I’m late to the Tumblr party, but you can’t help but notice the Tumblr aesthetic taking over the web with the proliferation of awesome single-themed picture blogs (though they’re not all necessarily Tumblr blogs).
As with an web service or site, as soon as it hits a critical mass, the critics get snarky – a la Fuck Yeah Sharks:
In addition to being beautifully designed, there’s a lot of great noises in this game – trolloping hooves under the head, an ear tug that turns into breathing fire, an airplane propeller nose, bouncing beach balls, a woman laughing when her foot is tickled.
There were some great mash-ups this week and I’ve posted a few of my favorites below.
Colbert kicked off the week during a convo with Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig.
Eclectic Method – The Colbert Report – Remix feat Lawrence Lessig
Other gems include a remix of excerpts from Obama’s audiobook autobiography and a hilarious video of Christian Bale’s audio rant remixed with the drooling and doped up kid in the back seat after the dentist.
Barack Obama is tired of you s**t (Techno Zuendli Mix)
Christian Bale takes David to the Dentist (Mash-Up)
A recent article on Mashable caught my attention with a headline about the problem with all the openness in a social media world. However, my attention was soon redirected by the mention at the end of the article about clever car thieves in the Netherlands who reverse engineer luxury car GPS systems by stealing cars at the airport and using the system to lead them back to empty homes.
The GPS scam struck me as a particularly civilized form of robbery, a Thomas Crowne type of an affair involving airports and luxury cars, as compared to the rude reminder of B.C.’s less glamorous car theft problem I received when I was recently visiting Vancouver. As I got on the SkyTrain to head downtown, a huge sign tacked to the wall of the mall overlooking a grey parking lot warned “Bait Cars Are Everywhere.”
The car bait program has been in place since 2002 and has seen a dramatic decrease in car thefts in the Lower Mainland, according to ICBC. The program has a sexy website (in comparison to ICBC or the VPD anyway), which is where I found this gem about how my hometown is managing to buck the province-wide trend of declining car thefts: Bait Cars Tackle Williams Lake Auto Theft Epidemic.
I’ll have to write something nice about my hometown next time. Until then, underscore_mouse and abbenquesnel have some pretty Flickr pictures of the area…
Last week Valleywag wrote about Mission hipsters taking on the Google with spray cans.
This past weekend on my walk home after a Friday night tutorial at Zeitgeist on how to graffiti like the pros (it involves a paper bag), I noticed the same stencil spray painted on the corner of 24th & Guerrero.
I walk past the Google shuttle stop every morning and I don’t know that I’d go as far as to call them “trendy professionals”, but I think the graffiti guys and the googlites have a lot in common, per Richard Flordia’s thesis in “The Rise of the Creative Class.” Florida posits that creative professionals are simply seeking communities with a sense of ‘authenticity’… that would be panaderias over Banana Republic.
Shootings > Starbucks?
It’s too bad the salaries of Googlites can’t take care of drive-by shootings on the same corner. From SF Gate on June 23:
…
San Francisco police also were investigating a shooting Sunday night of a man in his mid-30s who was attacked near the corner of 24th and Guerrero streets by a person who jumped out of a car and started shooting. The shooter then jumped back into the car and fled with a driver, according to police.
In related news, if “young professionals” don’t do it, the government will take care of public blight for you:
The Fillmore, where 60 percent of the residents were African American, was declared blight in 1948. The first demolition project began in 1956. The second phase, the brainchild of the redevelopment agency’s then-head Justin Herman, began in 1964 and expanded the area to 60 square blocks. Eminent domain was used to purchase Victorian homes and buy out local businesses. The thriving black business community was destroyed as owners of nightclubs, barbershops, banks and retail stores were forced to close up shop.
…
The city plans to turn over 1,300 acres – more than half of the Bayview-Hunters Point area – to the Redevelopment Agency to help clean up blight, build affordable housing and stimulate business. The project creates the largest redevelopment district in San Francisco history.
WHY? This was the most compelling demo at SF New Tech’s most recent event (other than the cuddly Pleo). You’re watching a 45 min clip from CNN but you just want the news about Iraq. Pluggd inserts text tags in the video at the points where Iraq is mentioned, as well terms they deem relevant like “Iran”, “war”, “terrorism”.
Diigo: social book marking site, also allows users to annotate websites and share with others
WHY? My laptop was taken from me before its time last month, and besides missing having a laptop period, the things I miss most from my clunky old Dell are, in order, (1) the graduate school dictionary I compiled of all the esoteric terms I was reading, (2) my bookmarks, (3) travel photos.
Diigo is my second try at using a bookmarking site. I used Del.icio.us for a while a couple of years back and abandoned it after a few months of use. The unforeseen laptop tragedy has given me a new appreciation as to why it’s useful to have your bookmarks stored online.
TweetClouds: Tag cloud of all terms you use on Twitter
WHY? You don’t already spend enough time thinking about yourself. Visual summary of what you’ve been writing about.
I’ve been using Twitter for just over a month now, see my TweetCloud here: http://www.tweetclouds.com/user_pages/ldpodcast.html
Someecards: Writers from The Onion write egreeting cards.
WHY? You need a laugh and/or another distraction at work.
Seeqpod: Find exactly the music you want, stream it to your computer, build playlists
WHY? You want what you want when you want it without having to download songs and viruses to your computer.
Ze Frank’s videos occupied many hours of my time while I was working in the basement Learning Center office at my university in Montreal. His videos warmed the evenings spent in that cold, dark, cement room.
For one year — March 17, 2006 to March 17, 2007 — he filmed one video entry a day, M-F. His video journal was one of the first widely popular blogs that involved audience participation; he also created an alternative advertising model that involved yellow duckies.
I have not heard of Ze since his last post in March 2007, until this week. One of my Twitter friends wrote something about thanking Ze Frank for orange, and today someone emailed a link to one of the funniest videos:
* Is there a stuffwhitepeoplelike post on Scrabble yet?
Why, I wondered, was Ze suddenly showing back up in my life after a one year hiatus?
Two Google-seconds later I had my answer.
Ze has created the ColorWars 2008 on Twitter. Team Orange, Blue, VERY Green, and on. Players join a color team by choosing a color follow, and voila! you’re a team player! There’s something about Bingo challenges, but with my diminished attention span I can’t be bothered to follow through to figure it out. Point is, user-created challenges, games, and merriment are on Twitter.
GaryVee launched GDP08 (Good People Day) on Twitter today, April 3, a little experiment that saw hundreds (thousands?) of nice messages tweeted about others deemed to be good people.
I hear blogging about blogging is in poor taste. I’ll end here.
Learned a valuable lesson about Javascript and WordPress today — they don’t mix — and Ze don’t do Java.
Regardless, glad to have some Ze back in my life. Go Yellow!
Social media has evaporated any remaining boundaries between professional and personal life, and you should get use to it – says Gary Vaynerchuk, wine connoisseur and social media extraordinaire.
This assertion seemingly dismisses the concerns about the issue of blurred boundaries and the professionalization of personal (via technology devices) that I highlighted in my thesis about the BlackBerry.
Is the work person and play person really the same thing?
What is the advantage for the ‘personal’ in having your work life integrated seamlessly into your private life?
Does this make us more or less secure in our employment? More or less connected to our work? More or less valuable?
Might the assumption that you are your own brand which is always on — observerable and accessible to all people all the time — be an attitude particular to creative professionals with jobs that more closely reflect their personal interests than say tool and die welding?
While I realized that personal relationships, cultivated on “off-time”, have always driven business relationships, and that social networks simply serve to increase the reach and value of these conversation; I still can’t shake the possibly dated concern that the loss of these walls, the that could hide the bad guys, also means the loss of a wall that provides a shade for the good guys in the glaringly transparent and connected world of social media and networks.
Does online work/life integration result in a more sanitized existence for those aware of the online brand they’re creating, or does it just require a higher degree of vigilance in maintaining an online identity?
Does blandness prevail in the name of SFW identities?
What does it mean to be talking about brand management in our personal life? It’s a business term usually used to refer to a company’s image.
Lots of questions.
One thing that’s for sure, the boundaries between work and private life will continue to become increasingly blurred as constant connectivity moves beyond 24/7 email access to integrated social networks.
Despite not generally considering myself a bad guy, I not entirely sure I’m ready to throw back the shades on all areas of my life to all people. This negotiation has been ongoing for quite some time and will continue for the foreseeable future as expectation of access and transparency shift.
In the meanwhile, I’m balancing the integration of work-related contacts into my previously personal-only social network, and it’s working out famously. Notifications from this integrated network about upcoming local events (for fun and work), connect me more closely to my physical community.
Maybe it all comes down to the old maxim that you get out what you put in.
