Link Banana

This collection is fun. The internet needs more sites that make Danny Glover the default avatar.

(via yewknee)

Profane and brilliant.

(via Mr. Sullivan)

Got an hour to kill? “Greg Rutter’s Definitive List of The 99 Things You Should Have Already Experienced On The Internet Unless You’re a Loser or Old or Something” can expand to fill any amount of down time.

Some of the best things I’d not seen:

• George Lucas in Love
• Winnebago Man
• Who Needs a Video?

This is a bit old, but I enjoyed perusing Rob Beschizza’s attempt to highlight the hardware preferences of certain types of people.

Clay Shirky wrote this paper in 1997. His point is still sinking in:

The price of information has not only gone into free fall in the last few years, it is still in free fall now, it will continue to fall long before it hits bottom, and when it does whole categories of currently lucrative businesses will be either transfigured unrecognizably or completely wiped out, and there is nothing anyone can do about it.

(via Andrew Simone)

There’s a lot of interesting stuff in this paragraph from Virginia Heffernan:

Does anyone still believe that the forms of movies, television, magazines and newspapers might exist independently of their rapidly changing modes of distribution? The thought has become unsustainable. Take magazine writing. In school or on the job, magazine writers never learn anything so broad as to “tell great stories” or “make arresting images.” You don’t study the ancient art of storytelling. You learn to produce certain numbers and styles and forms of words and images. You learn to be succinct when a publication loses ad pages. You learn to dilate when an “article” is understood mostly as a delivery vehicle for pictures of a sexy celebrity. The words stack up under certain kinds of headlines that also adhere to strict conventions as to size and tone, and eventually they appear alongside certain kinds of photos and illustrations with certain kinds of captions on pages of certain dimensions that are often shared with advertisements. Just as shooting film for a Hollywood movie is never just filming and acting in a TV ad is never just acting, writing for a magazine is never just writing.

Though the whole column’s probably worth a read for anyone interested in the future of media.

(via Snarkmarket)

I, like most of Clay Shirkey’s students, hadn’t seen this video from the election season. His explanation of it’s power is interesting:

Dear Mr. Obama was a trifecta. For the base, a muscular but polite attack on the very issue that brought Obama into the spotlight. For the undecided, the emotional charge is much likelier to sway them than argumentation. And for the Dems — nothing. The video might as well not have existed for all it was seen in Democratic circles. Since the video’s sole speaker can’t be criticized without making the criticizer look churlish at best, almost no Dems forwarded it, linked to it, talked about it.

(via Chris Bodenner)

A funny thing happens when you copy and paste the character on this page into a text editor. (via Waxy)

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.