Webcurios 05/07/13

Anyway, you don’t need me to tell you that. You don’t come here for scaremongering and a world-view so dark it’s practically painful to look at – NO! You come here for webmongery of the highest order, and each week I disappoint you with a mediocre collection of rubbish filched from other people’s websites. Sorry about that. So, with little further ado, let the weekly litany of mediocre prose and recycled links commence – OPEN WIDE, CHILDREN, WE’RE GOING IN. 

By John William Keedy

THE BIT ABOUT S**IAL M*D*A, ADVERMARKETINGPR, AND STUFF THAT YOU MIGHT, SHOULD YOU SO DESIRE, BE ABLE TO PASS OFF AS WORK-RELATED

Facebook:

• Facebook To Introduce Chatrooms: Well, potentially. If it does well in testing. The idea being that they’ll (potentially, again) introduce a feature which allows Page owners to create ‘chatrooms’ which, in theory, anyone who is friends with them can join and participate in. There’s also talk of friends-of-friends being able to gt involved, which the article describes as a GREAT WAY TO MEET NEW PEOPLE, but seems to me to usher in the sort of schizophrenically disparate shouty ‘ASL?’-type (NB – if you don’t know what those three letters mean in this context, you’ve probably lived a more fulfilling life than I have) atmosphere seen in late-90s community chat websites. Obviously (OBVIOUSLY!) there are potential implications for brands here – you can see the potential for live chats with celebrity ambassadors, etc, although it will need a LOT of pre-moderation and gating of participants to make it useful. Anyway, this may never happen. Let’s forget we ever mentioned it. 
• Your Ads Will No Longer Appear Next To Pages Advocating Infanticide Or Similar: Unless, that is, you want them to. Briefly, this is FB’s response to the ongoing furore about brands being upset that their averts occasionally appear on Pages featuring less-than-ON-BRAND! content. You’ll now be able to manually ensure that your adverts for your business no longer show up on, for example, any of these pages. So that’s good. 

Stuff About Short Videos (Really? Still?):

• Instagram Is Apparently Now Outperforming Vine: I’ll be honest, I have about as much enthusiasm for this as I do for people arguing about the relative merits of different games machines, but I probably ought to mention it. Here’s some analysis of how the number of Vines being produced has fallen since the launch of Instagram video, which OBVIOUSLY means that Twitter’s fcuked. Obviously. 
• Instagram Uses Half Its Active Users In A Month: Hang on, wait, scrap that. It’s Instagram that’s fcuked. Poor the Instagram!
• Why Making These Sorts Of Comparisons / Judgments Is STUPID: A welcome note of reasonable commentary in an otherwise impossibly hyperbolic maelstrom of cant and worthless rhetoric. Look, can we all agree that the platform ISN’T THAT IMPORTANT. And you know what? They’re short videos. PUT THEM ON BOTH IF YOU’RE THAT WORRIED ABOUT IT. Can we stop talking about this now, please? Good.
• Updates For Vine: Oh, ok, well after this then. Vine’s been updated a bit – technical updates in part, but also (more significantly) the inclusion of better tools for the discovery of videos, sorted by category, and with the ability to now track stuff under the heading of ‘on the rise’. Expect the junior editorial staff of Buzzfeed to be staring at this for 12 hours a a day looking for the latest 6-second viral extravaganza. He says, like the massive, stinking, hypocritical webmong he is. 
• The Top 50 Brands On Instagram: Yes, yes, I know, this isn’t JUST video. Go with it. Here’s a list of the top 50 brands on Instagram (obviously dominated by US companies, but think this is worldwide). You shouldn’t be surprised to see that these are all brands related to stuff that people like looking at anyway (clothes! sport! cars!), regardless of the internet (although the presence of that disgusting Monster energy drink does baffle me rather).  

Google+:

• G+ Is 2 Years Old: Time, surely does it fly. I don’t know whether Google have been doing some serious PR work around their little-loved social/notsocial/noonereallyknows platform, but I’ve seen increasing numbers of people online over the past 10 days or so writing ‘why G+ is actually quite good’ posts. Now, I still don’t really know anyone who uses it that much, not that that means anything, but this piece is a decent look at the platforms best / most useful features. Oh, there are some new plugins as well if you want to plaster G+ buttons and STUFF all over your website, which frankly you may as well. 
• Why Google+ Is Now Part Of The Comms Landscape: Ugh, ‘comms landscape’. Anyway, this is one of those aforementioned pieces about how actually it’s quite useful dontchaknow. Most interesting here are the examples – there are a few rather good public sector / internal comms-y things here which are worth a look if that’s the sort of thing that your mortgage repayments force you to concern yourself with. 
• G+ Is Good For Search: You knew this, but if you want to squeeze another few k a month from your clients by suggesting a G+ presence then this might help. SO CYNICAL, I know, sorry. 

Other Things I Find It Hard To Group Into A Semi-Coherent Whole:

Twitter To Launch More Tailored Ads: Blah, blah, blah, browser history, cookies, etc etc etc. You can opt out, which is something at least. Go and opt-out NOW. Obviously this is great for advertisers – plus ca change. 

We Await The Arrival Of The Paid-for Brand Armies: Oh. Oh dear. I thought that this stuff had gone away a bit, but evidently not. About 7/8 years ago there was a big boom in companies like BzzAgent offering Word Of Mouth marketing services – which effectively equated to paying people to go around saying how awesome your stuff was (a little like a slightly-less-dishonest version of ‘Soft’ by Rupert Thomson). Now it’s BACK (doubtless it never left). Thee are so, so many grey areas around this – not just about ethics and transparency, but also how these paid-for agents of BUZZ are found and recruited. I can’t help but think that this will basically end up like those market research companies who promise to do focus groups full of your TARGET AUDIENCE and KEY INFLUENCERS, but which end up delivering information based on the lies told to them by a bunch of bored students and ‘between jobs’ actors who will say literally ANYTHING for £50 and a free sandwich. Anyway, let’s accept the fact that everyone’s opinion and advocacy is essentially purchasable, and that you should never take anyone’s endorsement of anything at face value, and move brightly on into the glorious branded future.

• The History Of Advertising: This is HUGE, but very interesting (and it’s still Powerpoint, so don’t worry – you won’t have to read too much). A great look back at the evolution of advertising – it really does go into detail, and covers the past 200 years (and beyond). If you study this stuff, or are just interested in it, you might want to take a look.
• Alastair Campbell On The Evolution Of PR: This is one of the smartest things I’ve read about objectives, strategy and tactics (yes, I hate those words too) – if you do comms, make everyone you work with read this. If they don’t understand, sack them.
• Social Media Sells NOTHING: Brilliant. Piece in Wired US quoting research which suggests that email is vastly more important in terms of driving sales than Facebook or Twitter – by some sort of massive factor. PUGS IN PARTY HATS DO NOT EQUAL BUSINESS BENEFIT. Put that on a slide, GO ON. 
• A Decent Look At Free Social Media Monitoring Tools: The best thing about this is that it acknowledges how useful / important Google is for this sort of stuff. Another one to send round your agency with the appended instruction: “Learn”.

Some Campaign-type Stuff:

• Tweeting Badger: This is rather cute. Johannesburg Zoo have wired up their Honey Badger (yes, that one) enclosure with NFC, so as to allow the animal to ‘tweet’ about what it’s getting up to depending on where it is in the cage. You can follow it at www.twitter.com/zootweetslive should you so desire – it’s better-written and less annoying than it ought to be, and a really clever use of tech. 
• Feed The Pigs: Really nicely executed by charitable organisation Compassion in World Farming, which combines a big screen, Westfield shopping centre, a webcam and some REAL LIVE PIGS to create a cute ‘feed the pigs, donate some money’ game. If I were going to be critical / snarky, I might question the cost vs impact of this, but that would be mean. LOOK AT THEIR LITTLE PIGGY FACES!
• Coors Slapshot: Another shopping centre activation, this sort of thing would work beautifully for football. Has anyone done it yet? If not, why not?
• Yelp’s Map of London Hipsters: Such a clever (if internet-baiting) idea – Yelp maps the concentration of hipsters in a variety of cities (I’ve evidently chosen to link to the London version) based on the frequency of the word ‘hipster’ in reviews. Obviously in no way anything other than a piece of linkbait, it’s annoyingly interesting to look at. If you live in London, it’s unlikely you’ll be surprised by where the apparent concentrations are.
• IKEA Spoof Pr0n Site: Do you recall a few weeks back when I featured a website highlighting IKEA furniture’s appearances in actual bongo clips (no, I know you don’t)? It seems that IKEA saw that and created their own, slightly more SFW variant. Simultaneously funny and slightly disturbing when you realise how closely they’ve followed the copy style of certan websites. Ahem. 

FINALLY, SOME STUFF WHICH YOU MAY WANT TO BUY (NOT SOLD BY ME, I HASTEN TO ADD)

By Macoto Murayama

HAVE A FREE ALBUM FROM EL-P & KILLERMIKE! GOOD HIPHOP! FREE!

MISCELLANEOUS WEBSCRAPINGS TO AMUSE, BEMUSE, DELIGHT AND APPALL, PT.1:

• The Editorial Guidelines of the Washington Post: Yes, I know that this sounds dull, but I promise it’s more interesting than you’d think. Honest. Take a look at this list, and then create your own for your workplace, with a list of suitable fines for people should they slip up. No really, it will make you REALLY popular at work!
• Children’s Nightmares, Visualised: A really, really creepy selection of photos, turning the monster under the bed into a real, terrifying threat. I’m not a parent (which is probably for the best), but I’d guess that it’s probably advisable not to show these to small children unless you’re of a particularly sadistic (or, if they’re your own, masochistic) bent. 
• Cars From Films: If you like cars and films, this selection of film posters illustrating the iconic vehicles featured in the named movies might appeal – they’re available to buy as posters too, should you so desire (on reflection, ‘iconic’ is DEFINITELY going on my list of banned words as of the now). 
• 3d Pictures From WWI: Amazing. The French army in the First World War apparently had a Richard Verascope stereo camera (no, me neither) – a device which allowed the taking of stereoscopic pictures. These have been collected here – a fascinating look back in time.
• Phototrails: A really interesting project, whose description I am going to shamelessly lift from their site – it looks at the ‘visual patterns, dynamics and structures of planetry-scale user-generated shared photos. Using a sample of 2.3 million Instagram photos from 13 cities around the world, we show how temporal changes in number of shared photos, their locations, and visual characteristics can uncover social, cultural and political insights about people’s activity around the world’. So there. There are some very cool visualisations here, and it’s an interesting example of how to cut visual data – and potentially inspirational if you’ve got a shedload of pictures at your disposal (there’s a Facebook app which totally rips this off in this for the right brand, for example).
• Google Flights: This is just getting silly now. Go on, just try it. Mental. Poor the Expedia. There’s all sorts of directions they could go with this – I’m imagining a future in which airlines offer (potentially) preferential deals to people who are flying to destinations where they hav more G+ connections, for example. Maybe. 
• Barbie As A Real Woman: Everyone’s favourite anatomically improbably blonde gets the 3d printed treatment, this time demonstrating what she’d look like if she had the proportions of your average American 19 year old. What’s oddest about this is how oddly chunky/stumpy ‘real-life’ Barbie looks vs her Mattel-designed counterpart – a far better reflection of the weird, messed up effect that this stuff has on our perceptions of what is aesthetically ‘right’ or ‘normal’ than you often see with this sort of stuff. 
• Choose Your Own Adventure Phone Sex: Hmmmmmmmmmm. So this service effectively allows you to create a series of branching, recorded…’erotic’ (and I really do use that word advisedly) stories to share with your loved one (or whoever you’re currently rubbing mucous mebranes with, frankly – love is optional). You can either create your own story or, if you’re a little prudish or lacking in imagination, you can use one of their pre-prepared scripts. Here’s one, for example. I will pay CASH MONEY to anyone who can provide proof that they have used any of these lines with a real person over the course of this weekend – seriously, you can’t understand the horror of this until you’ve read the script. “Press 1 if you want me to suck your nipples”? REALLY??? *boggles*
• Incredibly Evil Alarm Clock: A clever but diabolical idea. You can set up this alarm clock to automatically donate a set sum of money to a cause of your choosing every time you hit snooze – the idea being that you create, say, a direct debit of £10 to the EDL each time you grab another 10 minutes of lazytime in the morning. Depending on your levels of self-control, this could get quite expensive quite quickly. Also, you could end up funding something really dreadful, just by sleeping. AMAZING!
• Beautiful Browser Lightbox Rendering Thing: A very impressive piece of HTML coding (taken from this excellent rundown of impressive pieces of HTML coding) which plays with light and shadows in a very pretty fashion. You can make some gorgeous little patternpictures with this – have a play.
• PRISM (No, Not That One): This is an interactive visualisation of content removal requests to Google from governments worldwide. Not only a nice piece of visualisation, but also shows quite how mentally request-heavy the UK government is (look at the scale). 
• 3d Print Your Own Drone: Well, almost. As it points out, it’s not technically a drone, and you will need to pull together the wiring, motors, etc, yourself, but STILL, this is quite cool. What’s even more interesting is that the kit allows you to attach the rotors, etc, to basically ANYTHING – so perhaps a dronephone for easy high-quality moving camerawork. Or, er, a drone gun. That’s less fun-sounding, in all honesty. 
• Cheapest 3d Printer In The World: SEAMLESS! If you would like to make your own flying camerasurveillacegunboatthing then you might want to bookmark this page – thanks to Kickstarter, this should be going on sale in a few months. $350 is nothing, really. I reckon when we see the first sub-£200 domestic maker this stuff is properly going to take off – can’t be long now, surely?
• Draw Stuff Which Then Rotates In 3d: What it says there. I have literally no idea why, but it’s sort of fun in a pointless kind of way. 
• Rain Simulator: Another in the series of ‘pointless but fun’ (SEAMLESS!) webthings, this is a webpage which simulates the sound of rain, varying depending on where your cursor is on the page. In fact, it’s a gateway to all sorts of other frivolous webarty things – click the buttons on the top and see where they take you. 
• Book Titles With One Letter Missing: Pictorial representations of titles gleaned from the popular hashtag game (Jesus, I sound like Mashable).

Photgraph by Ajay Koli

AN AWE-INSPIRING COLLECTION OF SUMMER SONGS FROM THE PAST 51 YEARS, IN A MIX-TYPE PLAYLIST THING!

MISCELLANEOUS WEBSCRAPINGS TO AMUSE, BEMUSE, DELIGHT AND APPALL, PT.1:

• Analyse Your Emails: This is interesting, particularly if you’re a bit of a narcissist who’s used Gmail a LOT over the past 8 years or so (*waves at self in the mirror*). A project by MIT, this takes the metadata from your Gmail account and analyses it, churning out a whole load of stats about who you’ve emailed most, who’s connected you to whom, etc. Weirdly fascinating – I learnt that I’ve emailed my girlfriend nearly 5,000 times in the 10 years since we met. Which doesn’t say anything good about our relationship, frankly.
• Fake User Interfaces: A massive database of fake user interfaces from films. Searchable by director, designer, etc, and if you do UI / design stuff then potentially really interesting. Otherwise probably a bit niche for the rest of you, unless you have a hitherto undiscovered passion for the computer interfaces used in the cinema of James Cameron. 
• Vintage Airline Attendant Fashions: As may have been noted previously on Web Curios, I am not a fashion-conscious person (I know that this may come as a surprise). Still, though, some of these are MENTAL. 
• PayPal, In Space: I’ve checked repeatedly and this doesn’t seem to be a joke, so PayPal really is doing research into making payments work in space. There’s something deeply depressing about this – we’ve not even come up with commercially feasible mass-market space travel yet, and we’re already trying to work out how to let people buy sodding perfume from the intergalactic equivalent of SkyMall.
• Men Wearing Their Girlfriends’ Clothes: Not really much more to say about this, other than that there’s a certain poignant quality to these that II can’t really put my finger on. 
• Container Magazine: Probably the most-hipsterish thing in here this week, Container is a ‘magazine’ which isn’t really a magazine. Instead, for £200 per ‘issue’, you get sent a box full of limited edition arty-type stuff. Utterly self-indulgent, but I confess to really quite wanting one. If anyone fancies buying it for me, that would be LOVELY. 
• If Your iPod Was Vinyl: If the music on your iPod (or other generic MP3 player) was on vinyl, this is what it would look like (clue: TALL). 
• Cyberpunk Dystopia, In LEGO: Wonderful Gibson-esque model. Click left to see more pictures.
• Sex Toy Reviews In Comicbook Form: Erica Moen draws this wonderful blog which looks at sex, contraception, etc, in comicbook form. Technically NSFW, but really quite hard to imagine anyone getting upset by this. 
• This, On The Other Hand: Really is NSFW – the best / worst tattooed penis you will ever see. Technically very, very impressive, but let me just reiterate – this is a FULL-PENIS tattoo. Men – take a moment and think exactly how much this must have hurt.
• AI Decides Peace Is Best: What happens when you leave computer AIs from an FPS game running for a few years? They turn into pacifists, basically. Really interesting, particularly if you think in terms of game theory, and a little bit frightening if you think too hard. 
• Idiots Fighting Things: A whole Reddit thread dedicated to the joy of watching stupid (often drunk) humans attacking inanimate objects and coming off worst. Absolute timesink, but you will not fail to feel better about yourself as a result of watching a few of these. Unless you recognise yourself (SEGUE: When I was about 15, a mate of mine got so drunk he tried to fight a leisure centre and injured his hand quite badly – the Link Centre in Swindon, fact fans. I haven’t spoken to him in about 18 years, but Graeme Bailey – if you google yourself and find this, feel proud).
• Visualising the NBA Draft: So apparently this is about basketball and the college draft. It’s a very nice way of presenting quite a lot of information in intuitive fashion. Even I, who cares less than little about basketball, managed to understand what it was telling me and how to cut the data. 
• The Best Parties In Music Video History: An annoyingly laid-out list, but there are some great bits of nostalgia here (if, like me, you’re were a teen in the 90s. If not, you’ll probably just look at these and sigh and roll your eyes at how everyone’s OBSESSED with OLD STUFF and OH GOD IT’S SO BORING). ALSO, this list of the 100 best albums of the 80s is RETRO GOLD, and there are plenty of streaming links which is always nice. Check it out. Oh, and this is very clever indeed, particularly if you’re a musicologist or music historian or just interested, really – an illustrated history of music in 7 minutes. 
• A Duck Has An Adventure!: Almost certainly the best choose-your-own-adventure game about the life of an anonymous waterfowl you will play all week. More fun that it sounds, and a really nice example of design for this sort of thing – very simple, visual storytelling style which works very well. Have a play.
• Final Statements of Death Row Prisoners: This has been everywhere this week, but in case you missed it – a database of the final statements of prisoners on Death Row in Texas. You will cry a bit – don’t worry, it’s normal. Here’s a blog collecting them, should you not want to trawl through the full archive. Really, really sad (again, I’m not selling this but really do recommend having a flick through). 
• Racist History: An incredible example of racism from 60s Louisiana – a n impossible-to-complete literacy test given to black voters to determine their eligibility to vote.
• Harkive: My favourite project of the week. Effectively acting as a ‘Life In A Day’ for music, Harkive seeks to collect thoughts, feelings, experiences and reminiscences from one day (Tuesday 9th July, in fact) of music consumption. The project will take information about what people are listening to, when, how, where, etc, which will pull together a picture of how we relate to music and what it means to us RIGHT NOW. The intention is to make it a regular, tracking thing – can I suggest that a music-related brand jumps on this and sponsors it please? Thanks.
• Underwater Pinups From The 50s: Literally no idea why these exist, but I am glad that they do. Available for sale too, should you like to buy one. 

Photograph by Silja Magg

GAMES!:

• Geometry Games: More fun than they sound. Honest. Although it will probably help if you’re a bit maths-y.
• Responsive Design Game: If you’re a web designer, you may find this fun. 
• MegaBreakout: EVERYONE should play this. Brilliant, slightly headfcuky idea – a standard game of Breakout (you know, that ‘smash the bricks with the bouncing ball’ game), with the one difference that each block is its own miniature game of Breakout. Pretty much impossible to visualise unless you play it. So play it. 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS:

• Illustrated Aliens: A new alien each day, culminating in the monthly creation of a planet for a whole month’s worth of extraterrestrials to live on. Lovely illustration style.
• Dogs I Have Seen: Random photos of dogs with excellent sweary captions.
• Other People’s Shopping Lists: If the eyes are the windows to the soul, the shopping list must certainly be the storm drain to the ID. Or something like that.
• Filter Fakes: I don’t use Instagram as a) I have a deliberately terrible not-very-smart-phone; and b) I take photographs like Helen Keller. Nonetheless, apparently tagging your pictorial output with #nofilter is a ‘thing’ – this blog outs people who have committed the heinous crime of LYING about the #nofilter thing. Jesus, everyone’s an arsehole, aren’t they?
• Fraszier: Plot synopses for unfilmed episodes of what is still one of the best sitcoms ever. Whoever’s writing these has seen a LOT of episodes. BONUS – LASER FRASIER!

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG:

• Nostalgia Songs: A New York Time piece asking readers to share the songs that make them nostalgic. Oh man, some of the comments. All of the feels, right there. 
• I Recognised My Ex In Pr0n: Despite the rather salacious title, this is a more sensitive and interesting read than you might think. Interesting on modern relationships and sexual mores and that weird, indefinable line between the arousing abstract and the emotionally painful specific. Worth reading. 
• You’re One In 8million: It’s an oft-quoted truism that cities can be lonely places. This is a beautiful sad-then-happy piece about that feeling of moving to a new place and not really knowing anyone and having to start again and not really knowing how or where or when you might start to feel a little bit less like a lonely, unloved speck in a cold, impersonal and fundamentally Godless universe (you may never, fyi). 
• The Future of Online Surveillance: This is paranoiainducing but worth a read if you’re interested in Snowden, PRISM, Google, Facebook and the like. Take a look at the comments, too, as there’s a lot of informed commentary and reaction in there which broadens out the scope of the article somewhat. TL;DR version: we’re all going to be watched, everywhere, forever.
• We Need New Swearwords: As someone who by nature of their use of language has pretty much exhausted all existing profanities, I am 100% behind this. 
• When The War On Terror Met Burning Man: The weirdest story of the week, by a massive, massive length. This is the tale of how a bunch of hippies hacked the war on terror, and brought Burner principles to Afghanistan. Really, properly into ‘Men Who Stare At Goats’ territory, this. You really couldn’t make it up. 
• Trinity Mirror and Us vs Th3m: I sort of don’t think I should link to Us vs Th3m, as basically they do a daily version of Curios and if you subscribe to their stuff you will have seen a lot of the preceding already. The GITS. Nonetheless this is a REALLY interesting piece by Martin Belam, one of the founders, on why they are doing it, why Trinity Mirror are backing them, how it works, how noone knows what makes something go ‘viral’ (AGAIN), and all sorts of other stuff. Required reading if you’re interested in content making, publishing, new media (can we still call it that?) and the like. 

By Alexandre Borderau

1) I’m going to put this at the top, as then maybe at least one of you will bother watching it. Look, I know it’s 17mins long but it is BRILLIANT – a short film called ‘Jonah’, about fame and tourism and how the two things affect the developing world. Also, just mesmerisingly good CGI, and some really strong central performances. Watch over lunch, or tea, or on Sunday evening or something. It really is VERY good indeed: