Webcurios 26/04/13

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Original Virgin Brazilian Hair – Walworth Rd, SE17
Garudio Studiage, Photo of the week

I AM BACK! You’re lucky that I’m on a tight deadline this week, so you’re not going to have to suffer anywhere near as much as usual with the poorly constructed attempts to pull together an opening narrative. Suffice it to say, though, that I learned a lot in my absence – about abhorrent rapper Pitbull’s inexplicable popularity in the Americas; about the fact that there really are songs played in public these days which would make the OutHere Brothers blush; about how there is almost no song in the world that can’t be improved by being covered in Spanish with a lounge/bossanova backing…like Bohemian Rhapsody, for example. So much. But most of all I have learnt that I really quite like being away from the internet for a fortnight. You should try it, it’s healthy.

 
Oh, and MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSORS, you should also come along to this if you’re in London next weekend and are interested in webby technology stuff and THE FUTURE OF ENTERTAINMENT. It’s free, so it’s not like I’m really selling anything. Honest.

Of course the brief break has meant that I have returned refreshed and rejuvenated, and ready to dive head-first into the viscera of online culture. Or something. As you can tell, I didn’t spend my free time honing my metaphors. ONWARDS!

Self Portrait by Bogdan Rata
 

Internettish Media-type Things of Questionable Interest and Value But With Which Tradition Dictates We Start

UK Digital Literacy: Ofcom’s annual datadump about how the UK uses the internet came out this week; unsurprisingly, more of us than ever are online, more people are using smartphones, etc etc etc. This stuff is interesting up to a point, but as ever contains some slightly odd language / taxonomy which skews the findings somewhat; the statement that “nearly half (41%) of 16-24 year olds don’t read newspapers or magazines” simply isn’t true – they’re just reading them online is all. Small point, but worth noting. Buried in there somewhere are a couple of interesting figures about people’s attitudes to community, too – apparently “slightly more than one in three adults (37%) agree that they consider themselves to be involved in the local community, with around half (50%) disagreeing. Adults aged 16-24 are more likely to disagree (59% vs. 50%)”. Insert your own assumption about the alienating effects of the internet here.

Google:

Facebook:

  • Mobile Page Redesign: Small-but-significant (if you do stuff on Facebook for brands) – Pages on mobile are being redesigned (a bit) to make them a bit more useful. I can’t be bothered to explain it; it seems most important for brands / companies with physical locations tied to their pages (as one might expect).
  • Thinglink Comes to Facebook: I’ve mentioned ThingLink before, I think (and they don’t even pay me, though I am of course open to offers) – it’s a service which allows additional data to be ‘tagged’ to an image (so, for example, you can tag a picture of a pair of trainers with information about where it’s sold, a video of a famous person wearing them, an animated gif of someone fetishising them in a slightly creepy manner, etc), which data travels with said image wherever it might go, be embedded, etc. It’s been integrated into Twitter for a short while now, but has been rolled out to Facebook this week. It would seem to make fairly obvious sense for brands to use this sort of thing as a matter of course, probably, maybe, particularly if you sell directly to consumers or want to share vouchers, coupons, etc. I think.
  • FriendFracker: This won’t last long, but give it a try while you can. FriendFracker will automatically delete between 1-10 of your Facebook Friends at random. It won’t tell you who, nor will it tell them. See if you notice! Somewhere in a ‘creative’ office somewhere in the world, someone is thinking ‘Yes! Just like that Burger King ‘Sacrifice’ app from years ago that people still wang on about!’ and trying to work out how to shoehorn this functionality into a client campaign. They’ll probably call it something like ‘Russian Roulette’. That’ll be £10 please.

Twitter:

  • Video Ads embedded in Tweets: What it says there. This is being trialed by BBC America as part of its promotion of Dr Who in the US; let’s see if it takes off. I’m not 100% clear as to why brands would pay for this when you can…er…embed video in Tweets already, but I am doubtless being dense.
  • Twitter Needs a ‘Nope, Sorry, I Was Wrong’ Button: Related to the Boston/Reddit/Buzzfeed thing above, this is a smart piece highlighting the need for a function which allows people to flag when something that they have previously tweeted has changed; effectively, to make post-facto amends to tweets which also apply to RTs, etc. 

Campaigns and Things:

  • UNICEF – Likes Don’t Save Lives: This got a lot of love online yesterday – UNICEF’s highlighting of the disconnect between ‘Liking’ something on Facebook and making any sort of difference at all. Although, of course, it sort of ignores this campaign which they’ve been doing for years with Pampers. 
  • The Biscuit/Content Event Horizon: Incredibly, this REALLY IS biscuit-related content (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, go here); a campaign for Weetabix’s breakfast biscuits which allowed people to get a free sample of said product by taking a picture of an ad which aired on Monday evening and then brandishing at a cashier in certain shops). Not totally stupid, although as pointed out by someone else it’s quite hard to track and you really might as well just tell people to go and whisper a secret word to the cashier. 
  • WW1 Facebook Timeline: A nicely made Facebook Page for Léon Vivien, a WWI soldier, put together by Le Musée de la Grande Guerre de Meaux. Not a super-new concept, but nicely executed and shows how the medium can be used for historical / educative purposes. Erm, it’s all in French FYI.
  • Order Pizza Through XBox: Not sure how much additional explanation is required for this. Needless to say, this isn’t great news for the health of young men in the Western World, probably. Unless you’re using Kinect, in which case it probably all balances out. Doesn’t it?
  • Icelandic Anti-Incest App: I had no idea about this, but apparently Iceland is so small that there are problems with people involuntarily sleeping with people who are related to them in some minor fashion. This app aims to stop that, by incorporating data from ‘The Book of Icelanders’, which contains details of the country’s genealogical history.  
  • Local Hockey Team Season Ticket Campaign Less Successful Than Hoped: My favourite PR-ish story of the week, and a cautionary example as to why you should never put yourselves in the hands of the online community. I’m almost tempted to buy a season ticket myself so the poor buggers can get down and go home. 
Transluscence by Anthony Wallace
 

LISTEN TO SOME MUSIC: Why not make it this 35+minute mix of rather excellent crate-dug vinyl?


Stuff I Have Found Interesting This Week, pt.1

  • Potentially Lethal Booze: This is a recipe for weed-infused drinks. I don’t think that there’s any way in which this could be good for you, but if someone wants to try cooking some up in the spirit of enquiry then please do let me know how it does (once you regain the power of speech).
  • The Future of Mobile TV (or not): I don’t 100% understand how this works, I must confess, but I think that it streams live TV direct to your mobile or tablet (but only if you live in NYC, at the moment). Obviously this isn’t massively appreciated by broadcast networks, so no idea whether it will survive, but it’s an interesting development and probably quite technologically significant in ways I’m not quite clever enough to understand.
  • Best Website-based Music Video of the Year: Turns out this was on B3ta last Friday, for which apologies but a) I wasn’t here; b) it’s still good and deserves linking to again. A great concept, well designed, and interesting as much as a piece of group psychology as a technological / artistic exercise. Although scary to see how much we are all alike in terms of how we respond to certain stimuli. Have a play.
  • Macabre NYC Walking Tours: You know the slightly macabre Jack the Ripper tours that you can do in London? How soon is too soon for that sort of thing? Test the boundaries of taste with Walking & Stalking, an iPhone app which guides you around the location of some of NYC’s most notorious 20th Century true crimes! As the blurb says, ‘see the crimes that inspired the movies!’. Yes go on, you ghoul, you do that very thing.
  • The Terrifying Homogeneity of Korean Plastic Surgery: I’ve just realised that this is on the Mail today. Oh well, hey ho – that’s what happens when you source things from Reddit. Take a look at the scarily similar faces of Miss Korea 2013 entrants.
  • The Drone Proposal: Web Curios confesses to being a bit obsessed with drones so far in 2013. The craze continues apace, with this San Franciscan turning everyone’s favourite anonymous death machine into a kooky vehicle for a marriage proposal! Creepily cute or cutely creepy – the relatively low price of drones, though, means we’re only going to see more of this stuff (witness, for example, this college football team using one in training). Particularly in PR / Marketing – there’s going to be a big brand stunt with one of these soon, I reckon (if there already has been then I am still right, just…er…late).
  • A Mix for the British Museum: This is a beautiful idea. Magnetic Magazine are, in their own words, ‘challenging some of EDM’s most talented DJs and producers to render their own acute perceptions of an architectural space by way of a medium that we hold so dear, the DJ mix. Rather then limit your experience of a distant piece of architecture to a Google image search, Sounds & Spaces will establish an archive of EDM that will contribute to our perception and understanding of the built world’s most exalted gems’ (EDM, for those unfamiliar with the acronym, is Electronic Dance Music. So now you know). For their first commission, they’ve engaged genius (not an exaggeration – the man’s got a Phd in computational biology, which is quite hard) Max Cooper to soundtrack the British Museum – take a listen, it’s lovely. 
  • Documenting the Changing World of Journalism: Deadline is a photoproject by Will Steacy, looking at the cutbacks and layoffs brought on by the Philadelphia Inquirer’s circulation declines, numerous ownership changes and 2009 bankruptcy. It’s a poignant look at the way in which the newspaper industry has changed (almost) beyond all recognition in the past century. 
  • Portraits of Boston: Another site, of which there seems to be one for each US city, collecting photos of random citygoers with a little bit of information about them. A massive timesink, really interesting, and yet another website / project which I think someone more talented and motivated than me should replicate in London. Please?
  • Tokyo City Symphony: This is a project to mark the 10-year anniversary of Roppongi Hills, which Google has just told me is a ‘new urban centre’ and one of Japan’s largest integrated property developments in a district of Tokyo (no, I don’t really know what that means either). This is a cute, odd website which projects interactive visuals with music onto a very small model of the development, allowing users to create their own little audiovisualvideothing. It’s very nicely made, as we’ve come to expect from Japanese development.
  • I Don’t Really Know What This Website Is: But it’s confusing, odd and a little bit creepy, and as such ticks all the Web Curios boxes.
  • Sewn Found Photography: Lisa Kokin combines found photography and needlework to strangely poignant effect. 
  • Digital Public Library of America: This is an excellent digitisation project, purporting to give online access to the archives of America’s libraries, archives and museums. There’s SO MUCH STUFF in there – another, very geeky timesink.
Image by Allen Ying
 

Stuff I Have Found Interesting This Week, pt.2:

  • Browser Accordion: Play the accordion by resizing your browser window. A throwaway conceit, nicely made – and actually quite clever design both in terms of coding, etc, and the relationship between the virtual activity and its real-world analogue (I know that there must be a term for this, but I am struggling to think of it – it’s something a bit like skeuomorphism, but not that. Anyone?).
  • A New Form of Music Notation: Really interesting attempt to update traditional musical notation; I’m sadly not a musician (despite my HUGELY IMPRESSIVE Grade 4 guitar), but maybe someone who is can tell me whether this is a good idea or not. Similarly, this was on the Guardian this week about the search for an alternative to the QWERTY keyboard (also contains more about skeuomorphism)
  • 18 Cadence – Another Interactive Fiction Model: 18 Cadence is…er…another interactive fiction model. This allows users to piece together story fragments and details together in a variety of different ways, which stitch together in a variety of ways to create a variety of different potential Frankennarratives. It’s cleverly made and worth a play.
  • SciFi Interfaces: A blog which analyses the technology design in scifi films and tv series. A bit scary in terms of the attention to detail shown, but there are some very astute observations in here about what makes good design, etc. They’re doing the 5th Element at the moment, which also gives me an excuse to remind myself of Tricky’s AMAZING future-West Country accent in that film (sadly underrepresented on YouTube).
  • The Alternative Limb Project: Some incredible prosthetics here -incredible fusions of medical technology and art.
  • Scribbler: A cute little generative drawing tool. Very easy to create some rather cool effects through this, even if you’re a cack-handed anti-artist like me.
  • The Ultimate Status Timepiece: Patek Philippe? Pah. TAG? Nah. This is an iPod-size, £300,000+ timepiece which is one of 8 worldwide and measures millennia. Christ alone knows why you would need or want one – and frankly, if you can afford that then you should probably consider making a donation to the sadly underfunded Matt Muir indolence trust instead. THANKS!
  • Restaurant Reviewed By Child, In Photos: Quite a nice idea – SF Chinese restaurant reviewed via the medium of one child’s facial expressions whilst eating. Obviously what now seems cute as it’s the first time I’ve seen it will of course become MASSIVELY IRRITATING when every single parent in the western world decides to document their offspring’s adorable taste reaction pictures. Til then, though, the people at Cow & Gate can have this for free.
  • Photos of Spiritualists: Shannon Taggart has taken some cracking pictures documenting the in-no-way-fradulent world of the spiritualist community.
  • “2 Grams for $40”: A brilliant if somewhat irresponsible way to make use of your 50,000-odd Twitter followers. There’s some truly questionable judgment on display here, not least from the people who are apparently former felons. Try it on your parents, kids! (NB – Web Curios accepts no responsibility for familial relationships destroyed as a result).
  • Photographs of Stag & Hen Parties in Blackpool: Prosaic description, amazing photos. I had to spend quite a lot of time in Blackpool a few years ago when I worked in politics – I can safely say that these images are broadly representative of what the place looks like (particularly during Party Conference season, if I recall correctly). 

A Selection of Videos That Aren’t in the Embedded Bit at the Bottom:

  • San Francisco in 1955: Beautiful nostalgic footage, in colour, and it all looks so CLEAN and LOVELY. 
  • Angry Poetry about Harry Potter: I confess to having had NO IDEA about the fact that the character of Cho Chan in Harry Potter was at the centre of a minor furore about the representation of Asians in popular culture (most probably due to the fact that I am a 33 year old caucasian man). Nonetheless, she is – this is a piece of spoken word about the whole thing by Rachel Rostad which is not only interesting but also rather good.
  • Bobby: 19 seconds of mental weird. Anyone able to tell me what film this is from?
  • Kiss Me (Alternative Version): Ah, 1998! SO MUCH NOSTALGIA! Or was it 1997. Can’t remember. Anyway, at some point in the 90s dull-but-ubiquitous Christian pop-moppets Sixpence None The Richer were EVERYWHERE with that bloody song ‘Kiss Me’. You may have thought you never needed to hear it again, but you probably didn’t know that someone had recorded a version in Kllingon. YES, QUITE. 
  • What Is Big Data?: Very clever little video explaining a bit about the concept of big data, what it can do and where it might be going. Concise and smart and worth watching / listening to, largely because if people are going to keep on using the sodding phrase you might as well know what it means.
  • More Killian Martin: This is the third time I’ve featured this guy, and I make no apologies. Another amazing, balletic and wonderfully shot skate video, this one shot in India. Relaxing like cocoa.
Untitled by Fintan Switzer
 

The Circus of Tumblrs:

  • Women Holding Fish: To the best of my knowledge, there is nothing sexual about this.
  • My Dead Parents: Slightly harrowing personal history project looking at the author’s relationship with their dysfunctional alcoholic parents. 
  • Stills from Films (With Associated Colour Palettes): More interesting than you’d think, and useful around issues of shot composition, etc, for photographers and cinematographers alike. Oh, and chromatics enthusiasts.
  • Bad Covers from Bad Romance Novels: Save yourself a fortune on hipster-ish greetings cards by bookmarking this and printing out a bunch of them on purloined office stationery. You’re welcome!
  • Hanksy: Tom Hanksy is a stencil artist from NYC who does pop-culture-themed Banksy-ish art, with some fairly dreadful punnery.
  • Beautiful 8-bit-style Gifs: What it says on the tin. There’s a nice aesthetic sensibility present throughout these, though.
  • Boys’ Clubs: A selection of institutions and bodies which remain resolutely men-only. Unsurprising but quite saddening.
  • Stereopeople: Stereoscopic gifs of apparently random people (and animals), with quotes. Oddly compelling.
  • Better Superheroes: In a similar vein to the now legendary Monster Engine, this Tumblr collects drawings of female superheroes inspired by costumes worn by little girls. Some great illustrations here.
  • Draw Homer: A project which seeks to encourage PROPER artists from around the world to draw Homer Simpson, however they want. There are some cool interpretations of a pop-culture icon in here…
  • Simpson’s Drawing Club: …as there are in this, which is similar but for the whole Simpson’s unverse, and featuring drawings by non-PROPER arists.

LONG Reads:

  • Kevin Russ Makes A Living From iPhone Photography: The git. This is the apotheosis of the trend that started with mobile phones being fitted with cameras a decade or so ago – and possibly the apogee of the democratisation of the artist’s trade. Russ uses filters for his photos that anyone could use – he’s a good photographer but not an exceptional one, and the pictures he produces are certainly not beyond the reach of many other amateur snappers with access to decent scenery. What sets Russ apart is his willingness to be flexible, work from anywhere, and leave his friends and home behind to pursue the pictures. What his story shows, though, is a shift in opportunity – in many respects, it has never been easier for artists to make an income from work. Whether that income will, for most, ever be enough to have what might be termed a ‘traditional’ existence, though, remains to be seen. You can read more about Kevin  here – his Instagram feed is here.
  • Shopping for High-Grade Weed in California: This is a really interesting and well-written look at the culture surrounding medical marijuana purchase and consumption in the US. Stylistically it’s possibly channeling a little too much of David Foster Wallace’s non-fiction style, but overall it’s excellent. Also, dabs sound TERRIFYING. 
  • How To Become Internet Famous (Without Existing): How to create a real-enough online persona for a fake person, for about £50. Not only interesting in general, but it pleases me because of its happy insistence that Klout & Kred and all that jazz are bunkum.
  • A One-Night Stand Under Lockdown: The story of what happened when a one-night stand was forcibly extended by the Boston Metro Area lockdown the other week. Cute, and, as one commentator points out, must surely lead to marriage. 
  • Insane Sorority Email: I’m going to presume a degree of familiarity with the American fraternity system (hazing, meat helmets, and all sorts of charming behaviour) – this is an email that went sort of viral last week from a member of a sorority at the University of Maryland and it is TERRIFYING. You can almost see the flecks of spit flying from her mouth as she types. 
  • How To Write The London Novel: Excellent piece of parody writing on VICE, which will ring tremendously true if you’ve ever read a London novel by Amis, Self, Smith, Hornby, Lanchester or any one of a number of other luminaries. DARTS!
  • The Bottom Logistics of Cocaine Smuggling: No! Wait! Come back! Ok, so it is about how much cocaine the average person can fit up their bottom, but it’s also fascinating on how smuggling works and also (unsurprisingly) biology. Also, will probably put you off either smuggling or using cocaine for at least 15 minutes or so. 
  • Eric Schmidt & Julian Assange: A full transcript of their conversation from last year. I’ll be honest, this is newish and I haven’t had the chance to read it all – am pretty sure that SOMETHING of interest will be buried within, though.
  • Bush Is Smarter Than You: In the week in which the Bush Museum opens, Keith Hennessey, a former Bush adviser, writes an interesting take on the ex-President’s intellectual prowess. I’m not really in a position to comment on this one way or the other, except to say that, whilst at the BBC in Washington in early 2001, the considered opinion of all the long-standing US correspondents there was that Bush ‘wasn’t stupid enough to do anything that interesting’ during his Presidency. Obviously then one or two fairly major world events happened rendering those pronouncements pretty useless, but still.
  • The Story of Suck: Great time travel web-nostalgia time machine stuff from Wired in 1996, on the website ‘suck’, the first dotcom bubble, internet publishing and all sorts more besides. Definitely worth reading for anyone with a passing interest in web culture.
 
Image by David Solomons
 
 

 

NOW THE EMBEDDED VIDEOS CAN COMMENCE:

1) We start with a video that’s basically a distillation of all the digital web art guffery that I’ve been wanging on about for a few months now – gifs and glitches and janky 3d animations andall sorts of other stuff combine in Win Win by Landloper, along with a song that to me is oddly reminiscent of Gracelands-era Paul Simon:

2) Like dominoes? Like electro? Strangely fascinated by Rube Goldberg machines? Tolerant of stuff that pretends to be one-take video but which quite evidently isn’t? Great, this will be right up your street, then. A-Trak & Tommy Trash with Tuna Melt:

3) This one’s a week or so late, but SCREW YOU I WAS AWAY. If you’ve not seen it before, it may take you a little by surprise – LOGO with Cardiocleptomania:

4) Radiohead are unquestionably an excellent group of musicians who’ve got an incredible and enviable catalogue of work. They are, though, often accused of being a touch po-faced, a bit joyless. What I’ve always thought (no, really!) is that they could use a touch of middle eastern influence to lighten their tone slightly. How fortunate, then, that someone should have gone and made this remarkable cover of Karma Police:

5) So I know that this is almost certainly a really emo visual allegory for how HARD it is to be a teenager when you’re DIFFERENT and stuff, and not a very subtle one, but I can’t stop watching this clip. The colours and photography and everything are just great, and the song’s better than I at first thought. MS MR with Hurricane:

6) You know that really creepy monster with the eyes in its palms from Pan’s Labyrinth? Well, that, but in strange clayfaceman art form. Look, just watch it. Joy Wellboy’s song ‘Flush Me’:

7) Hipsters! Think your bike is impressive? Try one of these for size. Slightly terrifying video if you’re a bit afraid of heights:

8) By way of a pre-emptive apology for the next one, have some Cookie Monster vs Tom Waits joyousness:

9) Finally, welcome to the oddest video of the week. I don’t really know what to say about it, other than that it’s quite NSFW due to CGI nudity. HAPPY WEEKEND, EVERYONE!!!

 

That’s it for now

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