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Jul 8 2008   11:32AM GMT

A digital nursery rhyme for online gurus and clever children of the Internet

Posted by: Alexander Howard
Apple, Technology, Web services, fun, YouTube, Internet, social bookmarking, creativity, Silicon Valley, songs, tag, social networking, Vista, humor, Web applications, Windows, word meanings, geek

Amit Agarwal posted the clever, useful graphic below over at his Digital Inspiration blog. The graphic has been making the rounds online; if anyone knows who originally created and uploaded it, please let me know so that I can properly credit him or her.

If you’re a geeky parent, this might be an upgrade on “A is for Apple.” Oh, wait. That part doesn’t change.

Most of these should be familiar to most netizens but, just in case you’re mystified, here’s a digital nursery rhyme to help you remember:

A is for Apple, user-friendly as can be

B is for Bluetooth, which connects printers to me

C is for Core Duo, a faster computer chip

D is del.icio.us, a social bookmarking trip

E is eMule, a file sharing client

F is for Facebook, a social networking giant

G is for Google, which searches most knowledge

H is for Holon, an Israeli college

I is for iPhone, a touchscreen smartphone

J is for Java, a language well-honed

K is Kazaa, another file sharing service

L is for Linux, an open source OS

M is for MSN, Microsoft’s portal

N is for Napster, which made record companies mortal

O is for Office, for presenting and writing

P is for Playstation, for gaming that’s exciting

Q is for Quicktime, used for videos large and small

R is for RSS, syndicating to us all

S is for Second Life, the 3D metaverse

T is tagging, creating folksonomies of verse

U is for USB, the universal connection

V is for Vista,  Microsoft’s OS correction

W is for Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia

X is for XP, the standard OS selection

Y is for YouTube, of online video fame

Z is for Zuma, a free silly game.

Now that you’ve relearned your ABCs,  next time won’t you sing with me?

Happy naptimes, future digerati.

Aug 7 2007   3:31PM GMT

LOLcats: I can haz control of the Internet meme space?

Posted by: Alexander Howard
fun, Internet, cool, culture, interesting, creativity, visual, image, tag, social networking, blogging, humor, buzzword, word meanings

Sometimes, Internet memes are just too powerful to ignore. Especially for a blog that delves into online humor at times. Witness the rise of the LOLcats.

For me, the tipping point may have been when a fellow editor emailed the WhatIs team a Schrodinger’s LOLcat.

For those unschooled in quantum theory, Schrodinger’s Cat is a famous illustration of the principle of superposition, proposed by Erwin Schrödinger in 1935. Our definition of the concept also happens to be one of the most popular pages on WhatIs.com, as you’ll often see on our recently added/updated page.

As pictured on the right, it’s just darn funny.
 story of how the Schrodinger’s LOLcat was created, if you’re intrigued. Credit goes there for the image, naturally.

It’s just one of the latest creations (albeit one more thought-provoking than some) to emerge from the minds of punchy technologists and quirky geeks.

So what is an LOLcat?

Put simply, an it’s an image of a cat with text on top of it.

As usual, there’s considerably more history to the etymology of the word.

Adam Koford, in fact, believes that the idea is much older, going alllll the way back to the early past of last century, where a cartoonist (his great-grandfather, Aloysius “Gorilla” Koford) he produced a comic strip entitled “the Laugh-Out-Loud Cats.”

Whether you believe the modern phenomenon is based upon that or not, LOLcats are in many ways a throwback to the early days of the Internet, where Usenet posters would use image macros to insert an appropriate image behind text captions to make a more emphatic point.

And, in fact, that concept fully fleshes out an more accurate definition for LOLcat, an image macro where humorous, idiosyncratic or insightful text is pasted as a caption onto an image of a cat that’s engaged in some sort of funny activity.

Call them “cat macros” for short.

For once, we might be “chasing the tail” of deadtree media, as TIME Magazine wrote about the LOLcat phenomenon recently, bringing this element of Internet culture out of the blogosphere and into mass culture.

While the fervor over LOLcats has subsided a bit over the past few months as netizens hit the beaches, these furry funnies are still popping up everywhere, not just encyclopedia entries over at Wikipedia, UrbanDictionary, Encyclopedia Dramatica or Answers.com.

And, lest you think this is just about “kittybloggers,” BoingBoing has been blogging up a storm about LOLcats.

Witness this tremendous post that dives deep into the etymology of the LOLcat (alluded to above.)
Or this one, where Xeni alternately praises, with tongue firmly in cheek, a “pedantic overanalyzation” of LOLcat history.

Personally, I rather admired how the author, David McRaney, offered such a thorough discussion of leetspeak and Internet slang.

BoingBoing and David aren’t the only commentators on the phenomenon, of course. Anil Dash, of SixApart fame, made a thoughtful post about LOLcat grammar and Internet pidgin languages.

Mahalo also has a great LOLcat roundup.

If you just want your LOLcat fix, however, Xeni also linked to two huge archives of LOLcat pictures, here and here. You can find more at LOLcat.com, LOLcats.com and ICanHasCheeseburger.com.

If that still isn’t enough, you can sort through images and pages tagged with lolcat at Flickr, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us and WordPress. (This relatively new phenomenon of being able to link to tag aggregations on social bookmarking sites as useful reference material is, by the way, one of my favorite outcomes of the Web 2.0 movement.)

If those reams of LOLcats still don’t slake your thirst for cat macros, you can always make your own at either of two great LOLcat generators, LOLcatr.com or kscakes.com.

If you want to extend the LOL meme beyond cats, you can also roll your own LOL at laughingsquid.com.

Above is a personal favorite, to round out the post for those of you who love a good unexplained paper jam.

(Credit: ljg)

Apr 12 2007   1:23PM GMT

Office 2000 HTML Filter 2.0: Free download to remove Office-specific HTML from documents

Posted by: Alexander Howard
Microsoft, useful, tool, HTML, Office, productivity, tag

If you work with Microsoft Office, you may be aware of the Office-specific HTML tags that the various applications in the suite add to your code when you save as HTML. This handy tool, available as a download from Microsoft.com, enables the user to easily remove those pesky tags. Nifty.