Weezer captures the essence of the internets
How have I missed this video?
Weezer’s music video Pork and Beans features, well, um, just about everybody. Everybody of YouTube fame, that is. It’s like a big ROFLCon reunion.
I’ve been trying to keep track of the references. Spot any others?
- Diet Coke + Mentos
- Chocolate Rain
- It’s Peanut Butter Jelly Time
- Daft Hands
- Daft Bodies
- Numa Numa
- Evolution of Dance
- Ms. South Carolina
- Shoes
- Best Sex Ever!!!
- Guinness World Record for most T-Shirts worn at one time
There’s still quite a few I don’t recognize. What’s the one with the strange monkey face?
Spread Firefox: Download Day!
Today’s the day to download the newest version of Mozilla Firefox, the fast and free browser.
Firefox 3 has a number of cool features, which you can read about in this field guide. There is also the revamped ccSearch in the browser’s toolbar. This search function identifes CC-licensed works from a range of sources by indexing works tagged with ccREL, the metadata specification developed by Creative Commons to express its licensing elements.
As for the celebrated Download Day, Spread Firefox has always been a stellar example of how to evangelize a good cause and generate community interest. Their past projects have been impressive and effectual: campus reps, Mozilla On the Street Interviews, globally-synchronized parties, CD distributions, T-shirt contests, and plenty more.
A key aspect of Spread Firefox’s campaign success is its openness. Rather than a central bottleneck stopping up ideas, the Spread Firefox community is organized by nodes and decentralized fora. Their members are open to new strategies, new themes, new structures. If you thinks it’s a brilliant idea to plow the Firefox logo corn field so that it can be seen by Google Maps, then more power to you. If you want to print giant stickers and post them around town, then do it.
Having an online platform solely dedicated to community-driven marketing is incredibly powerful. Open up your organization and let waves of ideas pore in from your membership. It is a brilliant way to harness the long tail of activism and community outreach.The good stuff will stick and, well, the lesser plans will go back to the drawing board.
So yeah, here’s a good idea: DOWNLOAD FIREFOX 3 TODAY and be part of an attempt for the Guinness Book of World Records.
Image: Screenshot from June 18, 12:12 UTC. Wow, 6 million downloads so far!
PowerPoint Karaoke on Vacation
As the Boston Globe notes, “If you’ve never heard of PowerPoint Karaoke, that probably means you’re neither German nor a hardcore techie.”
Well, I suppose I’m guilty on two counts. But at least that helps explain why I adore this über-g33k party game: PowerPoint Karaoke.
The idea of PowerPoint Karaoke is simple. Grab a beamer, a laptop, a few beers, and line up the victims contestants in front of the crowd. Each person is given five minutes to improvise a presentation based on a random set of PowerPoint slides. Points go to style and humor, and the more ironically a corporate slogan rolls of your tongue, the better. (video, for an example)
But here’s the twist. Instead of selecting a standard just-ripped-these-awful-slides-from-the-US-Government*, the Waving Cat and I thought it would be much more fun to PowerPoint Karaoke to some thing different. Namely, to a stranger’s vacation photo album. I’ve tried to dig up a few examples to prove what I mean, but somehow goolging “tacky tourist” wasn’t as successful as I had hoped. Maybe you can come up with some good text anyway!
* A very interesting side note in the history of PowerPoint. US military personnel are notoriously fond of overloading slides with blinking fonts and spiraling graphics. The officers’ presentations had gotten so bad that the Pentagon once had to crack down and banned the software from all important briefings. (^_^) Go, go PowerPoint Rangers!
Images: Roadside Kitsch by alasam CC BY NC ND 2.0, A Bony Honeymoon posted by seriykotik1970 CC BY NC SA 2.0, and The Tacky Tourist Award by The G-tastic 7CC BY SA 2.0
