Do you remember?

When Firefox 3 launched last year, I said to Scott Drummond "There goes the URL!" and thank God. While it still recognised the cumbersome string of letters aligned for a seemingly ancient protocol, it also now recognised the names of sites. So after closing the tab containing a story on Bit.ly raising $2 million in funding, I decided I wanted to reference it and ponder in some fairly semantical and tangential fashion about these further steps away from URLs. I forgot what site the story was on though, and so just typed in "bit". Lo and behold:

[caption id="attachment_642" align="aligncenter" width="540" caption="Bit.ly raises a round of funding and I find my way back"][/caption]

We're seeing the same thing on our phones, where we no longer dial numbers, we call people. I don't know the phone numbers of any of my friends, hedging my bet on always being able to find them in some fashion. Skype takes this one step further with the complete absence of numbers. I can imagine explaining to children one day how you once needed a number to find someone, and having them say back to me "Why didn't you just call their name?"

In one simple update, amidst what were I'm sure hundreds of more important features, Firefox 3 relegated the URL to history. The phone number is well on its way, and I'm wondering what other staples of life are due for a swift Darwinian exit from our technological lives?

Up where we belong

Since the demise of social media (in my head) I've been struggling to get excited about something again. I was sitting thinking about opportunities for a client this morning, and I was reminded of the enthusiasm I talked about the potential of browsers with. This stems from a beautiful execution last year by Poke London on behalf of Orange called Balloonacy, which purported to be (and who is going to argue) the first Internet balloon race (I just noticed they won an award for it too, as it should be!).

The (thoroughly sexy) idea here is Balloonacy didn't quite exist anywhere, rather it played out over the pages of people who took part, and, flying left to right over the screen you would land on new web pages when you went off the right-hand side. It was an app that didn't require Facebook or an iPhone, it was a campaign that didn't require a media buy. It was in fact an execution that could only have been done online, and there is so little work out there we can really say that about.

I don't know if I'll actually be able to get something in the browser off the ground for this client, let's be honest there's a barrier to entry, not to mention compatability issues, but in the same way processing is getting faster, the walls around technology are getting lower, which means more people participate, which means we get where we're going faster than we did before.

As I said over at Socialized when the web was abuzz with Skittles nonsense, we're all leveraging each other's work, and getting there together.

Do androids dream of these electric sheep?

Just found the below via Crackunit, which is a lot of fun. Watch.



Your friend and mine, Julian Cole, said the key to going viral is friendship. Which is nonsense. Even if Jules and I are friends (which we are).

The key to going viral is having something interesting to share, and finding it interesting or amusing regardless of whether you're somehow attached to it or not. And as we all find different stuff amusing and/or interesting, that is harder than it would seem.

For instance, if you had told me yesterday I was going to blog about sheep with LED lights strapped to their backs, I would have assured you you were quite mistaken.

And there you have it.

I'm a New York City man

"I am trying to draw every person in New York." - Jason Polan.

A few thoughts:

• I love a big, hairy, audacious goal, and this is exactly that


• Faber Castell, Caran D'ache, Canson, etc. should be all over this


• It's a nice extension of Jason's own brand as an artist


• This feels like a visualisation of Hemingway's "For sale: baby shoes, never worn."


• The trick is going to be in catching the moment rather than the person, the intent rather than the outcome.

Found via Andrew Cafourek's tumblog. I struggle to think of a better way to pass the time.

The end has no end

If you haven't seen the incredible work of Kutiman yet, make it your bid-ness to do so today. His remix of not only music but words and vision, all taken from YouTube clips is nothing short of amazing. Faris dropped some science around this the other day, delivering the following quote which sums it up (equal parts nicely and awkwardly):

It's because media has become much easier to reproduce thanks to the radical decentralisation of the economics of cultural production [which is the phrase I'm backing as a substitute to social media - I'm not very hopeful it will catch on.]

We all know how I feel about social media. I think Faris "radical decentralisation" is more easily summed up by simply stating it is now as easy to create content as it is to consume it.



Perhaps we need to extend that to being "recreate" content?

I'm a faker

From the "You know better than to eat those" department.

[caption id="attachment_617" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Chewy Chips Ahoy!"][/caption]

Wait, what does that say at the bottom?!?

[caption id="attachment_618" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Made with real chocolate chips!"][/caption]

Real chocolate chips? Picked by immigrant-labour hand fresh from the chocolate-chip tree? Flavouring rabbit droppings and mixing them in would make a more natural cookie for God's sake!

Can you tell it's Monday?

Intent = stuff white people like

"People have a really good  ability to see through you projects on the Internet that are just done to try and make you famous."



Great quote. This is why I bang on about INTENT!

Watch this Google talk, from Christian Lander, author of brilliant blog Stuff White People Like.