Successful blogging relies on a set of conventions that limit its own potential. Frequent posting keeps readers interested but tends to discourage in-depth analysis. Cross-platform compatibility restricts layout design to single-column vertical scrolls. Font options are scant, low-resolution images reign and non-linear flairs are frowned upon.

All that is slowly changing, and web journalism is starting to look more like, well, journalism. These cautious baby steps towards a prettier Internet are arriving through the advent of Apple’s “apps,” which allow designers to work within the fixed canvas of an iPad screen, as well as boutique websites that shun daily RSS traffic and search engine optimization in favor of paced-out content that’s as well written as it is visually appealing. The transition is not without its pitfalls— emulating a newspaper layout can easily veer into the realm of tacky 1994 CD-ROM design. Grain & Gram is one of the few sites getting it right.

It’s a brand new “gentleman’s journal,” built around beautiful photo essays that focus on one man, his work, and his personal style. Combining elements of blogs like Backyard Bill and The Selby with the rare class of fashion magazines like Fantastic Man, Grain & Gram is a promising new entity both as a style blog and as a design inspriation. Breaking the rules and transcending them in the process, its in-depth portraits of contemporary men are supplanted with intimate interviews, side-column tangents, and gorgeous video content, like the clip below from their feature on scruffy motorcycle-riding printmaker Nick Sambrato.

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Kool-Aid Man in Second Life completely blows my mind. It’s a project in which artist Jon Rafman— using the aforementioned anthropomorphized drink pitcher as his avatar— regularly leads guided tours throughout the awe-inspiring, deeply unsettling, and often hilarious multiverse of Second Life. The sheer WTFery of that virtual realm is so vast and elusive, you’ll have to see it to believe it.

Second Life served as the setting for art podcast Bad at Sports’ recent interview with Rafman/Kool-Aid Man, where the artist’s rumbling autotuned voice muses on a series of fascinating existential subjects as we float through the technicolor backdrop of “the ultimate tourist destination… turbo-charged Las Vegas and Dubai combined. Where every possibility and combination of landscape and architecture can exist.”

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Since its early days as minimalist HTML directory, awesome online photo gallery Tiny Vices has provided access to a goldmine of rad photographers’ portfolios without superfluous frills distracting from the viewing experience. Now they’ve got a brand new iPhone app that appears to continue that tradition of elegant simplicity, and it’s totally free!

This is exactly the type of content that makes me want an iPhone. Bah! If only Apple wasn’t so frighteningly totalitarian… and if only I wasn’t trapped in a T-Mobile contract. Should I finally swallow my scruples sell my soul to Steve Jobs?

Future Shipwreck superfriend Michael C. Hsiung set off salivary glands at Mastodon Mesa recently with his glorious laser-etched wood carvings, tantalizing fans while keeping the one-of-a-kind pieces off the market. Now we can all own a stunning (and practical!) Hsiung-designed Merman carving, thanks to Grove, a Portland-based design collective that makes eco-friendly bamboo iPhone cases.

Don’t miss the other tasteful cases in Grove’s artist series, featuring work by artists like Leandro Castelao, Nando Costa and Stubborn Sideburn:

I wanted a Secret Sender 6000 so bad, growing up. It wouldn’t have done me any good— no one else I knew had one. My infared pulses about farts, homework and angry librarians would have faded into the atmosphere every time, cementing the alienation of my lonely, pre-cyber youth. But what if I wasn’t alone? What if all my classmates were wielding Secret Senders, sending out insurrectionary missives 28 characters at a time (and you thought Twitter was constricting)? We could have built an underground telecommunication system connecting elementary school classrooms across the globe— a decentralized peer-to-peer network liberating students from the authority of their parents and teachers! Released in 1994, the Secret Sender strove to capture the zeitgeist of excitement surrounding the limitless possibilities of the Internet, and then simplify that idea to a level that a child could understand. The Casio JD-6000, as it was formally known, was probably developed as a proto-PDA and then marketed to children in hopes that they would be too stupid realize its uselessness. The commercial promised the kind of grade school anarchy I mentioned above— a device that would subvert the commands of adults and turn a docile library into a revolutionary dance party. With an $80 price tag, however, procuring the tools that would lead to our emancipation was something entirely out of our reach: our digital rebellion was contingent upon the wallets of our parents. The Secret Sender was a device that symbolized rebellion encased within powerlessness. Tellingly, the girl in the commercial uses it to turn on MTV. The New York Times reported this week on iPhone-related mistrials. There’s an epidemic, apparently, of jurors accessing the Internet from their phones to look up prejudicial information, text confidential trial tidbits, and tweet jury-room secrets. The Secret Sender’s fantasy of easy disobedience within the educational system has begotten the reality of total structurelessness within the system of criminal justice. Did Casio Cool not think of the ramifications?! Need I mention the havoc and disarray that supposedly secret texts have wrought across the cultural landscape? Kwame Kilpatrick? Chris Brown? Nonetheless, our telecommunication dream come true is not a total dystopia: secret messages are finally being used for the spontaneous outbreak of benign, faux-subversive fun that Casio promised us, in the form of flash mobs. Pillow fight!! Pass it on.

Jesse Spears, whose job title runs something like “Draw-er of boxy cars, boobs, and sassy ladies/Vice-President of Development: Semi-Sarcastic Sentiment Division,” joined me and my fellow former child star/Mean magazine editor Mya Stark in “Little Osaka” (Sawtelle Blvd., between Olympic and Santa Monica) the other night for a delicious dinner at the Giant Robot restaurant, GR Eats. I’ve had a few different things there, and I think my favorite is the shrimp curry. Also, the veggie meatballs are like nothing else on Earth. Not to mention the mixed fries that have yams and dried banana slices in them (and I usually hate bananas!)— but I digress— I’m getting off track here. After dinner we were wandering around Sawtelle, searching for a stationary store, when I looked up and noticed a big glowing sign on the second floor of a nondescript Japanese-style shopping center. “Pixel Memory Studio,” it read, and I couldn’t help hoping it was some sort of stealth marketing campaign/alternate reality game tie-in for a new Michel Gondry film. Actually, it was something almost as good: a Purikura shop. But Pixel Memory Studio goes beyond the simple simulacrum of Purikura’s visual diabetes by offering a variety of Japanese video games and flashy accessories for girls to decorate themselves with: tiny dogs and shoes dangling from necklaces, lip plumper, snap-on eyelashes, cell phone charms, and creepy-snazzy artificial fingernails. Mya ended up going home with a pricey pair of bejeweled nails on her hands, with plastic bows portruding from their slick acrylic surfaces. “I’m gonna go for an evil queen look,” she gloated, before panicking at the loss of her motor skills. “Use your knuckles,” Jesse reccomended.

In the wake of Al Gore’s Oscar win, the importance of environmental consciousness underwent a swift transformation in the arena of public opinion. Suddenly, “going green” had changed from a lame punchline about aging hippies to the hot new trend, quickly emerging as a marketing tool to sell everything from Saturday Night Football to Walmart. I initially feared environmental consciousness would soon be ushered out the door it had flown in, relegated to the trash heap of forgotten cultural movements like pet rocks and Beanie Babies. But the trend seems to be sticking, and there have actually been a lot of positive things to come out of this newly imbued American sense of social responsibility. For instance, convenient and (relatively) affordable applications of solar energy:

The rolled up sheet of flexible solar energy to the left is a Brunton SolarRoll, which for $479 provides 14 watts of energy— enough to re-charge most laptops in a couple of hours, and of course cell phones, digital cameras, iPods and all the rest of those fun portable toys. Also, it’s waterproof— so you can shove it in your pack and take it to the great outdoors, or blog while you’re living on a mountaintop in a tree house (assuming said treehouse is Wi-Fi enabled).

The handsome backpack to the right is a Voltaic Solar Bag. At the low price of $199, it comes with 11 different adapters for easy connection to handheld electronics. Supplying you with 4 watts of solar juice, you’ll never need to come home and charge a phone again. And it’s only 2.9 lbs, including the battery and solar panels! Anyone want to get me this totally unnecessary, but absolutely rad bag for Christmas?

+ Via Boing Boing Gadgets

When Wikipedia started, I guess I had some sort of misconceived notion that it would become a compendium for all human knowledge. And while it started to look that way for a while, there’s a problem in that dream that is just now coming into focus, after more than two million articles have been created and most of the “essentials” have been covered. Wikipedia is not the postmodern Library of Alexandria it has the potential to be, because (according to some) Wikipedia Is Not An Indiscriminate Collection of Information.

In order to be included in Wikipedia, an article must have an attribute called notabilty. But who decides what is notable? There are currently 1,360 unpaid community administrators who are given the authority to control the fate of new Wikipedia entries, as the only ones with the power to delete entire pages. They determine if a page is worthy for inclusion based on Wikipedia’s notability policy:

The topic of an article should be notable, or “worthy of notice”. This concept is distinct from “fame”, “importance”, or “popularity”. A topic is presumed to be notable if it has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject.

So essentially, on Wikipedia nothing is eligible for inclusion until it has received enough coverage from reputable outside sources. Sure, Paris Hilton is notable— she’s been analyzed from every angle on every level of culture— but what about a butcher shop in South Africa called Mzoli’s Meats?

What is more worthy of remembering? Paris Hilton, or this South African butcher shop?

That question seems simple enough, but has sparked a huge debate covered by news outlets from the LA Times to the English paper The Telegraph. Apparently, there are two factions of administrators, diametrically opposed on the issue of notability. From The LA Times:

Inclusionists believe that because Wikipedia is not bound by the same physical limits as a paper encyclopedia, it shouldn’t have the same conceptual limits either. If there’s room for an article on unreleased Kylie Minogue singles — and a group of people who might find it useful— why not include it?

Deletionists, meanwhile, believe that because not all articles are created equal, judicious pruning increases the overall quality of Wikipedia’s information and strengthens its reputation. An encyclopedia, they say, is not just a dumping ground for facts.

What could these “Deletionists” see in the aforementioned conceptual limitations of traditional encyclopedias? What could be wrong with hosting all the information in the world on one easily accessible, searchable server? Isn’t that the vision of so many sci-fi fantasies— a world where our robot pals could answer any question in the bounds of human knowledge instantaneously, with implied access to a centralized database containing all information?

Check out The Wikipedia Knowledge Dump, a blog devoted to rescuing information before it’s eradicated from Wikipedia. And for a first-hand look at the douchebag reasoning behind Deletionist attitudes, check out this Cracked.com article entitled “The 8 Most Needlessly Detailed Wikipedia Entries”. Note that since that article’s publication, several of the articles it heckles have been purged from Wikipedia— literally tens of thousands of words expunged because someone thinks it’s funny that there might be a demand— however slight— for plot descriptions of “7th Heaven” episodes!

Even this stain on human history deserves to be remembered in minute detail.

Information is never needless! As the chart in this video explains, knowledge is power! But beyond that obvious assertion, we must come to realize that trivia is important, and beautiful. To quote two kindergarten philosophies in one paragraph, there are no stupid questions. Everything is important as long as any person, regardless of their significance, has the desire to know about it. Minutia is glorious!

Divorced of the self, we are all merely information stored in other people’s brains— neurons filed away in an unknown cranial cabinet until death or senility renders those life-long memories moot. We never truly die until we cease to exist as information. Gravestones are less for presenting corpse coordinates and more for saving the names inscribed upon them from the same grisly fate that has claimed their owners. Hence, information is the same as life. Deletionism is genocide.

I am a believer in the viability of Borges’ life-sized map of the world. Why not?

	I was lucky enough to get a chance to go to the Wired NextFest Convention this weekend, and it was pretty awe-inspiring. My friend Mark brought me along to cover the event for Digital Media Wire, the site I took pictures for last week at the Spoon show. Robot clones, Russian virtual reality cages, samurai cyborgs and mechanical DJs were scattered throughout the Los Angeles Convention Center, and I got a chance to document some of the madness and radness. Mark shot the video to the right and I took the photos below the jump. Enjoy!

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Shorpy calls itself “The 100-Year-Old Photo Blog”, and acts as a catalogue of vintage snapshots and photos of little official (at least in a broad, historical sense) importance. In a time before the Internet, these sort of photos were confined to mysterious, musky antique shops, thrown in old shoeboxes with yellowed postcards from long since demolished tourist traps, and baseball cards with the smiling faces of now-unknown players adorning them. Nowadays, these ancient images are being digitally frozen, the originals left to perish at the unforgiving hands of time.

So much overlooked history is being catalogued in searchable databases, in the Web 2.0 world of Youtube, Wikipedia, and Flickr— not just in the realm of antique photos, but in all forms of ephemera. Images and sounds are resurrected (Shorpy says it “brings our ancestors back, at least to the desktop”) after so many years imprisoned in desk drawers, bootleg VHS tapes, and moldy out-of-print books. Now we need not leave the comfort of our homes to seek out unique objects in foreign places. The function of said antique stores, each with their own character and atmosphere, as keeper of such artifacts, will disappear at the same rate as the already-declining record stores and video stores, as all media loses its physical nature, soon to be accessible only within in the sterile virtual space of every monitor hooked up to the Internet.

Is that too much to sacrifice for glimpse of the abandoned past? Decide for yourself, by checking out the beautiful images in Shorpy’s already vast collection. Click the jump to see some of my favorites.

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Plan 59 is an online archive of vintage illustrations from the 1950’s, mostly from bizarre American advertising. Personally, I prefer the aesthetic of 1970’s advertisting, but amongst the squeaky clean forced wholesomeness of that nonsense decade, there are some fun little gems.

The above illustrations of wrestling stars are explicitly homoerotic. The true American hero on the left is named Yukon Eric. I want him to be my trail guide on whatever mountain he came down from. He can probably communicate with bluejays. According to legend, Yukon Eric was a friendly introvert who didn’t drink or smoke, and once beat up a saloon full of bullies who were criticizing him for being a milk-drinker. That’s my kind of man! There’s more great pictures over on Plan59’s Pro Wrestler gallery.

Plan59 also has a hilarious and terrifying collection of images called Demonic Tots and Deeply Disturbing Cuisine. The Bad Seed, anyone? Dakota Fanning is like, seriously jealous of these freaks. The kids in these pictures are the fictional progenitors of those cuddly Aryans in Village of the Damned. Why were parents in the 50’s so afraid of their kids? I mean, it’s not like they were on the irrevocable path of growing into pseudo-revolutionary herb-smoking, free-loving hippies, and then callous coke-snorting capitalists, or something… oh wait.

 

“Welcome to Cyberspace!” declared Time in 1995, when they published a special issue introducing its readers to the hot-button issue of the “information superhighway”. Approaching this strange new technology cautiously, with hyperbole abound, the issue attempted to break things down with a veritable lexicon of new vocabulary that failed to catch on. For instance: “Information may still be delivered in magazines and newspapers (atoms), but the real value is in the contents (bits). We pay for our goods and services with cash (atoms), but the ebb and flow of capital around the world is carried out […] in electronic funds transfers (bits).” Also, what’s a “teleputer”? Anyway, innacuracies are to be expected from a 12-year-old issue of Time, but I only bring it up because I was obsessed with the issue as a child. I wanted to “touch cyberspace” as one article claimed I would be able to.

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