Stumble Upon

One of the great ideas for netizens: StumbleUpon. Definitely one of the more interesting trends I've come across - and above all: useful. So what is the idea? Discover unexpected web pages on your topic of choice.

First download the toolbar. You will be asked to select your topics of interest (choose what you will - Games, Film, Self-help, what have you) Now you will notice a new toolbar with several icons - the one you are most interested in is the one on the left: "Stumble!" Just click there and you will be transported to a webpage that someone in the community recommended, of one of the categories you chose. Just to the right of that icon you can find the categories icon - either let it randomly select the category for you (All), or specify the category you want.

The other side of the coin is that you can also tag pages for other people. So suppose you have a favourite page about dance culture you'd like to share - simply give it a tag (tag textbox) and confirm it by clicking the tag icon. It's as simple as that.

And in addition you can keep track of your favourite stumbles by clicking on the "I like it!" icon and later view them on your StumbleUpon userpage - just click on the "pages" icon to get there.

There's a community growing around this, but it gets my vote and I hope it continues to expand. It's rare that I find a net trend as useful as this one - now whenever I have a free moment I find myself stumbling upon new web pages. Explore the internet!

Have fun!!

Earth

Here is a website giving essential information regarding the state of the earth.

or New Media Art

The Taschen "New Media Art" put me on a couple of new angles to Internet Art or New Media Art as they call it (although the label as a reference to the employment of "emerging media technologies" seems on the one hand of its time only - why appropriate the term when other media will come along sooner or later?).

So we have hacktivist artists who combine political activism with art. See Borderxing Guide and then data visualisationists who make data patterns more visual, eg. in the project Umbrella.net.

But there are also those who explore the world of technology and its relation to traditional art and media more thoroughly, and it is some of these projects that I find the most interesting.

First in line we have Life Sharing - an anagrammatical play on file sharing - by 0100101110101101.org. Eva and Franco Mattes shared the content of their computer online using the Linux Debian OS and opened up a whole can of worms: the notion that privacy in the contemporary information era is becoming an outdated concept (and what will replace it? Perhaps, as Donna Haraway says in her A Cyborg Manifesto, a hybridised cyborg citizenship!). It is not purely for show either - it is true sharing, everything can be downloaded the same way that software can be shared in the open source community. It problematises the notion of sharing and who can use it, since we are all aware that our identities are floating around the databases of large corporations. How visible are we really? Can our identities be constructed into profiles that are as defined as Eva and Franco allow?

For every old school gamer (which includes me - I haven't played a contemporary game in years, but how can I ever forget the joys of Software Projects' Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy, or Gremlin Graphics' Bounder and Trailblazer?) Cory Arcangel's Super Mario Clouds evokes the nostalgia inherent in the almost iconic familiarity of clouds in Super Mario Bros. He hacked away to edit out the rest of the onscreen digital presences, leaving only the clouds.

And finally, for a more intellectual experience one may go and look at the excellent The Intruder, brainchild of Natalie Bookchin. It explores the line between narration in the traditional literary sense, using a short story of Jorge Luis Borges, and information media by weaving the story - a misogynistic plot wherein two brothers mistreat and eventually murder a sexually enslaved woman - into a simple computer game wherein the different stages engage the user to participate in the story by moving it forward whenever certain game actions are successful. The game is very simple but the concept is adequately realised. I found the voice over quite atmospheric.

The possibilities opened up by these commentaries are quite vast. Imagine the subversion possible in online games such as World of Warcraft! Creatures that criticise the violence or the quests themselves - annoying online consciences that spread their thoughts by constructing protests or hacking the very network fabric that holds the game together.