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Archive for December, 2005

Which Action Hero Would You Be?

30 Dec 2005

Neo is the computer hacker-turned-Messiah of the Matrix. He leads a small group of human rebels against the technology that controls them. Neo doubts his ability to lead but doesn’t want to disappoint his friends. His goal is for a world where all men know the Truth and are free from the bonds of the Matrix.

You scored as : Neo, the “One”.

action hero
fighter 1

And you? Who would you be? Go here to find out. – [via Randy]

 
No Comments

Posted in Geek, Humor

 

Conclusive Link Dump, Dec. 29th

29 Dec 2005

Yeah. It’s the final link dump . It had to come this far some day. There’ll be no more linking posts on this blog this year. Here’s some stuff from the inbox :

Read :

* It was a year with both positives and negatives for RFID. (top stories)
* KB Cafe Blog Awards – Vote once in category nr. 32 for this blog :)
* Track Chitika Clicks with Google Analytics
* Real-time texting for deaf people
* No Room In MySpace For YouTube
* Movil.be Looking For A Sponsor
* Top 50 gadgets of the past 50 years
* Halfway Between Product Placement And A Commercial
* How Big A Problem Is Blog Plagiarism?
* Target Your Co-Workers With USB Air Darts

Do :

* Scott Blake’s Bar Code Art Clock
* Openomy organizes files and users online via tags
* Identify Syndicated Content, Use the Customizable Feed Icons

Download From Coolz0r :

(right-click, save as) [pdf, 611 kb, 53 pages]
* Advertising Age’s 19th Annual Global Marketing 2005. All Facts & Figures.

pray
Image from [here]

 

Freddy The Hamster

29 Dec 2005

Freddy The Hamster is the main character of i-Merge’s interactive X-Mas greeting, in true interactive standards delivered seriously overdue. Deadlines? Where? :)

What is this hamster-thing about? Well, seems that Freddy, your typical lazy rodent, sleeps a lot. Whenever you SMS (text) ‘wake up freddy’ to 3354 (in Belgium, that is) you can activate the hamster. Sending the SMS will cost you €1, the profits gained will be donated to charity – in this case ‘vredeseilanden‘, an NGO specialized in delivering Food Security in the third world. For a good cause and a laugh, please activate Freddy.
Just make sure the PETA or GAIA don’t catch up on you for mistreating the poor rodent.

There’s a hamster-cam, some hamster-pics, and an office for sale on eBay.

freddy

Question : they sell the Xmas statues on eBay for one Euro, and the Nokia is in the picture too, does that mean I can buy the Nokia for one euro? Sweet :)

Also, totally off topic, while linking to GAIA, I noticed they offer a site with or without frames. Ummm ? Isn’t it supposed to be Flash or HTML? What kind of modernistic design heroes are behind this site? Asking people to use the frameless site if your resolution is 640 x 480 px is soooo 1997.

 

Porn For Politics

29 Dec 2005

Austria is shocked to find a one million euro allowance for commercial advertisements for the promotion of their European chairmanship, starting Jan. 1st, is being used for ‘porn ads’. Chansellor Wolfgang Schüssel has ordered the removal of all public ads to clean up ‘his’ streets and restore safety, because he fears car accidents and very bad publicity and some other damaging PR terms.

The ads, created by 25peaces, display models wearing masks of presidents Bush and Chirac and queen Elisabeth, posing in compromising positions. One could wonder why Bush is a woman, but let’s not get into that.

25peaces 3
Image [source]

This isn’t 25peaces’ first public statement. They’ve made quite a few since January 2005, questioning authority and kicking shins all over the country. Why is it they do this? And what else have they been pulling?

One of their recent actions (which ran from Sept. 1st til Oct. 25th) is the restage of an after-war situation where Vienna was divided into 4 zones (sectors). They’ve reenacted this situation and painted the original lines throughout the streets again, using actors dressed up as MPs to strengthen their message. They used the very known image of ‘Vier im Jeep’ (four in Jeep) to stage this scenario. For many people of age, it was pretty shocking to see the past come back to life. Image [source] and inlay [source]

4 im Jeep

4 im Jeep 2

More about this project : (in German) : DerStandard

"25PEACES comprises 25 events in public space designed to open optional discussions on peace and freedom. This reflection about the past shall contribute to the imagination of a possible future of Austria. The question has to be: What will our life be like in 50 years from now on? And not: What was it like in the past? But there is no dream without a courageous imagination." [source]

According to a Flemish news paper, another compromising ad is this one, although I can’t find any related articles or pictures on the web, what it means is unknown to me. Your guess is as good as mine and no, I don’t think it has anything to do with East European countries joining the EU, and being known for ‘cheap prostitution’. Surely there must be something else.

25peaces 4

Update 15.13 CET : BrusselsJournal has quite a long article about the image/campaign above.

Related : Google search for 25peaces, where you can hit the translate button.

 

Wonderful Internet

29 Dec 2005

Nurun/Ant Farm Interactive is the interactive marketing arm of the Nurun Global Network, an interactive company specialized in full-service interactive communications and technologies. They’ve come up with a pretty neat interactive story about the internet, about a boy who wished the internet never existed at all, after he’d lost a game he was playing. His wish was granted and this is his story…

Every page of this online story, narrated in the style of ‘the raven’, has interactive buttons that either play sounds when hoovering them or change the graphics that illustrate the narrated text. Very nicely done !

wonderful internet

Check out the story: ‘it’s a wonderful internet‘ – via [UDN]

 

Slut-O-Meter

28 Dec 2005

Slut-o-meter evaluates the promiscuity of the subject you enter by comparing the number of Google search results with and without ’safe-search’ enabled.

slut logo

Calculations :

slut calculation

So now for the reseach :

My nickname, Coolz0r :

Promiscuity: 4.72% (3700 / 78400)
Popularity: 2 (equals the number of times this name has been sluttered)

My birth name, Miel Van Opstal:

Promiscuity: 9.2% (23 / 250)
Popularity: 3 (ey, who’s been checking me?)

Paris Hilton :

Promiscuity: 84.07% (326200 / 388000)
Popularity: 1592 (very popular search; so it seems)

Druppels :

Promiscuity: 31.18% (222000 / 712000)
Popularity: 1

Nathan Weinberg :

Promiscuity: 1.8% (1500 / 83300)
Popularity: 5

Britney Spears :

Promiscuity: 52.89% (229000 / 433000)
Popularity: 850

It works ! :)

So, you go check yourself : find the slut-o-meter and submit your names.

via [iBLOGthere4iM]

 
 

YouTube, Veoh & Other Video Archives

28 Dec 2005

YouTube is really on the roll now. Almost daily there are changes to the interface, making it better and better to experience the online video viewing and sharing. Nathan recently posted that YouTube possibly bypassed GoogleVideo in a race for video content on the web, and I’m the first one to agree on that. YouTube is very web 2.0, has thousands and thousands of users and allows those users to add personal value to each clip. From comments to bookmarks, to creating custom playlists, it’s all there. I’m a very satisfied users, and I think I made Nathan switch to YouTube too.

"YouTube, founded by Internet commerce pioneers from PayPal, has developed a new service that allows people to easily upload, tag, and share personal video clips through www.YouTube.com and across the Internet on other sites, blogs and through e-mail. The service also allows users to create their own personal video network." All you need is a Flash Player, which almost all of the surfers nowadays have installed already.

I remember Nathan asking me a little while ago why I didn’t upload all these clips from my archive to the GoogleVideo site, and I said it was far too complicated to then access them afterwards. With YouTube, I can browse on the tags I gave the clips, I can embed the clips into my blog, I can subscribe to RSS feeds from users, or have RSS feeds being generated on a specific tag or a combination of tags. It’s not just the amount of videos online, it’s the way I can use them. You can also add or invite friends to your personal friends list, making it even more easy to track recently uploaded clips by people you want to stay in touch with or of whom you like the things they’ve uploaded so far. Another thing that comes along with adding friends is that you can also access their favorites, so you even have a lot more clips to look at. Also very popular is the starred rating option which allows you to express your fondness of clips other people have uploaded.

YouTube

I made my own archive on YouTube, uploading every funny/shocking/deranged/sexy clip I’ve received this last year. I’m up to 488 clips, and it’s still growing. I did this because I got tired of the forwarding, with my ‘out’ box always filled with ‘pending sending’ mails. Also, due to spam regulations, a lot of companies are blocking video clips or file extensions for their employees, making a lot of emails to former colleagues bounce or just redirect to the junk folder. Forwarding a short (especially compared to GoogleVideo !) URL to someone is a very good way to bypass this corporate rule and doesn’t cause my email load to exceed human limits.

You can also use YouTube to share private videos with friends or family, making it very easy to upload clips from family reunions, dinner parties or birthdays and share them with other loved ones online. Yeah, YouTube really gets to it. It’s a perfect community. No doubt. If Google should decide they want some web 2.0 action, like Yahoo has it’s Flickr… they should buy YouTube and forget about their GoogleVideo stuff. To be honest, I haven’t really used GoogleVideo since I came across YouTube in July because the time between uploading a clip, and actually being able to use it somewhere online is just way too long. With YouTube, depending on the filesize (max 100 mb), it only takes a few minutes before it’s available. And instantness is a very high-valued quality of any web service.

Adult footage isn’t allowed, and the self-regulation between users is pretty high. You can flag a clip for unreasonable content, and be sure it’ll disappear very very soon. Not at once, but the review monkeys over at YouTube are very alert and step in very often to remove copyrighted or obscene material. And another wonderful thing about YouTube is: there are no porn ads, no adult friend finder ads or whatsoever, making it a very clean site for all ages.

I can recommend YouTube to all of you, so y’all can broadcast yourselves.

Links :

* Signing up at YouTube (for free, of course)
* Coolz0r Videos

So now what? Well, YouTube is a perfect online sharing tool. But there’s offline fun too. And in comes Veoh, an initiative very much like YouTube, but with some extras. I’ll take you through the extras and explain a little how it works.

Veoh is an Internet Television Network that is able to reach anyone with a broadband Internet connection and a PC or a Mac.  All you need to do is download and install the Veoh software, and you’re off. (Took me about a minute to set it up, downloaded .exe file size: 2.38 mb)

Veoh allows anyone to create and broadcast their own TV show or a Channel full of shows. Not small streaming videos, but FULL-Screen, TV-Quality video. Veoh does not transcode the content, whereas YouTube renders it all and makes a Flash clip of it. Veoh offers it in it’s native encoding, and does not limit the file sizes/length of video. YouTube has a 100 mb limit. Veoh’s goal is to become the platform for producers of all sizes (from individuals to studios and everyone in between) to have a democratized TV broadcasting system. Democratized means unfiltered, thus including adult material.

Veoh has over 10,000 shows available for immediate consumption.  If you’re worried about being exposed to Adult content, Veoh has a built-in family filter that is on by default.  You can choose what rating not to go above. Filters are: TV-G, TV-PG, TV-14, TV-MA, Adults Only and ’shocking & offensive’. Altering those filters requires the password to be re-entered.

Veoh

Veoh has a stand-alone function built in, so what you’ve downloaded is also viewable when you’re not connected to the internet or on the move with your laptop. Prior to watching, the show must be downloaded to your computer. Veoh makes this process as easy as clicking a download button. Most shows will download within minutes or even seconds, others may take longer. Once a download is complete, you can watch the show. If you like the show, you can “subscribe” to it, and automatically get every new episode that the broadcaster publishes. It is FREE to subscribe to all shows . Think of this as a TiVo for Internet TV.

One of the coolest features is that you can manage your Veoh video queue remotely. So if you have Veoh installed on your PC/Mac at home, you can log into our system from work, and add stuff for your Veoh to download, so that you have it when you get home.

Veoh also has an integration for iPods, with over 3000 videos ready to download and play.

Veoh is based in San Diego, CA, is venture capital backed, and built by some pretty cool guys :-). CEO- Dmitry Shapiro built Akonix Systems, (an IM/P2P security company with over 1 million deployed enterprise seats), Chief Scientist – Dr. Ted Dunning built MusicMatch’s recommendation engine (sold to Yahoo). Full bios can be found here.

Getting Started :

* Download the tool for Mac OS X (10.3.9 and +) or PC (WinXP)
* Take a Tour, hosted by Veoh’s CEO, Dmitry Shapiro
* Learn how to make Veoh use iTunes to download videos

What other Video Archives are there left?

Not really plenty. I haven’t found or heard of any others that are building upon social networking, but there are some cool places where you can access pretty funny viral material.

* Viral X
* iFilm
* EatMail.tv (register)
* ViralMeister
* Lycos Viral

 

Democracy Video Player

28 Dec 2005

With Democracy, internet video becomes internet TV. It’s free and open for everyone to watch and broadcast. There are more than 300 channels in the Channel Guide that is built-in to Democracy. They’re as interesting and diverse as the internet itself. You can subscribe to any of them for free with a single click.

Democracy

Stop squinting at tedious web videos– sit back and watch big, high resolution videos one after another. It’s both easy to use and very powerful.

Subscribe to video RSS feeds (including podcasts, video blogs, and BitTorrent feeds), watch fullscreen, share with friends, free and open source.

Tune in now, download your player | Developer Code