Links for 2006-02-04
Posted February 4, 2006 12:17 AM.
- YouTube presents "Brokeback to the future" Okay now this is just genuinely awesome almost beyond the counting of the ways. Obviously it helps if you've seen Brokeback Mountain, were obsessed about the Back to the Future trilogy and had a bit of a crush on Michael J Fox...
- 2005 Venture Capital Web 2.0 investment statistics: US entrepreneurs raise ten times more than Europe I don't know how much faith to put in these numbers, but the truthiness of them is beyond reproach, and that's got to count for something, right? European start-up and innovation seems generally pretty troubling to me right about now...
- Dan Futterman's page on IMDB Dan Futterman was the cute American in Shooting Fish, the son in the Birdcage and object of a minor crush of mine. I'm stunned and impressed to see that he's also the Academy Award-nominated writer of Capote...
- Find the missing Keynote 2 animations in Keynote 3 Apparently Keynote 3 removed several of the transitions that were in the earlier product, including "Burn" which was Simon's favourite. It turns out that they're all there in the new version, just turned off. Very weird / cool.
- There's a ... specialist ... painting representing scenes from Brokeback Mountain for sale on ebay at the moment... It's actually not that bad. They were aiming for $50 to start off with, but now the price is up to $255. If we make it prominent enough, then I think one of their agents will buy if for their office.
- The Adventures of Dr. McNinja He's an Irish Ninja whose parents are ashamed of him because he became a doctor instead of joining the Yakuza. What's not to like?!
- Pink's new video is a pretty entertaining tirade in favour of smart, ambitious women It's really cool to see some positive reinforcement in the mass media for a version of womanhood that isn't about tight clothes, booty, bling and boobs.
- Mekwa & Beam Station Project A pretty fascinating presentation expressing a different kind of personalised toy avatar widget that sits on phones and can travel around the world. I don't know if I've explained it particularly well...
- Wasp performs roach-brain-surgery to make zombie slave-roaches Pretty fascinating, if creepy, story about how some species of wasp brainwash and then control roaches which they then steer back to their lairs, laying eggs in them while they're still alive...
- Metacritic's list of lists reveals US film critics' 2005 Top Tens (and usefully aggregates them) There's so much more value in aggregation than people realise. All of metacritic could be rebuilt in a bottom-up kind of way using a few simple microformat style things and some decent aggregation tech...
- Alongside the Metacritic Critics lists, they've also compiled a full list of 2005 Film Awards & Nominations Good to see Brokeback Mountain doing so well in that selection as well...
- Could Pledgebank help Wikipedia? Thoughts: (1) Pledgebank is about increasing the perceived effect of ones actions by connecting it to a larger purpose (2) Wikipedia already seems to have that mechanism but (3) I like the idea of building social processes alongside wikipedia a lot...
- Omnidrive ploughs straight into one of my areas of fascination - how you could make all storage social I don't know what I think about the implementation, and of course one major problem is that I can't easily test it.
Comments
Please stay on-topic, informative and polite. I reserve the right to remove comments for whatever vague capricious reasons seem reasonable at the time.
That Pink video pissed me off – she still dressed up in skimpy clothes and writhed about on soapy cars, but it was OK because she was being ironic or whatever. It all seems a bit cold and calculating for me, just like that time she turned from hip-hop-party-track-meister to grunge princess with the "ooh, feel my pain" schtick...
→ Posted by: quis at February 4, 2006 10:43 AM
Exactly my point. It's only fashionable criticism as shallow as the people Pink, or her managers, are talking about. And all the while the average guy still sits down for this to watch three minutes of T&A. Well. This is the toughest that popmusic brings us in 2006. It's all a sign of the times. We're getting ooooold.
→ Posted by: Roy at February 4, 2006 7:47 PM
D. Futterman is mysteriously able to portray homosexualists, and write about them, while also being married to a woman. Mysteriously? Did I mean tantalizingly?
Gotta love Urbania.
→ Posted by: Joe Clark at February 5, 2006 11:36 PM
Thanks for the linkback (re Pledgebank/Wikipedia) - I'll try and get this going in 2006. And I've posted the rest of this comment on my blog...
→ Posted by: Phil at February 6, 2006 1:49 PM
Dr. McNinja - "He's an Irish Ninja whose parents are ashamed of him because he became a ninja instead of joining the Yakuza. What's not to like?!"
Almost. It's a bit more like this:
"He's an Irish Ninja whose parents are ashamed of him because he became a doctor instead of joining the Yakuza/CIA/'League of Shadows'. What's not to like?!"
→ Posted by: Superkuh at February 7, 2006 6:08 AM
Crap. I'll fix that now.
→ Posted by: Tom Coates at February 7, 2006 9:39 AM
That Mekwa thing is very interesting. The tamagotchi metaphor is great, except that instead of a baby it's more like a young adult with a sense of adventure and a short attention span.
If it's tied to a mobile phone number, however, what happens if you lose your phone and/or have to change your number?
→ Posted by: Greg Williams at February 9, 2006 9:15 AM
have you got any morals?
http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=16402%22
→ Posted by: pandamilo at February 9, 2006 11:04 AM
It's not like he's responsible for every decision the executives take, but anyway,
You've never visited Yahoo.com and given them ad revenues? Or mailed anyone with a Yahoo account? Yes? Shame on you.
What pressure can you put from the outside anyway? I would join Yahoo in China if I wanted to make a difference, or make friends with the executives - the horror.
Just my opinion, anyway.
→ Posted by: jaspoid at February 10, 2006 10:46 AM