Archive for November, 2008
It’s the day after Turkey Day. Obviously, not a day for deep thoughts or complex topics, since most of us are probably still zoned out from large quantities of comestibles. Therefore, LOLcats are the perfect subject for today’s post.
To understand the LOLcat phenomena, you first have to understand the idea of the internet meme. Chances are you’ve experienced one; you’ve been rickrolled, you’ve seen Chocolate Rain and the multiple spinoffs & parodies; the dancing baby, or even, going way back, HamsterDance. Memes are sometimes called “mind viruses;” basically, unusual ideas or themes that spread from person to person.
Wikipedia defines LOLcat as:
A lolcat is an image combining a photograph, most frequently of a cat, with a humorous and idiosyncratic caption in (often) broken English—a dialect which is known as “lolspeak,” ”kitteh,” or “kitty pidgin” and which parodies the poor grammar typically attributed to Internet slang. The name “lolcat” is a compound word of the phrase “LOL” and “cat”.
Not all LOLcats are actually cats, but nonetheless appear on the offical LOLcat site.
(Ok, I’m pretty certain that’s not a moose, but still cute)
Some of my personal favorites:
What does this mean to me, Laura?
- LOLcats have no practical use other than entertainment.
- You can get the latest LOLcat entries via RSS feeds.
- You can caption your own LOLcat pics or other people’s pics and also save your favorites.
- This is a prime example of what I call TMFTS (Too Much Free Time Syndrome).
- There are offshoots of the LOLcat meme, including a project to translate the Bible into LOLspeak and LOLCODE, a programming language based on LOLspeak.
(Thanks to Owen L. for the post idea!)
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If you’re like me, you belong to more than a mere handful of social networking and sharing sites. Keeping track of your online presence might be a daunting task. And letting people know where you hang out online might entail a rather long list of web sites. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could consolidate all that into one nice widget you could just embed on a web site or blog? What if that widget could also show your latest tweets, photos or links to your newest blog post in real time?
The widget exists, and its name is Retaggr. This is one of the handiest I’ve yet seen. To see an example of a Retaggr widget in action, look over to the left on my blog. You’ll see the Retaggr icon:
If you click on it, you’ll see my latest tweet, and links to my profiles on numerous social networks. OPLIN has a Retaggr account too, and you can see it on the left side of the oplin.org web site.
Creating one and embedding it is not difficult, and Retaggr supports over 170 different Web 2.0 services, with more being added all the time. You can also make your blog/site Retaggr-enabled, so that commenters with Retaggr accounts can have their cards attached to their comments, too. Your Retaggr info can even be made into an email signature. Overall, it’s a very flexible service that provides a lot of value for, well…it’s free!
What does this mean to me, Laura?
- If your library has (for example) MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, etc. accounts, this is a great way to accumulate all of them in a compact space online.
- Imagine sending all of your online presence info as part of your ibrary’s email.
- Remember that the info it shows is public (which is the point). If there’s something you don’t want included, you don’t have to.
- You can customize the widget with other widgets!
Virtual worlds are everywhere now, it seems. Their purposes range from socializing and networking to education and conferences. And some just…are. Yoowalk seems to be one of these latter.
Well, ok. I guess it has a purpose. I just don’t see that it really is necessary. It seems to be more of a proof-of-concept than anything else. Here’s Mashable’s take on Yoowalk:
Yoowalk is a new Web-based virtual world that lets you browse the Web via your avatar, in a 3D environment. With 3D representations of the Internet, Yoowalk offers an entirely different browsing experience for the Web, that almost reminds me of the Chappelle Show episode that surmised what the Internet would look like if it were a physical manifestation we could walk through–like a mall. Yoowalk has a similar idea: it’s laid the Web out on streets and avenues, starting from more broad categories and narrowing down from there.
Here’s a screenshot of me “walking” through the CNN website:
As you can see, Yoowalk makes “rooms” out of each web site. You walk down “streets” to reach them. However, because the (limited selection of) web sites have been modified for this virtual world format, a great deal of content is lost. If you click on a story link, it opens up a mini proprietary browser inside of Yoowalk. Personally, I found this browser-within-a-browser setup to be clunky and annoying. Why not just go to CNN.com and get all of the content without having to slowly “walk” to it?
Mashable sums up the problem nicely:
While it is great that Yoowalk doesn’t require a download for its service, its vision of recreating the Web is one of its biggest downfalls, as there is no need to force users to change their browsing experience or take away from a web site’s design and user interface in order to make it 3D.
What does this mean to me, Laura?
- Setting up information as a 3D environment this way is interesting in theory, but in practice Yoowalk fell far short of usefulness.
- Aside from a clear purpose, I found the environment slow and clunky. The experience does not make up for the loss of informational content.
- There is a social aspect to Yoowalk; you can connect with other avatars to chat and there is some minor integration with existing MSN, Yahoo or AOL chat clients as well. There is also the ability to create your own custom “rooms,” although the design tool is not easy to use.
- To be fair, Yoowalk is currently in beta. It’s possible that this could evolve into something interesting ahead.
