Ice Hotel

Now, before this blog turns into a linkfest to all kinds of weird sites on the Net... this is a place that is actually cool in more ways than one. You've probably heard of the place before, as it has been publicized a lot about the time of the opening, but it's a place that I'd actually like to visit if I have the chance: The arctic IceHotel! Should you go up North you should stay in an Igloo, but instead of building one this hotel allows you to travel in style! It looks as if the hotel is rebuilt every year, and sculptured beautifully by ice sculptors. And, don't forget to look at the online menu!

Collector's items

You can collect stamps, you can collect beer bottles... you can collect anything! So, of course, you can collect pictures of Tiny Animals on Fingers.

Do the Can Can

No words... just video.

Geostationary banana over Texas

We're not in Kansas anymore! No, on the list of best places to station a floating banana over..... Texas ranks first! No kidding, whether as a continuous reminder to eat your fruits daily or as a first hint at the extraterrestrians that we're banana's - here is the project that is going to make a giant banana floating over Texas a reality. Great.

The Venice Project

The Venice Project, the current name for peer-to-peer entrepreneurs Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis streaming TV project, is nearing release to a wider (though still beta) audience. The client based application will fuse TV and internet experience hopefully giving viewers the best of both worlds. Time will tell how the low threshold video posting of YouTube will compare to The Venice Projects' premium content (such as the cute baby panda above ;-) ). More in the coming weeks!

BumpTop desktop user interface

It appears as if (finally) some research surfaces again on how to improve on the decades old 2D desktop metaphor. Sure, there were some shareware experiments where you could 'walk through' your own house with rooms... obviously developed by someone not held back by any experience in the useability department. Now however, there is BumpTop. Nothing more than a video on YouTube and some scientific papers, it looks like something that could work. At the very least it is appealing to myself, as someone who loves paper piles on his desk and loads of icons on his virtual desktop... now if only something like this could be merged with the interaction controller of the Wii, the search capability of the Mac OS X Spotlight and some of the desktop switching of this Novell development. Please, Santa?

News show - generated

News at Seven is a generated, and simulated, newsshow. It's a great experiment that made me realize how different it is if someone reads something to you instead of reading it yourself - while at the same time explicitly showing how much proper editing goes into an 'ordinary' news broadcast... and how manipulative some automated editing can -unintentionally- appear.

Lords of the boards... presenting Tyson

"Even made a homepage for my dog..." - but not just ANY dog, but Tyson the skateboarding bulldog! It seems to have taken no training at all, as Tyson had been chasing skateboarders off their boards until he got his own... great video's!

A hyperlinked kitchen!

Here's some guys taking the hyperlinked structure to their kitchen environment...
Weird? You bet! Great? Well, it IS definitely showing how the web influences SOME people's lives...