New embeddable widget from Hulu.com makes sharing shows & movies a snap.

Hulu.com continues to kick ass. Hulu allowed me watch all of Firefly over the holiday break from the comfort of my parents' guestroom, saving me from the horror of their cable-less househould (Disclaimer: I don't have cable at home either, actually).

Now they're offering embeds. Here's the Daily Show:



I'm not sure, exactly, why you'd want to watch here instead of on the main site. I'm not going to worry about it; this is one more step towards a more accessible form of ad-supported online TV. Hurrah.

Enjoy some Family Guy:

Dancing on YouTube is another "feelgood" online moment

Story about WhereTheHellIsMatt via A Private Dance? Four Million Web Fans Say No from Charles McGrath of the New York Times.

All in all, I vastly prefer the warm and fuzzy Internet memes much more than the excremental instances.

Video from the BBC: Flying penguins reported in the Antarctic

This one premiered on April 1st, so the natural assumptions about its veracity apply.

It upholds the longstanding (and inspiring) tradition of grand hoaxes from the BBC.

Tron, Sweded

My friend Snarles IM'ed me this link to Wired's Underwire blog with a video of a Sweded version of Tron embedded.

I'd watched it earlier this week but watching it again reminded me that I really should have posted it.

Geektastic. I enjoyed Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind much more than I expected to, given the New Yorker's tepid review. The website for the film, BeKindMovie.com has a similar quirky aesthetic. You can see Google sweded there, along with this helpful guide to sweding.

Cyberdonkey: "Big Dog" Robot from Boston Dynamics

Big Dog has been all over the Internet today. How can it not be?

The unearthly gait, buzzing operation and weirdly mammalian bounding of Big Dog are even more impressive in this outing with a payload and snowy hills to navigate.


Boston Dynamics and DARPA are well on their way to giving Skynet a hardy pet someday.

BoingBoingTV: "Food Fight" -- an abridged history of war through food

Filmmaker Stefan Nadelman's stop-animation piece provides an abridged history of war (WWII-Gulf War II) told through the foods of the countries in conflict.

Funny, sad and in no way appetite inspiring, at least on this day. Brilliant in its own way.

[Hat tip to Jon Battelle]

eTrade's baby/clown commercial is still making me laugh whenever I see it

Never underestimate the creepiness of clowns.

Dramatic chipmunk, meet dramatic lemur. Hilarity ensures.

YouBama and the citizen-generated campaign

I'm loving Google Reader these days. I can consume blog posts, podcasts and video much more quickly and easily than ever before -- and that makes me happy.

This past week, I've been able to enjoy sharing and receiving shared items with friends who are also rocking Reader within the interface. I can see the appeal of Google's approach to social networking and bookmarking.

Your email address book is effectively your network. Your shared bookmarks become a living stream of of your online consciousness.

Facebook may aspire to become our primary online destination -- the recent releases of Facebook apps into the Web at large is a major step in that direction -- but Google's communication and productivity apps are beginning to be linked in ways that reveal the wisdom of the crowds in new ways.

All that aside, I discovered YouBama today through my RSS feeds and TechCrunch's post... I'll be watching those feeds too now.

Online video just gained has yet another outlet, one independent from the campaigns, that just received an avalanche of coverage from Tech Crunch's coverage.

YouTube still dwarfs this site, of course, along with the rest of the mainstream media.

Nonetheless, it's noteworthy to see how much control the campaigns have now lost over "the message" -- and how enabled we have all become in sharing our own opinions.

Democracy is going P2P.

What happened this month? A viral video mixdown, for one.

October has been quite the rollercoaster. Somewhere in there, I passed 31, found myself single again and did some decent writing. I almost caught a few fish, read a great book or three, caught up with work and made time to escape to the White Mountains and the Cape. Oh, there might have been a wee bit of Red Sox baseball in there somewhere as well.

There's much more to say but....it's Friday, and blogging is not what I want to be doing. Here's a hilarious video, courtesy of Eric, to take me into the weekend.


We Didnt Start The Viral - Watch more free videos

Family Guy and Star Wars?

I feel like I've gone to Geek Heaven.

We'll see how long these embeds stay live on YouTube.

Part I



Part II



Part III



Part IV



Part V

Constructaculular! A working Lego manufacturing plant:

21 days without posting?

My.

This constructigasm blew my mind sufficiently to provoke it, thankfully.



I adored Legos as a child. Hours upon hours of imagination expansion. I missed the introduction of Mindstorms, sadly, which is at the heart of much of the Lego factory above.

Coolest bit: When the completed vehicle rollw off of the ramp.

Homer guest hosts

Even the Tonight Show has been Simpsonized. I rather like the GE poke, courtesy of Lisa's comments to her dad.

BigDog Quadruped Robot: I don't want to pick up after this one

I'm not afraid to say that this thing scares the s--t out of me, even while I think it's really quite amazing at the same time. Bruce Sterling (easily one of my all-time favorite sci-fi writers) wrote about his impressions a bit more eloquently:

Yeah, yeah, I know -- some boondoggle Pentagon robot. Where's the zillion-dollar spare parts? But look at the insane way this lurching mongrel picks its way through mud, sharp rocks, and snow. And those horrible little hooves it has, and its bandage-wrapped black-zombie legs... and that irritating whining noise it makes. I don't see it "running and jumping," but it's so cheap-looking and pig-ugly that it looks entirely convincing -- twenty years from now, tech-savvy global-guerrilla marauders will be strapping IEDs and AK47s onto these things and unleashing them on remote mountain villages.

Eeek.

Oh no! The Internet Crashed! All Data Lost!

Thank you, Onion. Just when I think you can't get any funnier, you go and do...

This.

Breaking News: All Online Data Lost After Internet Crash

Best kitty-video ever: Even kittens can use a mac

Absurd cuteness.

Brings new meaning to "ease-of-use" though, eh? I wonder how the screen looks after those tender attentions. I have no doubts about whether this feline Q&A specialist might pull of a similar demo on a Wintel machine: nada.

Vote Different

I'm still woefully behind in posting here -- and for the few that are still checking the feed, I apologize -- but I did see something sufficiently provocative today to warrant a quick upload.

The blogosphere has been going a little batty (moonbatty, perhaps?) about a mashup of the iconic original 1984 Mac commercial and Hillary Clinton's online fireside chat. The video was made by an Obama supporter (shocking) and while I'm reticent to entirely endorse either candidate (I prefer Bill Richardson to both on a number of levels, frankly) the impact of this political ad/statement/art if undeniable.

I hope it's the first of many such mashups, on both sides.

YouTube = the new CSPAN?

Jeff Jarvis over at BuzzMachine reports:

Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s blog — note how that rolls off the keyboard — has been putting up video of representatives floor speeches against the war. That’s fascinating enough but get how they are posting the video: via YouTube. Here is Pelosi’s own YouTube user page.

C-SPAN has been the place to get source information on video: watch and judge for yourself. Now YouTube can take over that role and not just for limited official events but for source video anywhere. [crossposted at PrezVid]

This really is quite extraordinary. I'm sure my friends are tired of me blathering on about the Craigslist generation or the YouTube election -- but here we are. We're more wired than ever before, with the Edwards campaign on Second Life and the first presidential commercial (thanks, Mitt -- we'll all stop "dithering now") popping up there for embedding nearly simultaneously with its entrance onto the broadcast airwaves. The fact that the Speaker of the House is posting speeches from the floor of the House of Representatives (or more likely, one of her aides) strikes me as a significant step towards transparency. In other words, YouTube is good for more than just macaca moments. Such engagement in new media might even grab the attention of those who have turned off and tuned out from network news and newspapers, nearly en masse. I hope so. There are so many important stories out there.

Geektastic: Gollum and Smeagol Sing a Barry White Duet

So funny and yet so deeply distubing. I love it -- and not just because I read LOTR half a dozen times before the age of 12. Thanks for the link, Xeni.

Unbelievable wheelchair halfpipe tricks

As someone who retired from skateboarding seriously at an early age (ask me about my fake tooth) these wheelchair tricks are slightly mindbinding. I love that these guys are still thrashing in any way that they know how -- and doing things I'd never imagined possible in a wheelchair.