[YouTube:8tjs5ILNkJc]
I'm not sitting near a TV today but I'm guessing there are bits of this running on the air. The first minute or so is the best, not just for the footage but for the reactions. The YouTube description links to this higher resolution version if you've got DivX.
Coincidental to the mention earlier this week of our old chat room interviews I've begun booking audio interviews again. I have a few ideas I'd like to try but before any experimenting I need to brush up on talking on the phone. Today I published two pieces of audio. Atul Gawande is a surgeon and medical writer who explains in his book the system he's set up for himself to improve from a good doctor to an excellent one. Mohsin Hamid is a Pakistani writer who has spent a considerable amount of time in America. He wrote a novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, about a Pakistani man who has spent a considerable amount of time in America. In the course of writing, 9/11 happened, so the book includes a lot of insights into the relationship between the Muslim world and the West, particularly America.
"Booty pop" is "any variation of dancing that approximates the following: A (male or female) bent over at the waist with the pelvis of another individual (male or female) pressed against their buttocks while holding (or not holding onto) the bent over student's waist or hips." This article gave me the chuckles all the way through. I love how the kids are so dismayed that they won't be permitted to simulate sex acts on the dance floor at the prom. "'It makes me not look forward to my senior prom,' said Crystal Lucas." Yeah, what's a prom without booty poppin'? Actually, this prom is apparently also without "'grinding,' 'bumping,' 'humping,' 'hunching,' 'goosing,' or sexually explicit dancing such as 'freaking' or 'dirty dancing.'" I mean really, what's left?
Speaking of what the kids are into these days, I had always thought of the lolcats phenomenon as the digital equivalent of the old "Hang in there" kitten poster, but from what I've read recently I don't think that's quite correct. Anil Dash gives a thorough accounting of what it's all about.
This guy defines mastery. In this case, of the yo-yo. The yo-yo obeys him, does his bidding. I also think it's funny that there might be such a thing as yo-yo gloves. I followed the yoyoguy.com link on the poster behind him and it goes to a store full of yo-yo equipment.
This company lip sync video is fun but what makes me include it here is the t-shirt one guy is wearing (I recognize him as Zach Klein of CollegeHumor.com) that says SILF.
Speaking of ascribing uncomfortable human compulsions to food, "The Suicide Food blog rounds up pictures of food advertisements in which the animal that's about to be eaten is shown cavorting in anticipation of this happy moment."
Speaking of fresh food, I guess sea food doesn't get and fresher than this. I'm a little thankful the clip ends when the chop sticks enter the picture. I mean no offense to Koreans when I say this, but that dish looks seriously Klingon.
Speaking of Asian culture, my colleague John sent me the Weng Weng rap (NOTE: Has a couple curses in it). He's like Shaft meets Tattoo - Weng Weng is, not John. (Sorry John, you're not very much like Shaft or Tattoo.)
Commuter Click: A failure in generalship - Microscopic type. I don't know much about what generalship is, so I'm going to give this one a read on paper this weekend.
Pi as a piano solo (to 1000 places, which is past my annoyance threshold).
"If you're not familiar with the issues facing webcasters right now, it's a great place to start." "It" being this overview.
I was surprised at first to spot this old MSNBC.com story floating among the "most linked" but then I saw it's about Curt Schilling's sock. In case you haven't seen the story, some local sports guy suggested the blood on his famous World Series sock was in fact paint and the whole thing was a stunt. Naturally, the baseball bloggers are in an uproar. (see also) For our purposes, Schilling's response on his own blog is the most relevant click.
Bruce Schneier makes the case for expertise in security screening and does a great job fleshing it out with links.
Yet another article on a new cheap kind of solar power. At the rate these are turning up I'm getting the feeling that they're all going to hit the market at once.
Pose maniacs - This is in Japanese but if you're at all familiar with figure drawing you'll recognize its function right away. I'm not sure how great an idea it is to practice figure drawing with a 2D model, but if you need a reference it's not bad.
Flickr is planning a 24 hours of Flickr event in early May. I guess the idea is to photoblog yourself all day long. I wonder if this has anything to do with Twitter and the newly rejuvenated idea of logging every little bit of one's life.
Speaking of trendy new apps, Meshly lets you keep track of links the way you would on Del.icio.us but it's IM based. It's interesting to see the comments about it because it shows how people have different habits when it comes to sharing links. I hope it catches on because it generates another nice "most popular" list.
We've seen a lot of examples of commercial advertising manipulating images to make people look more beautiful (and strangely also less natural) but what happens as a greater number of regular people do the same? I guess to some degree we already accept some fakeness in personal photos when we force smiles.
Moving Your Eyes Improves Memory, Study Suggests - They're talking specifically about "recognition memory" and false memories. We've seen advice about changing your focal distance while you work to keep from burning out on the monitor, but I wonder, reading this, if horizontal eye exercise might help process the information on the screen better.
Speaking of politics, here's an interesting word count analysis of the recent Democratic debate.
Still speaking of politics, to make up for the lame elephant/donkey game, try Last Stand. (Slow to load, so give it a click and come back in a bit.) I also played Snowball from the same company. It has that maddening quality of making your say, "Oh wait, I can do better, one more try" and then it's dark outside and you have a beard you don't remember growing.
Speaking of Braaaains!, the five biggest neuroscience developments of the year.
Speaking of neuroscience, this piece about using an MRI to gain insight into how the brain processes morality is interesting and not too dense.
Anti-Americanism: Your questions answered - This is a chat Q&A with the BBC's Washington correspondent who has done a multi-part series on the subject. See the right margin for links to his stories.
For at least a month I've been reading about a Bill Moyers special that was supposed to be a real indictment of the media's coverage of the lead-up to the war in Iraq. I haven't posted any links because "gonna happen" doesn't really mean anything to me. Now that it actually has happened, the transcript is seeing a lot of online mileage.
A study showing that male lab mice prefer to mate with females who are less frequently available may not be all that surprising but I do like that title: Sluts and vermin. Anyone struggling to find a good name for a band?
The summer meter - Makes me start to feel a little panicky if I watch too long.
I don't know how I missed this, but it looks like we have another game on the site. You are a donkey or an elephant and you chase after money.
As if in answer to the question in my previous entry about how many people are actually participating in the online trends that seem so popular, Steve Rubel shares some of a new report on how people participate in online activities. Steve's perspective is from the marketing world, but I found Ross Mayfield's sharing of the data broken down by age more compelling.
The paper itself costs like 300 bucks, but there's also some information in the researcher's blog.
Speaking of making adjustments according to how much your audience likes to participate, the new Newsvine lets you do a lot of editing and rearranging to the (your) homepage.
Speaking of rearranging the front page, Digg.com reveals news stories fade after 1 hour - Most of the long tail/power law stuff isn't new, but this part is novel: "They found that digging decays in a "stretched exponential" way and the popularity of a story fades after just 69 minutes. In other words, the rate at which an article attracts votes slows down – the number of diggs continues to grow but at a slower and slower rate." So if MSNBC.com's users are like Digg users, we should be switching out our links at least every 69 minutes. We generally change the cover more often than that I think, but I wonder if we have internal statistics that show anything similar.
I'm having a really hard time believing a print magazine called Blogger & Podcaster isn't a joke, but it looks like a real thing.
The Library of Congress has a new blog.
"An Enhancement to Existing Alarm Systems, FogSHIELD Rapidly Ejects Safe and Intense Fog in Under 3 Seconds" - Ironically, the company that makes it describes itself as "an industry leader in glass protection." It seems to me, if you're trying to protect glass, the last thing you want is a burglar flailing about in the fog. Regardless, I wonder if they make a portable one for dramatic exits and entrances. Here's the actual site with some video. The last clip, "Protect your home" looks a little like the black smoke in Lost.
Ebert the movie guy says we spend too much time hiding illness. He's in pretty rough shape because of some recent surgery but he's going out in public anyway (to a film festival) and screw anyone who doesn't like it. Interesting points.
The first ever Carnival of Space is up.
Get free audiobooks from Simply Audiobooks
Speaking of listening to stories, I was just reading about a group called Coyote Rep that's begun doing theater podcasts for some reason (because I guess there aren't enough new words to learn) they're calling them "soundplays."
"HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 converter, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows." It converts your DVDs so you can watch them on your iPod.
Six degrees of computer science. I was expecting a joke here but instead it's a list of brief helpful explanations of different fields of study.
Today's feelgood link of the day is a clip submitted by a reader named Jeff of a guy proposing to his girlfriend on the Price is Right and winning a lot.
Powerful anorexia public service ad.
Y'know what I think is more offensive than Imus's H-word? MILF. (See also.) No decent person would use the phrase represented by the acronym in mixed company, but we toss around MILF like nothing. (As I've acknowledged in the past, I'm not a woman, so my opinion doesn't amount to much in light of the fact that women seem to be embracing the term.)
There is not enough public access television sex advice in the world. (No nudity or outright obscenity but she does say "penis power" and "vagina power" and talk about sex in weird spiritual metaphors for ten minutes.) NOTE TO HIGH SCHOOL CHORAL GROUPS: Skip this one.
Fascist America, in 10 easy steps - The idea here is that the Bush administration is doing the things that someone who wanted America to be a fascist state would do. Obviously this kind of article only appeals to a certain element of the online community, but it's been quite popular with that element so I share it here.
"How the CIA used a fake science fiction film to sneak six Americans out of revolutionary Iran." You might want to make this a Commuter Click because it's a little long. I was expecting something like War of the Worlds that scared Iranians into doing something that allowed an escape, but really it's about setting up a fake movie production as an elaborate cover to sneak a CIA agent into Iran. Good story though.
Postcards from 1900 show the year 2000 - Boy does this blog come up with some good stuff. It's amazing how many of these basically came true.
Renting Makes More Financial Sense Than Homeownership - Part of his reasoning involves spending money on stocks instead of a house, so it's not only renting vs. buying.
I happened to be poking through Watching Heroes and it reminded me to tell you that I was at some meetings at NBC HQ yesterday and found myself on the same floor as the SciFi channel. I don't know what I was expecting, and maybe they keep the cool stuff in a place I didn't see (I was lost, not on a tour. The place is a labyrinth.) but there was a disappointing lack of spaciness, creepiness, magicality or general supernaturalness. It was like arriving at the North Pole and not finding Santa.
Speaking of Santa, Why we should stop having Earth Day. If Christians has come to this conclusion about Christmas, where would we be today?
Linguists doubt exception to universal grammar - What's going on is that researchers had been looking at commonalities among languages and trying to paint a picture of what that means in terms of what we can say about literally every human - indeed, what it means to be human and think like a human. But then someone claimed to have found an exception, a natural language that doesn't use the commonalities, which pretty much blows the whole theory out of the water. But now it may be that the exception isn't so exceptional after all. P.S. What else we learn from this article is that there's something called LingBuzz that lets us see what's hot in linguist paper downloads.
The New Harry Potter trailer is out. The Leaky Cauldron has a different version than what's on the official site. I was very cynical about how this series of movies would hold up over time, but this looks really good.
Remove a dent with a hair dryer and a can of air. It's about making the metal expand and contract.
How big is the club? It's a short paragraph entry about a Web guy who recently learned that not as many people knew what he was talking about as he expected, leading him to wonder just how small the Web community echo chamber is. I wrestle with this question all the time as I try to describe Web trends to my colleagues here at MSNBC.com. At what point is something like Twitter something everyone should know about? Is it merely a niche interest until Google eventually buys it? Inherent in the problem, as some of the commenters point out is the challenge of contextualizing numbers online. If you get a thousand people to send really great photos and video of a major storm in their area, that's a great yield. But if you get a thousand people to look at the multi-media presentation you put together from all that submitted content, that's a terrible number and almost a waste of time.
There's something really unusual about seeing an old person sing, "I hope I die before I get old."
Speaking of age dissonance, I'm generally not a fan of people getting kids to curse, but this clip of Will Ferrell fighting with his diminutive landlady got a lot of attention last week. NOTE: In case you missed that warning, contains curses. UPDATE: Here's the real link. Turns out the clip is part of a promotion for a new video site backed by Ferrell. I guess he didn't appreciate his new site's promotional piece being on YouTube.
Here's that Sheryl Crow blog everyone was talking about yesterday. Specifically this entry about the one-square-of-toilet-paper-per-person idea. The Washington Post has highlights.
Here's that guy who's asking people to call him on the phone and getting thousands of calls. They just interviewed him on TV and he had some interesting stories. It's a shame he's not tracking the calls on a map or in a podcast or something.
"The world's oldest continuously operating family business ended its impressive run last year. Japanese temple builder Kongo Gumi, in operation under the founders' descendants since 578, succumbed to excess debt and an unfavorable business climate in 2006."
172,150 tracks in this guy's iPod collection. Didn't someone once figure out what it would take to download the entire Napster catalog for the least amount of subscription time? Seems like that might have been a good option to consider.
MySpace news launched. Not exactly the Digg killer they forecast.
Speaking of big web companies launching new things, Yahoo's Upcoming looks pretty handy. It probably helps to live in a place where there's actual stuff going on.
Site specific StumbleUpon is coming.
Stephen Colbert is now the number 1 Google search result for Giant Brass Balls and Greatest Living American.
Iraq the Model has an interesting story of what stray bullets mean to the average Baghdad non-combatant.
BuyYourFriendADrink.com - Not really as revolutionary as I expected. It's like buying a digital gift card. Your friend gets a mail with a number and gives that number to the
bartender.
"In what can only be described at the most horrific experience of my life. I, Jacob Seilheimer, completed the Boston Marathon... DEAD LAST. And I'm damn proud of it."
Are the rules for lowering the flag to half staff completely arbitrary? I understand that there's a difference between soldiers who put themselves in harm's way and innocent students mowed down by a maniac but I'd expect the flag to be for more official purposes.
Related: Iraq's universities know violence's toll
When I was learning to drive I accidentally started the car while it was in reverse without my foot on the clutch. The rear door was open and the car was parked next to a telephone poll so when the car jerked backward the door was turned inside out. That was in an old Dodge Aspen station wagon that was already well worn. It was not a brand spanking new, stickers still on the window, $50,000 Mustang. NOTE: At least one out-loud curse.
My favorite part of this photoshop gotcha story is this line: "But then I noticed the file name (top-kyoto2.jpg) ends in the numeral "2". Now, I know what it means when I add a "2" to a file name, so I removed it to see if anything came up."
The Art of Showing Pure Incompetence At an Unwanted Task - The corollary to this is make sure you never come up with any good ideas because you'll get stuck being in charge of their implementation. It reminds me a little of the non-violent protest tactic of going limp. UPDATE: Here's a free version.
Combination mirror, TV and PC. How is this not the future?
Is lascivious online content, traditionally on top, losing its lustre? The suggestion here is that porn is becoming less popular because it comprises a smaller share of what people are surfing online. If you think on it a bit (without further information) there are a lot of possible explanations.
Part of me loves the idea of interactive advertising (in this case a billboard with motion sensors that detect you walking by) and part of me fears it.
Time lapse video of the Virginia Tech story on Wikipedia.
Fast food in advertisements versus what you actually get. (I don't care, that Arby's still looks good.)
Speaking of junk food. Since I got such a strong response last time I mentioned Doritos flavors, I know some of you will be interested to learn that I've tried the new Smokin' Cheddar BBQ. It's better than the Blazin' Buffalo, more like traditional BBQ flavor chips. My supermarket has Wild White Nacho too, but I can only do these things when I'm in the mood so we'll see when it strikes me.
And yesterday I tried the new Diet Coke Plus. I had the plastic bottle version (Diet Coke drinkers know that the product is best in a can) but it was still pretty close to regular D.C. I had to laugh at the logo given MSNBC.com's recent rainbow rebranding. A Fuller Spectrum of Diet Coke? (One colleague described it as "more metallic" and another said she just didn't like it but also conceded the point that she has a psychological bias against adulteration of her D.C.)
These glass floor pictures are better than anything I've seen from the new Grand Canyon display.
Supercooled water is super cool.
I don't know how to show support for Mike Daisy from here but what those people did to him is really just so crappy I can't even stand it. I have a review copy of his book somewhere around here. I recall it being a funny read. Here's a funny story: I was sure we'd had him in the chat room to talk about the book but I couldn't find the transcript. I tried Google and found Mike Daisey's blog entry about the chat. He takes some creative license in turning me into a Microsoft demon and calling me names, but whatever, that's his job. I don't remember him being a jerk (though now I'm wondering if there's a reason I can't find the transcript) but even if he was I wouldn't have poured water on him. Damn.
That's not a bad price for an indoor desktop batting practice machine.
This was inappropriate to post last week, but hopefully this week we can laugh again. Pool of blood pillows.
Adding wood to technical gadgets is a winner every time. This phone isn't for sale, but surely it should be.
"The word contronym (also the synonym antagonym) is used to refer to words that, by some freak of language evolution, are their own antonyms."
As you've no doubt noticed, I've been caught up in Virginia Tech coverage this week. It feels a little odd changing gears from that, so let's go to the mailbag for highlights from the past couple of weeks to get Clicked back on its more familiar path.
From the 10 Zen Monkeys mailing list:
The first aliens won't come from the stars. We'll create them in our own labs... And Professor Alan Goldstein is offering $26,000 to the person who makes it happen. As a nanotechnology awareness campaign, Dr. Alan Goldstein is offering a prize for the first synthetic lifeform created, "to make people aware that creating synthetic lifeforms is not that hard... Many people in many labs are working on it right now, and it will probably occur in the near future."
Hey,
Thanks for all the work on Clicked. I look forward to each posting you do. I was doing my own poking around and come across this which made me laugh.. The readers' comments are classics. Which led to one poster who uses this…
-Darren
Will replies: Thanks Darren. Those pee-standing-up cups for women seem like such a good idea I don't understand why they aren't in port-o-johns like Dixie cup dispensers. One note for women if you're going to use one: beware that the rate of the cup's output is not exceeded by your rate of input - if you know what I mean.
Fotowoosh, a free tool that automatically transforms standard 2D digital images of outdoor scenes into 3D images launched today as the latest functionality from Freewebs, the company dedicated to ensuring everyone in the world can unleash their creativity through multimedia websites and blogs.
Will points out: This is the top of a press release. I haven't tried it yet but the demos are cool. The trick is basically explained on the "about" page: "If we can determine where the vertical surfaces contact the ground in the image, we can recover the depth of those surfaces (up to a scale), giving us a 3D model."
Hopefully taxes are not giving you headaches right now. In an attempt to make tax season a little more bearable we've gathered a few humorous quotes about taxes and tied them in with this week's Carnival of Homeschooling.
I hope you enjoy the carnival.
Best wishes.
Will remarks: I have to think there are a lot of parents giving new consideration to home schooling this week.
Save Me 2: Stickman City in Flames! - In this great sequel to "Save Me" it's up to you to save the fat stickpeople, pets, televisions, and other odds and ends from the burning skyscrapers in Stickman City. But watch out for the lions, elephants and grenades!
This one's pretty clever. Hope you enjoy it.
-Ralph
Will replies: Thanks Ralph. I think I like the asteroids game you sent in better.
Will,
I don't know if you are aware of it, but if you want to see the larger version of someone's profile picture on facebook, but aren't friends with them, just right click (assuming you are using Firefox) on their image, View Image, then in the browser link change the "s" into an n as in: this becomes this.Just a trick of the trade I picked up I dunno where.
-AlexHi there ...
In August last year you posted one of my entries in clicked and so I thought you might be interested in considering one of my more recent very popular posts.Grow your own potatoes without the need for a garden.
Thanks,
Allen
Will replies: Allen, that potato barrel is the coolest.
Wow - not many good things to say today, but I did find a spot-on article which summed up a lot of feelings toward really annoying computer issues. I think they hit all of my hardware and software complaints (esp Apple ITunes, Norton AV, and Quicken, none of which I use anymore for these exact reasons!).
-Eric the Read
Will adds: Eric sent this mail on the 16th, the day of the VT shooting so that's what he's talking about in that first sentence. The article is The 20 Most Annoying Tech Products and since one tech trend that really annoys me is "pagination" (having to turn the digital page to read more) here's the print version with the whole list on one page.
Hi Will,
Here's a great link regarding toilets. Thought you'd get a chuckle...'Toto's Z-series toilets recalled due to fire hazard'
-DanHey Will,
Not sure if this fits with the 'Clicked' oeuvre but being a fan of oddball Japanese monster movies I had to send it in. Someone actually wrote an after the fact theme song to a somewhat obscure (and incredibly weird) movie called "The X From Outer Space" and it got posted to Youtube with clips from the film. What makes this work so well is that the whole thing is played straight, it has an almost melancholy feel to it.
-Sean
Will replies: All I want to know is where I can get one of those suits.
My meatless edition of the Carnival of the Recipes is ready for your consumption. Thanks to everyone for your delectable contributions and please help spread the word!
Cheers,
MikeWill:
Background: Malaysia is multi-racial - 52% Malay, 30% Chinese, 8% Indian. The chinese have always run the businesses and economy in Malaysia, but that has been changing in the last 30 years, due to continuing government-initiated affirmative-action programs called the New Economic Policy /2020, that favors the Malay majority.Most of the first part of the rap is in chinese dialects -mandarin, cantonese, maybe teochew, etc, which I quite understand.
Towards the middle around 2:39, it is in Malay, the official language of the country, and - is a veiled criticism of racism against the chinese, by people who want them to go back to China" (China balik china)
- there are also criticisms and racist rants by the singer/author against the Malays. (Melayu)
- reminder that Malaysia wouldn't be Malaysia without it's multi-racial identity.
etc.
I was born and grew up, in Malaysia, and I can empathize completely with the author....
Will reminds: He's talking about this rap song.
Will,
2 of my favorite things have been combined, and I thought you might like to tell the world about it.........I am really looking forward to the 1 of the ideas mentioned in the comments; having a dance party w/ everyone getting their own wiimote. They do something similar @ Bonnaroo w/ the private disco.
Everyone gets their own headphones and listens to 1 of a few DJ's who are perfoming and basically get to dance to their own internal music.
-Craig
Will explains: The link is to a video demonstration of a looping machine answering to a Wiimote. So you move the Wiimote to get different sounds and have them loop at different speeds and it starts to sound like techno music. It looks a little awkward, but I can see how it might catch on. Regarding the headphone idea, I always though it would be cool for there to be a dance club that used sound direction technology to point the music at people individually. (I just Googled it and I think what I'm talking about is called "focused sound."
In time for a new MLB season, a little public service announcement for why not to have to many beers at the ball game.
-Jason
Will replies: I guess he's lucky he passed out or he'd have been actually driving that drunk. I was a little disappointed they didn't let the engine seize if only to hear what that sounds like.
Your post on dual photography came the same day I got a post up about Hybrid Photographs. I'm not very good at this technique yet, which involves stripping the high frequency information from one photo, the low frequency information from a second, and merging the two photos. The result is that, close up, you see the high frequency image, but far away, the high frequency image blurs to nothing and the low frequency image becomes visible. People sometimes scream if you show them a picture of a man up close and then carry the photograph far away and show them again.
The scientists investigating hybrid photographs as a window on human perception have a web site that demonstrates some amazing examples. One of my favorites is the bicycle that turns into a motorcycle. For the record, I learned about the whole process from a New Scientist article that is available only to subscribers such as myself; from the information in the article I tracked down the web site and then tried to learn what I could do using Adobe Photoshop Elements. I wouldn't be surprised to see software available in a few years that lets you do this automatically.
Thanks for a great column, by the way.
Rob Carr of UnSpace
Hey Will
Here's another great video that has crossed my desk, and by desk, I mean lab bench, because I don't have a desk, being a molecular researcher and all. Oh well. Not sure if you are a Soprano's watcher or not, but this is the final season of the show. After a wild ride of twists and turns, the series is coming to an end. So, what better way to catch up on all the memories from the past seven seasons than with the 7 Minute Sopranos video.As with the show, there is some cursing, but it's edited in such a way that it flies by and is pretty amusing, despite the rather unsavory plot lines that play themselves out.
Anyway, hope you enjoy it. Happy Friday!
Scott
Will replies: Thanks Scott. This is really well done, but I think you've got to be familair with the show to be able to follow it. In that way it works well as a "what a long strange trip it's been" piece. It'd be cool if they add on the last season when it's all done.
Will -
I stumbled across this site earlier today that may be of interest to you It gathers personal info of bloggers from any number of sources, including phone numbers and addresses, and reposts it in a one-stop-shopping-for-stalkers kind of way. At best, it's a misguided venture; at worst, a malicious one.They claim that they'll take down personal info when asked (they're the YouTube of personal information, I guess) - I asked them to remove mine, so we'll see.
All the best,
Jeff
Will replies: Jeff, I can see the creepy angle, but I can also see how it could be a handy Web convention. It could be like a phone book where everyone can control their own entry by creating an "about me" page that is eventually scraped by the database.
Will, maybe you can help clarify this discussion on my blog, Did the media get this wrong? Are these really flares, or is it something else?
Almost every MSM site is reporting this as flares - but we're (mostly) just not buying it.
Thanks for the help,
Rob
Will replies: For all matters space I always refer to my man Alan Boyle. He got word from Chris Faranetta of Virginia-based Space Adventures, the company that put billionaire Charles Simonyi on the rocket pictured. Chris confirmed your explanation. Not flares but support structure being retracted.
Will,
I just ran across this site and thought you might find it interesting.
Pat,
Louisville, KY
Will replies: Thanks Pat. I'm not much of a celeb watcher but it's a cool idea. It reminds me a little of the Blogpulse name watcher.
If you haven't gone so far as to express your opinion on a message board, chances are good that you've at least muttered under your breath what you think of the decision made by NBC News to make public some of the material mailed to them by murderer Cho Seung-hui. The range of opinions online shows that NBC News would have a hard time finding a happy medium.
At one end of the spectrum of opinion, self-described technology utopian Dave Winer advocates the release of everything. "NBC should release all of the videos in Quicktime form as downloads. It's wrong to withhold them."
If Winer's words sound a bit adamant Doc Searls is more expository. Searls essentially agrees with Winer. "I believe the need to reveal outweighs the need to conceal." He goes on to elaborate on the principles we see largely espoused in the tech community and how they apply in this instance. (If you click one link in this entry...) The phrase we hear most often is wisdom of the masses. The more minds put to a problem, the more likely it is the problem will be solved. "It's about no longer depending on The Media alone." It's easy to see how this also works with the libertarian leanings of many Web citizens. Mainstream media already faces charges from news bloggers of appointing itself the public "mommy" instead of disseminating the information so individuals can decide for themselves. Searls concedes that bad things could come from releasing the entire NBC package, but his is a philosophy of optimism.
Technology can also be a reason to oppose the publishing of the Cho material. The bad things Searls concedes lead the arguments from the opposite end of the spectrum of opinion. Siva Vaidhyanathan decries the inevitability of the "mashup/YouTube effect." On his blog he posts a few benign examples of what any honest web surfer must admit will be much worse. Releasing full videos as downloads along with the photos and text in this digital age is the sure path to granting Cho online immortality. There can be no doubt we'll soon see his words and images in movies, songs, games and who knows what else. But as long as we're being honest it must be said that it's less certain that NBC is really in a position to stop any of this.
More common than concern about the mashup effect is concern about the copycat effect. "The blood of the victims of the 'next one' is on the hands of everyone in the decision-making chain at NBC for this utterly inexcusable decision," says one blogger, outraged at NBC. "If you watch any football game (and presumably every other televised pro sport), if a liquored-up fan attempts to run onto the field, the television director in the control truck cuts as quickly as possible to another angle--any angle--to (a) not give some knucklehead his 15 seconds of fame and (b) to discourage others from attempting the same stunt," blogs Ed Driscoll. Cho Seung-hui, it should be noted, did not need the benefit of full disclosure to commit his copycat act.
Driscoll agrees that the material itself is newsworthy, but his crazed fan metaphor works for another argument against publication. I can report that a common complaint in the comments submitted to this blog is that Cho wanted his words, images and video published and a person like that shouldn't get anything he wants, period. In that regard, a lot of people are pointing to the debate over the publication of the Unabombers manifesto as a parallel to this one.
Speaking of comments submitted to this blog, the other strong theme I see is sensitivity to the families involved and human decency as a whole. As best as I can tell, this is the one concern that is also shared by NBC's own decision making process. I haven't spoken to my colleagues at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in an official capacity, but I have had several casual conversations and there is a bevy of material NBC News has offered:
From these I derive a short list of considerations that went into the decision to publish the "multimedia manifesto." First is newsworthiness. Even critics like Mr. Driscoll, above, agree that the contents of Cho's package are worth releasing to the public in some fashion for both the journalistic purpose of telling the story but also the social purpose of helping society understand what happened and hopefully learn some useful lessons. Of course, the perennial objection of news bloggers is that they don't trust the judgments that decide what's newsworthy and, more importantly, what isn't. Most disturbing to me in my casual chats today was a colleague who disagreed with my assessment of the content of the manifesto (specifically the degree of religiosity of Cho) and suggested I read more. Maybe my colleague meant that I should read the available material more closely, but since I do not have access to more, the possibility that I'm not getting the full picture from what's already been released is a problem for me.
Some of the mission of reporting the news flies in the face of concerns about doing the killer's bidding or glorifying him, but that's not to say NBC doesn't recognize that there's a line that shouldn't be crossed. In the Early Nightly video, Williams makes it clear that NBC has heard the criticism that overuse of images and video for promotional purposes is exploitation, not news. His labeling it "video wallpaper" reminds me of the post-9/11 decision limiting the use of footage of planes flying into the Twin Towers. Unless it's relevant and part of the furthering of the story, it's not to be used. It's not clear whether NBC plans to release more from Cho's package, but I take Williams to mean that we're not getting any more unless something comes up in the investigation that relates to as-yet unreleased material. Even in that case, NBC's standards with regard to profanity will probably prevent a full, uncensored distribution from ever happening (barring unauthorized leaks).
What else makes me wonder if we'll see more than has already been released is the degree to which NBC took into consideration the emotional state of the victims' families and the general populace. Even on my previous entry looking at the online lives of the victims I received a comment that it was "too soon." When April 16, 2008 comes around, will the environment be more appropriate for more?
Using our victim list I sought to find any online profiles or personal pages for the victims of the Virginia Tech tragedy. These links aren't as informative as the written bios in the news services, but to my mind there is something more impactful about seeing the marks a person made online. These pages and notes aren't about the person's life, they are the person's life. They're their real friends and their real interests and their real words.
I started with Facebook, given its prominence among college students and then tried other searches and the research of other bloggers. I'll try to keep this updated as more things come to light. If you know of something good to add, let me know in comments or through my address there on the left of this blog. I couldn't find anything specific for a few of them, in some cases their name was too common to make anything of the search results. In other cases they may simply not have an online presence. I included their names here because the old joke that if you don't have a Facebook/MySpace/Blog you don't exist isn't funny at all in the context of this effort and I don't want to give the impression that it has any truth.
CrimeBlog has some of the best research in that he appeared to Google the names. Unlike me, a lot of these bloggers were searching on the names when they were still breaking news and/or rumors, so incomplete lists are understandable.
Gateway Pundit has collected photos and personal details from various newspaper and other media biographies. In many cases, local papers are reporting on people from their area who were killed. I left those out of my round-up, focusing instead on the online identities.
Some biographical links at Riehl World View.
God Bless Virginia Tech - Reminds me of the missing/I'm OK boards after Katrina.
Wizbang had some links I didn't have. Also some worthwhile links here.
The victims:
Ross also apparently enjoyed commenting in online forums like the school paper, and gadget and gaming blogs.
And he typed like a whiz.
"I just got off the phone, and I can't stop crying. One of my best friends, Jamie Bishop, has died."
"Brian Bluhm, a popular member of the Detroit Tigers internet community, was one of the students killed in the horrible shooting at Virginia Tech yesterday."
"My good friend and fellow contributor to this blog, Brian Bluhm, was among the 32 students killed in the massacre at Virginia Tech on Monday."
Also recently participated in a tree planting and wrote a thank you to volunteers. I mis-recognized the towns named in the paper. This is not the same person. (Thanks Jesse.)
RAs in support of Ryan 'Stack' Clark of Virginia Tech
Remembering Ryan 'Stack' Clark
One of three members of the International Relations Organization killed that day.
She was 5'9" and played forward in high school basketball.
Rate VT Teachers - Highest average rating possible.
Une Québécoise sur la liste des victimes - OK, this is a news outlet, but it has a photo I haven't seen elsewhere.
Longer list of published works.
It's a fair guess that this is his band unless Matt Gwaltneys in easter Virginia are more common than I realize. Then again, there's a Matt Gwalatney in this Virginia based band as well. ADDING: It is pointed out in comments that this is a common name, as I said, more common than I realize, so indeed these bands may not be related to the victim.
Kappas for Caitlin Hammaren (sorority)
The man was apparently a runner. Pages and pages of race results.
Why Emily Hilscher was cooler than me
This looks like her MySpace.
This is almost nothing, but if you look for the highlighted spot in this Google cached page you see the excellence award she won in 11th grade. That one got me.
"Safety is one reason why Beth Hilscher of Woodville brought her daughter Emily, a 14 year old Rappahannock High School student, to ride at Moody's stable. When Emily was 8 years old she was riding at another stable and fell off and broke her arm. Beth wouldn't let Emily ride anymore but Emily kept pestering her mother for 2 years."
One of the lines most associated with Michael Pohle's Google results is from the I'm OK in VT Facebook group: "Does anyone know the status of Mike Pohle? - his family is trying to get in touch with him."
"During Monday tragic events one of my close friends and teammates was killed. His name is Mike Pohle."
Jarret's recent birthday party
Memorial to Henh Ly(Henry Lee)
In memory of Professor Liviu Librescu who saved his students at Virginia T.
I'm seeing "Liviu Librescu is a hero" images on blogs and message boards. I'll grab one for this space shortly.
G.V. Loganathan wins Wine Award for Excellence in Teaching
Her MySpace - Hearbreaking messages from family asking her to call them the day of the shooting.
EXCEL Scholars Frederic Lott '06 and Dan O'Neil '06 Study Effects of Urban Development on Watersheds (includes a photo)
She was researching "Erosion generated from footpaths and rural unpaved roads in mountainous agricultural watersheds."
Treasurer of SEEDS, "a non-profit educational organization that creates a discovery - oriented learning environment."
Mary Karen Read....We will miss you...We love you...RIP
Bring Reema's face back in the book!
Contemporary Dance Ensemble member (The photo pages are quite heavy and take a while to load.)
This isn't a direct Waleed Shaalan item, but it's interesting to see how the VT Muslim community is coping with the shootings.
Updated 4/17 3:10:
If you've been looking through MSNBC.com's coverage of the massacre at Virginia Tech you may have seen the link asking you to share your story if you were there. I happen to have access to the tool that gathers submissions through that page so I can share a bit of what we're seeing come in. Submissions fall into three classes, jokes/hoaxes/off topic, admonitions for being media vultures, and genuine first hand accounts of being on campus during the shooting. Ignoring the pranksters, the conflict between the two other groups is interesting. I understand the perspective of the people who resent the media for making such a blunt pitch to those most affected by this tragedy, and if I wasn't seeing the sincere submissions of people who experienced the event directly (or peripherally) I'd be inclined to agree. But some people have a need to share their experiences. I won't go so far as to speculate it's a universal human compulsion, but I recognize it in myself, so it's familiar when I see it in others. The need to share experiences is the same thing that makes some people tear articles out of the newspaper for others to read. It's what makes people submit photos to sharing services like Flickr. It's what makes bloggers report audiences of questionable quantity, and it's the spirit that drives much of the participation in the amalgam of social sites and online forums I see in today's volunteer online journalism.
When the Virginia Tech shooting story was breaking I was tinkering with Twitter tools to see if I could watch the story unfold there. Results on that effort were mixed, but elsewhere it was observed that Newsvine beat Digg in getting the story out to users. From the Newsvine link I clicked through to this string of reports from on campus.
Speaking of looking at social networks, there are many Facebook tribute groups that have formed, but this one appears to be the most active.
This Livejournal writer's girlfriend was shot in the hand. This one has fewer details, but it's interesting to see a reporter from the Boston Herald trying to make use of the Web as a resource.
Via Riehl World View I read about rumors that this all started with a jilted lover and scrolled through the school's sports message board. (It's funny to find myself scrolling through an old fashioned message board when I began the day playing with the new and trendy Twitter.)
I'll be interested to see what the school paper has once they work out their server issues. They've got what appears to be a camera phone picture of what it looks like to be in "lock down." It looks like a lot of the video on TV is from camera phones but I haven't seen this photo. Speaking of camera phone footage, You may have seen this clip on TV but if there was a TV anchor talking over it you missed the point. Listen close to hear the gun shots.
Naturally when there's a high profile shooting, thoughts turn to the issue of gun control. Depending on your view either the tragedy wouldn't have happened if there were no guns or it wouldn't have happened if there were more guns. For some reason I ended up clicking more pro-gun links. This year-old story seemed to come up often. It describes how a pro-gun bill was defeated last year, making the campus a gun-free zone.
I got this research paper (Multiple Victim Public Shootings, Bombings, and Right-to-Carry Concealed Handgun Laws: Contrasting Private and Public Law Enforcement) from Glenn.
I hope this blogger has heard from his son by now and simply hasn't posted an update yet. I can't imagine the agony of having to wait this long.
This site is aggregating Virginia bloggers. Speaking of the local perspective, The Roanoke Times coverage is impressive to scroll through even if it's not very media rich. That style of updating a story with times is becoming iconic of emergency news; a visual siren.
For the map heads, here is a big map of the campus.
I'll add more as I find them. Let me know if you come upon anything compelling (that isn't already in the mainstream).
UPDATE: The Virginia Tech radio station crashed my machine a couple times when I tried to play their stream. Understandably they're struggling with the traffic so that one's going to need a little patience.
UPDATE 2: The Web is burgeoning with fake MySpace pages and profile and hoax photos and "not him" pictures of Asian guys with guns. Rather than get in serious trouble associating someone with a horrible crime they had nothing to do with I'm going to follow the mainstream on shooter material - at least until the Web settles down a bit.
Something I don't understand is why they keep saying, "I can't believe it would happen here of all places" if this had already happened last summer: "William Morva, accused of killing a police officer and a security guard, is captured after a day-and-a-half manhunt that prompts the shutdown and evacuation of Virginia Tech. A hectic day unfolds in a series of updates below."
Speaking of past incidents at the school, here's the coverage of the recent bomb threat.
Here's how Wikipedia is covering the story.
It's interesting that we're calling this the worst gun rampage in U.S. history. There were more deaths in the Bath School Disaster but that was an explosion.
The VA Tech shooting Flickr pool
Planet Blacksburg is another school paper I think. Veeery slow to load.
Why they couldn't just tackle him while he was reloading.
This student blogged compellingly from his dorm room yesterday. Today he's got a list, not unlike ours, of the dead reported so far. I'll post again shortly as I come upon their personal pages.
UPDATE 3: Virginia Killer's Violent Writings (It's Cho's play.)
See the update at the bottom of this entry for an interesting look at a message board posting from a gun shop ower who think he sold Cho the guns. The message board itself is crashed but I'll check back later to see if comes back.
Check out the new MSNBC.com game. It's like Break Out but with headlines dropping on you. I just took the number 1 position on the board with 16950.
A Play-By-Play: The JL Kirk & Associates Saga - That's probably the only link you need to understand the story of the blogger who is being threatened with a law suit and other action to take down material from her blog that is critical of an employment agency. But if you want to read more of what is rapidly turning into a good old fashioned blog storm, I clicked Glenn's entry and this item that explains why it's foolish to sue a blogger in these circumstances, and this guy's Googlebomb tactic is good for a chuckle, and of course, there's the blogger in question.
The parallel between early blogging and these early days of Twitter continue. In this case, Scoble is declaring that the first reports of today's earthquake in Mexico came in by Twitter.
Famousr is easy for me to play because I don't know half the people in it. If I don't know them, the other one must be um... famousr.
Glenn Greenwald has a pretty funny round-up of missing documents stories from the Bush administration. Actually, it's not really funny. It's just funny when Greenwald says, "I feel -- in this vaguely intuitive sort of way -- as though there is some kind of a pattern buried within this set of facts..."
Here's an interesting bit of counterintuitiveness. Terry Moran at ABC makes an argument that people shouldn't feel too bad for the Duke lacrosse players. Since my mailbox is full of notes demanding that Al Sharpton apologize to the players, the connection makes for an interesting contrast. I don't know what Sharpton says about the Duke thing but unjust prosecutions are a can of worms he probably wouldn't mind opening.
In case you didn't already think the Imus story was a dead horse, Snoop Doggy Dogg's thoughts on the matter pretty much did me in.
I finally got around to playing with the "Is it better to rent or buy" tool the New York Times put out a few days ago.
Josh Marshall says the whole US Attorney story is really about the voter fraud investigations as an effort to thin the ranks of traditionally Democratic voters.
Remember that guy who's living his life with a camera on his head, streaming live 24/7? He had sex the other day, but didn't keep the camera going - at least, not in the way you would expect given the description of the project. The Valleywag report on it gives some thought to the question of whether there can be a collective/shared sexual experience. (Valleywag link is safe but you may find unsafe stuff beyond that.)
"Women might soon be able to produce sperm in a development that could allow lesbian couples to have their own biological daughters, according to a pioneering study published today." Almost every paragraph in this story is bizarre.
This is why you shouldn't clean your HDTV with windex.
Yemen's khat habit soaks up water - I almost never hear about khat, but in talking about it at the virtual water cooler I also read this piece about its use in America. Is khat use in the U.S. common and I'm just not hooked into the drug world well enough to realize it? Maybe I don't know enough African immigrants?
I've seen a lot of local bloggers linking to this "I'm obsessed with being a hipster" advice column. It's not really about hipsters though, it's about dissatisfaction with oneself, and the answer, as I read it, is to find something you love doing and do it. Let me know if that's what you think it's about.
Top tower defense games - I've already mentioned that Desktop Tower Defense is the most addictive game ever, so a collection of versions of the game could be life ending. Kiss your wife and kids goodbye for the weekend before you click this.
I keep running into creationist car photos.
The same model does a childhood obesity ad and a McDonalds ad and they're displayed as billboards next to each other.
The South African anti-rapist condom - The main problem I have with this idea is that it doesn't actually prevent the rape because it requires penetration to work. And then it doesn't do any permanent damage so... what's the point? Shouldn't it implant an RFID tag at least or something so the rapist can be tracked?
Here's a cool, old fashioned feeling game (meaning there's no fancy graphics or animation). Simply arrange the cubes to match the various views.
"As an IT guy, I know all too well that most emails are nearly impossible to "lose," especially if one really wants to find them." And I can add that as the kind of guy who gives IT guys headaches, I have had whole accidentally-deleted folders restored for me. Not fully restored, but it's hard to lose everything.
The mystery of leaping shampoo
Kid-proof your iPod - Just the other day I was wondering what kids these days play music on. I don't mean big kids, I mean little ones who are the age I was when I played with a playschool phonograph or a big buttoned tape player. Is there a big plastic mp3 player with fat buttons that click out loud? All the new music players are so dainty. Anyway, this is a pretty good start.
This Katie Couric plagiarism story is just so rich I can't even stand it. She should at least be thankful it wasn't discovered by bloggers first. Can you imagine CBS suffering another humiliation like that at the hands of bloggers? Hopefully independent online volunteer journalists won't have to endure as much preaching from mainstream news with this as a rebuttal.
Something I've been wondering about lately that bears some relation to Katie's gaffe is whether it is the result of a necessary risk of mass media. I'm not sure where the line is, but at some point in mass media a person becomes a brand. Their image is controlled by a marketing department, their schedule is handled by assistants and their words are written by producers (or assistant producers or interns or in Katie's case, WSJ columnists).
Part of what's so hard about someone like Katie Couric writing her own "notebook" is that included in the price of her celebrity is that in a sense she is only the "news actress" in the Katie Couric show. What I wonder is whether this is just part of television legacy culture or if it's a necessity for a certain level of celebrity. For all of the success of the Internet, I can't think of anyone who regularly performs at a network TV mass media level. Even when MSNBC.com regularly clears a billion page views a month, that's a different dynamic than the 8 or 9 million (ballpark) who watch Brian Williams every night. Will the Internet's model of cumulative, long tail, on-demand traffic volume eventually dissolve the idea of constructing a mass-market brand personality? Or is it just a matter of time before Web stars are reading scripts prepared by teams of producers and writers?
Speaking of puppet masters, remember when we saw that some anti-Bush bloggers were duped by a fake photo of Karl Rove with a Coptix folder under his arm? If you read the comments on that entry you saw a brief exchange I had with a reader named John Doe who asked about the background of the conspiracy theories surrounding the photo. It turns out there's a belief that the White House is using a private service to host its e-mails on GWB43.com so they don't become part of the public record (even if they're technically doing public business). I never paid much attention to the story (the anti-Bush conspiracy theories start to blur after a while) but there's plenty to be learned in a simple search. The reason I bring all this up again is that GWB43.com has reached mainstream news. It won't assuage online accusers that e-mails on that service have reportedly been accidentally been deleted. What were the chances?
Speaking of mainstream media types using other people's words without credit, ESPN radio big guy attacks sports blog little guy - The coverage has a real "Imusian" quality, including questions about whether the apology is sufficient.
Speaking of Imus, I feel like I should say something about it since I'm getting so many comments and e-mails, but I'm not sure I have anything original to contribute. From inside this building and sort of inside NBC I can offer that the company is very diverse so it's not surprising that there was a lot of internal pressure to fire him. I've been thinking about whether Imus's act is old fashioned (compare with the comedic social/political commentary of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert) but I could just as easily believe that the whole episode is nothing more than MSNBC hiring a jerk and getting more than they bargained for (wouldn't be the first time). I've been reading all the comments and mail people have been sending me but I haven't approved any for the blog because I don't care to host any fights about the characters of Imus, Sharpton and Jackson. I am, however, interested in whether folks think this is a sign of some larger trend. Again, I'm nursing the idea that it's indicative of a generational shift, but I'm not totally convinced. Let me know if you see a bigger picture.
The hamster powered paper shredder (not real)
O'Reilly's lessons learned so far in drafting that blogger code of conduct. To his credit, he's not at all intimidated by the number of dissenting voices on the subject and is viewing criticism constructively.
Why I fired my secretary - This is the kind of thing you get in an e-mail with a thousand names on the To line but it gave me a laugh so I'm sharing.
I expected a page with the title "The Power of Make-up" to be another one of those beauty myth series. Instead it shows how one woman's look can change. It's a little over the top but still fun for a quick scroll.
Florida Legislature Forces University To Idolize Jeb Bush - Because the university wouldn't grant Jeb an honorary degree, his colleagues in the state legislature forced the renaming of the university's education school to the Jeb Bush College of Education.
This feels a little like spam, but it's a cool service, so who cares? It's based on some kind of image recognition software that can search images in the media and find uses of a certain face or photo. It's worth noting the phenomenon of Everywhere Girl who I think we may have seen in Clicked before. She's a model whose image in stock photography databases has put her in lots of ads.
Speaking of spam, Spam to overtake human-issued e-mails in 2007 - It's not clear from this article whether the amount of personal e-mail being exchanged is decreasing, though it does mention that people are using other means of communicating like VOIP and IM. When RSS first started to spread some people predicted that it would replace e-mail because you only get messages from people you want messages from (by subscribing). We see a similar situation with Twitter and all the friends lists people are compiling on social software around the web. More effective than filtering mail is to use a system that only involves people we know and trust. I already don't answer my phone because most likely the person calling is a spammer so it's not hard for me to imagine e-mail following a similar fate.
Still sort of speaking of spam (though it's not a very nice joke to make), remember those inexpensive laptops that were going to be distributed to poor people in developing countries? Here they are in action. (You thought that sentence was going to end with bad news, right? I don't know what the accounting looks like for the program but I'm impressed at how quickly it went from idea to practice.)
Juvenile snicker headline of the day
Mom, I'm an atheist. NOTE: Mom curses out loud. A lot.
I had no idea the distribution of single people in America was so east/west. What's that about?
The belt flip - This has tragic local newspaper headline written all over it.
Malaysian rap - The last few seconds are in English. Reading the comments I think the song is about conflicts between people who speak different dialects.
Following in the vein of thinking about women in the tech community, I enjoyed these two women reviewing some Bluetooth gadgets. It made be revisit Shiny Shiny with an eye toward what it means for tech material to be geared to women.
Diabetics cured in stem-cell treatment advance - This story is seeing heavy linking from two communities. The headline itself is an obvious draw but political bloggers have picked up on a sentence in the middle of the article: "But research using the most versatile kind of stem cells — those acquired from human embryos — is currently opposed by powerful critics, including President Bush." Defenders of Bush point out that he actually only opposes federal funding for new embryonic stem cell lines, but doesn't oppose research using already existing lines. It's confusing to me that the article says that the stem cells in this study were drawn from the patients' own blood. So that would mean non-embryonic stem cells, right? Given the current efforts in Congress, it's probably a good idea to study up in preparation for what will surely be some dramatic election year propagandizing on the issue.
Over a million people have watched this Harry Potter puppet video in just a couple weeks? I don't get it.
Insights from the people who decide what cell phones look like.
"David Belle invented parkour in France. It has spread mainly by videos on the Internet, and has been embraced in Europe and the United States by thrill-seekers and martial-arts adepts." One such David Belle video.
"A graphical dissertation on the number one song in America" That song being "This is why I'm hot."
For all of its promise, the Internet does not appear to have improved discourse between people. It's done wonders for organizing and uniting people of like mind, but as far as bridging gaps with this new means of communication, we haven't seen it. But maybe we haven't been patient enough. It wasn't until my colleague, Jane, pointed it out that I saw the Imus story in the context of what appears to be a new examination of the state of social discourse.
Two stories in this past Sunday's New York Times serve as a helpful framework. "A call for manners in the world of nasty blogs" is the continuation of the Kathy Sierra death threat story. Some members of the online community are drafting a bloggers' code of conduct and there's a further idea that bloggers can identify the degree of civility they're willing to endorse by marking their blog with the appropriate badge.
For what it's worth, as a blogger I think it's a ridiculous idea and I won't be participating. I don't mind anonymous comments if you have something worthwhile to say. If you don't have anything worthwhile to say, I won't approve your comment even if you do put your name on it. (And sometimes even worthwhile comments that aren't quite relevant or that speak more to other commenters than what I've written don't get approved. People can start their own blog and say whatever they want and no matter how many happy badges I put on my blog, I can't do anything about that.)
As many online have pointed out, bloggers don't need a special code. Bloggers are humans, so regular standards of decency already apply - not to mention legal standards for libel and threats. It's ironic that some A List bloggers who are constantly preaching (to mainstream media in particular) about what bloggers are and what bloggers do are now trying to explain that bloggers are regular people who don't need special rules. To read the coverage of blogging over the past few years, you could be forgiven for thinking bloggers are some special social class or new species of superhuman.
Though I'm sympathetic to the charge that the New York Times was just looking for an opportunity to paint online volunteer journalists as "the world of nasty blogs," I'm going to stick with my thesis that we are engaged in an examination of public discourse. I'd like to see Scoble's proposal of looking at how women are treated in the tech community pursued, and Dave Winer's idea of actually trying to disperse an online mob before it does its damage is downright revolutionary. When have you ever heard that? Everyone laments the mob but most see it as a necessary evil to the wonders of the Internet's organizing ability.
The second prong in the Times' stab at public incivility (and second attack on web culture as a socially destabilizing force of evil) points to a new level of heckling of performers.
The article cites increased online participation and how the behavior there bleeds into real world public conduct. In my experience, it's online anonymity that fosters incivility so, as long as theories are being tossed around, I propose that our solitary culture of quiet TV watching and solo car driving does just as much to sap us of our human decency as anonymous Web commenting. Furthermore, as much as we endure the hyping of "your participation" in online media, to my mind the cultural narcissism that makes people think everyone needs to hear their opinion is more rooted in the exploitation of pro-democracy propagandizing. The American Idol "we care what you think" mantra isn't an extension of the participatory Web, it's an extension of the march of American democracy to save the world.
But I digress. The Internet may not have ushered in a new age of brotherhood and understanding through communication, but it has certainly given us ample material for study of how we treat each other, and that may be an important first step.
Speaking of the Imus story, coverage is already quite deep but I can add just a bit of color. It's odd to come to work with protestors in front of the building, even if it's only two and the one holding the "apology not accepted" sign said hello as I walked in.
The reactions of Al Roker and Ron Allen are pretty remarkable in the context of online media to say nothing of the weight of their opinions themselves. The fact that Roker can call for the firing of someone who is arguably his co-worker in such a public way on the company's own site is surely worth a footnote in the history of media transparency.
Scuttlebutt about Alison Stewart's reaction has yet to reach me, but since she is the most prominent of the many African American women who work in this building (where Imus broadcasts) I look forward to learning her thoughts. Hopefully she'll find time to similarly put them in print.
By the way, have you actually seen the offending clip? In all of this coverage I haven't seen it anywhere (though admittedly I only watch cable news at work, and then mostly only one channel.) This particular version has an added bit on the end of a guy named Billy Packer using a gay slurBritishism with Charlie Rose (I have no idea why it's attached to the end of the Imus clip).
I'm somewhat disappointed to see that along with the Imus story, with its theme about respecting women, two other big stories in today's new cycle are that the Girls Gone Wild guy has been arrested and DNA tests finally reveal who the father of Anna Nicole Smith's baby is, all capped by a promo for a new documentary series about models that features women stripping down to what looks like bathing suits or maybe underwear. Yes, clearly we've learned a lesson about respecting women.
Speaking of how the tech community relates to women, How dating my ex was like playing DOOM II on nightmare mode
Still speaking of how gamers relate to women, this has hoax written all over it but the story of a woman trading sex for World of Warcraft money is making the rounds. NOTE: This is a YTMND link, which always comes with flash music that loops with no off button. Hit mute first, then click. Here's the link. UPDATE: OK, they got hacked. Here's part of the image with no music. There was another image that was her follow-up saying she was successful in her acquisition. I'll put the original link back when they fix it.
Oh what the heck, one more... Are You Raising Another Man's Child?
Speaking of mainstream stories from the weekend papers that made a big splash online, The Washington Post got one of the world's greatest violin players to perform in a D.C. subway station to see how many people noticed that they had quality music in their midst. Surprise, hardly anyone noticed. The writer's discussion of his story is also a popular link.
And speaking of the isolating effects of television, Ten Financial Reasons To Turn Off Your Television - And Ten Things To Replace It With
World Record Penny Pyramid (289,318 pennies - 300 hours in under 3 minutes (it's a time lapse clip). The main site has diagrams of how big a stack a billion pennies would make.
I keep running into Mehmet Ozgur's smoke photos on arts sites and general "neat-o" sites. Coming soon to a college dorm poster near you.
The world's top 20 most livable cities - The closest American city is Honolulu at #27.
Since some folks are growling their way through those little newsprint books, Tax Freedom Day is April 30th this year. I'd never heard of it before. It's the theoretical day that the American workforce covers the year's tax burden and keeps the money it makes.
Is Google Voice Local Search new or just new to me? I remember reading about it once but I didn't realize it was up and running. UPDATE: Oops, no it's new.
Backhoe row - My first thought was that it would be really inefficient to row a boat with a backhoe, but it probably does give a really big push.
Speaking of quick clips, Does web video have to be short? My first answer was yes, because something like this video of a V8 engine block being machined from a solid cube of metal is just too long. But part of the point in the blog entry is that if Tivo can ingest your Web video and make a playlist for you, does that change how long you're willing to sit and watch?
Not quite a global warming denial but pretty close. My favorite line is also my least favorite: "The current alarm rests on the false assumption not only that we live in a perfect world, temperaturewise, but also that our warming forecasts for the year 2040 are somehow more reliable than the weatherman's forecast for next week." I'm always up for bashing the weathermen who slowly change the forecast for tomorrow as tomorrow gets closer and even then get it wrong. I'm even open to the suggestion that the earth might do better or just as well at a slightly warmer temperature. But my understanding of the current alarm is that the change itself is the problem. That change is what causes erratic weather and a shift in the jet stream and that's what's so potentially catastrophic.
Speaking of bad science, here's a disturbing story of "post hoc coincidence detection" and the dangers of bad math. The probability that a woman committed a series of murders is miscalculated and then combined with some cart before the horse reasoning to get a woman a lifetime conviction. (The point isn't that she's innocent, just that the case isn't constructed correctly.)
This piece in the Guardian arguing against Net Neutrality has me doing a mental double-check to make sure I'm not one of those people the article accuses of being out of touch with reality. Here are the two sides as I understand them. Let me know if I'm missing something:
Pro Net Neutrality - Greedy telecoms want to charge Web content providers for the service of delivering their Web pages to web surfers even though Web surfers are already paying their ISPs for that service. If this happens, only the wealthiest content providers will be able to pay to distribute their stuff over the Web and the little guy loses the use of this valuable tool for democracy.
Anti Net Neutrality - Greedy Internet giants want to make money on the Web without paying to support its infrastructure. Put-upon telecoms can't improve the capacity of the Web if they see their investment going straight into the pockets of the aforementioned Internet giants who continue to flood the Web with bigger bandwidth offerings like Internet TV, movies and games. The little guy still loses because the Web becomes a morass - a bandwidth traffic jam that ruins the online experience for everyone. The little guy does not, however, lose a valuable tool for democracy because it's already been shown that the Web doesn't promote democracy, it promotes echo chamber driven digital lynch mobs and weirdo niche groups. And furthermore, no one has actually proposed charging the those greedy Internet giants and even if we did, we're certainly not seeing any little guys being priced out of anything so Net Neutrality legislation would be solving a phantom problem.
The Guardian piece also argues that Net Neutrality is built on a misunderstanding of how the Web works. Unfortunately the only explanation we get is "it's a network of networks, and experimentation on private networks must be encouraged." I think this means we're supposed to let the ISPs do as much restricting as they want so they're free to experiment and improve the system. But does it also mean that the solution bandwidth bottlenecks is that we should add more networks to the network?
While calling Net Neutrality "an Intelligent Design for the Left" is enough to give me pause to reaffirm my understanding of things, here's why I'm not quite ready to take of my "The end is nigh" sandwich board:
It's clear that bandwidth capacity is becoming a problem for ISPs that's only going to get worse. How you expect that problem will be solved will determine whether you see Net Neutrality as a hindrance or a vital protection.
Related: Net Neutrality: Do it for the girl at Hot Dog on a Stick.
Google's new MyMaps has been on my wishlist since map sites were invented. (I know there's Frappr but this is much easier.) It's unreal that it's taken this long to be able to easily draw your own driving directions. I once wanted to show a co-worker my back-road routes to New York City from MSNBC's New Jersey headquarters. I had to use a stack of printed maps and all the highlighters I could find. Last night I did it with Google in no time at all. And since people can share maps publicly, soon there will be a nice database of hopefully useful and/or interesting routes that go beyond basic driving directions. How nice would it be if motorcycle riding clubs shared their favorite routes on here?
Speaking of mapping routes, when I showed my Google map to my colleague Dave he told me about the jogging routes people are sharing on NikePlus. In the Community menu on the bottom choose "map it" to find routes near you.
Speaking of drawing routes, if the line racer game were with a race car in 3-D it'd look like this.
Speaking of games, this one has a peculiar means of playing. You have to trace the shape in order to use it as a tool in the game. For me the game was figuring out how to play, never mind actually winning.
Still speaking of games, Top 5 most addictive games - I could almost trade Desktop Defense for late night reruns of CSI.
There's such a thing as trick shot bowling? The old spinning ball spare conversion?
A plane that produces its own cloud may actually be cooler than Wonder Woman's invisible jet if only for the fact that it's real. (It's not really a cloaking device, it has to do with the air reacting to the plane's speed.)
Seeing the business end of a mosquito makes a bite seem a lot more gross than the simple straw I always envisioned.
Dave Sifry is back again, this time with his customary State of the Blogosphere report, though now he's calling it The State of the Live Web (We're post-blog now. Haven't you heard?). Steve Rubel takes the opportunity to reiterate his "blogging has peaked" theory.
Make Congress read the bills it passes. Help pass the Read the Bills Act - I don't think this is a left over April Fool's joke, and if it is, it shouldn't be.
Speaking of missed jokes, a photo of Karl Rove carrying an envelope with the name of an Internet company on it recently roiled the political blogosphere. Rove haters jumped to the conclusion that it was proof that Rove was running White House e-mails through a private company in the wake of embarrassing Justice Department e-mails. The company's Vice President describes it as a viral marketing idea, not exactly a prank of the magnitude it became.
Back up your photos with a no-click external hard drive. I clicked on one of the vender links. They want $140 bucks.
Back in the olden days when I worked with chat rooms, one of the great revelations was that people often went to chat rooms because they had something to say, not because they want to see what others had to say. (This is why the blog explosion of people going off by themselves to talk was not a surprise to me.) I have to think there's a similar dynamic at play in the video reviews on Smarter.com. Watching some of the videos I have to wonder if the point is really for me to learn about the product or for the reviewer to talk about this thing he just bought.
David Lynch on product placement - NOTE: Contains distinct curses
Dick Dale on why the music industry is a rip-off - I wonder when experts will begin to speculate that drops in music sales are offset in part untracked sales of music from trunks of cars.
iPod saves a soldier's life - Like the old metal flask in the coat pocket trick, he was shot in a pocket containing an iPod which slowed the bullet enough to keep it from penetrating his armor (and more importantly, him). UPDATE: As is mentioned in the comments, it wasn't quite the "metal flask in the coat pocket" trick. Still a good story, particularly how it spread.
The blogging backlash is upon us, but the strange thing is that what's set to replace blogs is... blogs. We've already seen the popularity of Twitter and how closely it resembles early blogging (in functionality, brevity, and hype). Today I was reading about Tumblr and what the heck a tumblelog is and really, this too harkens back to old school blogging.
As blogging has grown into a primary medium for reporting and commentary, its roots as a simple way to share little bits of information have been lost. The real difference that Tumblr and Twitter bring is the emphasis on the philosophy of brevity. Sometimes you don't want to write a headline. Sometimes you don't want to have to think of tags. Sometimes you don't care how well a search engine or aggregation service can find your writing. Sometimes you just want a place to jot some notes or, you know, keep a log.
Speaking of simplifying note taking and sharing, Keep track of your friends with The Coop - Still in the early stages, but the idea seems sound. If you share stuff from the Web with your friends, shouldn't your friends list be part of what you're using to view the Web? And wouldn't it be handy if you could gather your friends in one place even though they're all using different social networks?
Dave Sifry, who usually releases "State of the Blogosphere" reports has released a "State of Technorati" report. I have been using Google's blogsearch lately because I wasn't liking the results Technorati was giving me but looking at the reactions to this report makes me think I should give them another try.
I wonder how the New York Times decides who to assign to write stories...
I got this one in the mail with the cryptic description: "kid jumps with his head." The real magic starts at 1:49 in the clip. (Thanks James)
These weren't necessarily meant to go together but somehow they feel related:
Speaking of cars, I was reading some of coverage of the New York Auto Show, mostly admiring the concept cars that'll never be built when I saw a piece about the Bugatti Veyron. 1001 horsepower, 0-60 in 2.5 seconds $1.5 million price tag. The list of jaw dropping stats goes on and on. But the crazy part is that it's totally road legal. It's a rocket with rear view mirrors and brake lights.
Cincinnati mayor's ridiculous pitch - I thought this might be too mainstream for Clicked but most of the people I asked hadn't seen it. If you're ever called upon to do something like this, you really should practice. You only get one chance to make a total fool of yourself.
Top Figures is an interesting game because, unless I'm not understanding how to play, you decide when it's time for you to move on to the next level. If you try to do too much on one level, you lose. It's also pretty hard.
The new Die Hard trailer. I'll start lowering my expectations now so I really enjoy it when I see it. It'll be hard to suppress my annoyance with the ancient "kidnapped daughter" plot device.
Real Estate Roller Coaster - The best rendering of information I've seen in a long time. If you're able, watch to the end. You really get a sense of how unusual the market's growth has been lately and because of the roller coaster model you get a real sense of "uh oh, this bubble's going to pop."
Pictures on layers of glass - It's a little hard to see, but I imagine the idea is that they're 3-D.
Commuter Click: "A Columbia professor believes that converting skyscrapers into crop farms could help reduce global warming and make New York cleaner. It's a vision straight out of Futurama—but here's how it might work." Is there any bigger waste of space than the rooftops of buildings in a city? I always think they should be covered in solar panels or else I'm a fan of the green roof idea. I'm not totally sure about farming but I could be easily sold. Something I wonder about blanketing a city with organic matter is how it would affect the city's atmosphere - literally. Would it smell like dirt? Would the wind be gritty? Would we start having to deal with mosquitoes and other bugs? Would our rats climb up there? Well, I'll read it and see how grounded (no pun) this idea is in reality.
Actually eating the food from a skyscraper farm reminds me a little of this piece about a guy who cooks the animals he finds in his back yard. I can see someone eating squirrel in the abstract, but it'd be hard to convince me that New York City rodentia isn't somehow tainted with pollutants.
VideoHybrid was crashed most of the day while I was trying to check it out. Finally toward the end of the day I was able to get through. I imagine being listed on TechCrunch as a great source for copyrighted video gave them a heavy traffic push. After lots of dead links I finally got an episode of Weeds to almost load. If it doesn't seem like it's cooperating it might be one to mark for return later when the buzz dies down. What did ultimately work was a copy of the movie 300 but it was a link to the DailyMotion version. The utility of VideoHybrid is that when I went to DailyMotion I couldn't find the video I'd been watching on the other service. As with music piracy, video production is not going to be able to beat 'em so they'd better hurry up and join 'em so at least they have a say in the terms of how people watch online.
Speaking of finding commercial video, it sounds like TV Guide may be coming out with a good solution. Basically a video search engine that draws from a limited database to keep results manageable.
Speaking of TV moving online, gone (soon) are the days of Neilson families and ratings numbers of mysterious origin. Online we can get a much more accurate picture of what's being viewed. The new question is what measuring standard to use. "In an attempt to go beyond page views and visits, today web stats company Compete introduced 'Attention metrics'."
Coldwell Banker To Sell Second Life Properties - I wonder if they'll eventually require licenses to broker virtual real estate.
Here's a neat idea: People share their personal wisdom about blogging and those entries are aggregated into a big linkback fest. In this case, sharing mistakes made while blogging. The big list of respondents is here.
This little rant about how offline web apps are only useful to people who fly on planes and the rapid rate of expansion of online access means offline apps will be that much less necessary that much more quickly turns into a huge comment thread about whether offline web apps are really necessary.
What do you do when your success ... sucks? - The Topix.com guy explains why they switched to being an aggregator to a hyper-local & user generated news site. I used to use the Blogs channel of Topix.net to gather links for Clicked, so I preferred the old version but apparently they didn't feel like they were distinct enough in the field to compete well.
If We Taught English the Way We Teach Mathematics... - Not a perfect analogy, but a worthy shift in perspective on math - math as language.
Wonkette thought the camera pan from Cheney to Bush at the recent press conference at the White House was creepy.
Remember that item the other day about a weapon that inflicts fear? Bizarre Human Brain Parasite Precisely Alters Fear - It's a parasite in cat urine that makes rats no longer afraid of cat urine. Only cat urine. Look for this one in an Intelligent Design argument coming to a blog near you.
I feel like we've seen The Pixelator before, but the photo of the one on a TV makes me think it's a good idea for if you like to have the TV on in the background while you do other things. You can still listen without the distraction of the images (which are often superfluous anyway).
The predictions for 2001 of a 14-year-old in 1901. The funny thing is that he describes a city like in The Fifth Element or like Coruscant from the Star Wars movies.
Meat cake. Of course you think of that Friends episode but really it doesn't look that gross. It's just a pretty meat loaf dinner.
"A suspended Toronto elementary school principal has pleaded guilty to throwing feces (excrement) on a child." I love that they had to add that parenthetical clarifier for people who don't know what feces is. The article is woefully lacking in details.
"On a Digg religion poll, out of a base of over four thousand votes taken, 45.56 percent are reported to be atheists. This makes them the single largest religious group on Digg, followed closely by Christianity, at 29.08 percent." The article talks about why geeks are often atheists, but for me that sentence is most significant because in the general population atheists represent a really small percentage - single digits. (The number I read recently was 4 percent of Americans, which I grant is still a large raw number.) Given the number of atheist items on Reddit, we could probably guess that their statistics are similar. What I wonder is what the relationship is between Digg-like sites and geekdom. When a site like msnbc.com, with an audience that is arguably closer to the general American population, sees the success of these social sites, should we consider the specificity of the audience as a warning that the technology may not have broad appeal? Or are the characteristics of these sites purely a case of people of like mind being drawn to each other like any other online echo chamber?
I'm pleased that unlike just about every year since I've been blogging on MSNBC.com (holy moly, has it been 4 years?!) I wasn't fooled by any April Fool's links so far this year. (Speaking of today's headline, Nina Gordon's cover of Nobody's Fool [mp3] remains a favorite.)
Of course ThinkGeek kicked butt again this year on funny April Fool's items. There's a full list of this year's online pranks (to which you can add any that you spotted). And another here.
Better still, one ThinkGeek item had such appeal that an e-mail campaign forced them to actually produce it. Look for an 8 bit tie coming soon to a geek near you.
Speaking of April Fool's double takes, Panda's Thumb pulled an elaborate prank on its readers by linking to a purported message from an Intelligent Design advocate claiming that ID itself is a prank to get the goat of evolutionists. Of course, the ID movement is not a prank.
Speaking of fighting about God, "On a cloudy California day, the atheist Sam Harris sat down with the Christian pastor Rick Warren to hash out Life's Biggest Question—Is God real?" It's pretty long, so here's the printer version if you don't want to deal with the pagination.
"Welcome to the 10th edition of The Festival of the Trees, a monthly blog carnival for all things arboreal."
"Ballhype tracks more than 1,600 sports blogs to find great content so you don't have to." Works like Digg.
Coolest idea to make you wish you were young and without responsibilities: The Miss Rockaway Armada. Groups of artists construct rafts and boats from found objects and junk and float them down the Mississippi River, stopping along the way "to perform, give workshops, and create the big huge stinking spectacle we wished would have stopped in our hometowns" (and hopefully make some money doing so). Good pictures.
Wulff Morgenthaler is enjoying a moment in the online spotlight. It's a single frame comic.
Google Responds to Yahoo by Increasing Gmail Storage to Infinity Plus One - I didn't post a link to the news item here but you may have heard that Yahoo is offering unlimited storage capacity to its e-mail customers. There's been a bit of a storage race since Google's Gmail offered a gig of free storage. The article is satire obviously. I'm trying not to think about why I pay for a pro Flickr account when they're giving free unlimited storage to e-mail users. Maybe I should figure a way for their e-mail service to host my photos.
Speaking of Google responding, this is their response to criticism of their use of pre-Katrina images in the Gulf areas of Google Maps.
AP reporter zapped with one of those new pain guns. They say it makes you feel like you're about to burst into flame. It's interesting that the reporter was more affected by the panic than by the pain. Kind of reminds me of Batman Returns Begins - a weapon that makes you afraid.
Desktop image alert: Coffee meets milk
Hummer versus school bus - Go school bus! Hummers are too small and fuel efficient for me anyway, and now this? I'm totally going to start driving a school bus to work.
I haven't seen Grindhouse, maybe this weekend, but I did read this item about how to get in the proper mindset for seeing this and similar movies that make you sit up and say, "Wow, that looks really good." His strategy is to read all the negative reviews to give himself the lowest possible expectations for the movie, so this is a round up of those criticisms. There may be spoilers, but not anything you wouldn't have read in a review somewhere. I'm not sure about this whole strategy. Movies in New York City are more than ten bucks a pop, so it sucks to leave unsatisfied, but tricking yourself into liking a movie more than it deserves feels unhealthy somehow. (P.S. Wow, check out that list of trailers.) (P.P.S. Eagle vs Shark)
"Well, it's getting closer and closer to 2015 and we have a lot of catching up to do." Remember in 1984 how everyone was constantly making comparisons to the book to see how much had come true? While not exactly Orwell, there's a similar milestone coming in 2015. It's the year in which Back to the Future's future was set.
The tunnels of Moscow's Metro. Some of these look like long exposure, others look like HDR layered photos.
Don't buy Girl Scout cookies - The argument here is that the organization isn't making much money from the sales and both you and the organization would be better off if you didn't eat the cookies and just donated the money directly.
How to Make Video Panoramas from Your Digital Camera's Video Clips - Photojojo has a history of simple ideas and it's written in a way that makes things sound easy. This is not so easy - particularly because step 1 involves very expensive software (that you could never ever find on Bit Torrent, so don't even try search for it on any of the popular torrent search engines because it's just not there, don't even look. Don't.). Anyway, the result is cool.
Designers Work to Rescue a Dying Art Form -- the Album Cover - You know you at least need album art so you have something to put on the concert t-shirt. I kid, but it's an interesting problem/opportunity.
Speaking of music in the new age, "For bands and solo artists, Unsigned.com provides you with an outlet to be heard by an ever-growing fan and listener base." It's still a work in progress and I don't think I'll use it much until they come up with a way I can listen to it like a radio. So far though I like that I can click on my city and listen to bands from my area. I don't know of another service that does that.
Remember the woman who was threatened online and cancelled her speaking engagements? She has released a statement along with the guy who helped create the site on which she was threatened. He's not the threatener, but he's been painted as the bad guy in some tellings of the story because of his association with the site. They put out these statements in advance of a CNN story to make sure their positions are clear (and not sensationalize by cable news).
4 years of persistent training - This is one of those linkbait sites so we don't know the actual source of this series. (Mike in comments did the leg work, here it is. I killed the old link.) I don't believe some of the criticism that it's a photoshop job, but I'm a little curious about the regimen that goes along with the various stages of this guy's development. There are a couple of points of pretty radical change. He also starts smiling.
I'm not sure I understand what an open source car is. Is it that much different than traditional custom car culture?
Here's a funny one while I process the new week's links. Safe for work, but you'll probably have a small crowd around your cube when folks come over to see what you're laughing at.
[YouTube:W91sqAs-_-g]
UPDATE: Ok, since some folks aren't seeing the humor let me supply a little context. The original song, below, was described as "a song so awful it hurts the mind" so half the humor comes in seeing it given more serious musical treatment. The other half of the humor comes from Morissette making fun of her own image. Unless she's undergone a make-over, I don't believe she performs in hot pants and "icey icey." These could never be her lyrics. She is prone, however, to taking herself awfully seriously, so the bits with her weeping on the floor are, I imagine, a jab at her own propensity for "drama, no, no, no, no drama."
[YouTube:Vj9swNR5-lY]
ONE MORE UPDATE: Just to be clear, I don't think this is the funniest thing in the world, just kind of funny (and getting less funny the more I explain it). As is pointed out in the comments, there are further levels of humor and irony in that Alanis Morissette is, by many assessments, no more serious an artist than Fergie (the original Humps performer) so she has no grounds for making this kind of joke in the first place.
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