Flour Power

Do you know those things that are so bad they’re good?

Well, this is not the case. This song is the perfect example of algorithmically-generated music, Auto-Tune-enhanced vocals and the best lyrics a 3 year-old could write. And of course, it went viral and is now one of the biggest things on Youtube and Twitter. It’s just so bad that people just feel the need to show it to everyone they know. Like I’m doing now, with this blog post. I know I’m feeding the beast, but here goes, Rebecca Black’s Friday:

This… thing… has garnered almost 30 million views on Youtube at the time of writing, and 1M of them just in the few hours since I’ve seen it this morning. It’s also a trending topic on Twitter and has already got the attention of music-mogul Simon Cowel. Not bad for the reported $2.000 paid to Ark Music Factory for the production of the video. And again thanks to the Internet, we now we can all enjoy the parodies.

What’s with all these songs with explanations of the ordering of the days of the week?

Dear copyright holders who get your content removed from Youtube,

Fuck you.

Sincerely,
António Farinha

Eh, this is quite neat. There’s a new Gmail Labs feature that enables previews in messages that contain links to Youtube videos, Flickr and Picasa photos and Yelp reviews. So, with the Youtube Previews feature enabled, if someone sends me an email with some Youtube links, this is what I’ll see:

Very handy indeed. No need to click through to Youtube. I can watch the videos right from inside Gmail. Too bad it doesn’t work on playlists.

And a link to a Picasa Web Album turns into:

If you want to link to individual pictures, though, you’ll have to pay attention to the link you’re sending. Be sure to copy it from the address bar, don’t use the “Link to this photo” option on the right side of Picasa Web Albums. For example:

http://picasaweb.google.com/farinha/KrakowMar08#5201735599173133954 - Works
http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/Xtusb0M4D12GFJ8inb6C1A?feat=directlink – Does not work

Flickr previews work in the same way. Both album and single picture links work:

To activate these features just go to Settings, then choose the Labs tab and enable the ones you want.

(via Gmail Blog)