I’ve downloaded the new Firefox 3 beta and I must say I like it quite a bit. Certain plugins don’t work but hey it’s a beta. My only serious beef with it is where the favicons show up now. Designers have been used to the favicons being at the beginning of the address bar and design accordingly. Now it seems we are all going to have to design with transparency in mind and break the box format somewhat, as it looks terrible in the new firefox. It seems unbalanced and odd to have a square favicon in this new address bar.
I’ll see what I can come up with in the coming days. I needed to change my favicon anyway. :-p
Some people have been talking about friendfeed as way to keep up with all their web 2.0 goodies from the same place. I however received an invite to Socialthing!. It is much nicer and a beautiful interface and a great mobile iphone edition. If it only had a twitteriffic type application that went along with it, it would be perfect.
I have a few invites left to Socialthing! so if you’d like one follow me on twitter or pownce and send me a note. Links in the sidebar.
I recently got back onto twitter. At first I thought it was stupid and a waste of time but recently I decided to give it a second chance. What really sold me on it was twitteriffic which is an awesome app for osx. It’s fun and you get strange things popping up on your desktop throughout the day. Not long after rejoining twitter I ran into ColorWars which is this odd game for twitter users created by Ze Frank. Being a huge fan of The Show with Ze Frank I decided to give it a whirl and joined Team CMYK. No real reason why, just thought it was interesting. I’m a little late to the game but oh well. This current challenge is a nerd rap battle. I thought this would be fun so I spent about 45 minutes tonight writing and practicing my little 1 minute nerd rap. If your on twitter please follow me and CMYK.
Ah mixtapes how I miss them. Here is one from me. Feel free to make me a mixtape, with something old and something new. Something I said or that we did that reminds me of you. Make me a mixtape that makes me yours, don’t leave out Husker Du. Put something on that The Cars did in 1982.
Ok, so it looks pretty. I’ll admit that. For those of you not in the know hulu is a video site put together by NBC and Newscorp in an attempt to monetize the online market and curb illegal downloading etc. Does it still suck, well kinda. Other than having rather limited content, my biggest problem with the site is the ad placement. It’s horrible. It reminds me of movie broadcasts on Sunday mornings sponsored by vinyl siding installers. Rough cuts in the middle of a scene with no regards to how intrusive it is to break the action like that. Below is the movie the Girl Next Door. It’s a fun little flick but it’s also a great example of what I’m talking about. Watch it and see how they chop it up. So if you want to catch an old episode of family guy or one of the 7 movies they have, sure it’s great . Other than that I think it sucks. Oh and you can’t watch it outside of the states.
I’ve been offered countless trial discs for World of Warcraft and turn each and everyone one of them down. I like games, I really do. I even like RPGs but I just can’t get into that whole online RPG scene, I’m just too busy with real life. I couldn’t handle having a virtual one as well. Nonetheless, I know quite a few people addicted to MMORPGs and other such video games. So when I came across this little web gem I couldn’t help but instantly luv it. This is a great web series written by and starring Felicia Day. I’ve included the first 7 episodes below.
I must admit that I love classic arcade games. My vice of choice is Galaga but I tend not to shy away from a Donkey Kong Machine when one is mysteriously adorning the front room of a pizza joint like a relic that the kids give museums glances to before moving on to fancier games. I have fond memories of playing many of the classic games so when presented with a documentary about two guys competing to be the BEST Donkey Kong player I didn’t hesitate to add it to the netflix queue.
I must say this documentary is amazingly compelling, there is a classic rivalry built rather quickly and the 3 act structure works amazingly well in this documentary. Steve Wiebe is the archetypal “good guy”, you cheer and root for him if not aloud in your very center. You clearly want him to succeed. Moreover you find yourself really hating the “bad guy” in this film and quite honestly if I ran into Billy Mitchel on the street there is a good chance I would punch him in the mouth.
From time to time you need to send a file to someone that is bigger than email can handle and the receiver may not be that familiar with ftp or IM simple won’t cut it. Enter drop.io, a simple website that allows you to create a drop space for people to get a file that you upload and people can upload to the same space if you let them. It is a beautiful interface and very simple. Unlike yousendit which is horribly cumbersome. The best part is there is no sign up . No account creation just space creation. The service has some amazing features like email, fax and phone drops. So you can email a pic to your space and it will post the pic without all the email junk. You can fax a document to it and it will render it a pdf. You can call a phone number and leave a message and it will mp3 it for you. Moreover you can subscribe to the drop via rss and create a media type podcast to include video, audio, pdf’s, images etc. Its an amazing service with tons of potential. yousendit has left my bookmarks bar, I need the space for drop.io.
Feel free to upload a file to me with the widget below.
When Tony Wilson opened The Haciendain 1982, I doubt he and his cohorts would have known the kind of change they made on music culture beyond the creation of Factory Records. Some might say it was just a night club but it was much more than that. It was the birth place for Rave culture. Hundreds of kids doing drugs, dancing and enjoying the music they moved to. I could speak on the importance of all those involved and the music of Manchester for Proustian lengths but I will make my point quickly. Rave culture made the DJ just as important as the artists on the records they were spinning. In some cases more so. From that point in time forward, a DJ was as much of a star as the artists. They were applauded and cheered just as if they had written the very songs they hit play on. There is still some debate as to the validity of the DJ as an artist but I concede to it being an art form. I’m actually a fan of certain DJ’s myself.
What does this have to do with the internet? The internet has resurged the idea that the medium is just as important as the author. Lets begin with a simple youtube example. Here is a video with about 800 thousand views of Liam Lynch’s song the United States of Whatever.
Liam is nothing short of a creative genius and does a lot of work in the TV and Music industry. Lets move on to another video by Brookers. A youtube starlett, her “cover” of the song in great youtube fashion has a little over 1.5 Million views.
Granted Liam’s work has been seen in other venues and he is probably more “famous” than Brookers, she did have a brush with fame signing a development deal with Carson Daly but little came of that. Nonetheless in the venue of youtube, Brookers seems to be just as important as Liam if not more so. Moreover the idea of authorship begins to blur as the internet allows for you to find one thing but maybe not the other. Some people may never know of Liam or his work despite having watched and enjoyed the Brookers Video.
Lets move on to social news giant Digg.com. Every day people submit content to the site but in this strange place sometimes the submitter becomes as famous as some of the things they submit. It wasn’t that long ago that Jason Calacanas wanted to pay Top Digg submitters to work for Netscape in their Digg ripoff. Are the people who scour the internet to find good content the new DJ. These people are essentially “pushing play” on other authors work. The internet has created a new place for people to congregate and someone who can keep a crowd pleased earns them similar respect of a DJ. It may take a decade before this becomes mainstream but I think the concept is there.
The internet has provided the frame work for a new type of rave culture, and social networking sites have created the venue for content submitters to be just as important as the content itself.
I’ve downloaded the new Firefox 3 beta and I must say I like it quite a bit. Certain plugins don’t work but hey it’s a beta. My only serious beef with it is where the favicons show up now. Designers have been used to the favicons being at the beginning of the address bar and design accordingly. Now it seems we are all going to have to design with 
transparency in mind and break the box format somewhat, as it looks terrible in the new firefox. It seems unbalanced and odd to have a square favicon in this new address bar.
I must admit that I love classic arcade games. My vice of choice is Galaga but I tend not to shy away from a Donkey Kong Machine when one is mysteriously adorning the front room of a pizza joint like a relic that the kids give museums glances to before moving on to fancier games. I have fond memories of playing many of the classic games so when presented with a documentary about two guys competing to be the BEST Donkey Kong player I didn’t hesitate to add it to the netflix queue.
