If you're anything like me, you despise the likes of Justin Bieber with their teenager pop "music". Well, since I listened to his latest single, my opinion has changed: I now think his music is awesome... if slowed down 8 times. The computer-algorithm-generated crap that's "U Smile" becomes a 35 minute ambient epic. Check it out for yourself:
Impressive, uh? Sounds like something out of an epic movie soundtrack. Or Sigur Rós. If you want to create your own ambient sounds, just follow this tutorial at Lifehacker.
Tyrannybook was born as part Amnesty International's plan for 2010 of getting more involved in social networks, both to gain the visibility inherent to these web platforms, and to facilitate the contact between the causes it promotes and the public. The network aims to generate a global consciousness about the countless atrocities that take place across the globe.
As the name implies, the website is a Facebook clone, and looks almost exactly the same, with the familiar blue giving way to an aggressive red.
Using a following system, the users can be updated about the faults committed by those leaders against the Human Rights. It’s up to each user to decide which leaders they are most interested to watch. The profiles of the tyrants are released by Amnesty, and can be updated both by the organization itself and by the users.
For now there are ten tyrants in the site: Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Omar Al-Bashir of Sudan, Kim Jong Il of North Korea, Than Shwe of Myanmar, Hu Jintau of China, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, Thomas Lubanga Dyilo of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Radovan Karadzic of Serbia, Aleksandr Lukashenka of Belarus and Ramzan Akhmadovich Kadyrov of Chechnya.
Inside the Tyrannybook all their actions are reported through news articles, with a link to the source.
Between them, users can become allies (the equivalent of friends on Facebook), exchanging points of view and discussing current issues. Much like Facebook, it's possible to create groups, events, and upload videos and pictures.
The homepage shows a News Feed displaying all the activity on the site, from all the users. I believe this should be tweaked to only show updates from allies and the tyrants one is watching.
This is a very interesting way of approaching the problem that Amnesty is faced with. It's not that this information is not already available in lots of other places, but keeping everything in the same place and wrapping it in something familiar to a huge number of people might be a powerful way of raising awareness to the task at hand.
There's not a lot of functionality on the website, and it will be interesting to see how it evolves as more users sign up. One thing is for sure, people will try to abuse the system. At the time of writing, there is a user in the site that calls himself George Obama as a reference to both George Bush and Barack Obama. This user is also using a picture of George Bush tinted red (like the pictures of the tyrants). There's also a group for the president of F.C. Porto (also tinted red) and a few other groups for completely unrelated subjects. If the site grows a lot, which is the whole point of it, the admins will have a hard time getting rid of all the abusive behavior.
Check out the promotional video that also serves as a guide through the website:
Check out this amazing HD video of the Apollo 11 launch, July 16, 1969. The camera is running at 500 fps, making the total clip of over 8 minutes represent just 30 seconds of actual time. Narration provides some insight on what's involved in the launch.
Guinness, the brand that is a synonym of "the black stuff", is entering the black lager market with a new product - Guinness Black Lager.
Pitched at a younger market, the drink will be served up in 330ml bottles and supported by a new advertising and marketing campaign. It is being trialled in Northern Ireland and will go on sale at selected pubs and off-licences, priced similar to other premium lagers.
It seems like every once in a while Guinness tries to launch a crazy new product, and has failed consistently. Examples of such flops from Dublin's legendary St James' Gate brewery include "white Guinness" Breo and Guinness Light. But this time they're confident this new product will be a success, maybe because of the growing popularity of dark lagers. John Kennedy, Diageo's managing director, said the new beer had a unique taste which is "an evolution in lager making".
With this lager, the master brewers of Guinness have built upon 250 years of rich brewing heritage to take lager enjoyment to a new level.
If, like me, you've never been to Paris, this might be a good introduction. Paris 26 Gigapixel is an amazing panoramic picture of the city, created by Martin Loyer, Arnaud Frich and Kolor.
Paris 26 Gigapixels is a stitching of 2346 single photos showing a very high-resolution panoramic view of the French capital (354159x75570 px). Dive into the image and visit Paris like never before!
You can move around by clicking anywhere on the image and moving your mouse, and you can zoom with your mouse wheel (alternatively, you can use the arrows and +/- keys on the keyboard). It’s easy to get overwhelmed by this huge panorama, so there's a quick of 20 of Paris’ most impressive monuments.
There are also some easter eggs hidden in the picture. Can you find them?
a Kolor advertisement
a reblochon (french savoyard cheese) with a Kolor logo on it
a turtle
a groundhog
a frog playing guitar
a couple of UFOs
a photo of the team (a grafitti on a wall)
a licence plate on a car with the Kolor website
a Pi (3:14) clock
a red traffic light (3 red traffic lights in one)
And if you look carefully, you might even find odd things that weren't placed there by the authors. Like this gun...
The image above is part of the satellite imagery that Google recently released of the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group (AMARG) - commonly known as The Boneyard. It's a collection of over 4,000 retired aircraft including nearly every plane the US armed forces have flown since World War II.
That's right! This little corner of the web is already one year old. And so I feel obliged to do some kind of summary.
It's was on the 17th of January 2009 that I inaugurated Flour Power. One year later and it's still here, after 239 posts with 292 comments. The site has seen a total of 83,512 unique visitors that produced 105,092 pageviews. Most of them got here from search engines (76.87%), of which Google was the biggest contributor. Geographically speaking, the 4 biggest sources of traffic were the USA, the UK, Canada and Ireland. But there was also 1 person from Rwanda that considered the blog interesting enough to spend more than 5 minutes here.
And what made all those people come here? The 10 most popular posts of 2009 (excluding the Facebook "incident", which alone caused about 50% of the total traffic) were:
As far as content is concerned, Flour Power started off as a daily frequently updated diary of my "adventure" of leaving my home country for 6 months to live in Galway, Ireland. As those 6 monhts turned into a year (and now probably two), the frequency of said reports was reduced, and the type of posts changed with it. This is now a place where I post the most fun/interesting/useful stuff I find around the web, along with the occasional rant about whatever is bothering me at the moment. And that's how I plan to keep it going forward.
So if you enjoyed it so far, stick around for a while longer. I'll try not to disappoint
