Encounters of the weird kind

Italian artist Franco Brambilla is being featured in Wired this month with his delightful weird images of Old Skool photographs in which little aliens appear. Vintage images turn into settings for encounters of the weird kind. Great stuff!

Weird semantic coincidence

First I write about semantic web and then I get together with an ex-colleague who wrote a doctorate on Topical facets, the semantic patterns between documents and vocabulary. Weird! And here I'm all wired up, writing a memo for my colleagues to check whether we could actually take this up and run with it and see what gives. Fascinating stuff! And the doctorate is public, here's where you can find it. Not that I understand, I get the basics. But for now, that shoud suffice.

Semantic web is getting somewhere with Open Calais

The OpenCalais Web Service automatically creates rich semantic metadata for the content you write or load up. Using natural language processing (NLP), machine learning and other methods, Calais analyzes documents and finds the entities within it. But, Calais goes well beyond classic entity identification and returns the facts and events hidden within texts as well.

Frankly, I hadn't heard from it and I read that less than two years into the project, 18,000 developers have joined the OpenCalais community and are now processing four million documents per day, according to Tom Tague, OpenCalais Initiative lead, Thomson Reuters. New sites using it are being announced regularly.

How does it work? If I now write about myself, living in Antwerp, working in e-government, driving a secondhand Renault and having taken the train to work in Brussels today, the result would something like this:

They did it! They got the money

Two weeks after launching a mission to raise $250,000 (£152,500) to finance their latest record, hip hop pioneers Public Enemy have hit the $50,000 (£30,500) mark through Amsterdam-based site Sellaband.com.
More than 700 people in 50 countries donated to the cause, making it the site’s fastest fund-raising effort to date, and it puts Chuck D and crew on course to make their full target by the New Year. Which reminds me of this Dutch guy who, a couple of years ago, became famous for about two sec's, asking everyone to donate 1 euro on his website so that he could buy himself a Hummer ...

Rickrolling ... wtf?

I'm probably the last one to read about Rickrolling? Or are we talking about an internet meme that can only be appreciated by those who actually are old enough to actually have listened to the actual Rick Astley crooning his stuff in the eighties? Apparantly, rickrolling is (and now I quote from Wikipedia)a bait and switch: a person provides a web link that they claim is relevant to the topic at hand, but the link actually takes the user to the Astley video of the 'Never gonna give you up' hitsong. The URL can be masked or obfuscated in some manner so that the user cannot determine the true destination of the link without clicking. When a person clicks on the link and is led to the web page, he or she is said to have been "Rickrolled".

Interesting though: as the practice has spread, two of the various Rickrolling videos available online have been viewed more than 39 million times combined. Rickrolling has extended beyond Web links to playing the video or song disruptively in other situations, including public places; this culminated when Astley and the song made a surprise appearance in the 2008 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, a televised event with tens of millions of viewers.

Now then: is this an internet meme or a cool marketing trick?

iTunes is a Time-Machine

One is so focussed on using iTunes for new stuff. I have been using it the same way I used to make 4 or 5 cassettes a year with songs taped from the radio ... a running inventory on the hits & stuff of the moment. I do the same with iTunes: by the end of the year I'll have a 2009-list that will be bétter than the 2009 compilations I won't have to buy anymore. Recently I started using iTunes very differently and as the iTunes offering expands it gets even more fun: downloading old stuff. From ages ago, stuff I only have on vinyl. A lot of the times Very Old Stuff has been digitally remastered and sounds even better than it used to do. Right now I'm listening to the digitally remastered Venus & Mars by McCartney & Wings, a record my sister had somewhere mid-70's. Nostalgia! And it still sounds great (and after 30 odd years I still now it by heart)

we will be losing our minds, eventually

... or rather: we will start losing the capacity of using our minds. Why bother remembering songs when you can have them recognized through using intelligent music meta-data tools. Now you can doodle all you like and this cool program will translate your drawings and doodles through image recognition in real images. Great stuff! Pitty the site itself is unavailable. Chinese censorship?