Somewhere, Somehow, This Is Art

Sometimes you run into something that you don’t really appreciate at first, but have to get accustomed to. There is this trend of so-called image macros, which basically are images with some text on them. Now when the same image keeps being used, with differing text, a new internet fad or meme is born. Advice Dog is such a meme.

It’s the image of a dog on a colorful background giving you (often bad) advice. It’s only when you start to realize how these images and the whole meme was created you might view it as art. But more like the kind of art that won’t be recognized for it until 500 years from now someone digs up a computer server from the nuclear wastelands and thinks this is the way we express ourselves in the beginning of the third millennium.

Just have a look and try to see what I mean. These came in existence in the same way the marble season started on your school in the past. There is never any coordination or manual but it appears anyway. I have to give a small warning though, many of these are rude, insulting or otherwise politically incorrect. Make your own with the meme generator!

Advice Dog has many spin-offs: Courage Wolf, Foul Bachelor Frog, Socially Awkward Penguin, Technologically Impaired Duck and my favorite, Philosoraptor.

If you still don’t believe it’s art then look at the following video. It’s of an unrelated meme, but shows very nice how that originated, from a computer glitch to many people creating their own version and hundreds of thousands of people watching the creations.

My New Visual Tumblr Blog

tumblr logoI have tried to keep track of the websites where I have an account and share stuff on my Web Wide page. Now I have an addition. I made a Tumblr blog. Tumblr blogs are usually used for images or videos. You can also write blogposts with Tumblr, but thanks to the beautiful ready made themes and easy bookmarklet they’re very suited to share visual stuff. That’s why I named my Tumblr blog “Speaksforitself“, for anything that more or less speak for itself. I don’t intend to write much with the posts and just let you enjoy the images. I also post my Youtube favorites on there.
You can follow the blog when you have a Tumblr account yourself or in your favorite RSS-reader. I’m still looking for a cool way to display all of my shared bookmarks, diggs, youtube favorites and stuff on one page, but I guess that’s maybe/someday.Tumblr types of posts

Do you have a cool Tumblr blog or do you have any favorite ones you follow? Or do you know any other ways to share images? (I have also tried vi.sualize.us which is more like visual bookmarking and also pretty cool)tumblr

Dial gdgt for gadgets

gagdetWho doesn’t call him or herself a gadgetlover? Everybody likes to look at and touch shiny new phones, laptop or gaming devices, right? We all like to open a package and smelling the plasticky Taiwanese smell before it dissolves (alright this is getting weird). Anyway, there is a new gadget site where you can go for all your gadget news and discussion. It’s not a new Gizmodo or Engadget, although their founder Peter Rojas is co-creator of gdgt, together with former editor-in-chief of Engadget Ryan Block.

The idea is not just a gadget blog where authors tell you what to think of something, but a more social experience. You can sign up for an account and add gadgets to your profile that you want or have. After this you can review them and of course read other reviews and discuss all the new shinies. I haven’t spent a lot of time there yet and as it has just launched the community has to grow. You can connect with my at my profile. But it is that community that has the potential to make this big. It looks like a great way to stay on top of the latest things and show off your new gadgets. If only they found a way to add that new plastic Taiwan smell.

Please Say Something, a short film

If you’ve got 10 minutes to spare please have a look at this award winning short film. Put on your headphones or loud speakers! Or even better, watch it in HD at vimeo.

Please Say Something – Full Length from David OReilly on Vimeo.

A troubled relationship between a Cat and Mouse set in the distant Future. Winner of the Golden Bear for best short film at the 2009 Berlinale.

Written, Directed & Produced by David OReilly, Sound design & Voice synthesis by David Kamp, Sound design & Music by Bram Meindersma. Distributed by Future Shorts.

Your very own democratic news site

democraticIt are difficult times for newspapers. First the internet has taken over the function of marketplace and joblist from them and people went online for their news and opinion pieces. And now advertisers loose interest because there are less readers and these companies have less advertising budget. It’s hard to say what the future will look like for newspapers. It’s undeniable though that the need for news is only growing, so it is being suggested that newspapers should focus a bit more on the “news” and a less on the “paper”.

Online the motto should change from “All the news that’s fit to print” (since 1896 the NY Times‘ motto) to “All the news that’s fit to link”. In what way will you find and display the interesting pieces of news and articles? How the online content is created is another story and out of reach of this piece. Dave Winer, webpioneer and developer is always experimenting with new things and very interested in the future of newspapers and news.

He has made a personal newspage with a list of links to articles. These links are shared on his twitter page where people can click on them. The links are shortened with the service of tr.im which enables Dave to see their clickcount. The list is ranked by the amount of clicks, which creates a democratic news site. It’s true that the subjects are picked by Dave, but the clickcount determines where each article stands.

Some of his other experiments are also interesting. He started 100twt, a page with the tweets of the 100 most followed twitterers. I think that mostly was to show that these are not the most active or interesting people on twitter. A good example is Oprah who still ocassionaly updates, but her latest interaction is from april 25th. And even that wasn’t with a fan, but with Hugh Jackman. Also included in 100twt are pages of the people working at Twitter and the NY Times. This way you can see how the company deals with the medium itself and how reporters use it.

Another way to use a similar system is Friendfeed. It’s not only possible to use the very extended search feature to find the most discussed and interesting entries of certain friends or topics, but it’s also possible to view a page with the “Best of Day” entries from your contacts that have received the most “likes” or “comments”. I like these experiments to discover interesting news and articles!

Tweeting Too Hard gives important tweets their deserved attention

The website Tweeting Too Hard shows a collection of tweets, on which every visitor can vote. The purpose is that eventually the most ridiculous and arrogant tweets will emerge.

This results in the following example gems:

  • it makes me sad, the more I have success the more people don’t like me…. - by @iamsammis
  • Went to the gym this morning. As I left, everyone said I was the best! – by @serafinowicz
  • ok poop is coming out. – by @leto75

Logging in and voting can be done just using your twitter credentials. Let me know if you’ve found anything interesting on www.tweetingtoohard.com

via Mona on Friendfeed

A newer Friendfeed (and faster en better en prettier)

Friendfeed is a one stop shop for all of your social network and news needs. It exists for about two years now and is steadily growing. When Facebook launched their redesign a couple of weeks ago they had copied a large part of the interface of Friendfeed. Now Friendfeed has got a redesign of its own, which has launched today in beta mode on http://beta.friendfeed.com. After having received feedback from the users they will transfer this design to the main site.

As I said the site is your main hub for all of your online communication needs and this has only improved since today’s redesign. It’s very versatile (it can be used in many ways) and very powerful (you can add an extract a lot of information).

One way of using it is just like twitter, but then with many more possibilities of adding images, videos and links to your messages. So forget about twitpic, mobypicture, powertwitter and other services like URL shorteners and unshorteners, because you can all add it to Friendfeed. Another way of using Friendfeed is by having a great overview of all of your contacts online activity in one place like blogposts, flickr photos, vimeo videos and digg and youtube favorites for example. On the other side it’s a nice way to collect all your own things and display them in a nice centralized way.

But enough introduction. I’m just telling this because I am enthousiastic about it and think Friendfeed could easily replace twitter, facebook, myspace and other social networks. You just have to know how and take some time figuring out the site. To see the new design in action go to http://beta.friendfeed.com. You can find my profile on http://beta.friendfeed.com/tobiasverhoog.

The most interesting changes since today are:

  • All the pages are real-time now. (This can look imposing, but there is a pause button and with the right filters and lists this becomes very usable)
  • You can send contacts direct messages. These are regular posts, but the receiver gets a flag in their received messages list. This is what I was missing to have it replace twitter. I have to give it some more tryout time and of course my twitter contacts have to make the jump)
  • In the design the person from whom something comes is more emphasized than what source it came from.
  • There is a (modest) profile page.
  • Filtering and searching has changed and improved. This requires some more time to figure out and setup, but after a while you can perfectly tune the site to your needs.

There are all sorts of large and small changes, that above all have to make the communication and sharing with your contacts easier. It’s a bit more like a real-time chatroom. For more elaborate reviews go to Techcrunch, Scobleizer, Thomas Hawk and the Friendfeed blog itself. These blogs have already gotten a preview last friday. They had only forgotten to invite yours truly. It’s a disgrace…

Magnetic Joe is my favorite game for the iphone or ipod touch

Difficult Joe

I would like to introduce Magnetic Joe. It’s my favorite game on my ipod touch and ofcouse the iphone. Joe is a purple ball who, despite what his name suggests, isn’t magnetic all the time, but only when you press your finger against the glass somewhere. Joe is pulled to the blue magnets that are spread out in the 2D mazes which he has to cross. There are also parts which Joe can’t touch. This results in a simple and addictive game, of which the difficulty level reminds of old games on the NES and 286 pc.

A free iphone game

Other good news is that it’s a completely free game, while it’s a complete app. So it’s not free lite version or a demo, no just more than 40 levels of Joe for free. I’ve got my ipod touch for a while now and I have to say the app store and installing apps works great. But it’s too bad that most of the free apps are just a sample of paid apps. The makers of Magnetic Joe have already made some money on a Nintendo DS version and some other games and it seemed a nice way to them to introduce the game to ipod touch and iphone users. Magnetic Joe 2 and 3 are also being made, but those probably will cost money.

Screenshots of the gameplay

To give you a better idea of the mazes that you have to guide Joe through with your touchscreen, here are some screenshots. Magnetc Joe can be downloaded in Apple’s app store.

Een nieuwe NRC.next site en een feed voor de columnisten

[This post is currently only in Dutch, please use the translate button in the bar below.] NRC.next heeft vorige week een vernieuwde website gelanceerd. Ze zijn overgegaan van een beetje vreemde kopie van de papieren krant online naar een weblog met toegewijde bloggers. Hier hun eigen uitleg. Ik vind het best een geslaagde overgang. Ze hebben er blijkbaar voor gekozen niet te proberen al het heetste nieuws te brengen, maar meer achtergrondinformatie en opinie. Ik had het nog wel leuk gevonden als ze een digitaal krantenarchief hadden aangelegd, waardoor je artikelen zou kunnen delen die je interessant vond in de krant. Ik begrijp wel dat dit natuurlijk lastig is en mensen dan misschien de krant niet meer kopen. Maar genoeg hierover. Wat ik eigenlijk wilde vertellen was dat de columns van Aaf, Jan Blokker en Rob Wijnberg zijn meeverhuisd en een welverdiende prominente plek hebben gekregen op www.nrcnext.nl/columnisten. Met een goed werkende RSS-feed die er voor zorgt dat je de volledige artikelen in je rss-reader kunt ontvangen. Een uitleg over wat rss is bewaar ik nog even tot een latere blogpost, maar neem maar van mij aan dat dat handig is. Een verandering in de NRC.next site is dat je nu ook commentaar kunt leveren bij artikelen, zoals gebruikelijk bij weblogs.  De heren en dame columnschrijvers zijn echter nog niet zo ver gedigitaliseerd, want onder hun stukjes staat nog: “Bij deze column kun je geen reactie achterlaten omdat hij voor de krant is geschreven.” Jammer. Bij dit weblog mag het wel :-)