My pals from The Buried Life just dropped me a note with a link to their new trailer shown above. If you missed the news, they’ve been given there own MTV show! Fantastic coverage of what they’re up to in this past Sunday’s New York Times
Four buddies set off across the country in an R.V., video camera in tow, to knock items off their “100 things to do before I die†list: kiss the Stanley Cup, get a tattoo, grow a mustache.
With plenty of high jinks and adolescent humor, “The Buried Life†seems like the perfect MTV reality show, except for one unexpected twist. At each stop the group helps deserving locals with their own wishes. In Idaho, for example, they took eight children with brain cancer on a shopping spree at Toys “R†Us.
During this political season it’s almost guaranteed that you’ll be relying on various media sources for your up to the minute election coverage. If you’re looking at online periodicals and sites run by certain 24-hour news networks, the likelihood that all of your information will be ‘fair and balanced’ is slim to none. Most gatekeepers have an agenda that might not always be obvious to those who look to them for commentary. Thankfully, if you have trouble cutting through the biased sheepdip, interactive agency Sarkissian Mason has launched The Contrarian, an independent online fact-checking site that seeks to empower the masses to demand truth in media. The site doesn’t undermine your favorite news source, but rather enriches it by allowing readers cull key points on an issue from several “contrary” sources in order to develop a more focused opinion on world matters.
Your Virgin Big Brother is watching. No, not Jeff (although you may want to add a second lock on your bedroom door). The Virgin Eye is a new interactive way for you (and more importantly Richard Branson) to keep an eye on everyone who’s talking about Virgin stakes around the world. From Virgin Atlantic, to Virgin Healthcare, to Virgin Online Dating Service, keywords are aggregated as links in a Milky Way of Web chatter, all scanned by a Dr. Evil-like “laser.” It looks hot, but methinks it smells a bit of the Spectra razzle dazzle.
Well, all of the mystery surrounding the new iPhone we’ve been shrouded in for the past couple months can finally be put to rest. Mr. Jobs just revealed the particulars at today’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference in San Francisco. Jason Chen and crew at Gizmodo did one hell of a job live blogging the event, and I found myself hitting ‘command-R’ just about every 10 seconds anxiously awaiting new nuggets of info. On July 11th, we’ll get (black or white) iPhones with a fast 3G network, the availability of tons and tons of 3rd party apps, impressive battery life, GPS functionality, and it’s going to be sold in 70 countries for the drastically reduced prices of $199 for the 8GB version and $299 for the 16 Gigabyte-er. Doesn’t look like they squeezed copy/paste in there, but we always need something to look forward to, right?
Photos and other informational goodies courtesy of Gizmodo.
CNN news crawl, meet your younger, colorful, more animated brother. If you’ve ever said to yourself, “I hate reading the news. But if it were color coded by topic and then put into a swirling vortex of Flash animation, then maybe I’d know what the hell was going on in Myanmar. Behold, the Spectra newsreader from MSNBC, a visually stylized way for daily news junkies to manipulate their content. Select your top stories and the feed starts aggregating from MSNBC’s site. Click on a topic and it flips it open in a Today Showmeets Minority Report fashion. Save your favorite stories, add channels, and customize your experience. We think it’s hot and all, but is this new and intuitive, or just simply some browser-candy?
Ben Kaufman wants you to work for him. And you. And you. And all those people in that building next to you. We told you about his ever morphing business of crowdsourced product development called Kluster. Now it has landed on something new: Knewsroom, a user powered daily news feed. Of course, Kaufman doesn’t expect you to power his enterprise for nothing. That’s why every day, if you’ve submitted or bet correctly on the winning stories, you get cash. It’s kind of like a headline horse race, and you’re the one feeding the pony anabolic steroids. No, wait. It’s kind of like CNN meets American Idol. Well, it’s not quite that either. Here, Ben can explain it better. Oh, and he’s also throwing a party with Mashable at Webster Hall on Friday. Just tell him we sent you. When that doesn’t work, pay for a ticket.
CNN.com quietly launched a new feature today which allows readers to order T-shirts of their favorite headlines as they happen. And yes, they have some funny (and terrible) headlines to choose from. To get there, look for the tiny little T-shirt icon next to the headlines on the front page. The great and inherently viral part about it is the shirts are limited edition, and only available during a certain “headline” period of time. Shirts are $15 a pop which is totally fair, and the entire service is powered by Spreadshirt.
Because we received so much feedback from the original post, I felt compelled to inform you all that Yang Wu and Wu Ping have succumb to the Chinese Government and the real estate developer that will build a shopping mall in the area that their two story home stood just days ago. An end of March court order provided that the couple must vacate the premises or face forcible removal. Still, until the very end, they were defiant and strong. Their final settlement reportedly included a similarly sized apartment in the building that will replace the chasm in which their “nail house” once stood. They sure had a great run at it, but in the end, the man gets everyone down!
In the good ol’ U.S. of A, we have eminent domain laws that allow the government to take land from citizens as long as they pay the dispossessed a fair market fee for the “taking.” Yang Wu and Wu Ping, a couple living in the Chinese city of Chongquing, have been holding out in the most extreme sense to a real estate developer who wants to build a shopping mall where their neighborhood once stood. The conflict has been going on since 2004, when the developer paid the couple’s 280 neighbors to vacate their domiciles– as you can see in the photo, it has gotten to the point where their two story dingzihu (or “nail houseâ€) is now perched precariously on a little spire of land around which the developer has begun to dig the mall’s foundation. A local court recently ordered Yang and Wu to vacate their home, but they nevertheless remain, holding out for more money, despite being offered around $450,000 USD (a very high amount for that particular region)– utterly determined to exercise their rights as property owners. They’ve garnered the support of fellow citizens and are getting a boat load of media attention. Any thoughts about this? Do you think the couple is justified in their actions? Or do you think they’re beyond reason?
If you’re a regular reader of the Wired blogs (like I am), you may have noticed the series of redesigns throughout the past few weeks on Wired.com. A site redesign is a big decision for a widely read blog (or family of blogs) to make. You want to keep moving forward with creative and user-friedly additions, but you don’t want to alienate your readership by trying to get too fancy or by adding extraneous features. Looks like Wired is bouncing back from a recent redesign that provoked some pretty “frank reader reviews.” Some of the highlights of their most recent redesign from their first redesign: A ‘River of News‘ aggregator; tabs for most e-mailed stories and real time updates to the web’s hottest links from Reddit; and variable headline font sizes so you can distinguish ‘big news’ from, well, ‘news.’ I think they’ve improved on their old design with some thoughtful, intuitive additions. What do you think?
I’m not going to lie– the paper version of “America’s Finest News Source,” The Onion, got me (and many of my friends) through college. The university made the mistake of stocking the lobbies of all the lecture halls with the rag, and at the end of late afternoon classes, the entire area of the floor would be covered with smart and satirical Onion headlines. I sure didn’t mind; probably covered up some gnarly half-eaten burritos that would have gotten stuck in the sole of my Vans. We still, to this day, recite side-cramping Onion stories we read when we were in college. Today The Onion is taking a jump forward, following the likes of John Stewart and Steven Colbert, with The Onion News Network. This morning, I learned through its maiden newscast that President Bush is calling up Civil War Re-enactors for Iraq duty. That’s a scoop not even Fox News had picked up on yet! We’re talking timely and relevant news here. Here’s what the “real news” has to say about Onion’s foray into live (mmm err taped) broadcast news. Please join me in raising a glass for the new Onion News Network!
The story of Eric Volz is scary, heart wrenching, and unfortunately, very real– it has gained national attention with a front page story in the Wall Street Journal last week, and the viral exposure it’s sure to get with this YouTube video will surely make it a huge and widely recognized piece of national (and international) news. I will let you learn the details by watching this video– as it does such a great job of explaining the story– but the basics are that American Eric Volz was living a great life in Nicaragua as a publisher for El Puente Magazine, a travel lifestyle magazine focusing on eco-tourism in Nicaragua. Upon the mysterious death of an ex-girlfriend, law enforcement came after him despite a solid alibi, locked him up for 84 days, and then a judge convicted him of the murder without following any concrete evidence– he was basically tried in the press. Violations of Eric’s rights to due process run rampant throughout this story, and it’s sure to elicit a surprised and sickened reaction from you all. After watching this short film, head here to donate to Eric’s cause, and here to become a friend on Myspace– and write your politicians a letter on his behalf.
An article on the Snowboard Mag website is indicating that there may be riding/skiing (and a lot more) in Las Vegas in the not so distant future. According to one of the founders of Las Vegas WET, they’ve been exchanging offers and counteroffers with an undisclosed landowner to acquire 200 acres of land along the Strip to build a mega sports facility, that will include an over 350,000 square foot indoor water park (to be the largest in North America), and a ton of other attractions that have yet to be disclosed officially, but may include in indoor ski area (according to the photos on their website– included here). If built, this facility would be larger than the entire Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, CA. But don’t worry, the development group has decided to “expand the environmental angle” of the project to be more “conservation conscious and environmentally friendly.” (chuckle chuckle). Do we really need another water-sucking, electricity-devouring monstrosity in Vegas? I’ll stick to the roulette wheel.
As much as I love my Apple Blackbook, I don’t think it could provide me with the service that this Panasonic CF-M34 laptop provided to an American soldier in the 82nd Airborne Division on duty in Iraq. Word is, the soldier started carrying his laptop with him to help him fulfill his duties– something tells me it came in most handy for a task that he never foresaw. No word about where the shot came from, or how high a caliber shell, but the Panasonic Toughbook stopped it right in its tracks and saved the soldier from, at the very least, a trip to the hospital. Looks like our brave and dedicated overseas are now even doing the work of advertising agencies. I don’t think Panasonic could have wished for better publicity for their Toughbook line.
Via BoingBoing
In the good ol’ U.S. of A, we have 
If you’re a regular reader of the Wired blogs (like I am), you may have noticed the series of 
As much as I love my Apple 
