Link Banana

Many people have linked to this article on Flickr’s Director of Community and I didn’t get why. Then I read it. It’s pretty interesting.

Perhaps topping Firefox 3’s about:robots easter egg is Google Chrome’s about:internets, which unveils the 3D Pipes Window screensaver (you know the one) and the invocation: “Don’t Clog the Tubes!”

This has been going around for some time, and I never found an hour with which to watch it. Today I finally did, and I’m glad for that. It’s well done, and brings new weight to Robin’s question: “How is YouTube not the greatest art project ever?”

Aware of the internet’s love for bacon, Salon shamelessly devoted a week to it. If you’re interested, they are:

• Why we love bacon
• I made bacon
• I made other pork things
• Bacon won’t be cool forever

Weezer’s new music video is chock full of internet memes, and thus must be loved by everyone on the internet. That is all.

(via Waxy)

David Brooks again earns my admiration. From his well-executed history of nerdiness:

But the biggest change was not Silicon Valley itself. Rather, the new technology created a range of mental playgrounds where the new geeks could display their cultural capital. The jock can shine on the football field, but the geeks can display their supple sensibilities and well-modulated emotions on their Facebook pages, blogs, text messages and Twitter feeds. Now there are armies of designers, researchers, media mavens and other cultural producers with a talent for whimsical self-mockery, arcane social references and late-night analysis.

They can visit eclectic sites like Kottke.org and Cool Hunting, experiment with fonts, admire Stewart Brand and Lawrence Lessig and join social-networking communities with ironical names. They’ve created a new definition of what it means to be cool, a definition that leaves out the talents of the jocks, the M.B.A.-types and the less educated.

I note this just because I’m rather surprised anyone actually bothered to conduct such a poll. But SurveyUSA did — maybe hoping that people like me would like to it? — their explanation is here.

(via Waxy)

Really, I’ve not read it and don’t intend to. I’m just using it as an excuse to share some of my favorite episodes. Like:

• Hindsight
• Serious Issues
• Scrabble
• Thanksgetting
• Brain Crack
• Outside

This has been making the rounds, I’m surprised how much I liked it.

The latest episode of Bloggingheads, a conversations between Will Wilkerson and Clay Shirky — author of the recent Here Comes Everybody — is fascinating. Truly the most interesting thing I’ve seen in well over a week.

It’s phishing, but only for big fish only.

Thousands of high-ranking executives across the country have been receiving e-mail messages this week that appear to be official subpoenas from the United States District Court in San Diego. Each message includes the executive’s name, company and phone number, and commands the recipient to appear before a grand jury in a civil case.

A link embedded in the message purports to offer a copy of the entire subpoena. But a recipient who tries to view the document unwittingly downloads and installs software that secretly records keystrokes and sends the data to a remote computer over the Internet. This lets the criminals capture passwords and other personal or corporate information.

(via Daring Fireball)

Wake Up Later put together a sequence of what a number of high profile websites used to look like. It’s not exactly groundbreaking, but I’m a real sucker for this stuff.

(via kottke)

Related: Ben Tesch’s Magnetbox is nine today, and has a compilation of how it used to look.

Twitter — that 140 character “microblogging” engine — officially became the least romantic way to propose when it was recently used for that purpose by Greg Rewis.

At first I dismissed this as a poorly produced piece fan-made internet garbage. Now I’ve watched it at least five times and think it’s the best thing I’ve seen in ages. Long live camp.

Also of note, this video provoked what may be the best YouTube comment in history:

This seals it - the internets need to be banned.

EDIT (3/24/2008): I’ve also written a review of the video as it fits into camp. It’s not great, but you might be interested.

Andy Baio has some good words on the topic of the FAIL meme (typified by The FAIL Blog).

A few years ago, I wrote an entry about knee-jerk contrarians on the Internet: those delightful people who find fault in anything and everything, dismissing months or years of work with a few words.

This is nothing new. It’s as old as communication itself. I’m sure that the moment man discovered fire, there was some guy nearby saying, “Too smoky. Can burn you. Lame.”

(via Daring Fireball)

io9 put together an alarmingly uncomprehensive report card for the physics and space movies. It’s still entertaining though.

(via Boing Boing)

This argument’s been made thousands of times, but every once in a while I appreciate seeing it. Amy Goldwasser’s defense of the internet (and teenagers):

Kids today — we’re telling you! — don’t read, don’t write, don’t care about anything farther in front of them than their iPods. The Internet, according to 88-year-old Lessing (whose specialty is sturdy typewriters, or perhaps pens), has “seduced a whole generation into its inanities.”

Or is it the older generation that the Internet has seduced — into the inanities of leveling charges based on fear, ignorance and old-media, multiple-choice testing? So much so that we can’t see that the Internet is only a means of communication, and one that has created a generation, perhaps the first, of writers, activists, storytellers? When the world worked in hard copy, no parent or teacher ever begrudged teenagers who disappeared into their rooms to write letters to friends — or a movie review, or an editorial for the school paper on the first president they’ll vote for. Even 15-year-old boys are sharing some part of their feelings with someone out there.

At Slate, Garth Halberg has an interesting look into the world of Amazon reviews.

It was late at night, in a fit of furtive self-Googling, that I discovered the first Amazon customer review of my debut book of fiction. “Superb,” wrote Grady Harp of Los Angeles. “Fascinating … addictive.” Not to mention “profound.” Such extravagance should have aroused suspicion, but I was too busy basking in the glow of a five-star rave to worry about the finer points of Harp’s style. Sure, he’d spelled my name wrong, but hadn’t he also judged me “a sensitive observer of human foibles”? Only when I noticed the “Top 10 Reviewer” tag did I wonder whether Grady Harp was more than just a satisfied customer. After a brief e-mail exchange, my publicist confirmed that she’d solicited Grady Harp’s review.