Sweden has surrendered its official Twitter account, @sweden, to the hoi polloi. The project, Curators of Sweden, signs up Swedes to tweet a week at a time. It started December 10 with Jack Wermer, a writer and marketing specialist. The second tweeter was Hasan Ramic, a Bosnian immigrant
Currently, the position is filled by the moose-hunting, oral tobacco product enthusiast Anders Dalenius.
Surely you saw the #OccupyWallStreet pepper-spraying cop Internet meme. And perhaps since then you've been inspired to create your own Internet meme. If so, then take a hint from the "Hey Girl" Ryan Gosling Internet meme, which features a picture of the actor alongside an intellectual pick-up line. It's been going strong since December 2010, and it's not disappearing anytime soon.
Ryan Gosling Feminist, one of the smarter iterations of this meme was created by Danielle Henderson, a graduate student in the University of Wisconsin Madison's women and gender studies program. We asked her a few questions about her take on the popularity of "Hey Girl." And just days after we did that, the Internet produced Museum Hey Girl, for the artier among us. Hey Girl Happy Hannukah appeared on December 20, the first day of the holiday.
Today Twitvid announced that it is launching a new open social video network and redesigned site focused on helping users find their favorite videos. Twitvid wants to make it easier to upload clips and share them to YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook and Twitter.
For now, Twitvid's frontpage interface looks more like Digg's (before the social newsrooms). It shows most popular TwitVids by views, along with a featured Twitvid and a Twitvid Tuesdays Winner. There is a list of popular members on the right rail. Twitvid is tossing this simplistic design for user profiles that focus on personalized video taste. Sharing will be more focused around personal interests rather than top rated content. Imagine the Facebook news feed, but only populated by video that has been personalized to your tastes.
In 2009, Iceland passed a privacy and free speech law to make itself into a haven for new media. Since then it has seen the eruptions of the Eyjafjallajökull and Grímsvötn volcanoes and one of the worst banking meltdowns of all time. But despite the dark times, Iceland has not lost its faith in the power of the social web.
The country is now crowdsourcing the writing of its new constitution.
Tomorrow, the State of Alaska is set to release over 24,000 of Sarah Palin's emails, "covering much of her tenure as governor of Alaska." The New York Times is hoping that its readers will pitch in and help them filter this vast cache of new data on the former governor and erstwhile vice presidential candidate. Derek Willis announced the project on the Times's Caucus blog.
"We're asking readers to help us identify interesting and newsworthy e-mails, people and events that we may want to highlight. Interested users can fill out a simple form to describe the nature of the e-mail, and provide a name and e-mail address so we'll know who should get the credit. Join us here on Friday afternoon and into the weekend to participate."
Last week, former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin gave a highly idiosyncratic (read: inaccurate) portrait of American revolutionary figure Paul Revere to the media. Now, a struggle has broken out on Wikipedia over Ms. Palin's version of history.
Her version was that Paul Revere rode through Boston, ringing a bell, to announce to the British that the colonials were preparing to fight. This is not remotely true. He rode silently, to let the revolutionaries know the British were en route.
Update after the jump.
The largest telescope ever to exist (on this planet anyway) is going to be the Square Kilometre Array. The SKA will cost about $2.1 billion to construct. Australia and South Africa are bidding on the project. What may give Australia an edge is the way they intend to handle the massive computer processing and storage demands of the array. Crowdsourcing.
The crowdsourced computing initiative which those behind the Australia bid have put together will leverage personal computer power in lieu of extremely expensive petaflop supercomputers.
Twitter photo-sharing service TwitPic has updated its terms of service to clear up any misunderstanding of who owns the pictures uploaded to the service. There have been controversies in the past year about media organizations using photos posted on TwitPic and not giving proper attribution or compensation to the original photographer.
TwitPic's new terms of service should clear up that confusion. In it TwitPic explicitly states that content uploaded by a user is the copyright of the respective owner. It is not part of the public domain and is subject to how the user, not media organizations, chooses to have it disseminated.
Australia has begun employing the Web as a major tool in gathering, preserving and sharing the cultural traditions of its native peoples. The religious, personal and individual stories of Australia's native peoples, their visual art and worldviews are globally acknowledged to have a powerful presence. However, as with most now-minority peoples around the world, the forces of centralization and modernization have taken their toll.
Now, Web technologies are allowing the peoples in question to dynamically capture and pass on the wisdom and experiences of their culture as a whole and those of their elders in particular. Here are two particularly exciting examples of how technology has been used in Australia to achieve these goals.
Save the Redwoods League has partnered with Google Earth Outreach to create a virtual walk through a modeled old-growth redwood stand in Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park in California.
To celebrate the U.S.'s 120th Arbor Day, you can take a stroll through 3D stands of ancient redwood trees.
