Social Media Websites in Illustrated Form

Social news/bookmarking sites these days are controlling what gets popular on the internet, with their users that is. Once a story gets popular on one community driven site, it’ll easily get picked up by its competitors and the blogosphere. Therefore these sites play an important role in discovering new trends beyond the internet and making people aware of things we wouldn’t normally read about.

I personally was a longtime fan, but now I’m distancing myself a bit of digg.com, cause the community has gotten too large after a lot of media attention and the youngsters keep ‘digging’ the lightweight stories. A perfect example is the Paris Hilton jailtime thing going on right now.
So now I’m in search for an alternative with more serious articles.

Anyway, check these very funny and oh-so-true sketches of some social bookmarking sites.

1906 San Francisco earthquake

I just spent half an hour looking at this very fascinating picture that got picked up by the ‘blogosphere’ on the wikimedia server.
It’s a hundred year old high resolution picture of San Fransisco taken right after the great 1906 earthquake(flickr). Apparently the gigantic camera was elevated 2000 ft.(610m) up by a number of kites.

I’ve always wondered, I live in Belgium where the streets are crooked and the traffic’s a mess, but don’t people get lost in this grid like city where every block looks almost identical to the one next to it… And not to mention the numbered streets.

FedEx Planes Dodging a Storm

Now, here’s a funny image, these are mapped FedEx planes trying to deviate a thunderstorm.

Vista and some thoughts

I know I haven’t been posting too often lately, but I’ve been busy playing around with Windows Vista. Yeah, I installed it a few weeks back on a separate partition to see what it does and now I completely switched over.

I didn’t install Vista because it’s newer and possibly better, but since I’m a power user I think I can benefit and work more efficiently with features like on-the-fly disk searches or file tagging.

I must say my first impression was very good. I’ve got a Dell pc and on XP I had to install tons of drivers to get everything functioning properly (Hyper-Threading and stuff) and on Vista I had to do squad, everything worked right out of the box, the installation was done within 30 minutes.

Off course every feature they implemented already exists and might be taken from other operating systems like OSX or Ubuntu, but all in all I think it’s a big step in the right direction for Microsoft.
It’s a very clean UI, I’m not a fan of the Aero Glass eye candy but it isn’t distracting either. I’m not gonna talk about the other features cause I haven’t had time to explore them thoroughly.

Together with Vista I installed the new Office 2007 suite which has a very cool and intuitive user interface.

As you can see I’m speak highly of the new Microsoft products, maybe it’s a first impression, maybe not. I hope I don’t change my mind.

Google Search - Fixed Search Results Bar userstyle

Just created another userstyle for Google Search, this one makes the page navigation bar fixed to the bottom for easy acces. Got the idea from a guy at the userstyles.org forum.

For more information on userstyles and the Stylish firefox extension, go over to userstyles.org.
Also check out my other styles at the Downloads section or my userstyles.org profile.

AmonTobin.com launching Feb. 26th

This is a teaser for Amon Tobin’s new website, which launches on February 26th.
A designer said:

I’m from Notice Bureau, we were in charge of creative and art direction on this project, and we’ve been working on this for over a year. Don’t know if it exactly applies to your blog, but it sure is fun, and we created more that 30mns of animations and videos for the final site.

Meanwhile watch this unofficial music video of Amon Tobin’s Slowly that some guy made with a video game called Gary’s Mod.

BTW I also bought Gary’s Mod and I’m having way to much fun with it, very addictive. It isn’t exactly a game, it’s an application that gives you all kinds of tools to play around with Half-Life ’s physics engine. You can make movies and do all kinds of crazy shit, just check out the site.

Josdigital.com needs updating

Just wanna let you know that tomorrow my blog will be unavailable cause I’ll be updating my content management system to the recently released WordPress 2.1.

It’ll probably be done within an hour, but if I run into some problems and will most likely happen, it could take a little longer so I’m taking the whole day. Just to let y’all know…

Update: Done, everything went pretty smoothly.

Hiroshima, the pictures they didnt want us to see

Here are a series of pictures with description of the suffering after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I must warn you for our sensitive readers, these are some very disturbing pictures.

I’m not approving the bombings or anything, but I want you to see why the Americans decided to kill so many in advance. I mean NOTHING justifies killing thousands of innocent people.

These are pictures of the Nanking Massacre in 1937, where the Japanese killed and raped thousands in a very cruel manner.

Aren’t we blessed to live in this western society where we feed the hungry and help the lesser fortunate?

Hiroshima, the pictures they didnt want us to see

Here are a series of pictures with description of the suffering after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I must warn you for our sensitive readers, these are some very disturbing pictures.

I’m not approving the bombings or anything, but I want you to see why the Americans decided to kill so many in advance. I mean NOTHING justifies killing thousands of innocent people.

These are pictures of the Nanking Massacre in 1937, where the Japanese killed and raped thousands in a very cruel manner.

Aren’t we blessed to live in this western society where we feed the hungry and help the lesser fortunate?