Random - Magic number #5

I'm a bit late on this one as well (40 visitors past the magic number...), but I'm not going to break the tradition!

The visitor #500 is from the states, Pennsylvania to be more specific, and spent 11 seconds reading ;)

The traffic has been going up lately, and I find it very exciting - mega boost for my tiny-blogger-ego!

SL - No comment! (bis)

Here are a couple of my weird/cute encounters while roaming around in SL...
An alien (or is it a flying spider?), and Snoopy playing the violin on some busy shopping street - I love the Woodstock detail :)

Google - 9 years and counting!

Google celebrated their 9th year in the business on the 27th :)
Happy Birthday!

These tweaked logos really make me happy. I always wish they would have them more often :)

Random - Mr Tengu

Here's the latest really-cool-but-useless gadget coming straight from Japan - as expected, I love it, and I would definitely buy one if I knew where to find it :)

Mr Tengu is a little USB device that changes faces and depicts your mood depending on what type of music you're playing on your computer.

Read more about it here.

Buzz - Google VS Microsoft

This was kind of expected, let's see who wins (if anyone does) the final battle:

"Facebook has suddenly become the hottest property on the Internet, with Microsoft and Google slugging it out over the purchase of just a small stake in the social-networking site amid a much larger battle for dominance in online advertising.

In recent weeks, Microsoft approached Facebook with a proposal to invest $300 million to $500 million for a 5% stake in the startup firm, a move that could value all of Facebook at $10 billion or higher, people familiar with the matter tell The Wall Street Journal. But these people say that Google is also angling for a Facebook stake."

Read the full article here.

Web 2.0 - Visuals of the world

Visuals of the world is a really cool project: visitors are asked to submit a 300x700px image to contribute to a continuous vertical banner in order to build the longest visual website in the world!

"Scroll through yards of inspirational images. Share and contribute, see what you can do. Add a personal link to your submission or just engage anonymous".

As I write, the banner is 27183.69 cm long :)
Love it!

Upload your visual contribution here.

PS: I might work on something - I'll post it if I do ;)

Web 2.0 - I, You, She, He

The blogosphere is all hyped about the I, You, She, He project, an application that uses live questions from Yahoo! Answers to generate an overall impression of people's raw feelings.

Which got me to finding out that there is a Design innovation team at Yahoo, that comes up with really interesting applications/visual interpretations of specific topics.

There's no possible interaction with the applications yet, but you can view quicktime movies about each of them - they're really funky! :)

Check them out here.

ID - Visual data of the ME conflicts

The Middle-Eastern conflict/political scene is definitely one of the topics I will NEVER get into - way too complicated to handle, too sensitive to even discuss.

Nevertheless, since today is *supposedly* an important election day in Lebanon, I thought I'd post a couple of interesting links.

I came across these visual representations of the conflicts history in the ME a while back. Most of them surfaced last year, but they're still worth seeing.

Take a look:



> The Middle-East Buddy list:
A chart of the region's players to understand "who likes whom, who can't stand each other, and who's not sure".
Click here.



> Animated Middle-East history:
"A 90 second animated map illustrating who has conquered the Middle East over the past 5,000 years, including the Egyptians, Turks, Jews, Romans, Arabs, Greeks, Persians, Europeans etc..."
Click here.



> Strife and power in the new ME:
"Interesting infographics attempting to describe the underlying issues in the current mideast conflict".
Click here.

PS: Topic closed. I will consider these as examples of information architecture.