Tag Archives: Google

Friday Links: Google Zeitgeist 2011

• Today’s the last day to Give Toys for Tots and remember the Bucklin Boys.
• Google Zeitgeist 2011 (aka The Year of Rebecca Black).
• 10 documentaries tailor-made for nerds.
• What A List Apart readers learned about the web in 2011.
• You know you want it, StarWars Nutcracker.
• Gifts for your Design Snob Best Friend.
• The messy art of UX sketching.
• Anatomy of an advertising emergency.
• An open letter to writers of open letters.
• The woman behind the iconic “Let’s get Mikey” ad for Life cereal has died. So has the co-creator of Captain America. Also, Christopher Hitchens.
• Okay, now that you’re sufficiently bummed out, here’s a penguin fetching a newspaper.

Friday Links: AT-ATs, nerdy vacations, and deadly sins

• 9 nerdy movie locations you should visit, just in time to make vacation plans for 2012.
• Edible gingerbread AT-AT.
• Stop Motion + Minecraft + Super Mario Bros = This video.
• Perfect secret santa gift for the chocolate-loving nerd in your life, handmade Space Invader chocolate bar.
• The most iconic weapons in video game history.
• Wired’s Geek Dad presents the 5 best toys of all time. It’s hard to find fault in this list.
• FTC and Facebook reach a settlement regarding user privacy abuse.
• Taxidermy Deer LEGO Kit a.k.a. $12 of awesome.
• Books for the geeky creative in your life.
• This isn’t so nerdy so much as the best thing I found on the Internet this week, The Rap Board. It’s super fun and will steal entirely more time out of your day than you anticipated.
• The seven deadly sins of StarWars.
• Swanky doodle, a nice story about Google’s doodles.
• Don’t forget you can give Toys for Tots to remember the Bucklin Boys.

Friday Links: The pros & cons of the Internet circa 1996

• If you’re looking to waste a large chunk of time, go on over to Supercut.org and get clicking. There’s a lot of good ones, but I really liked this the one featuring all the Holy. . . by Robin from the 60s Batman series. “Holy one-track bat computer mind!”
• Also, you should read The Video Remix ‘Supercut’ Comes of Age over on Wired.
• Apple’s 1983 holiday catalog.
• The pros and cons of the Internet (circa 1996).
• 60 years of Chevrolet speedometer design is much cooler to look at than it sounds.
• The 8 worst fonts in the world (and Comic Sans isn’t one of them).
• This was all over the Internet this week, and rightfully so. If you haven’t read novelist Mona Simpson’s A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs, you should. It’s beautiful.
• We’re pretty honored to be included in the Best HTML5 gallery.
• 10 nifty Google Easter eggs, for those of you who loved do a barrel roll.

Are you happy to be a product?

People’s opinons on Google and the goodness or evilness of the tech monolith seem to be as deeply ingrained and as passionately espoused as views on religion, politics, or which flavor of M&M is the best (pretzel, of course). A long time ago, I accepted the fact that I divvied my e-soul into three parts and gave those parts to Apple, Amazon, and Google. I’m okay with that.

Even so, reading Google doesn’t get people, it sells them was kind of unsettling and a little thrilling (like reading 1984). The GigaOm post covers a talk Don Norman, the author of The Design of Everyday Things gave at a conference last week where he discussed Google quite a bit, including this piece about the controversy surrounding the use of real names on Google+:

“Real names, they say, turn out to be the names on your driver’s license and your passport and your credit cards so that they can track you. Are you happy to be a product?”

While I don’t agree with everything Norman has to say, it’s thought-provoking and it’s good to have your thoughts provoked every once in awhile. It keeps you sharp, and as marketing grows ever more individualized one has to be sharp.

Friday Links: Short & Sweet Holiday-weekend Edition

• Mark Zuckerberg says something awesome is coming from Facebook next week.
• Speaking of, 9 reasons to switch from Facebook to Google+.
• The eternal shame of your first online handle.
• It’s more likely you will survive a plane crash or win the lottery than click a banner ad.
• Yahoo! and Yippie! Design differences 30 years apart.
• New stamps honor noteworthy American industrial designers.

Ridiculously hard Google doodle quiz

You deserve a break. Head on over to Boing Boing to take this difficult Google doodle quiz. It’s 12 questions and will test not only your memory, but also your powers of deduction. I took it twice and somehow managed a 58.3% both times.

Hackers turn Google’s April Fools’ joke into reality

That’s right some nerds from the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies hacked a Microsoft Kinect and made GMail Motion a reality. Get the full scoop on The New York Times Bits blog.

Friday Links: Google battles content farms & spam blogs

• Google updates their algorithm to squelch content farms and spam blogs.
• LEGO: Stars Wars, make your own story.
• Eminem: The most popular living person on Facebook.
• How Great Gatsby became a long lost NES Game.
• How to be the Watson computer at Jeopardy.
• The end of the IT department?
• If you’re in need of a little pick me up this video of The Muppets covering LCD Soundsystem will do the trick.
• If you like a good agency dust up (and who doesn’t?) go take a look at PHD responds to we are the future comments.
• Jules Verne: The man who invented the future.

2010 Trends

Google, YouTube, and Twitter have all released their 2010 trend pieces. What do they have in common? Justin Bieber.

Here’s a quick breakdown of the top 10 trends on Twitter.

1. Gulf Oil Spill
2. FIFA World Cup
3. Inception
4. Haiti Earthquake
5. Vuvuzela
6. Apple iPad
7. Google Android
8. Justin Bieber
9. Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows
10. Pulpo Paul

The fastest rising Google searches.

1. Chatroulette
2. iPad
3. Justin Bieber
4. Nicki Minaj
5. Friv
6. Myxer
7. Katy Perry
8. Twitter
9. Gamezer
10. Facebook

And if you have a minute 86 seconds you can find out what the top YouTube videos were.

There, now you know what happened in 2010.

Friday Links: More on Gapgate & How Facebook can be bigger than Google

• How Facebook can become bigger than Google in five years.
• The President of Gap explains the new logo. In the Huffington Post she says, “We chose this design as it’s more contemporary and current. It honors our heritage through the blue box while still taking it forward.”
• Related to the last, A follow-up to Gapgate.
• Broken meetings (and how to fix them). Watchable, not just because it’s Merlin Mann or because he calls people nerds affectionately, but because it’s helpful and true.
• Everything you need to know about new Facebook groups.
• Get your buzz on with Star Trek drinks.
• 92% of US toddlers have online presence .
• Typeface memory game: “This very attractively finished typographic memory game includes 25 variations of the letter ‘A’, each in a different letter type. Players attempt to find the matching A’s in the same letter type.”
• The ultimate StarWars party, a bunch of cool looking food and recipes so you can make it yourself.