This is amazing. I won’t spoil it for you, click the picture above and have a go.

Have you ever wondered what a bird’s favourite font is? Well, that’s the sort of issue my mind turns to on a Friday afternoon. Check out Type Nesting, a collection of homely nests inside various letters of the signage alphabet.

Apparently they prefer the letter R…

Where were you when you heard Michael Jackson had died? It really doesn’t matter I’m afraid. Sorry.

We’re living in a time when information is more mobile than ever and things happen FAST even in your pocket. You don’t need to be there, you just need a hotspot. The video above shows the news breaking on Twitscoop, which tracks Twitter trends. It’s fascinating, this is how information behaves in real time, it’s alive.

All of the frantic information, rumour and then iPhone scrambles for valid news sources to verify the story, led to a massive spike in internet data usage. Twitter was groaning under the strain, think of the poor birdies trying to lift that massive King-of-Pop sized whale…

In fact Twitter became the star of the show, as in addition to the turmoil in Iran, Michael Jackson’s death was something which offered one of its first true tests, the world was really relying on it to find out what was happening. It’s no good Googling “Michael Jackson Cardiac Arrest” in the middle of the night when you suspect someone is surely pulling your leg, there’s no cached information to draw on. MJ hadn’t had the foresight to put out a press release or preschedule his multiple organ failure to coincide with the evening news (although Uri Geller seemed strangely available for comment). No, Twitter is the immediacy search engine™, the only way to find out what’s going on right now. No wonder so many important people are frightened of it.

And so maybe it’s fitting that Twitter also offers up the best tribute to Michael Jackson I’ve come across so far, the inspired Billie Tweets by 9Astronauts. I could try and explain but it’s easier if you just click this link and see it for yourself.

Amazing.

These really are fascinating times we’re living in.

Rest in peace Michael.

What is it with Twitter? Or more specifically, why don’t people understand it? Or, even more specifically, why are those people still so fascinated by it? Are they mystified? Outraged? If they don’t like it, perhaps they’re the ones who should turn the computer off and go outside…

That wasn’t a very well constructed opening paragraph, but at least it contained fully formed words RTHR THN TXT SPK, that’s a big bug bear of Twitter-haters.

It’s generated a lot of interest in the press as it goes mainstream, but what is Twitter exactly? The image above is from a recent article in The Sunday Times, which I would have expected to have more of a clue really.

They’re calling it a micro-blogging service, but it isn’t really something that’s easily classified because it’s not a new type of anything, it’s the first of something else. People have come to understand blogs, but they’re hard work, you have to write proper sentences and everything, you have to have a point of view and a (yawn) purpose. You don’t need any of these things with Twitter, you just write up to 140 characters about whatever you like, what you’re eating or thinking, what you’ve just read, or just restate someone else’s comment which you found interesting (the fabled ReTweet). It’s all very confusing, except that it’s not, it really isn’t. You write stuff when you feel like it and read other people’s stuff when you don’t. That’s it. Really.

If anything, it’s too simple. People expecting a hugely complex technological and sociological phenomenon are often left baffled by the straightforwardness of it all with a feeling that they must have misunderstood something. It’s just people typing. Any criticism of Twitter’s content is only really a criticism of real people’s preoccupations. So, the the question shouldn’t be ‘What is Twitter?’ but ‘What’s the point?’

Read the rest of this entry…

I love this sort of thing, I think I might have a problem.

This looks like and oldie (it’s dated 2003) but I’ve only just found it. Turn your site (or anyone else’s for that matter) into a kaleidoscope by entering the URL and sitting back to watch all the JPG images from that page mashed up for your viewing pleasure.

Here are some from this very site…

From Project Euh, there’s other nonsense on there too…