a man suprglu-ed to the paperless, wireless, timeless and spaceless office

Don’t miss Southpark’s season 12 episode 6 “Over Logging” about the effects of losing your connection to the internet at home. Remember last time your beloved internet provider left you out in the blank and you had to check your Facebook and IM your pals? Well, you get the feeling.

Funny to see that this episode comes out shortly after Soutpark decided to put all their episodes online with no geographic restrictions. You can’t check this episode online yet due to contractual issues but it will be available in June. If you can’t wait, you know the drill.

Incidentally all the browsers featured in the computers in Southpark are Mac OS Safari showing a distressing “You are not connected to the internet message” (The TV station though shows a IE not found page).

Check the full Southpark online episodes guide here.

An excellent mashup, or a geo-localized short story written on Google maps bubbles by writer Charles Cummings. I’m halfway through it and about to fly to Edimburgh. Don’t tell me the end!

Visit the 21 Steps website

La Banda Municipal del Polo Norte has recorded a demo CD with 5 tracks and a nice sleeve design which features a bear. Its title “Iros Despidiendo de Todo” which would roughly translate for “Say Goodbye To Everything”, reminds me of Dougas Adams’ So Long And Thanks For The Fish form the Hitch Hicker’s Guide To The Galaxy saga. I’m still working out the connexions between the two.

And by the way, any band that features me in their acknowledgements if of course the best band in the world.

See them tonight in la Sala Monasterio

Read about the concert I saw by La Banda here.

Do The Test is the perfect online campaign (yes, viral of course) to raise awarness for cyclist’s accidents in the streets of London.

In a nutshell: while you are concentrating on driving you can become blind to events that you would normally notice. This “inattention blindness” is in most cases the reason why motorists collide with cyclists.

Never heard of “inattention blindness”? Try yours at Do The Test or watch this video very carefully.

Now you can answer the question: why would this video never work on TV?

The campaign is sponsored by Transport for London

I wrote a while ago about a couple of tv ads “inspired” either by online projects or videoclips available on YouTube.

Well, history repeats. A couple of weeks ago I found a gem on YouTube called Daft Hands, where a couple of hands with text on it danced to Daft Punk’s Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger (over 16 Million views as I’m writing this). The video spawned dozens of replies of people with text all over the body dancing to the tune.

My surprise was when a week ago I saw a commercial on TV by Spanish telecom Telefónica, where two hands with the terms of a special offer danced to a copycat of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.

Talking about Web 2.0 changing traditional media!

Here’s a nice video where you can see both and judge for yourself. First the commercial and next the original version.

Here’s a link to Daft Hands on YouTube.
Marvel yourself at Telefónica’s website (the 4th telecom in the world). God!

Here’s the presentation to the students of the “Design and Web Programming” course of the ” <target="_blanka href="http://www.cea.es/">Confederación de Empresarios de Andalucía.

You can download the pdf in Spanish here.

You can see last year’s presentation here.

Looking for some info on Google Maps API, I stumbled on this project where German artist Aram Bartholl plays with the Google satellite by placing physical Google Maps markers on the ground.

Here’s a picture:

Check Bartholl’s other projects where he explores the interactions between the web and the physical world.

www.datenform.de - Aram Bartholl’s website

I watched this documentary late last night. I just wanted to watch the beginning and let it for today but it turned out to be impossible to stop.

The film deals with copyrights, copylefts, intellectual property and how the net is changing well established business models while allowing for reach and creativity for the rest of us.

In the documentary you’ll find:

• Danger Mouse talking about his highly successful The Grey Album where he mashed Jay-Z Black Album with Beatles White Album (thus The Grey Album). It violated all kinds of copyrights but it’s a masterpiece. Obviously it was downloaded by millions, earning Danger Mouse just credibility and respect. Fancy a torrent?

Here’s the video with John Lennon breakdancing to Ringo Star’s DJing.

• Musician Girl Talk. He performs live with a laptop mixing and mashing every conceivable sample creating new real time songs. He would be willing to pay the billions he should, according to current copyright laws, for using the original songs, but even if he had the money it would take him no less than 50 years to get all the permissions from the owners.
• The Brazilian DJs from the Techno Brega scene in the north of Brazil (a kind of Techno Kitsch, don’t try at home). They mix and remix whatever they listen on the radio and download from the net, Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy this time. After that they distrubute their CDs for free expecting to attract fans to their live acts, a business model that is catching up in the traditional music industry.
• Larry Lessig, author of Free Culture and creator of the Creative Commons licensing model, talking about the need to protect intellectual property but also on how too restrictive copyright laws hinder creativity and access to culture by everybody.
• The guys from Pirate Bay in Sweden. Well you know them.

Funny at the end when Girl Talk remixes Gnarls Barkley’s (Cee-Lo and Danger Mouse) remix of Crazy done by the Brazilian Techno Brega DJ, and turns it into something completely new. You could see him rocking the house with this small sample and his laptop.

Check the trailer at the Creative Commons website
Watch the movie online
Download Good Copy Bad Copy from The Pirate Bay

Brilliant acting from the guys of Improveverywhere.com with 200 people freezing for 5 minutes in NY Grand Central Station.

Their motto “we cause scenes”. Judge for yourself.

Yesterday 185.000 views and today 630.000. Going viral. I’ll talk about it Thursday on the radio.

Check their other actions in Improveverywhere.com.

Via Criterion I discover Piclens, a new plugin for Firefox (Mac & Win) and Safari that allows you to browse images on the web full screen with an advanced cinematic interface. It just blew me away when I fired it up while in my Flickr account.

Heres one of my Flickr sets seen with Piclens.

Do yourself a favor and download this beauty.

Once you have it up and running try it with the just created group to save Flickr from Microsoft.

Extremely creative and yet simple video of two hands dancing to Daft Punk’s Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger. All in one take and no editing.

13,5 million views and counting.

Here’s the error Twitter spits out right now.

Cool design as long as you don’t see it too often.

Al igual que disponemos de algunas herramientas que nos permiten conocer las noticias y contenidos más destacados en la blogosfera, ya sea a nivel general o para algunas temáticas en concreto, para Twitter, este sistema de microblogging que poco a poco se va haciendo más popular, tenemos un memetracker específico para él.

Tweetmeme, desarrollado por el mismo equipo de Fav.or.it, un sistema de comentarios para blogs aún en beta cerrada, rastrea la información cada cinco minutos de los tweets que comparten los usuarios a sus grupos de amigos, de manera que nos crea una portada principal con los tweets más destacados, y junto a éstos, los tweets relacionados.

Además, en muchos de los tweets es normal encontrar enlaces a distintos tipos de contenidos, con lo que nos permitirá, mediante pestañas, filtrarlos. Para ello disponemos de las pestañas: Blogs, Imágenes, Vídeos y Audio.

Sería interesante juntar algunos de estos servicios con el propio Twitter, ya que estos servicios complementarios cubren las carencias del propio Twitter, como la de un buen buscador integrado, estadísticas, y otros servicios que dan valor al propio Twitter.

Vía | Download Squad
Enlace | Tweetmeme

Dado el éxito de Twitter, resulta extraño que no haya aparecido algún script que nos permita montar nuestro propio clon de este servicio. Los chicos de Automattic, encargados del desarrollo de Wordpress, que están que no paran, han creado un tema para este gestor de blogs que le otorga funcionalidades similares.

Lo han llamado Prologue y permite implementar sobre Wordpress un Twitter para un número reducido de usuarios. Los usuarios registrados como editores en el blog pueden enviar sus mensajes cortos directamente desde la página, a través de un pequeño cuadro de texto situado en la parte superior.

Cada uno de los mensajes enviados es una entrada en toda regla, por lo que dispone de su propia página con comentarios. Es decir, no deja de ser un blog con un tema que facilita la tarea de montar un sistema similar a Twitter. Ideal para grupos de amigos o compañeros de trabajo.

Vía | Twitter de Andrés Milleiro.
Más información | Wordpress.
Enlace | Prologue.

Looking for some naming tips I stumbled upon this funny name generator. It even checks the availability of the domain. Kewl.

Web 2.0 Company Name Generator

He expects to save the world with this song and he will no doubt be the next viral video. I wish he would only save us from spam and links to virtual casinos as he says. Don’t miss the end part when he sings about “lots of videos of people lip synching to we are the world”.

Kudos to Tom Willett for this great country ballad!