Twitterfountain, billed as a mashup of Twitter posts and Flickr images into a visual backchannel, is a flash widget/badge that does what it says. Visually mesmerizing, it has a few neat options as well. You can resize it, change the color to any hexidecimal code. (Man, I hate when they give you just a plain color option: ‘green’ or ‘pink’—might as well just name them ’sissy’ and ‘vomit’ for all that they match your site.) You can have it toss up tweets with a specific keyword, and Flickr photos as well. This might work well with hashtags. The only things I don’t like is that you can’t click on any of the tweets, and some of the text is in Dutch…I think.

I’ll play with the settings a bit to try out different speeds and multiple keywords; you can actually do that yourself with the ‘adjust’ setting, then copy those settings with a click of a button from here, or go read up on Twitterfountain and get your own.

Friggin’ awesome.

Formally known as microelectromechanical system (MEMS) microrobots, the devices are of suitable scale for Lilliputian tasks such as moving around the interiors of laboratories-on-a-chip.

Via NanoTechWire.com

Yet another cute social network: Plurk. Tiny floating posts on a timeline that can be commented on. Post pictures, video, flyers for your missing dog. And I can access it via IM. What’s not to like?

Oh yeah, the karma thing. I have to earn karma points to edit my profile? Uh. Dumb.

Got a widget, though.

WTF! Can’t use IM, can’t use Spaz, can’t use the web interface. Ugh.

This trailer video’s been making the rounds recently. I saw it first on io9, all over the place in Google Reader, and most recently on Adventures in the Outer Rim. The Iron Sky is billed as scifi comedy, and I’d been hoping for something a little more hardcore, especially since there’s a strong storyline potential in the deviated history of the Cold War Era. Still, I’ll buy it.

This will be the second internet feature film that Energia Productions has produced. The first, Star Wreck, was a huge collaborative process—Iron Sky is being made the same way, but with the help of Wreck A Movie (still in beta) whose aim is to enable Internet-era collaborative filmmaking.

Okay, so now we have social movies to go with our social networks and images and viruses. Anyway, it’s still cool. You sign up, choose the production you’re interested in (there were three that I noticed—you can’t create your own yet, but they’ve plans to implement that in the future), and voilà, you’re part of the production crew. There are a couple of ways to participate, and one that caught my eye was creating “War Bonds” to help fund the production. You can see the ones they’re selling on the main website.

In 1945 the Nazis fled to the moon. In 2018 they are coming back.

Play with a purpose - Cosmic Log - msnbc.com

Researchers are enlisting Internet users to try out a new set of games that will help them develop smarter search engines and sharper-eyed machines. It’s kind of like playing “Hot or Not” … for a scientific cause.

Games With a Purpose, or GWAP, is the brainchild of computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University - including Luis von Ahn, one of the creators of the CAPTCHA filter to distinguish between real humans and machines. As part of their plan to elevate machines to the next level of human-style intelligence, von Ahn and his colleagues hope to capitalize on the all-too-human desire to get to a multiplayer game’s next level.

Now this is really neat. With (hopefully) millions of people pitching in and “playing”, researchers will be able to program search engines that can more accurately judge what we’re looking for. Another step along the way to creating friendly little AIs to help us verbalize what we sometimes lack the words for. That’s not all, either. Any step towards creating a true AI will have an impact on all AI applications.

Forget about scary scifi scenarios of super robots taking over their weakling creators: I’ve a sneaking suspicion that we’ll be using this technology to boost our own strengths and prop up our unbearable weaknesses. Hard-wired and bristling with some truly awesome brainware, we’ll be the AI’s doomsayers are droning on about. I say, bring on the robots. For all you know, it’ll be the cute boy next door.

As an interesting aside, the MSNBC article also notes some gender differences.

The gender game
Although you’re not required to share any personal data, you do have the option of filling out a profile that’s much like the kind of listing you’d see on MySpace or Facebook. Von Ahn’s experience with the ESP Game has already yielded some insights into the finer points of game play.

“Pairs of females and pairs of males do better than when one is female and one is male,” von Ahn observed. “For example, if there’s a picture of an attractive female, and there are two males playing, they’re more likely to both say the word ‘hot.’”

Despite that same-sex advantage, von Ahn said online players would rather go through the game with a partner of the opposite sex if they’re given a choice - which just goes to show that a little sex appeal goes a long way, even when you’re engaged in the scientific game.

I’m going to give a few of those games a whirl tonight. I’ll get back to you on ‘em if they’re interesting enough.

In the process of consolidating my web presence, it seems I have to diversify a little bit. All of my social networks should be peripheral, while my blog remains my “home”. My main blog, however, is of too sexual a nature for friends to read at work, at home, amongst their loved ones, and certainly not in public.

So this is where my nonsexual nonsensical posts shall reside.