My doll, myself
Posted: Tuesday, January 30, 2007 12:25 AM by Will Femia
Young student's documentary leaving audiences stunned - No joke, it's pretty stunning. Fifty years ago a study found that black children preferred white dolls to black dolls. The study was conducted again, less formally by a girl making a film for her high school class. Here it is.
Speaking of distorted self image, extreme photo retouching
This commercial for "Synth Coke" is only 37 seconds long but you're going to watch it at least twice and then sit there for a minute or two thinking of how many layers of "wrong" it has. Presumably it's more fulfilling than other cocaine alternatives.
What we don't know - 42* of the biggest questions in science. (*** Wiki warning on this one.)
Creative photos by Chema Madoz
Speaking of scrolling through interesting images, "Each image portrays a specific quantity of something." I like the soda cans and the shipping containers. The point is apparently to send an environment message about consumption.
A quick word about Googlebombs - You may know that when a lot of people link to the same thing with the same words, search engines associate those words with what they're linking to. Sometimes a campaign is organized to deliberately associate a word or phrase with a result. The most famous is probably that a search for "miserable failure" returns the biography of George W. Bush. Not anymore.
New ROI of blogging report from Forrester - Is blogging worth it for businesses? Though it doesn't give a definitive answer, it outlines some ways to assess the value of a blog to a business.
Speaking of the value of blogging, ascertaining that value is not a debate for the meek.
Amapedia is a new site from Amazon.com. It's a product wiki, which means the public can write and edit entries about Amazon.com products. It's still brand new, so not very meaty, but I still have to wonder why this is better than the product reviews as comments on Amazon itself.
At Least 25 Million Americans Pirate Movies - That is WAY higher than I ever would have guessed.
Remember that item about the president of India posting a question on Yahoo Answers? Well now Hilary Clinton posted a question to Yahoo Answers. Of course, Hilary is working that "let's have a conversation" angle in her campaign, so this fits right in. I don't know why, but I was completely ready to believe that the president of India had posted his question but I can't bring myself to believe that Hilary actually submitted her question.
It takes 35 seconds to get to the point, and you probably won't need to watch it for much longer past that. But in the category of trendspotting I think it's worth noting the number of people who know the entire Thriller dance and perform it as a line dance. In the last Halloween parade here in the City there were groups of people dressed as Zombies who would suddenly break into the Thriller dance. I can definitely see this integrated into the traditional American wedding dance set along with the Chicken Dance and the Electric Slide.
Books mapped - I can't imagine how long this will take them, but they've found a way to find the locations of settings in books and plot them on a map. Actually, the whole thing could be handled with a lot of automation since they are already taking in the text of the work. Scan the text for place names and automatically plot them. Someone's still going to have to go in and double check for things like Manhattan, Kansas.
"Search for music by singing or humming part of a song. All you need is a microphone." OK, not exactly. The way it works is that people record themselves singing songs and the site searches against that database when it does a voice search. After singing just about every song I know into the thing I managed to get three or four to guess my song correctly. Though I don't doubt that the many failures were due to my lousy singing, I also have to wonder if party of the problem was that I wasn't singing as badly as the people who have filled the database. Another problem may be that no one had recorded the song into the system yet. In an effort to test the "hum it if you don't know the words, I made myself hoarse on The Outfield's "Your Love" before I figured out that it just wasn't in the system to find (and surely not that my falsetto is at all flawed).
Speaking of free ways to record music, this gal used YouTube and her online star is rising.
Wicked cool 3D spinning Flash map of the world by economic activity.
Stop the Iran war before it starts - I was wondering when we'd hear from Scott Ritter. I remember him well before the war insisting in the face of tremendous criticism that Iraq had no WMD. Since so many people bashed and smeared him I would have thought he'd do an I-told-you-so by now.
Reverse product placement sounds at first like a new advertising idea: take a fictional product made popular by a fictional show, movie, video, etc and make it real. But isn't that basically the same as merchandising?
Where are they now? Interview with “Switcher Girl” Ellen Feiss - I could never really get into the whole cult of Ellen so I was surprised to find myself reading so much of the interview. I think what's refreshing about it is that she's not really famous (remember, no one on the Web is famous) so it's an interview about what minor celebrity is like.
This electric car answers a question I've often wondered. It's generally acknowledged that electric vehicles are dangerously quiet. They have a way of sneaking up on pedestrians. So if a vehicle didn't make a sound, what sound would be artificially added? If you've been to an airport you know we can rule out a high pitched beep by virtue of sheer annoyance. What about an electric motorcycle? Maybe just put a baseball card in the spokes?
Reggie Watts: Out of control - Fun with a microphone and a loop machine.
A car seat with a 5 point racing harness welded to a robotic arm.
