“web”

In what must be one of its most bizarre moves to date, Google just released a collaborative-tagging game (!): Google Images Labeler. It frankly seems against the company’s algorithmic DNA and I almost dismissed it at first, but perhaps it’ll work… for a while: it’s actually interesting to play but the interest fades quickly. (Via John Battelle)

I can’t remember where I got this notion that Google Finance was just an uninteresting, me-too product¹ from Google, but the prejudice set in without my noticing (as, alas, so many do) and it was strong enough that I hadn’t deigned to pay them a visit until I chanced upon them today.

Here are some screenshots of both Google Finance and Yahoo Finance (the current king of the hill) set to display Google’s stock information. There’s simply no comparison: Google outshines Yahoo “in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars.”^EEM

¹ Perhaps it filtered somehow from the popularish blog GigaOM, who to my utter amazement finds Google Finance “downright tiresome and plain ugly.. clearly.. a me-too move.”

This is some fiendishly impressive photoshop.

Sexy Loners^WP is (or rather, was, it just closed this March) one fetishy, weird, morbid, scabrous, bizarre, twisted, risqué, potentially-offensive webcomic (really, so don’t click ahead and complain about it!) with subtitles to match (Story of my life… got the right girl, got the wrong sexual fetish—I jerked myself today, to see if I still feel. I focus on the stain, the only thing that’s real.—Sometimes I think God hates me, but then I remember that it’s probably because I do strips like this one.—When the gods want to punish us, they answer our prayers—The biggest threat to otakus is natural selection.—If I really knew a surefire way of getting laid, do you think I would have time to write a strip about it?). It also has the best interface I’ve seen for a webcomic and got me excited all over again at the possibilities of a wikicriticism (see The Lighter Side of Tentacle Hentai or Video Girl Etchi I to see how much the commentary adds to the strips).

Jon Aquino, father of YubNub, is onto something with his idea of deep software:

To my constern, I could only venture Vim, Mathematica, and some tentative candidates to his growing list, so please pay his post a visit and contribute.

There was on the thread, though, one nomination to the title of deep software that I simply can’t skip, because I happen to agree that the nominee is one of the best pieces of software there has been (and its author build it when he was, get this, eighteen; see Rolling Stones article on him) and because the nomination itself is just damn good writing.

And I am, because it really, really, really is true: YouTube’s lonelygirl15 is the birth of a new art form.

How Gibsonian (or Laughing-man-esque) the whole video-cult esoterica was, don’t you think? (Though no one would have predicted that we would become obsessed with a (fictional) chirpy teen.) Danah boyd has some interesting things to say and the New York Time’s article on the memebomb is outstanding (but would some link love really kill them?).

I knew I wasn’t the only workspace-obsessed geek out there: there’s an 800-photo-strong Flickr group of like-minded fellas!

Interesting: hundreds of people are just pouring to Imagery from, of all places, Slovakia^WP. This Slovakian website apperas to be the cause. How weird (I did nothing particular for this to happen) and how cool (it’s the 21st language on which there’s written record of Imagery talk!).