Alt + Ctrl + 0 It seems all hackers have about the same Myers-Briggs and are Scientists and Visionaries which in the grad scheme of thing are some of the smallest parts of the general population (unless this changes over time as it’s a 1964 study).
Archive for May, 2008
On the first of 2007 John and Hank Green decided to stop talking to each other via text and alternate days creating Youtube videos instead. A Year and almost 300 videos later a community of 30,000 people formed around their discussion of Harry Potter, Awesome, Nerdfighters (a pro-nerd moniker), and WorldSuck.
Their experiment ended at the end of 2007 but as they wrapped up the idea of sharing a channel and posting a video on alternate days was about to get a refresh. The Five Awesome Girls channel started just before the Green brothers were done. The brain child of Kristina Horner, of The Parselmouths, along with Lauren Fairweather, of The Moaning Myrtles, Five Awesome Girls brings together five girls who each were apart of the community that John and Hank Green built.
Quickly a format was established. The five girls each picked a day of the week to post a video. They didn’t all know each other in real life and so the used the videos as a way to learn about each other. Each video addressed the other girls to directly to ask questions and give challenges. Other habits also came in to the format like says why the day was awesome.
Hardly a month later Five Awesome Girls was such a complete success that other channels popped up fast and furious with the same format. a Five Awesome Guy’s channel popped up in late January and not a week went by in February where a similar channel had also appeared. Everyone was Awesome: Girls, Guys, Gays, Kiwis, Teens, People, and on and on. All with a clear legacy back to what the Green brother’s started and the Five Awesome Girls formalized.
This internet meme has been successful for a number of reasons and I think it’s here to stay and will not wither away. A group channel has several advantages over individual channels.
Multiple members makes it possible to put out more content at a higher level of quality. It also make more avenues of finding subscribers through the members individual channels. More people also makes it more interactive for the people making the videos. And their interactions also makes it easier for the audience to follow along.
You know you’ve hit it big when you have a lot of haters. Just this week the Five Awesome girls’ account was hacked and their videos deleted. YouTube has just restored their account today, four days later. I think this format has a lot more success in the future.
approx # of videos in ( )
January 01, 2007 – vlog brothers (299) – 27,658 Subscribers
December 31, 2007 – Five Awesome Girls (110) – 9,762
January 26, 2008 – five awesome guys (90) – 16,060 Subscribers
February 03, 2008 – 5 awesome gays (64) – 4,853 Subscribers
February 09, 2008 – Five Awesome Kiwis (74) – 1,236 Subscribers
February 14, 2008 – five awsome teens (45) – 71 Subscribers
February 15, 2008 – 5 Awesome People (81) – 51 Subscribers
February 16, 2008 – voltron team (87) – 59 Subscribers
February 18, 2008 – 5AwesomeRvBers (71) – 85 Subscribers
February 21, 2008 – Five Awesome Limeys (17) – 225 Subscribers
February 25, 2008 – five younger girls (60) – 494 Subscribers
February 27, 2008 – five awesome goats (20) – 1,188 Subscribers
April 02, 2008 – 5 Awesome Midwesterners (37) – 159 Subscribers
April 14, 2008 – amazing vlog show (33) – 41 Subscribers
April 14, 2008 – five awesome clones (26) – 169 Subscribers
May 09, 2008 – five awesome Js (16) – 65 Subscribers
A great tiny lecture about sex in video games. Where it’s been and where it will hopefully go. (via alice)
I don’t like weezer’s new song and as soon as I saw an internet meme in the music video I was fully ready to hate the music video. But I think they do enough unique stuff with it to keep it original and interesting. At the very least people need to learn to let these memes go. We were all bord of them by the time they fizzled out in the first place.
“Embedding disabled by request” – fuck you weezer.
A lot of photoshop tutorials suck because the people doing them are just not very profesional. psdtuts seems to have some extreemly profesional and indepth tutorials. There are alot of tips and tricks to get out of their demonstrations.
A List Apart says never discuss your salary:
“Never discuss your salary with coworkers. Sharing salary information is not only inappropriate, it can lead to real trouble in the workplace.”
Really? I’ve heard this many times before but never really thought much of it. Lot of people do find talking about financial stuff uncomfortable but is that normal?
So far at the jobs I’ve worked at most every one was fine talking about salary. A List Apart says you should negotiate a salary that you should “feel comfortable with your financial arrangement”. And if you are comfortable then you should not be upset by what other people make.
If you work in a place where your co-workers of similar skill level and position make a salary that is a significant different then that does not sound like an honest work place. You should not be shocked by your co-workers salary. It might be different from your own but not to a shocking degree.
There are many types of jobs where salary are public knowledge. Sports stars and government officials are well aware what their co-works make and so is the general public.
So you should be careful about talking about money with anyone. But if a conducive work environment can only be achieved when salary is kept a dark secrete then something is wrong. If you are happy with your own salary then you should not care what others are paid. And if you are paid tens of thousands of dollar different from your peers then there is some thing wrong with how your company compensates it’s employees and you should know.
FireFox 3 RC1 has some small but good updates from the beta 5 version. One of the biggest eye sores was fixed in the auto complete url bar. The typography and color make it much more organized and easier to read. The little design changes always make me happy.
History Of The Color Wheel. very in depth.
I’m glade a lot of these attempts at data portability from google, myspace, and facebook have been getting bad press. They are at best halfhearted attempts at data portability with the data still tethered at the original site.
I am at best a modest programmer and as I build Books I Am Reading (BIAR) I am looking for different ways to add features that are fully integrated with out needing to reinvent the wheel. If I could add a friends module I would love to. But they are not giving out friends data, just links to friends on other sites. I don’t need links to myspace. I need links to other profile on BIAR.
Recently I put a lot of thought in to adding Disqus comments to the site. I was excited about not needing to build a comment system for a few days. Disqus has a good comment module with great features.
But it is just not able to integrate enough to truly feel part of a site. If I log in there is no way to also log you in to disqus forcing people to log in twice. Most likely most comments would end up being anonymous. There is also no easy way to associate a comment thread with a profile and have the person emailed. Perhaps disqus was not meant for this application but it illustrates a common problem with how social modules are being built.
These will not meet the requirements of data portability until all these modules can freely talk to one another. The question is how much of Books I Am Reading will I have to build before these easier options become available? Hopefully the data portability wars will force it to happen sooner then later.
“Teens are far more competent than we assume.” I never know what to do with these kind of articles. It all makes sense but I don’t know how to navigate what should be done and the society that disagrees.
Yet another amazing video about how banks create money from nothing and how eventually the entire system will crumble. It’s kind of sad that so many documentaries can expose such fundamental flaws in the world that are never talked about.
Amazon finally released a mp3 widget to embed songs from their digital catalog. Not sure I’m wild about the design but hopefully they will work on it. Also it seem to not work at all in firefox 3 and I had to use ie7 which is a pain. Now they just need to catch up with myspace and allow full songs to play too and we’ll be golden. Check out the embed below:
Mahalo has great videos of people playing through all the levels of GTA IV. The videos are much more helpful then IGN’s text walk throughs. Oh… I suck at gmaes.
The Submarines – Honeysuckle Weeks is finally avilible on amazon mp3. Why do mp3 albums have different release dates? Why does amazon not let me embed a song? Anyway this is an awesome pop album.