film comes courtesy of Wavves, whose songs I’ve always liked but who I’ve always found it hard to warm to. No different with this one, but the accompanying clip will make you want to watch a long-form film version and there’s no higher compliment. The song itself is also very good indeed, which helps:


7) What do you get if you combine Disney’s Sleeping Beauty (and Bambi) with Top Gun, and turn the whole into a story about Tom Cruise wreaking vengeance on woodland creatures for no clearly defined reason? This, it turns out. Aerodisney, by Africa Pseudobrutismus:


8) Cartoon ducks. At a rave. Drawn in the slightly unpleasantly lysergic style of an unsteady-handed Ralph Bakshi. This is “It’s My Beak” by Libythyth:


9) Finally, this is a beautiful and romantic and slightly sad/wistful short by Gustav Johansson. Get a cup of tea and watch it with someone you like a lot. It’s called ‘Everyday’:

 
 

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.

 

 

Webcurios 22/02/13

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Pete Birkinshaw, CC licence http://www.flickr.com/photos/binaryape/2335322468/

Well, the future is here. A future in which we as a species are overwhelmed my a raft of incredibly tawdry first-person bongo flicks. Come on, we all know that within a matter of hours of Google Glass being made available to the general public there will be a comedically-named website compiling the hundreds of thousands of ‘erotic’ home movies which the world’s exhibitionists have seen fit to foist on us. Don’t try and fight it, it’s what we’ve been evolving towards for millennia. Not that any of the people shilling for a test pair will admit it – can someone please make a more accurate version of this Twitter feed, please? Thanks.


But that’s not all that’s happened this week. We’ve seen another, almost even more scifi, aspect of the future unveiled; we’ve seen the media gripped by a debate that has proven beyond all reasonable doubt that here in the UK our own media are engaged in an almost daily attempt to troll us; we’ve moved a week closer to being able to wave goodbye to good ‘ol Benny and start looking forward to his successor; we’ve hopefully finished with the whole bloody Harlem Shake thing (as an aside, is this a new record for the time taken for a meme moving from new and fresh to insufferably played out?); we’ve revisited and remixed one of the more odious advertising trends of the 90s; we’ve arrived at what can only be described as the apotheosis of televisual entertainment; we’ve perfected the cat delivery system which the internet has been waiting for; the line between advertising and horror became blurred to the point of indistinguishability; and I discovered the ULTIMATE version of Believe by Cher (no joke).

All of that OBVIOUSLY pales into insignificance before the majesty of all the rest of the stuff that’s been going on now, which I’m about to tell you about in migraine-inducing detail (prepare the darkened room now, you may need it). Don’t worry, though – I, and by extension Web Curios, am on holiday next week, so you have a whole extra 7 days in which to recover from this edition. Oh, in the meantime, should anyone want the two spare tickets I’ve got to see Momus on Friday 1st March in East London then please get in touch with me on Twitter. He gives great gig, honest.

Right. Let’s get to it. If we all grit our teeth we can probably survive this with only minor psychological scarring.

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


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.