Friday Collection of the Worldwide Internet

The Friday Collection is back. At least for now. It's been since gone since August 29th, quite a while for what was supposed to be my steadiest recurring feature. Better throw in many more links to distract everyone.

• The American Society of Magazine Editors has released its list of finalists for the best magazine covers of the year. I always love these. The one of Ahmadinejad in the bathroom stall is my favorite, with the Spitzer cover a close second.
• America the Gift Shop:

If American foreign policy had a gift shop, what would it sell?

America the Gift Shop is an installation project that reflects the current foreign policy in the fun-house mirror of American commerce.

My palette is the vernacular of retail. The more familiar it is, the better host it becomes for the idea. Once of the sugar coating of the ordinary dissolves, we are left with the hard and uncomfortable truth about where we've been as a nation.

We buy souvenirs at the end of a trip, to remind ourselves of the experience. What do we have to remind us of the events of the last eight years?

Awesome description of his vision. And the art itself is hilarious.

• The YouTube interactive videogame is here. We have way better games than this nowadays, but it's a clever concept. You click on the specific place which loads the next video, moving you along to the next level. Clever.
• This is a fantastic way to design a cover for a book: let someone else do it. In contest form. The results are fantastic.
• Some interesting stats that give us some sort of idea of what technology the cool kids are using.

Friday Collection of the Worldwide Internet

John McCain doesn't know what he's missing; the internet was particularly good this week.

Is the stress of virtually interacting with your electronic friends catching up to you? Can't stand to hear that another one of your friends became a fan of Michael Phelps? Do you hate knowing when everyone's birthday is?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, it might be worth your while to check out the hottest new thing in social networking, what Kottke calls Fake Following.

This is a little bit genius. One of the new features of FriendFeed (a Twitter-like thingie) is "fake following". That means you can friend someone but you don't see their updates. That way, it appears that you're paying attention to them when you're really not. Just like everyone does all the time in real life to maintain their sanity.

I won't be insulted if you fake follow me; not everyone needs to know that I recently became a fan of Baseball Prospectus.

And remember, besides candy, online networking is the thing young people like the most.



The "Modern Dwelling" exhibit at the MoMa brought back some memories of weird stuff people are doing to the things they put inside their modern dwellings. Here's a really wonderful collection of 30 innovative designs for book-holders; shelves is probably too limiting a word for what's on display here. This one's my favorite, because it tightly focuses the attention of the viewer on the books themselves.

This dude disassembled many of his common household appliances. Very similar concept to what this guy did, but not nearly as creepy. These two examples of people getting to the figurative hearts of their robotic living accessories caught my eye mostly because it reminded me of this blender designed by MIT students which only works if someone is yelling at it.



I don't know the motivations of the people who came up with this, but one of the results of this type of mechanism is that the user needs to interact in a more obviously personal way with the blender. The speed of the blender is directly related to the sound of my voice, a more intimate interaction than is achieved by pushing a button.

We live in a time in which humans interact with a whole bunch of machines, from our computers, to our iDevices, to our eyeglasses, to our pacemakers. I'm glad that there are folks thinking about the ways in which people connect with their machines.



It's not about how our machines interact with us, it's about how we interact with our machines.

Friday Collection of the WorldWide Internet

I'm back with more of the internet. Let's jump right on it.

• The Spanish basketballers scoff at political correctness. Jason Kidd raises an interesting point: If the American team had pulled off a similar stunt, NBA Commissioner David Stern would have been none too happy, and suspensions or fines would be expected. But, wait a second, there are NBA players on the Spanish team; what's going to happen to them? Nothing, that's what. From the Yahoo! Sports article: "And for his European peers, well, Kidd suggested, 'They won’t do anything to them. It’s a double standard.'”
• This has been getting lots of internet press lately, and for good reason. The Parallel Universe Film Guide is basically IMDB for movies that never existed. I thought at first that this guy collected fake movies mentioned in other media, like Troy McClure's complete filmography. But it's not. This guy made up all these movies that were never filmed and wrote brief summaries of them. The scary part is how detailed the thing is: he created this whole universe of movies. The fake actors and directors are used consistently throughout the database. So if Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon is getting boring for you, you can play Six Degrees of Marshall Fair, who, remember, isn't real.
• Here's a really tough WorldWide Internet time-waster: How many of the 100 most common English language words can you name in five minutes? It's cool to think about how we use words and which ones are most common.

We'll end off with some youtubery. The first is of Chris Chambers of the Classy Chargers football squad doing cool things, and the second is of (allegedly) Kelly Clarkson and two of her backup singers drunk at Fenway Park singing Sweet Caroline. I watched the video a coupla time and can't for the life of me verify that this is actually Clarkson, but this guy seems very certain.

Friday Collection of the WorldWide Internet

The founding principle of this blog remained just as true yesterday as it was nearly 20 months ago when this blog was founded. And it continued to be true during the frequent four-month hiatuses. The principle I'm referring to, of course, is: This blog suffers from a serious lack of direction.

But today marks a hesitant baby-step towards a modicum of internal structuring. For today witnesses the beginning of a new feature at TDS. And it's the first ever recurring feature at TDS. I proudly present the inaugural Friday Collection of the WorldWide Internet. Every Friday that this blog, the internet, and the universe exist, you'll receive a smattering of the things that I found interesting from the week that was. Most of these things will be collected from either deadspin.com or kottke.org because they most consistently deliver the goods. You should probably just read those sites instead of mine. And judging by their daily hits, you probably are doing that already. But only here, at TDS, will you be able to find my pithy remarks on the stuff I find cool. Sorry, joseph, for the blue, underlined words.

Let's get right to it.

• A kid I went to high-school with is a big NY Giants (American Football) fan, was planning a trip to Nicaragua, and decided to search out the Patriots Super Bowl Champions (they lost) paraphernalia which was sent to Central America to clothe the naked. He found one. And wrote about it for the Boston Herald. Which was reported by Deadspin. I'm not at all surprised by this: he had one of the best jump-shots in the Yeshiva League. Speaking of bitter Boston sports memories, I have a pennant at home proclaiming the Red Sox to be the 1986 World Series Champs, which they, famously, were not. I didn't have to go so far to get that, but I did have to spend time in Boston.
  
• My favorite of the hundreds of reports being filed by American reporters on the utter weird- and gross-ness of China.
• Thorstein Veblen wrote this awesome book in 1899 called The Theory of the Leisure Class. He talks about how in cities, where residents are surrounded by strangers, objects which communicate economic and social stature grow in importance. He calls this conspicuous consumption. Here's the best example I've ever seen of that.
• This article is nothing so special, but, my God, look at the comments. I never knew there were that many possible donut puns.
• Didn't Ennismore do this for a color-war breakout once?
• I'm sick of Favre already--SportsCenter this morning devoted the opening twenty minutes of their hour to only Favre--so it's good that the NY media tends to be a laid-back bunch.
  

That's enough for now, I believe.

One last FYI tidbit--I'm leaving Denver on Sunday after having a raucously good time. This may affect my blogging, since I'm not sure what I'm going to be doing with myself come Monday morning. If I find gainful employment, there's a chance I won't be able to continue the every-weekday blogging schedule. But if I remain unemployed for a bit, I might accelerate the pace. But I might pick up some other hobbies--like origami--which will take me away from TDS. In short, don't be surprised if there are a whole bunch more origami-themed posts coming your way.

Enjoy the weekend.