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  • Simon Pegg Writes 1,000 Words on Why He Joined the 140-Character-Publishing Twitter [Twitter]

    I loathe following celebrities on Twitter, but I make an exception with British actor Simon Pegg. He's classy, funny and knows how to use Twitter correctly—something you only have to look at Courtney Love's Twitter feed to appreciate. Pegg wrote for the New Statesman that he grabbed his Twitter handle early to avoid cybersquatters, but admitted he "resisted Twitter for a long time, initially because I didn't understand it," before becoming entranced in the marketing power it could give him for the launch of his latest film, Paul. More »


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  • Lessons from 10 years of Pepys's diaries online
    For ten years, Phil Gyford has been republishing Samuel Pepys's diaries online in one-entry-per-day chunks. On the way, he and a growing community of readers, historians, literary scholars and enthusiasts have annotated Pepys's legendary accounts of life in 17th century London. In this presentation, Phil walks us through the most surprising and interesting moments in his decade of Pepysianism, from random Twitterers who've taken on the personae of other characters in Pepys's saga to Google mashups of Pepys's London. I saw him present this earlier this year at The Story in London and it was marvellous. My talk about Samuel Pepys' diary as an online story MP3 Link...


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  • "Please Do Not Photoshop Justin Bieber's Face on My Personal Photos"

    Here is a human resources complaint sent by a co-worker of David Thorne—one of the greatest troll artists working today—after David photoshopped Justin Bieber's face all over the co-workers personal photos.

    Screen_shot_2011-04-12_at_3.40.17_PM.png

    Here is a snippet of the email exchange after the co-worker discovered the doctored photos:

    From: Simon Dempsey
    Date: Thursday 31 March 2011 1.05pm
    To: David Thorne
    Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: No Subject
    But what did you put Justin Biebers face on them for dickwad? I was going to use them for something.

    From: David Thorne
    Date: Thursday 31 March 2011 1.12pm
    To: Simon Dempsey
    Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: No Subject
    You can still use them. Justin Bieber is very popular.
    Read the entire exchange here, and for more of David Thorne fucking with people's lives in hilarious ways, go here. AND ESPECIALLY HERE!! (For those of you in a hurry, check out a couple of the Bieberized photos after the jump.)

    Photos_bieber_lake.jpg

    Photos_bieber_boulder.jpg

    More here!

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  • Faux software interfaces in film
    Access Main Computer File is a marvelous celebration in images of (mostly phony) computer user interfaces from Hollywood. Once there, mouse over the pictures to see the movie name and year. Notably absent is the instant messaging screen from Pretty In Pink's library scene. Above, Weird Science (1985) and Tron (1982). (Thanks, Jess Hemerly!) And in a similar vein, there's the classic "Let's enhance" montage of faux image enhancement scenes in movies....


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  • OCD cutting board marked with precise angles and measurements for accurate chopping
    The OCD Chef Cutting Board is screened with fine, precise measurements so that you can cut all your food into perfectly even, perfectly angled chunklets. THE OCD CHEF CUTTING BOARD (via Joshua)  Astronaut-etched cutting board - Boing Boing Combo mousetrap and cheese cutting board Boing Boing Space Invaders cutting board - Boing Boing Boing Boing: Cutting board marked with measurement guides...


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  • Video Curation Is Growing Up, ShortForm Hits One Million Visitors

    With 35 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, the Google-owned video behemoth would be the second largest search engine were it standalone site. Web video has become a powerful medium. But, I think it’s also fair to say that this powerful medium is in serious need of curation. What if you’re just looking for a quick laugh, a short video, and don’t want to wade through billions of videos — what if you want to create your own, personally curated streaming video channel? Hmmm? Thankfully, content curation has come to video: ShortForm shows it’s here to stay.

    The San Francisco-based startup allows users to create personalized channels of web video content, easily pulling clips from YouTube and other video sites. You can play videos back-to-back to create a stream of video, not unlike the TV viewing experience. Creating custom channels is simple, and I would say the UI is more user-friendly (or at least more attractive) than that of YouTube.

    ShortForm curates its own videos, but the real focus is in encouraging its users to become VJs (video jockeys), curating their own channels. And with the recent addition of an embed-able widget, publishers can embed their own video player and curated channel lineups on their site. This means that the channels you create on ShortForm are available anywhere. It’s these kind of additions that pushed the startup past the one million users mark.

    So ShortForm has all these visitors, but how is it going to make money? The startup is planning to place interstitial ads between videos. The Interstitial ads will be in the camp of video promotions that feel more like content and are fun to watch, ShortForm CEO Nader Ghaffari said, and they’ll be targeted based on channel context, so sports channels will get sports related video promotions. The cool part, though, is that even though the interstitial ad model will be rearing its annoying head, the startup plans to share its ad revenue with its VJs. After all, it’s the VJs who create the channels.

    “When it comes to mixing the world’s videos into channels, we want our VJs to have all the tools at their disposal to make VJ-ing channels fun and easy”, Ghaffari told me. “We are integrating with Vimeo in the coming weeks, for example, so our VJs can mix YouTube and Vimeo videos, and soon we’ll be adding new features for VJs to further personalize their channels”.

    ShortForm also has a leaderboard that lets VJs see how their channels are doing relative to other VJs, and viewers can scan it to find channels of interest to subscribe to. ShortForm also plans to provide VJs with more social feedback on their channels, like who has watched, shared, liked, and subscribed, for example, and VJs will be able to add commentary into their channels.

    But, as you are probably readying your comment for the comment section, I should say that ShortForm isn’t the only video curation startup in the game. VodPod lets users share collect and share videos with their friends and Magnify.net allows website publishers to make video channels for their sites. ShortForm differs from its competitors in that it, unlike VodPod, it enables back-to-back streaming, and, unlike Magnify, is focused on the consumer rather than enterprise.

    The startup is also teaming up with CollegeHumor (one of my favorites) this week to launch a best video contest on Facebook, which will allow users to watch and vote for their favorite videos on CollegeHumor. Once a vote has been registered, a leaderboard can be accessed that shows the leading vote-getters. Check it out.

    Information provided by CrunchBase


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  • "The Wire" as a Dickens serial
    It's one of those ideas that sounds less nuts the more you think about it: "The Wire" imagined as a 19th-century serialized novel. After all, David Simon's great multi-season drama had all the muckraking moral outrage of Charles Dickens (Google the reviews and try to count the number of times you see the word "Dickensian"), and its shifting viewpoint over five seasons gave it a similar historical sweep and reportorial authority. The real kick of "When It's Not Your Turn," though, is its obsessive attention to detail. You have to admire the dedication of creators Joy Delyria and Sean Michael Robinson, who seemingly cram every arcane bit of the show's rich mythology into a fake lit-crit essay. The illustrations, ostensibly by Baxter "Bubz" Black, just add to the goofy verisimilitude of the thing. It's a fabulous fraud....


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  • Flipback books: shirtpocket format designed for one-handed reading
    The Dutch publishing industry's "flipback" format sounds clever: it's a sideways-bound book with a lie-flat binding, printed on onionskin, sized to fit in a shirt pocket and optimized for easy one-handed reading. More than a million have been sold in the Netherlands and now it's to be introduced in the UK, France and Spain. It sounds like a handy format, though "Could this new book kill the Kindle?" probably takes the prize for silliest Guardian headline of the year to date. It is all the rage in Holland, where it was introduced in 2009, and has since sold 1m copies. A version has just been launched in Spain, France is next, and the flipback reaches UK shores in June, when Hodder & Stoughton will treat us to a selection of 12 books. They cost £9.99, and will include David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and Stephen King's Misery. I am keen to see what the hype is about so I take a pre-released copy on my travels: Chris Cleave's The Other Hand. Nearly 370 pages long in its original format, the flipback version has more than 550 - but still fits easily in my pocket. The book's not called The Other Hand for nothing. It's so small that I can perch it in one fist, and keep my other hand free for shopping. How? The paper is wafer-thin. Could this new book kill the Kindle? (via MeFi) (Image: Linda Nylind/Guardian)...


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  • Junkyard Jumbotron: join all your screens into one big one, no software install needed
    Here's a demo of the Junkyard Jumbotron, created by Rick Borovoy at MIT's Center for Future Civic Media. It's a cool app to allow you to gang up multiple screens (phones, tablets, flat panels), running any OS, and turn them into a single, joined display. It's very clever: you arrange the screens as desired and then display a web-page with a QR code on each of them; snap a picture and send it back to the server and the server takes any image you feed it and splits it across the screens. No client-side software needed, apart from a browser. Junkyard Jumbotron (Thanks, Akwhitacre, via Submitterator!)...


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