Every Person in New York
Jason Polan is trying to draw every person in New York.
If I do draw you, you will see yourself (or rather, a drawing that hopefully somewhat resembles you) on this blog that evening.
When the project is completed we will all have a get together.
FBI Top Ten Anniversary
Yesterday was the 60th anniversary of the FBI’s Top Ten Most Wanted list.
The year was 1949, and a reporter came to the FBI with a novel question: who were the “toughest guys” we were after? We responded with photos of 10 fugitives, which were published on the front page of The Washington Daily News. Although we didn’t know it at the time, a crime-fighting institution was born.
The “Top Ten” list immediately caught the public’s attention, and several of the fugitives were captured as a result of the media exposure. The following year—on March 14, 1950—we formally established our Ten Most Wanted Fugitives program, relying on the support of the public to help us capture the worst of the worst.
The mugshot archive.
dynamo
Independent filmmakers will soon have a new option for renting their films to viewers online: Dynamo, a start-up set to be announced at South by Southwest on Saturday evening, which will allow video producers to set their own prices and embed their videos wherever they want.
Chatroulette Map
We can geolocate pervs now. (via)
NOON
Bye-Bye, Boner Party
Today Ned Hepburn shut it down. Boner Party, perhaps the greatest bait-and-switch blog of our time, (I’ll distract you with breasts but really I’m going to talk about how it’d be great to just settle down.) is over and done with.
I’m sad to see it go, but I think the last post sums it all up.
SarcMark
The punctuation mark for people who don’t understand sarcasm.
(thanks, Aaron)
Chatroulette Challenge
Renner, should you choose to accept it, I challenge you to 17 minutes on Chatroulette and a report of what you find.
Selleck Waterfall Sandwich
Shit William Shatner Says
Twitter sensation Shit My Dad Says is becoming a TV pilot with William Shatner set to play the larger-than-life dad at the center of it.
What will they call the show if the pilot makes it?
A very nifty twitter aggregator
STL Tweets is only for Saint Louis, but it was created with locative extensibility in mind. Using a secret sauce, it aggregates local tweets into categories and subcategories and finds the most linked articles and pictures. It’s more compelling to look at than explain; needless to say, this is precisely the sort of thing that should have existed for awhile, but hasn’t (at least, not well implemented). Kudos to the folks at Infuz for pulling it off.
One thing I did notice was that an occasional non-STL tweet would make it into the fray or it would flat out miss some users in the STL area. There is nothing that can be done about that, apparently, unless twitter fixes its hidden fail whales in the geocode search API.
ChatRoulette
It is what the title implies.
There was a man who wore a deer head and opened every conversation with “What up DOE!?” A guy from Sweden was reportedly speed-drawing strangers’ portraits. Someone with a guitar was improvising songs for anyone who’d give him a topic. One man popped up on people’s screens in the act of fornicating with a head of lettuce. Others dressed like ninjas, tried to persuade women to expose themselves, and played spontaneous transcontinental games of Connect Four. Occasionally, people even made nonvirtual connections: One punk-music blogger met a group of people from Michigan who ended up driving eleven hours to crash at his house for a concert in New York. And then, of course, fairly often, there was this kind of thing: “I saw some hot chicks then all of a sudden there was a man with a glass in his butthole.” I sing the body electronic.
(via marginal revolution)
Slaughterhouse 90210
Quite possibly the best tumblr ever?
we stand supremely blessed
Barry posted some of my photographs on O Empire Wide and Glorious.
It’s lonely in the modern world.
Even in your company, I feel so alone. (Dwell, September 2009.)
Unhappy Hipsters. (Thanks, Kate.)
reinventing content
Apple’s goal is to offer a new platform for content creators to reinvent books, magazines and online content — in addition to offering a new avenue for content producers to make money. That platform will likely be far broader than just a tablet device, and will extend to every device or computer that iTunes touches.
Pomo Jukebox
Pomo Jukebox is a new music blog I’m contributing to. Go have a look.
After Three Months, Only 35 Subscriptions for Newsday’s Web Site
Wah wah wah waaaaah (as in sad trombone)
UPDATE: See, also, the web game, Paywall!
The 2009 Feltron Report is out.
For Phil
YouTube has confirmed its first live major sporting deal, announcing today that it will host live Indian Premier League cricket matches in the UK, and casting into doubt the value of British TV broadcast rights.
The YouTube deal involves every country outside the US – a significantly larger scope than reports had suggested. It was thought that YouTube would only stream live matches to countries that did not have TV deals with the IPL.
The two-year deal gives the Google-owned YouTube the exclusive rights to stream IPL matches online, with the two companies splitting revenue from sponsorship and advertising.
NYT paywall
This won’t affect me since I read the hard print copy at my local café, but it’s still dumb:
Taking a step that has tempted and terrified much of the newspaper industry, The New York Times announced on Wednesday that it would charge some frequent readers for access to its Web site — news that drew ample reaction from media analysts and consumers, ranging from enthusiastic to withering.
I foresee a bleak, copy-and-paste future for the news organization with my email inbox filled with entire NYT articles from friends who actually shell out the cash for a subscription.
Indie+Relief
Tomorrow, January 20th, a group of 135 independent Mac and iPhone developers will be donating the sales for the day to assist Haiti in their recovery from last week’s earthquake. Each company is listed with their main application and what charity they will be donating to. My company, BitBQ, will be participating and donating to Doctors Without Borders.
There’s a lot of great software on that page, as well as great charities. If you’re the in market for any of it, tomorrow would be a great day to buy it. You get software, Haitians get help.
Perforation Problems
Handwritten wisdom and a heart full of soul from Iggy Pop, circa 1995.
it’s been a long road since then, but pressure never ends in this life. ‘perforation problems’ by the way means to me also the holes that will always exist in any story we try to make of our lives. so hang on, my love, and grow big and strong and take your hits and keep going.
all my love to a really beautiful girl. that’s you laurence.
iggy pop
(Thanks to Kate Theimer of ArchivesNext for pointing to this by way of Facebook.)
Brick Tumblr
For any of you that loved Brick, the 2005 teen noir film by Rian Johnson, he recently started a tumblr to put up various images. Focus Features had taken down the official Brick site for a while, and the Tumblr is filled with goodies.
noah | networked organisms and habitats
An open-source citizen science project by three of my classmates.
I don’t have an iPhone, or even a data plan for the smartphone I do have, so I can’t submit critter spottings to Project Noah. All you people with your fancy iPhones can contribute, though, using Noah’s beta iPhone app; sign up on the site to be a tester.