Cows are SO chic.

Sometimes, photo comments make my day:

Preppy Overload

I wonder if Facebook somehow knows I went sailing this weekend.

G-Chat Safety

Clarissa: why are you alone right now
and not with your duchess
Cameron: I’m GChatting her
right
now
Clarissa: G-Sex
use protection!
even on the interwebs

Yelp Is For Hookers And Blow

We Need a Yelp Italy – Yelp

The New Dork (Jay-Z Spoof)

Thanks, Jenny!

Privacy vs. Transparency

A little exchange I had regarding privacy (which I do not really value as highly as I value transparency). I learned that not everyone shares my values, and that, for many, eschewing Google products is the most appropriate choice:

Thanks for allowing me to learn something new, Steve!

Opinion: Why I’m dropping Google: Google Buzz, blog deletions show the search giant doesn’t respect users’ privacy – Computer World

Mature, Adult Relationships

How The Internet Is Saving Haiti

By connecting humans to one another, the internet has revolutionized communication, and by extension it has also revolutionized aspects of every other discipline. This can be seen quite clearly in the lightning-fast response to the post-earthquake humanitarian crisis in Haiti.

Within an hour of the quake, news reports were disseminated across the globe instantly. Those reports made mention of the quake, its location, and its severity. That put aid agencies on alert, and sparked hundreds of thousands of subsequent phone calls between consular officials, humanitarian/aid organizations, foreign militaries, airlines, medical staff, concerned families, et cetera. The fight to save Haiti became viral, and the virus’ method of delivery was undoubtedly the internet.

The internet has allowed for much more than quick dissemination and virality of news results. On Wednesday, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal posted image galleries online which effectively communicate the scale of the destruction to outsiders. The image galleries act as a crucial emotional appeal to humans’ nurturing instincts, and are most probably responsible for a surge in the size and quantity of charitable donations being made.

Already, Haitian-American recording artist Wyclef Jean has managed to raise more than $750,000 for his Haiti-focused charity, Yele, by soliciting donations via Twitter. His charity accepts donations via the internet, and through SMS shortcode (Anyone on an American wireless carrier who texts ‘YELE’ to the phone number 501 501 makes a donation of $5 to Yele which is charged to their mobile phone bill). Without the viral platform that Twitter offers, Wyclef Jean’s charity surely would have raised much less money.

The immediacy, virality, and rich media offered by our modern internet has surely helped save the lives of Haitians who would’ve perished without it.

If you’d like to make a donation to the relief effort, consider the following organizations:

Direct Relief International
Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières
Yele

Facebook Profile Photos in Latin America Are Unintentional Hilarity

I’ve just come across perhaps the funniest yet-undiscovered thing on the internet. It seems that young people in Latin America are stylizing their Facebook profile photos, and with predictably hilarious results:

Those sunglasses are boss, but the fierce nickname, ‘El Calen’, really adds to the coolness factor.

Classy. Bonus points for the stars in the background.

How could she still be single with that money profile pic?

Killin’ it with those shades! Don’t mess with this muchacho.

DANGER! Skinny dancers! Yay-yo!

Adding insult to injury, many of the accused joined the ‘Panama City, FL’ regional network–instead of their native Panama–by mistake.

I’ll let y’all find the rest.

Twitter Avatars Can Rap

Joell Ortiz – Food For Thought

Twitter Disguised As Excel

I’ve seen games in Excel before, but this is something else:

Spreadtweet is a Twitter client that makes a person’s incoming Twitter stream look like a typical Excel spreadsheet, giving the impression that an employee is working when they really are not.

Via The Type-A Way (Thanks, Marina!)

Gist Previewed

I sat down with Gist CEO T.A. McCann last Friday and got a personalized introduction to their messaging application. I’m finally importing all my messaging, contacts, and social networking data into Gist so I can use it as my centralized messaging center day-to-day.

It’s fascinating what kinds of things Gist can tell you about your contacts:

Imagine I had a meeting scheduled with Marcelo Calbucci next week. I could look at his Gist profile and see which media organizations had mentioned him in the last week, and what they wrote about him. That way, I can be caught up on what’s going on in Marcelo’s world before even sitting down with him.

Gist functions in a very similar fashion to my BlackBerry’s Messages application, and by that I mean that it’s a centralized destination that gives a timeline of my communication with all my contacts no matter the platform (email, Facebook messaging, Twitter, et cetera). That kind of continuity and context is important in our modern, connected, busy world. And to top it off, you can reply using any and all platforms right from Gist. No need to open up Facebook or Gmail in a separate tab.

This thing is just going to blow Google Wave out of the water because it harnesses the power of context. It combines communication and contextual relationships into one, bringing a human element into messaging–something that Google could only wish they’d thought of building into Wave.

It seems like this product was purpose-built for me. If they made me pay monthly for it, I would–in a second.

I’m going to write about any new Gist features that strike my fancy each week, as I get to know the software better, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, try it out yourself: https://beta.gist.com/dashboard

‘Internet Dollars’ Defined

internet dollars – /ˈɪntərˌnɛt/ /ˈdɒlərs/ - pl. noun

1. the exposure and web-visitor traffic showered upon internet startup companies’ websites, which earn the company legitimacy and fame but generate little to no actual revenue.
2. what 90%+ of internet companies thrive on.
3. the lack of a real business model or end-game.

Origin:

2004; English compound phrase theoretical + internet + dollars, “South Park”, Episode 1204¹

1. The [South Park character] boys post a music video on YouToob and go to what looks like an employment office to collect their money. In the waiting room, they encounter many Internet sensations including Tay Zonday, the Numa Numa guy, and the sneezing baby panda. They were all waiting for their millions in Internet theoretical dollars.

What moral does “Southpark” leave you with? Kyle said, “We thought we could make money on the Internet. But, while the Internet is new and exciting for creative people, it hasn’t matured as a distribution mechanism to the extent that warrants a trade of real and immediate income opportunities for the promise of future online revenue. It will be a few years before digital media distribution on the Internet can be monetized to an extent that necessitates content producers to forego their fair value in more traditional media.”²

2. “Southpark: Internet Theoretical Dollars”

dollar /ˈdɒlər/ noun
1. a paper money, silver or cupronickel coin, and monetary unit of the United States, equal to 100 cents. Symbol: $

Origin:
1545–55; earlier daler < LG, Dutch daler; c. German Taler, short for Joachimsthaler coin minted in Joachimsthal in Bohemia.

internet /ˈɪntərˌnɛt/
1. a vast computer network linking smaller computer networks worldwide
2. a series of tubes

Origin:
1990-1995; Albert Gore, American politician³. Vinton Cerf, Robert Kahn, creators of TCP/IP protocol.

3. “During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the internet.” -Albert Gore. March 9th, 1999. CNN’s ‘Late Edition’ with Wolf Blitzer. (link)

I was prompted to define internet dollars by phenom internet entrepreneur Arianna O’Dell (@r_e_on_a), co-founder of FlyByMusic, who is smart enough not to chase internet dollars!

Doctors Now Unnecessary

When you can tap the knowledge of everyone you know, on a single platform, with responses coming at you near instantaneously, who needs a specialist anymore?:

Twitter Tee

Link