Foster Hagey

This guy took 17 months to build an unbelieveble replica of one of Daft Punk helmets.

And here is Al-P explaining how it came to be.

The world’s first HTML5 embeddable album.

I’ve been reading Clay Shirky’s newest book – Cognitive Surplus. It basically says, we’ve wasted a bunch of time watching TV for the past 60 years. I don’t know about you, but I would consider my time watching South Park as time well spent, but clearly I don’t need to watch the reruns when they are on.

The clearest example of the Cognitive Surplus is Wikipedia; which Shirky says has taken about 100 million hours of human work to build. He then goes on to say that the US population collectively spends two billion hours per year watching TV; which is roughly 20 times the amount of time required to create wikipedia. There are other examples of Cognitive Surplus like the open source projects Linux and the Apache web server, and many other projects that are organized around the intrinsic motivations of the participants rather than extrinsic motivations.

Here is another great TED talk by Dan Pink that explains how the intrinsic motivators of Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose are far better motivators than the extrinsic motivators of Carrots and Sticks.

Prodigy – Invaders Must Die

I haven’t dug deep into the code yet, but it looks like embedded Vevo videos wont go fullscreen unless they are on the www.vevo.com site. Grumble!!! I’ve got the fullscreen parameters set to true, but no fullscreeen available. Weird. I know they just launched, but fullscreen should be a standard function on the embedded Vevo player.

And I can’t embed playlists. Poop!

UPDATED 8/3/2010:
Looks like The Prodigy – Invaders Must Die is no longer available from VEVO, but like all things video on the internet I’m sure it can be found on YouTube. Let’s see…

Yep… Here it is.

A few weeks ago, Wired had an article that said Google was likely using YouTube’s massive traffic to make peering contracts with Tier 1 ISPs. These peering contracts would effectively make Google’s bandwidth bill for YouTube equal to zero.

For more information on the topic I recommend listening to “The Future of the Internet: Lecture 2:TCI, IP, and the Alphabet Soup” by Ramesh Johari of Stanford University on iTunes U. (Start at 1:02:00 for an explanation of how the underlying contracts of ISPs work.)

If you’ve got 8 hours, I would recommend listening to the whole lecture series. There are about 8 hours of lectures and several corresponding .pdf to follow along with The Future of the Internet. iTunes U has free class lectures from Stanford and several other highly regarded educational institutions. Go get your learn on!

I’ve been rather underwhelmed by Google’s new multi-user-real-time-uber-collaboration-web3.0-(fill in buzz word here)-(fill in buzz word here)-(fill in buzz word here)-plat-o-form (got to remember the platform). It is just in the Preview stage, so none of the apps that they showed in the demo were working. All that cool stuff they were talking, “Just add Bloggy/tweety to the wave and now the wave posts to your blog/twitter feed.” None of it worked.

I was able to Wave (or blip as they call it) with a friend in Australia, but I could have also used email, IM, twitter, skype, facebook, or one of the other 50 ways to contact someone. I can see how this would be the killer app for contract negotiation, which is collaborative document creation. I could also see how if you are someone who has conversations across three or four different types of media this might be useful for keeping things organized in one place, but that seems a ways off.

If you are interested in trying Google Wave, and you don’t have an account yet, send me an email and I’ll invite you.