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Internet
May 17, 2006
The Gamine Audrey Tautou
Movie critic A.O. Scott staggered through a screening of The Da Vinci Code, and walked away unimpressed. While his review only mentions in passing the Hanks Mullet, Scott laments the underutilization of the film's other star, Audrey Tautou. "Ms. Tautou, determined to ensure that her name will never again come up in an Internet search for the word 'gamine,' affects a look of worried fatigue," he writes.
Internet
May 4, 2006
Spamming Stocks
Serge Ollu says he is pissed off. As the vice president of HE-5 Resources Corporation, he has been besieged with angry emails and phone calls from people who have received mail from spammers urging them to buy shares of his newly acquired company. "Those guys have put me in a bad situation with their shitty spam," he tells Gelf.
Internet
February 15, 2006
Reclaiming Anti-Semitism
When a prominent Iranian newspaper started calling for the creation of Holocaust cartoons in retaliation for the widespread publication of offensive caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, Amitai Sandy was saddened. "It's not impressive to laugh at other people's sorrows," he tells Gelf over email. So the 29-year old graphic artist from Tel Aviv started a cartoon contest of his own, this time based on comic submissions from Jews around the world. "[The Iranians] don't have the balls to do an anti-Arab cartoon," he says, but he hopes that his fellow Jews are willing to draw anti-Semitic cartoons to steal the newspaper's thunder.
Internet
January 30, 2006
Celebrity Face Recognition
Face-recognition software is cool, but regardless of what the feds try to tell us, they've still got a ways to go before it becomes the exclusive identification tool. In the meantime, though, some entrepreneurs have started using this new technology as the basis of their companies, for uses other than crime-busting. One of the first commercially available versions popped up on the internet a few days ago. MyHeritage.com promises to analyze uploaded photos and compare the faces in them to those in its archive, identifying long-lost relatives and determining previously-unknown genetic relationships. Gelf decided to test it out.
Internet
January 17, 2006
The Chronic(What?)cles of Viral Video
When New York Times music critic Kelefa Sanneh saw Lil Wayne and Robin Thicke team up for an impressive version of the song "Shooter" on The Tonight Show, he was inspired to write an article about what he terms "cross-under hits." As Sanneh sees it, this is one of many music videos that start out as part of big-budget television, get picked up on the web, and "return to life as underground hits." But he misses the point.
Internet
November 3, 2005
Bugmenot Lives
Bugmenot—the site that provides usernames and passwords to let online readers bypass annoying (and potentially privacy-invading) registrations at many news portals—has been down today, and an ominous sign stating "Notice: This domain name expired on 10/29/05 and is pending renewal or deletion" has been posted on its homepage. For many who rely on the site, this shutdown is reminiscent of when the site when offline last August, and the site's anonymous owner told BoingBoing "Our stinkin' host pulled the plug on us without notice." But this time is different, according to bugmenot's new sever host, NearlyFreeSpeech.net.
Internet
October 18, 2005
JibJab
JibJab, makers of the awesome election video "This Land is Your Land" (see the bottom of JibJab's homepage), are being accused by some of hypocrisy for sending a cease-and-desist letter to The Black Lantern for using snippets of "This Land" in the Lantern's equally amazing mashup, "George Bush doesn't care about black people." JibJab was once sued by Ludlow Music, which owned the rights to Woody Guthrie's song, and prevailed by claiming fair use under the First Amendment (see WFMU's "Beware of the Blog" for an excellent roundup). Gregg Spiridellis, the cofounder of JibJab, talked briefly with Gelf today on the phone (interspersed with a lot of our waiting on hold and listening to "This Land is Your Land" in the background). While Spiridellis declined to tell Gelf his rationale over the phone, he later emailed us JibJab's reasons for sending the letter to The Black Lantern. (Spiridellis also said he may be willing to answer some follow-up qestions. If he does, we'll post his responses here.) (UPDATE: We post follow-up questions from the WFMU blogger who'd been critical of JibJab; we've also emailed these questions to Spiridellis.):
Internet
October 14, 2005
The Origin of the Noodles
Our Noodly Prophet has touched us again! As reported last month in Gelf, the modern-day prophet Bobby Henderson preaches the good word of Flying Spaghetti Monsterism. But this religious craze—with its humble beginnings as a letter mailed to the Kansas State School Board—has more grounding than you might expect. As the BBC reported last week, noodles dating back 4,000 years have been unearthed in Lajia, China. When contacted regarding this discovery, Henderson tells Gelf his take on the unearthed evidence:
Internet
October 11, 2005
Googling Campaign Donations
When relatively unknown figures make big news, journalists rush to find out more about them, usually by trying to arrange interviews with them and their close associates. Reporters can also try to dig up paperwork on those individuals, using the Freedom of Information Act (Wikipedia) for federal documents, and similar open records requests at the state level. For example, the New York Times ran an article about Harriet Miers after reporters uncovered fawning letters from Miers to then-governor Bush in which she repeatedly calls him "cool." But what can those of us not blessed with the resources to comb through piles of government documents do?
Internet
October 6, 2005
Hiding from the Crawlers
As far as Gelf can tell, the word 'unGoogleable' first entered our lexicon in late November of 2002, when technology writer Clive Thomson asked readers of his blog to nominate a term for people whose names do not appear on the world's most popular search engine. Of the terms proposed, 'unGoogleable' seems to have taken off, but as a recent article in Wired News shows, the meaning has changed. Instead of simply referring to people whose names do not appear in Google (which could include most of the world's population), the term now seems to be reserved for those people who actively try to stay off of the search engine grid. Gelf emailed the writer, Ann Harrison, to ask some follow-up questions about the piece.
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