Internet

Just three months after release, Twitter's Vine video service for creating 6-second clips has already become the muse of marketers looking to reach people through imaginative messaging.

Brands such as Lowe's, Urban Outfitters, Taco Bell, and Bacardi, with the help of their digital agencies, have embraced the platform to test unconventional campaigns on social audiences who seem to appreciate their business-as-unusual approach.

What follows is a panoply of creative Vine brand campaigns. If advertisements as looping, GIF-like videos scare you, I suggest you turn away now.

Note: If for some reason a particular clip below shows up as nothing more than a black box, you can click on the white banner along the top of the box to open the clip in a new browser tab.… Read more

It used to be Twitter was all about text. We now have Vines and Instagrams to go with it, but letters and numbers are still the primary form of tweeting communication. Twaggies give tweets a visual lift thanks to a team of illustrators who take the funniest and weirdest tweets and turn them into little comics.

Twaggies add an extra blast of the surreal to tweets that are already outside the norm. The site has been around since 2009, when it started with some very crudely computer-drawn illustrations. Founder David Israel (@resila) had to admit to a lack of artistic skill, so Twaggies grew into a crowdsourced repository of images created by a couple dozen different artists.… Read more

There are many measurable quantities in the universe, but we would not have called "happiness" one of them.

Since 2008, however, a team of scientists from the University of Vermont and the Mitre Corporation, led by mathematicians Chris Danforth and Peter Dodds, have been figuring out a way to try.

Together, they've been working on a piece of software called the Hedonometer that measures -- and graphs -- data pulled from Twitter Garden Hose, a random sample of 10 percent of all tweets, to gauge how happy the world is on any given day.

A paid team … Read more

A quick history lesson for readers.

In 1989, British physicist Tim Berners-Lee invented what would be called the "World Wide Web." The first trials were held in December 1990 at the laboratories of CERN, the major research laboratory in Geneva that's better known today as the home of the Large Hadron Collider.

On April 30, 1993, CERN published a statement -- on the Web, no less! -- that made the technology behind the World Wide Web available on a royalty-free basis. (Specifically, this was the software required to run a Web server, a basic browser, and a library of code.)

And thus the modern public Web was born, at info.cern.ch. … Read more

If you're going to have a Web presence, sometimes it pays to make sure any domain name associated with the name of your organization is accounted for. The Australian Christian Lobby operates out of the acl.org.au domain name, after moving from australianchristianlobby.org.au. But the australianchristianlobby.org domain has been quietly occupied, seemingly kept in reserve -- until a relaunch on Sunday.

Three Melbourne feminists -- Hilary Bowman-Smart, Genevieve Stewart, and Jessica Alice -- snapped up the domain when it became available, turning it into a website for the group, called Australian Cat Ladies, stating that there has been a case of mistaken identity between the two groups. "Please note, it is very important that you do not confuse "Cat-Holics" with "Catholics," the site reads. … Read more

We've all heard of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack and know what it is: when a person or people attempt to take down a Web site by flooding it with connection requests. These max out the site's bandwidth, making it unable to accept new requests. The attacks are usually automated and can be accomplished in a variety of ways. The loss of traffic during the attack itself, and the recovery afterward, can end up costing Web sites quite a lot.

But what does that actually look like? Well, nothing by itself; but thanks to a Web site traffic visualization tool called Logstalgia, Ludovic Fauvet, developer of the Web site VideoLAN (which created and distributes the free multimedia player VLC), managed to capture an April 23 DDoS attack on his site. … Read more

When Twitter first released the 6-second Vine video format, a lot of people wondered just how much information you could convey in such a short amount of time. It turns out the answer is a lot, if you do it right.

A Tribeca Film Festival competition has brought a sense of legitimacy to the new realm of Vine filmmaking. Some of the winners are wild, wacky, and just a little bit worrying.

The "Genre" category welcomed everything from Westerns to sci-fi to LOLcats. The winner, however, is definitely in the horror genre. "LazerAndDonald Close Shave" crams a lot of creepy into just 6 seconds. Juror and famous filmmaker Penny Marshall says, "The use of lighting is amazingly set for this 6 second Vine."… Read more

I have always believed that the old and the new can coexist with extreme joy.

Microsoft appears to believe this too.

In a promotion that melds the dying world of magazines with the living world of Wi-Fi, select copies of Forbes are enjoying a Wi-Fi router, which oozes 15 days of free Wi-Fi through T-Mobile.

This fetching gift was first noticed by someone on the Slickdeals forum -- handle BigMacG4 -- who wondered whether anyone else had been fortunate enough to be gifted this way.… Read more

The first post on the White House's official new Tumblr boldly tackles a topic sure to inspire as much debate in certain circles as immigration reform, tax cuts, and gun control -- the pronunciation of "GIF."

I, being the softie that I am, have always pronounced the acronym for Graphical Interchange Format "jif" (it sounds more French), but the White House informs me I am wrong and may be declared an enemy of the state. "Hard G," it declares on a graphic (or is that jraffic?) previewing the kinds of content we should expect to see on the new Tumblr -- everything from behind-the-scenes photos to updates on policy and First Dog Bo (and, presumably, Bo's take on policy updates).

And because a Tumblr without them wouldn't be worth its weight in dancing cats, "yes, of course there will be GIFs," it says. … Read more