It's Microsoft's last CES, we say goodbye, and will it have any major impact on the worlds largest electronics show. Short answer. No. The vote on SOPA gets delayed until 2012, just in time to try to make people forget. Plus, some of the Top 10 lists from the internet meme world! We love you Nyan Cat!
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This is so cool. A group of musicians calling themselves The Piano Guys released a video of two Jedi playing the theme from "Star Wars" on dueling cellos.
"Why Star Wars Cello? Because of our unending admiration of George Lucas, John Williams, and the most EPIC movies and film score ever created," the guys stated on YouTube. They say they "like to put a new spin on classic stuff and a classic spin on new stuff. It's a must-see video for fans of the space opera.… Read more
Just days ago, in a blog item about how theater groups and symphonies are setting aside "tweet seats" for the Twitter-addicted, I wrote the following: "It's not much of a stretch to [conjure up] a vision of performance pieces that go whole hog and incorporate tweets into their very structure."
Well, the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra Chorus was way ahead of me.
It recently asked fans to tweet tips on staying warm this winter. And, as Diana Adams at blog Bit Rebels reports, the orchestra's chorus master, Timothy Shantz, spent two hours arranging the 20 resulting tweets into a three-minute ditty sung to the tune of "O Fortuna" (from Carl Orff's famous "Carmina Burana"). … Read more
Ugh. There's no worse first-world problem than having to wait for your food to come out of the microwave.
Thanks to a group of young developers, you can now watch YouTube videos on your microwave while you're waiting for those delicious little White Castle burgers. Mmmm.
The uWave is basically an HP TouchPad connected to a microwave, but its functionality is so much more than that.… Read more
There you are, enjoying just another day at the office. There you are, just doing your job as best you can.
How can you possibly know that one little pro forma action of yours will spout hundreds of imitations across the Web?
This must have been a thought of Lt. John Pike, the University of California at Davis policeman who had clearly eschewed paper pushing for finger pushing.
Should you have been suffering from unreasonably stingy eyes of late, you might have missed video of Pike mistaking his pepper spray for his plant food and a group of seated students … Read more
Tesla bids farewell to Roadster Tesla will stop taking orders for its electric Roadster sports car later this year as it shifts its focus to the Model S electric sedan. More
FTC, Senate rachet up Google antitrust probes Federal Trade Commission and U.S. Senate appear to step up their antitrust investigations of Google, a development that follows formal investigations already under way in Europe. More
Microsoft chasing Apple's app lead Trailing badly in the number … Read more
We are cheap bastards, the lot of us. We don't want to pay for content. The New York Times puts up a pay wall that's leaky by design, so nonpaying readers can share stories they like with other people and articles pop up telling people how to take advantage to read all the newspaper online for free. The underlying conceit being that if you can get it all for free, no matter how valuable it is to you, you're a sucker if you actually pay.
But if we won't pay with cash to see stuff we like, there are other ways that publishers and marketers can extract value from our attention: By turning us into advertisements.
The latest experiment in micro-monetization is putting a "Like wall" between readers and content. The New Yorker tried a single-article trial last week for nonpaying readers; it made an essay by Jonathan Franzen available for "free" to those who would "Like" the magazine on Facebook. As Mashable notes, Self Magazine, Jennifer Lopez, and Lil Wayne have also put content behind Like walls
There are other pieces of content like this. Electronics manufacturer Denon is coming out with new models. The company promises Facebook users a peek at the new gear, but only if they "Like" Denon's page. The reputation site Honestly.com has an A/B test running (in other words, not all users see it), where registered users don't see their own ratings until they "Like" the site.
The idea, in these and other tests, is obviously to get people to tacitly recommend products on Facebook, in exchange for access to the online services. In some cases (like Denon), users are asked to Like something without fully knowing what it is. Call it the clueless vouch.
It's got to stop, for two reasons.
There's money in them thar cheezburgers. At least, there's money for buying other Internet meme sites.
The Cheezburger Network, home to hit sites like I can has Cheezburger, the Fail Blog, the Daily What, and many others, has bought the popular meme etymology site Know Your Meme. The deal closed last Monday, Cheezburger CEO Ben Huh told CNET.
The deal was first reported by Tubefilter, which said that Know Your Meme, which was a spin-off from Rocketboom, is getting a low seven-figure payday. Huh would not discuss the financials of the deal.
Know Your Meme has become famous … Read more
The 404 Digest for Episode 785
Our guest today is MemeMolly, who gives us an update on the latest memes, Internet culture, and why nobody can stand the word "viral." Add Molly on Twitter and follow her Tumblr. Top Dog: one is tough, the other is a dog. Where are they now, featuring Star Wars Kid and Numa Numa Guy? Is Cathymay15 a troll, a genius, or another victim of online bullying? EU proposes right to be forgotten online.… Read moreJust as I--and many of you--suspected, the viral video claiming to demonstrate how to hack into the huge video monitors in New York's Times Square was a fake.
The video shows two people: one filming and holding an iPhone with a "video transmitter" plugged into the headphone jack, and the other with a "video repeater" that appears to hijack any screen it comes near, forcing it to display the video feed from the phone. Toward the end of the video, the repeater is attached to a helium balloon, and floated up in front of the Times Square monitor, which also acquiesces to the "hack."
As it turns out, there's more of a backstory to the video than its DIY aesthetic would seem to indicate. The faux hack was actually part of a subtle viral marketing campaign for the movie "Limitless." The only nod to the film comes in the moments before the Times Square screen is taken over--the movie trailer is playing on the screen before it's replaced with the iPhone feed.
While many people called the hoax, we didn't get it totally right. I and most others assumed the screen manipulation was the result of video post-production. In fact, Michael Krivicka of Thinkmodo, the marketing agency behind the video, says the apparent video hijack really did play on the Times Square screen.
"We basically rented the screens on Times Square," Krivicka told InformationWeek. "We had our own footage play on there, which had sync points that were looping every 60 seconds. So we basically synced up the footage on our iPhone and made it look, with rehearsed timing, like it's being hacked into. It was really simple."… Read more
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