Webcurios 28/02/14

By Michelle Hamer

WOULD YOU LIKE TO SOUNDTRACK THIS WITH SOME DEEP, MINIMAL TECHNO-TYPE STUFF? OH GOOD!

THE SECTION WHICH IF IT’S TOTALLY HONEST SORT OF FELT SLIGHTLY SICK WHEN IT SAW THAT BLOODY ‘STATE’ WEBSITE AND REALISED THAT THERE WAS AN OFFCHANCE THAT THERE WOULD BE *ANOTHER* BLOODY PLATFORM TO PRETEND TO CARE ABOUT, AND WHICH RIGHT NOW IS SORT OF ROCKING BACK AND FORTH CATATONICALLY THINKING THAT MAYBE WE NEED FEWER WAYS OF VIRTUALLY WANGING ON ABOUT STUFF BECAUSE, REALLY, LET’S BE HONEST ABOUT IT, WHO’S REALLY LISTENING? NO FCUKER, THAT’S WHO!

• State: So this launched yesterday, I think, although it may have been the day before and frankly who really cares? State is a new ‘opinion network’ which, simply put, gives users the opportunity to share their opinions on a variety of topics, browse the opinions of others, award kudos (I’m paraphrasing, but you know what I mean) to opinions with which they agree, start debates around ones they don’t, etc etc etc. You know that popular phrase about opinions being like arseholes in that everyone’s stinks? Well this appears to be the logical endpoint whereby everyone’s turned into a sodding proctologist. I’m only mentioning it on here as they’ve been very smart in setting up pre-existing categories / tags around brands and products, which automatically means that people whose jobs involve them protecting / promoting brand reputation now have ANOTHER place to potentially worry about. No word yet on its relation to search, etc, which I suspect will be a reasonably big decider in how important or otherwise this becomes, but if you fancy spending a few hours telling the world (or at least the early-adopter portion of it) exactly what you think about…er…cake, or Syria, or homosexuality, then now’s your chance. NB – if you feel compelled to actually go and do this, it’s a safe bet we probably wouldn’t be friends in real life. 
• Facebook Launches ‘Highlights’ On Mobile: Another tweak to Facebook’s mobile offering after Paper earlier this year, this gives standard mobile users the opportunity to see curated ‘highlights’ from their friends’ lives, prioritising new friend requests, life events, birthdays, etc. Not hugely significant to most of you, but I wonder to what extent this is fiddleable with from an API point of view if at all.
• You Will Now See Page Updates In Your Feed From Pages You Don’t Like Which Mention Pages You Do Like, Maybe: Yes, yes, I know that’s barely comprehenisible, but seriously, you try and say it in any less clunky fashion. Basically if you like Adidas but don’t like Chelsea and Chelsea mention Adidas in a wall post, there’s now a chance that you will see that post in your newsfeed. Which means that if you’re a community manager it makes sense to start mentioning/tagging all sorts of other brand pages in your updates on the offchance that your screed will show up in front of their fans’ eyeballs and they’ll somehow be motivated to ‘Like’ your rubbish as well. Expect to see each and every tinpot tiny page bigging up Coke, Red Bull and Vin Diesel relentlessly in the next few weeks – although, and let’s be clear about this, unless you buy ads this is all moot anyway as NO ONE WILL SEE WHAT YOU WRITE. Speaking of which…
• FB Rejigs Ad-Buying Structure: Utterly tedious, but there’s now a slightly different breakdown of ads in terms of campaigns, subsidiary ad sets, and sub-subsidiary ads – what this means, in simple terms, is that bundling targeting of groups of adverts within a campaign to discrete markets will become easier – as will swapping ads in and out within those target sets. Good for A/B testing, although as this (rather academic and involved) piece suggests that might all be mostly rubbish anyway the way we’re all doing it. 
• FB Partner Ads Coming To UK: Whatever you may think of Facebook and their incredible admoneygrabbing, one sort of has to concede that they are pulling out the stops in terms of refining the product in 2014. The UK’s soon to get partner ads, using data bought in from 3rd parties to allow brands to target ads at people based on stuff they’ve done off-Facebook – bought an Alfa Romeo, say, or spent over £50 per week on wine since 2009 (that one may not be true, but you get the idea). You don’t need me to tell you why this is useful (if you do, you probably shouldn’t be reading this section and should skip ahead to the next bit which has pictures and fun websites and stuff). 
• Facebook Lookbacks For The Dead: You can now make FB lookback videos (you know, like the ones that everyone bored each other to tears with a few weeks ago on FB’s birthday) for your deceased relatives / loved ones who had a profile on the service. I can’t speak for any of you, but I can’t think of anything guaranteed more to reduce me to a snotty, weeping mess than this, but each to their own. 
• ANOTHER Person Complaining About Fake FB Likes: Not much more to say than that – to be honest, this is just one bloke’s opinion and as such should be taken with a LITTLE pinch of salt; that said, the whole thing is interesting and I don’t think is going to go away anytime soon. Will be interesting to see if FB does respond in any way if these allegations continue. 
• Internet Access Is A Human Right (If That Access Is Via Facebook): So last year when Facebook launched Internet.org and spoke of granting access to the internet to the developing world many cynics suggested that this was simply part of the dreadful company’s strategy to get all those second-world eyeballs rather than a truly philanthropic step. “Fie on you!”, said Facebook, “How could you think such a thing? *innocent face*”. And yet here we are in 2014 and Zuckerberg has given a keynote at MWC in which he basically demanded that mobile carriers grant free access to the intern….oh, no, hang on, free access to Facebook to people in the developing world via mobile. Let’s be clear – not access to the internet, but access to Facebook. Facebook as a portal to the internet. Hm. Look, I know I’m a pinko lefty idiot and all that, but it’s really hard not to get a little depressed at the idea that you would be funneling millions of people into experiencing the web via the prism of a company whose primary purpose is to sell data to advertisers to thereby sell said people useless crap more effectively. Welcome to modernity, less-fortunate people of the world – now buy some trainers and drink our branded sugarwater you peons!
• Some Stats About Mobile Usage Of Twitter In The UK & Europe: Lots of people access Twitter via mobile. So now you know. 
• Twitter To Show Promoted Accounts In Search: Slight tweak to one of Twitter’s three main ad formats here – nothing huge, but will make promoted accounts marginally more useful.
• About Twitter Cards: This is a really useful slideset about exactly what Twitter cards are and how they work, and it really is worth reading; there’s no reason whatsoever why all websites shouldn’t use cards in some way – not all over the place, before you think I’m a total idiot, but there are some sections where it makes sense (sharing links to contact info, for example) – very much worth a read if you’re still a bit unsure about what cards are / do. 
• Most Shared Mainstream Media On Twitter: Moderately interesting stuff on which mainstream media sites have most links shared on Twitter. No huge surprises, but if you’re in PR then this might be a useful thing to bookmark if you want to justify to your client why that online-only piece in the Manchester Evening News was actually really good, honest. Would be more interesting with a side-by-side comparison of what the ranking looks like with non-news sites thrown in, but you can’t have everything – anyway, as you recall from last week, sharing links on Twitter doesn’t actually correlate to readership anyway. God, why do we even bother? Rhetorical question. 
• O2 Integrates Customer Service With Twitter: This really is clever, though (it sort of builds on stuff Amex did in the US a couple of years back) – O2 customers in the UK can link their phone accounts with their Twitter accounts to automatically get account info via Twitter through using certain simple hashtags. It actually looks cleverer than it is – in effect, it’s just the Twitter equivalent of ‘text ‘balance’ to 66994 to receive your account balance’, but it’s useful and easy and should see lots of other similar companies following suit soon enough (apologies if this sort of thing has been going for ages and I missed it). 
• Social Media Stadium Choreography: This is lovely by Juventus (Italian football team, for those of you to whom that means nothing) – they invited fans to design one of those ‘in-crowd mosaic-type’ pictures (oh, you know what I mean) which would be recreated by the Curva in the Juve-Inter game a few weeks ago. Lovely idea, beautiful execution. 
• Unicef Tap Project: Quite a clever concept – visit the site from mobile and it starts a timer, asking you to keep from touching your phone for 10 minutes; if you can manage it, that’s one day’s clean drinking water given to a kid in Africa by some Armani stinkwater or another. Obviously, though, as with all of these things the main question is “why can’t you donate some more of your fcuking disgusting profits to this without making punters jump through hoops Giorgio, you jumped-up leather-faced tailor?’ The particularly shocking thing here is the revelation that a day’s clean drinking water can be achieved through a donation of just $.025 – so that’s what 10 mins of nonphonefiddling causes cuddly old Armani to donate. The fcukers have had the gall to cap total donations to $75,000, too – which total will only therefore be met if this 10 minutes thing happens…erm…3 million times. Which is pretty unlikely. THANKS, MAJOR INTERNATIONAL FASHION LABEL!
• Instagram ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’: Cute idea from Pan Macmillan to promote a Young Adult novel called Thirteen – go here to see how it works (it basically uses Instagram tags).

By Matthew Pillsbury

WOULD YOU LIKE TO SOUNDTRACK THIS WITH A MIX OF WHAT IS HOT RIGHT NOW IN HIPHOP? OH GOOD!

THE SECTION WHICH HAS DECIDED THAT IF 2014 IS SET TO BE CHARACTERISED BY ANYTHING IT’S BY THE DEVELOPMENT OF ONLINE PRODUCTS AND SERVICES WHICH ARE SO RIDICULOUS, OUTLANDISH AND WRONG-SEEMING THAT IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO DECIDE WHETHER OR NOT THEY ARE FOR REAL AND WHICH WILL AS A RESULT CAUSE PEOPLE LIKE ME TO WANDER THROUGH THE CORRIDORS OF THE INTERNET IN WHAT THIS WEEK AT LEAST HAS FELT LIKE SOMETHING OF A FEVER DREAM, PT.1:

• Broapp: So the first of these ‘hang on, no, this can’t ACTUALLY be a thing, can it? Can it??’ apps this week is Broapp – purportedly a ‘relationship wingman’, which deals with the tedious business of bothering to communicate with your girlfriend or wife (because, unsurprisingly, this one’s for the LADS) by automating nice touchy-feely text messages and status updates about all the warm, fuzzy feelings you have for them, without you, the user, ever actually having to type – or indeed feel – those things yourself. There’s no real telling whether this is just jaw-droppingly awful or a parody – and the evidence suggests that it may in fact be a gag – but the fact that it’s not automatically obvious made me have quite dark thoughts about civilisation on Monday when I found it. 
• The Wolfram Language: WARNING! THIS IS A VIDEO ABOUT PROGRAMMING WHICH IS 11-ODD MINUTES LONG. Right, now that 99% of the people looking at this have skipped ahead to the next link, the 3 of you who remain can enjoy an overview of the newish Wolfram language, which (and I say this as someone who understood about 90 seconds worth of this) looks incredible. It seems to offer all sorts of incredibly quick and easy computational fixes, all of which seem scaleable and massively easy to implement – but then again what do I know? I’m just some webmong. Can someone programmer-y please take a look and tell me if it really is as exciting as it looks to a dilettante? Thanks.
• Fun Palaces: This isn’t actually really internetty at all, sorry, but I do think it’s a nice idea and a worthy project. Taking place on the 4th/5th October, this is an Arts Council project which is based on the 1960s vision of the Fun Palace – a place where people and communities could share their vision of fun and creativity with each other and teach / learn in kind. Obviously that’s the sort of utopian hippyish stuff that gets people’s backs up a lot of the time, but the idea – for local spaces to try over the weekend to create spaces whereby communities can gather to explore creativity together however they desire – is a lovely one which it would be nice if people got behind (he said, didactically). 
• Joseph Tame’s Art Of Running: I think, and I mean this in the nicest possible way, Joseph Tame’s a bit of an odd man. An Englishman living in Japan, he’s found minor fame by doing marathons, etc, in some sort of extraordinary cyborg-style getup – seriously, all you people with your Fuelbands (also, just as an aside, can you decouple them from your social media accounts please? NO ONE CARES) have a long way to go before you match up to THIS stuff. Anyway, he does a lovely thing where he runs in courses which maps designs / pictures over Tokyo – some of them are really shonky, but some are GORGEOUS; take a look (someone’s got to rip this off for London, no?).
• Google Maps Gallery: Launched yesterday, this is the latest iteration in Google’s ongoing project to make its maps software, and everyone’s maps data, open and available. Particularly useful / interesting to academic institutions, artists and Government, I’d have thought. You can explore the maps uploaded to date here – not many, but this number will swell quite rapidly I’d imagine. 
• Hairy Mail: Send people messages, sculpted into a man’s fulsome back hair (virtual, sadly – how much better would this be if it was a limited-edition service with real-life Vauxhall bears waiting in the k-hole to be shaven with the message of your choice? Eh? Oh, just me, then). It doesn’t seem to be affiliated with any brand – I’ll be honest here, I’m mainly including this as it was an idea I floated with the Braun team at H+K about three years ago (to promote their male grooming equipment) and which I think they thought was too gross to work. They were probably right, on reflection – good work, team. 
• I’m Drunk Get Me Out Of Here: Simple and useful little web hack, ideal for people going to SXSW (for whom I think it was designed, in fact), which lets you input all your hotel details and your phone number and which will send you a text message with all that info in it when the bars kick out in the city you’re visiting so as to ensure that, rather than having to make your incoherent slurrings comprehensible to a cab driver, you can instead just show them your phone before you’re sick on their upholstery and they throw you onto the pavement to be discovered three hours later by the street sweepers as you cry pitifully and try and work out how you got to be so lost and far away and alone. Ahem. Or something like that. 
• Gifs Of Blooming Flowers: I could look at these all day. You’d never get this newsletter if I did, though, so I shall tear myself away JUST FOR YOU.
• The History of Bitcoin: It’s been a big week in Bitcoin land what with all the MtGox stuff; turns out that encrypted currency may not be quite the monetary utopia people were painting it as a few months back (shocker!). Anyway, this is a neat little webiste which runs through the thing’s genesis and development from 2007 onwards, which might be useful if you need a primer (or indeed if you just like looking at timeline visualisations). 
• Mini USB Post-it Things: I confess (not for the first or last time this week) that I don’t fully understand this, but it looks impressive and that’s the main thing. It’s a design concept for incredibly thin (graphene) storage devices which can be then stuck to any Optical Data Transfer Surface (ODTS) and which can then transfer data to which ever device said ODTS is itself attached to. Which is obviously sort of incomprehensible when explained that poorly, so I suggest you look at the link and see whether it makes more sense when visualised. Is this even halfway near to possible?
• Spritzinc Speedreading: Reading fast is USEFUL, although makes reading over people’s shoulders on the tube incredibly irritating (PROTIP: people don’t seem to like it if you begin impatiently tutting at them to turn the page because you’ve been waiting 2 minutes for them to finish it and it’s HARDLY BLOODY WAR AND PEACE NOW IS IT YOU IMBECILE shush shush sorry); this is a really, really clever looking app which takes text and presents it as a L-R scrolling stream; the app creators maintain that this can increase reading speeds by some stupid-sounding amount – the Google Glass integration is very cool-looking too. 
• Zkipster Guestlist App: PR PEOPLE! Isn’t doing the list at an event the best thing EVER? Well, maybe not, but oftentimes it beats having to actually BE at the bloody event and talk to your hideous clients. Anyway, this is a clever app for iPad which manages and syncs guestlists, allowing guests to be checked off multiple lists simultaneously when they arrive (meaning fewer liggers), adding photos to names, etc. If you do big event stuff this actually looks almost invaluable. 
• Randy Regier’s Odd ‘Vintage’ Toys: Randy. WHAT a name. Anyway, Randy makes vintage-looking toys (it’s unclear whether these were vintage toys which he’s hacked, or whether they’re new but in a 50s retro style) which have a slightly wrong vibe to them. There’s the same sort of off-kilter sensibility here that you might find at play in Scarfolk, for example, or in the post-apocalyptic dystopia of Fallout. 
• Niice: Thanks to Sacha Baron Cohen, this cannot sound like anything other than something being pronounced by a grinning Kazakh. Anyway, this is in fact a photosearch site which only sources ‘pretty’ images – great for moodboards, etc, should you require images for such things and not want to have to wade through Google’s slightly esoteric (and inevitably really, really breast-and manga-heavy) results. 
• Cloudwash by Berg: Now obviously no one actually needs an internet-enabled washing machine (see comments passim about fridges), but if I were to have one I’d want one like this mockup by the clever people at Berg, which combines clever programming with lovely design to create a proof-of-concept which looks genuinely quite useful. I particularly like the programmable e-ink displays (and what of it?). 
• The…Er…’Ring’ Ring: Blimey, when I first saw this yesterday it was on about £10k – now it’s around £160k. People LOVE a futureinterface. Anyway, this is a kickstarter for a project called ‘Ring’, which looks fairly certain to meet its goal and is a gestural interface which not only allows you to use it as a remote control and switch, but also in theory to gesture letters and thus spell out text, and also to make payments. Which is sort of magic, really. Very clever-looking indeed, though as with all Kickstarters several buckets of salt may be required. 
• Le Blox: I rather love this, I must say. Le Blox is an app which lets users design their own little Minecraft-style pixel creatures in a very cute 3d building interface, and then have those 3d printed on demand and delivered to their home. Or at least that’s what it will do when it’s launched – I imagine that this could get VERY expensive if you leave your kids alone with it for too long, but the concept’s gorgeous. 
• Weird Responsive Hexiwall Thing: Yes, yes, but click on the link and watch the video and then tell me that you don’t sort of want one in your house or at the very least on the way to work. Basically like the modern, architecturally acceptable versions of those plastic flowers which used to be able to follow your movement and turn to face you and which secretly in my heart always made me think of triffids and therefore caused me not inconsiderable psychic distress as a younger and more impressionable man. 
• Pulp Lesbian Erotica Covers: It’s ok, these are all on the Yale Library website so that makes looking at them basically an academic research project. There are some crackers on there, in particular the cover of ‘Lesbian Twins’ (page 2) which has possibly the best disappointed 1950s husband face on it I think I’ve ever seen. 
• Oscars – The Dresses: On Sunday a bunch of famouses will get given awards and a disgusting amount of free stuff. You may or may not care – I personally don’t. This, though, is a lovely illustration showing all the couture worn by Best Actress winners from the first Oscars to the present day, which if you’re into fashion and stuff should be right up your street. Oh, and here’s a load of data about previous winners and stuff in case you fancy betting all your life’s savings on the outcomes (hello Bob!). 
• Human Leather: The second ‘no, hang on, this isn’t real, is it?’ website of the week comes in the form of this charmer, which purports to sell articles of leatherware made from human skin. It’s actually a five to six year old site, which makes me think it’s a dormant hoax, but…but…I don’t know, it’s just plausible enough to be really creepy indeed. Or it’s a front for people who are flogging the darker side of Nazi memorabilia, or to entrap people who are into said memorabilia. Ugh, it’s all really quite skincrawly, in any case. 
• Average Price on eBay Tracker: Apologies if this is really common knowledge, but I only found it this week – a site which tracks the average sale price of items over the past x amount of time on eBay so you can see exactly how much you might be able to get for those Beanie Babies (clue: you will get nothing for Beanie Babies, despite what the 90s may have told you). 
• Exposure – Photographers Sites: Exposure looks like a very nice way for pro photographers to show off their work, or to create storytelling collections of their pictures, in a beautiful standardised intrerface. If you don’t want to pony up for your own website then this could be a very nice alternative indeed; for £30-odd quid a year, it seems like a pretty good deal to me. 
• An Eye In 3d: Basically just a little toy, but a very nicely made one. BONUS: they’ve made it again, but in the style of Escher. 
• The Portuguese Doll Hospital: Obviously this is a really lovely concept for small children whose favourite toys have been damaged and who might want them repaired, and it’s been going since 1830 which is sort of amazing. However, and this is quite a big however, its website is full of some of the hands-down creepiest pictures of broken dolls you ever will see. Pediophobes beware – even the slideshow on the homepage is sort of unsettling. LOOK AT THEIR UNSEEING EYES AND BROKEN FACES!
• Mutant Vegetables: A collection which would have meant so much to researchers on That’s Life!, this is a whole collection of photos of mutant vegetables, collected for no apparent reason other than that the photographer quite liked taking pictures of them. Slightly creepy in places, though I don’t quite know why. 
• The Original ‘Oblique Strategies’ Cards: I’m guessing that many of you work in places where you have Creative Directors and stuff, and so will be familiar with Eno’s ‘Oblique Strategies’ cards – in case not, they’re basically a system of flash cards created by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt in the 70s, each printed with an aphorism designed to help creative minds unblock themselves and seek out oblique solutions to puzzles. These are the originals in all their shonky carboard taped-together ‘glory’. 
• Scrollthrough Google Maps: A Google Maps hack which lets you plot a route from A-B and then scroll through the Google Streetview shots of that route, creating an almost-animated journey. There’s a very easy lift here for brands wanting to do an update on that slightly tired ‘put in a postcode and we’ll show you something happening RIGHT ON YOUR STREET (again)’ thing. 
• Reddit Now Doing Live Events / News: Last week two of the biggest things on Reddit were Twitch Plays Pokemon and events in Kiev – both were used by the platform to experiment with a new service effectively creating livestreams of commentary and discussion around certain key happenings, effectively beginning to open Reddit out towards more of a journalistic bent, with the people allowed to contribute to the livestream being selected by admins to maintain ‘quality control’. Will be interesting to see the extent to which ‘proper’ media use this as a Twitter-analogue to keep track of the next big event – worth watching. 
• ANOTHER Very Flashy Website For A Tall NYC Building: Following hot on the heels of that other one from the other week whose name I’ve forgotten and which I’m running far too late this morning to look up comes THIS rather gorgeous website promoting some other really tall residential /commercial development that noone you’ve ever met will ever be able to nearly afford to enter let alone to live in. The website’s very slick indeed, though, so well done them. 

By Pyuupiru

THE SECTION WHICH HAS DECIDED THAT IF 2014 IS SET TO BE CHARACTERISED BY ANYTHING IT’S BY THE DEVELOPMENT OF ONLINE PRODUCTS AND SERVICES WHICH ARE SO RIDICULOUS, OUTLANDISH AND WRONG-SEEMING THAT IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO DECIDE WHETHER OR NOT THEY ARE FOR REAL AND WHICH WILL AS A RESULT CAUSE PEOPLE LIKE ME TO WANDER THROUGH THE CORRIDORS OF THE INTERNET IN WHAT THIS WEEK AT LEAST HAS FELT LIKE SOMETHING OF A FEVER DREAM, PT.2:

• A Truly Beautiful Interactive Music Video: Erm, from 2009. Sorry. But that was Pre Curios, and so basically it’s ALL NEW. Anyway, this is Spanish and really is utterly gorgeous; the way in which you’re allowed to draw along with the music in a sweeping pen-and-ink style fits the sound perfectly, and the integration with the scripted bits of video is almost seamless. 2009 means Flash, of course, so be aware that it won’t work on mobile or tablets (SORRY). 
• Chris (Simpsons Artist): This made me laugh more than any single other thing this week. I thank Rich Leigh for pointing it my way – I have no idea who Chris is, but his Facebook Page on which he posts terrible drawings of the Simpsons with quite indescribable descriptions had me laughing like a drain for a good ten minutes (and that may not sound like much, but I bet it’s more than you laugh at work ALL DAY). 
• Current.ly: Making trending topics on Twitter less rubbish, Current.ly applies its own algorithm to the Twitter stream to try and prevent, say, 3 of the 10 topics being Bieber-related. A nice idea, well-executed, although I think part of the beauty of trending topics is the weird disconnect which often exists between them and anything which anyone could conceivably think of as ‘important’ or ‘worthwhile’. Also, what does this do with promoted trends?
• The Beyonce Soundboardt: Do you want a soundboard(t) of Beyonce samples? OH GOOD!
• Dinosaur Statues: Have you always wanted to spend many thousands of pounds on a 10-foot tall fibreglass model of a dinosaur but up until now had no idea where in hell one would find such a thing? OH GOOD!
• Lost & Found In NYC: A selection of pictures of found objects collected by photographer Will Ellis over a period of several years in NYC. As with all found art there’s a serious sense of melancholy about all these, and some very creepy / odd things in there to boot, but my overriding thought with this is that it would be a wonderful project to take these images and to write a narrative which links them all in some way. So, you know, someone go and do that for me please.
• EVE True Stories Graphic Novel Now A Thing: More of interest as a cultural side/footnote than anything else; as announced last year at some point and reported RIGHT HERE (reported ahahahahaha), massive spreadsheet masquerading as a space MMO Eve Online has published the first of its comic books based on ACTUAL EVENTS from in the game. Let’s just repeat that – a comic has been published (a proper one, by a proper publisher) whose script is derived from events which occurred in-game. Art imitating art imitating life. Quite astonishing really. 
• Lovely Cinemagraphic Storytelling By The BBC: The BBC is quietly upping its digital storytelling game at the moment. This is another really lovely and very clever execution, this time to create a visual accompaniment to a podcast all about / linked to recent comedy show Inside Number 9. The page uses cinemagraphed clips from the show to accompany the narrative, and it works as something inbetween radio and a game – have a play, it’s really rather beuatifully made (if you’re interested in said making, there’s a few more details here). 
• The Photocopy Club: Interesting idea, this – a photo event which requires participants to present their work as xeroxes rather than digital prints. I imagine the cumulative visual effect would be rather striking (you may be unsurprised to know that this is taking place in Dalston, East London). 
• The Pollock Crocs: Another one of this week’s ‘really? REALLY?’ things, this is a truly unexpected partnership between Aussie purveyors of hideous footwear Crocs and the estate of Jackson Pollock who, it would appear, have sanctioned this ‘official’ line of Pollock-inspired, paint-splattered monstrosities. Something something something brand value something something. 
• A Search Engine For Cover Versions: Just in case you should ever need such a thing. There’s a really nice idea in here, actually, for a particular brand of beer and their current ad campaign – that’ll be £5,000, please (you know who you are). 
• Cannabis Condoms: Well, cannabis flavoured /scented, anyway. I am baffled by this for a variety of reasons – even the most ardent potsmoker doesn’t, I don’t think, find the smell of weed particularly arousing or indeed all that pleasant in prolonged doses (it’s called skunk for a reason, no?), and the flavour??? That said, credit to Aden and Susan for coming up with ‘Pipe Smokers’ and ‘Boners for Stoners’, respectively. Careers in advertising surely await both. 
• The Scent of Vulva: I tried to think of something less bald than that description, but there’s no real way to soften the impact of this truly hideous-sounding but purportedly (again) real product. Just…just…oh, just click on the website and then try and forget you ever saw it (technically SFW, though you may get one or two funny looks). Thanks to Simon for this one. 
• A Lego Man, Everywhere: By way of an apology / palate-cleanser (oh, God, no, that doesn’t help as a turn of phrase – SORRY!), have this (though I imagine it’s probably been in ‘proper’ media this week too). Pictures of a Lego man in various places. Charming. 
• Pasteogrid: A seemingly very easy way of making photogrids for websites or to dump into documents. Have a play, looks pretty useful. 
• Regional Listening Preferences In The US: Taking data from music streaming services powered by The Echo Nest, this is a mapping of the musical preferences of Americans, by artist, by state. It’s worth reading through because there are LOTS of very interesting ideas about how to do this sort of datacutting which lots of UK people could steal (*cough* Amazon/Spotify *cough*). 
• Twitch Plays Pokemon Plays Pokemon Puzzle Challenge: I could have filled practically the whole blog this week with baroque variations / riffs on Twitch Plays Pokemon, which has kept at least one person I know glued to his screen for the past week, the weirdo. This is sort of the most interesting of them – taking the inputs into TPP, including the ‘anarchy/democracy’ battle, and then running them into a different game – it was Tetris when I found it, but has now been flipped to Pokemon Puzzle Challenge, which is sort of more apt. NB – if you’ve understood none of the last 60 words or so then congraulations, you have a healthier life than I do. If you DID understand them, though, then you’ll probably like this too. Oh, and probably this insanely comprehensive character list from the whole silly saga, too.
• The Electric Eel: I’m just going to leave this here. This is an Indiegogo prototype seeking funding, which also happens to be an ‘electric’ condom. Which electrocutes its wearer. No, me neither, and I really don’t want to. 
• GORGEOUS Winter Olympics History Website: Part one of snowboundgravityfest has finished, but whilst we await part 2 next week you could do worse than check out this BEAUTIFULLY made site which goes through the history of the Winter Games and pulls out facts, stories, photos, etc, from each year. It’s really, really slick and deserves a look, even if you have no interest whatsoever in people sliding on ice. As a bonus, here’s a history of the Winter Games’ logos too – there have been some absolute shockers over the years, it turns out.
• Flappy Jam: 800 Flappy Bird-inspired games, all together in one place. This may be your idea of heaven or your idea of hell – I’m not judging either way.
• Language Learning Tool For Kids: Actually maybe for adults too, but it feels like it’s for kids. Anyway, this is really nicely made and seems to work pretty perfectly, at least in theory; choose from one of 9 languages, and the site ‘speaks’ words at you in said language; it’s up to the user to click on the object which is being described by the voice. Simple and effective, and probably quite fun for small children. 
• Google Glass Will Make Sport Better (Maybe): VERY slick site deisgned to showcase the AMAZING ways in which Google Glass will improve the experience of participating in ‘extreme’ish sports (BMXing, paintballing, etc). It’s nicely done, though you do need to be able to shout at your computer to make it work which is sort of embarrassing. Also, although I know I’m really not the target audience for this, I can’t say it makes the sports look THAT much better. Bah, humbug. 
• Carpets For Airports: Carpets, from airports. Because there really is a website for everyone. 
• 3d Music Maze: This is utterly shonky but I think there’s the gem of something quite nice here. Album cover maze game which occasionally seems to play the tracks of the artists whose album sleeves you’re in front of – now imagine this as a music exploration tool going through what’s on your iTunes, etc – might be fun, no? Oh, please yourselves you joyless fcukers. 
• The Tokyo Tune Train: Another little music game hack thing, this is basically snake which lets you remix songs on the fly. Quite clever if a bit janky. 
• Night Bus Interactive Video: ANOTHER interactive music video, this time from South :Londoners Night Bus. This is slick – two separate videos were filmed, one for the female lead and another for the male; the now-familiar slider interface lets users select which they want to see more of at any given time. What’s really clever, though, is the way that the mix of the song’s different in each instance, particularly the vocal, and the way in which the interface copes with that. Oh, and the song struck me as dreadful at first and then revealed itself to be a surprising earworm…
• Minimuseums: The loveliest thing on here this week, if you’re a science geek at least. A well-funded Kickstarter to sell ‘minimuseums’ – perspex displays containing some of the oldest materials on earth. For the right person in your life, this is the PERFECT present. 
• What The Inside Of A Nuclear Plant Looks Like: You think this is going to be boring, and then you get to the bit with the controls and you suddenly realise quite how unlikely it is that Homer would ever be allowed near one of these bad boys. 
• Mapping The First Sentences Of Famous Novels: Like novels? Like design? HERE YOU ARE THEN.
• What A LiveStream of Pr0n Searches Looks Like: I found this first thing on Monday – I can tell you honestly that I sort of sat there and watched the stream for about 5 minutes in creasing confusion; it’s quite punchy thing to deal with at the start of the week. Now, though, it’s probably Friday or the weekend and so you may be better equipped to cope. Anyhow, this is a stream of searches from bongo sites, in real time. WOW, there’s some niche stuff that people look for. There are no pictures or video, only text, so it’s SFW-ish. Ish. Oh, and here’s some poetry made from some of the more outre terms if you’d like some. 
• Bitelabs: Last up in this section, the final one in our ‘no, really, this can’t be true can it?’ series of links. Bitelabs purports to be attempting to create edible meat products (salami, etc), from a combination of vat-grown animal meat and…er…celebrity meat. I mean, this can’t be true, can it? For a start, it’s basically the plot of ‘Antiviral’, to an extent at least. Anyway, Christian Ward quite perspicaciously wondered whether it might all be a bit of sneaky PR for THunderclap (see the Bitelabs website and there’s a BIG LINK to Thunderclap about halfway down, which might make more sense). But isn’t it slightly scary that we’re not 100% sure?

By Patrycja Podkoscielny

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS:

• House of Carbs: Scenes from House of Cards with additional poorly-photoshopped carb-heavy foodstuffs. LOOK, I DON’T MAKE THIS STUFF. 
• Shopped Tattoos: This is sort of lovely, though – old pictures of famouses, with added tattoos. Audrey Hepburn, I think, probably looked better without on balance. 
• Angular Merkel: A series of increasinly tenuous puns based on the German Chancellor’s name which you will probably find funnier than you really think you ought to.
• Creatures of Adland: Applying collective nouns to the denizens of ad agencies – ‘a delusion of creatives’, etc etc. Not strictly advertising, but can I suggest ‘a vacuity of prs’? Thanks x
• Street Semi-Legal Cassette covers: Celebrating the unique artworks found on slightly-bootleg audiocassettes. I used to get a lot of mine from San Marino as a kid – I think I’ve still got my copy of Maxinquaye on tape which featured a really badly photocopied and terrifyingly demonic-looking Tricky staring out at me wild-eyed. 
• Experimental Music on Kids’ TV: Celebrating the odd times when kids’ TV producers decide that some slightly leftfield musical stylings are what would best complement Big Bird et al, to the joy of stoned students everywhere.
• Bad Poems About Sad Sex Workers: Some of these are GREAT. Terrible poetry, collected from other Tumblrs I suspected, about the plight of the sex worker. The best are the ones which the authors have felt the need to tag #metaphor or #analogy – SHOW DON’T TELL, KIDS!
• The Most Amazing Music Video Tumblr Thing I Have Ever Seen: No really – how does this work? MENTAL.
• Death Book: I love this very much indeed. A sort of counterpoint to the Facebook Lookback for the deceased which I mentioned up there, this gives people the theoretical opportunity to determine exactly how the web remembers them after they die, with a picture and some text of their choosing. I got all emo going through these just now – a beautiful project. 

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG AND WHICH THIS WEEK DUE TO WATER-INDUCED TIME CONSTRAINTS MAY NOT BE EXPLAINED AS FULLY AS I WOULD ORDINARILY LIKE BUT WHICH LET ME ASSURE YOU ARE AS MEATILY GOOD AND INTELLECTUALLY NOURISHING AS EVER:

• The Other Paul Anderson: No, not that one – Paul W S Anderson, who’s made such cinematic opuses as the Resident Evil series, Event Horizon and…er…Mortal Kombat. This is actually a really interesting piece in which the action director picks his favourite scenes from a selection of his films and talks through them; will make you have a modicum more respect for the less-auteurish director. 
• Why Popups Should Fcuk Off: Anyone who mentions the term ‘pop-up’ in an advermarketingpr meeting in 2014 should be sacked. Fact. Well, not FACT per se, but certainly a reasonable debating point. Anyway, this piece is less about that and more about the genesis of the term itself and why overall pop-ups are A Bad Thing, in partucular in the context of the imminent Elephant & Castle (one name, two broken promises) development. Very good, again, from VICE, which is in serious danger of becoming the best source of decent writing about modern British culture in the UK press. 
• How To Get A LEGO X-Wing: This is not actually about that; it’s about how it feels when your father falls ill, and coping with death and its aftermath. It’s a very lovely piece of writing indeed. 
• The Evolution Of The Modern Magazine Cover: Truly fascinating, especially if you’re in publishing but even ifnot, about how trends in cover design have changed and what that means about the manner in which we read / consume information, and what we expect from our bundled content when it’s in dead-tree form. 
• The Titles Of The LEGO Movie: Apparently the LEGO movie is excellent – should I set aside my cinemaversion and go see it? Anyway, this is a long-but-interesting look at how the credits were made, which contains all sorts of interesting things about filmmaking and animation and the creative process and, obviously, LEGO. 
• On Internet Language: In defence of the broken syntax and irregular contruction of ‘internet language’ (‘all of the feels’; doge-isms, etc). Very good piece of writing, this- ETA til the Guardian writes an entire G2 piece in internet language? I reckon by June. 
• On Bots And Identity: How would you feel if someone created a Twitter bot which was able to take off your tweeting style almost perfectly, to the point where it was hard to tell which was real? For many of us it would be easier than we think. Thoughtprovoking on all sorts of issues around identity and self and STUFF.
• MEGALONG On Assange: This really is kilometric, even by the standards of this section, but it’s a hell of a read. Andrew O’Hagan in the LRB on being Julian Assange’s ghostwriter and, basically, what an absolute, unremitting tosser the man is. There’s a very real naked emperor sense about all this, and the overriding feeling I was left with was of Assange as a sort of Quixotic/Mitty-esque figure, tilting at all sorts of windmills whilst royally fcuking people over left, right and centre. Highly recommended, this one. 
• Being Rocky Balboa: What’s it like being a professional Rocky impersonator? Like this.
• Normcore: The latest fashion is no fashion. I AM SO ON TREND. 
• An Oral History of Ghostbusters: In the week Harold Ramis died, a great piece looking back at the making of Ghostbusters – I am going to watch both films this weekend if BT fix my SODDING internet and I suggest you do too. 

By Mate Bartha

FINALLY, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1) First up this week, a gorgeous short film called The Runners. The makers accosted people running in (I think) Battersea Park and asked them questions – the answers make for a beautiful, candid, reflective piece of filmmaking. It’s 11 minutes long, and if you’re a runner yourself then you really should watch this:

2) From the arty and sort of profound, to a video showing each and every one of the penises which one man drew on his wife’s whiteboard over the course of a year. Puerile yes, but I challenge you not to laugh at the wrestlerpenises a minute or so in::

3) If time travel were possible, it stands to reason that some of the people using it would be twats. This is a perfectly formed two-minute short about exactly those people:

4) This is called Be My Yoko – it’s by Reptile Youth, and it’s an amazingly labour-intensive video featuring the sort of effects which in recent hears have all been done digitally but here are reproduced in analogue using paper and butterfly pins and stuff. Really, really slick (though the song leaves me cold, I must say):

5) Cut Copy are GOOD at videos. Following last Summer’s naked Jesus-y one, here’s their latest for the track ‘We Are Explorers’. The gimmick here is that the models in it are 3d printed – and that the band have made all the files used to make the models, etc, used in the video available to print and manipulate however others may wish, inviting all sorts of potential remixes of the audio and visual, sanctioned by the band. You can get all the materials and learn more here if you like – or you can just watch the video below if you’d prefer:

6) Can someone German please explain to me what this advert’s about, please, and why it exists? Thanks. Supergeil!:

7) This week’s collision of 80s sensibilities with strange, glitchy, 90s-style graphics comes in the shape of EMA’s ‘So Blonde’. Crap song, really interesting video:

8) I found both this song and video utterly mesmerising in a sort of minimal, skittery sort of way. VERY ARTY, which may or may not appeal, this is Jamie Isaac with She Dried:

9) And this…this…this is some sort of weird combination of CGI and claymation and stop-motion and is sort of weird and creepy and sort-of-attempting-to-be-erotic and generally sort of awesome. Try it, you might like it. HAPPY FRIDAY:

That’s it for now