fauxstor.net

After seeing this logo roundup get featured on TechCrunch, I was inspired to fire up the wayback machine and demonstrate the downfall of a corporate logo. In the neatorama piece, most logos improved. In the case of my web 1.0 alma mater, iSyndicate, I'd say it was a bell curve:

1998-1999

1999-2001

2001-2002

2002-Present

Cameron Marlow has now been blighted with the phrase "whiz kid," which I will never let him live down. To celebrate his initiation into the timeless realm inhabited by the likes of Doogie Howser, Matthew Broderick, and Michael J. Fox, I dug up this little gem:

And if you are morbidly fascinated, here are the lyrics.

Some awesome MJ action at the anti-war rally:

YouTube page...

Hooray for internet chain letters. Even better when they come from your friends.

1. The rat flea (Xenopsylla cheopsis) feeds from rodents, and is the most common cause for infection of the bubonic plague. This occurs when the flea has fed on an infected rodent, and then bites a human.¹
2. Flea "dirt," in the fur of a cat, is actually excess blood (from host) consumed by the adult flea, passed as feces.²
3. Flea developed an enthusiasm in playing music very early, first trying his hand at the drums. However, at the age of nine he took up playing the trumpet, soon finding a strong natural aptitude for the instrument. He was so skilled that upon his family's settlement in LA he swiftly earned himself a place in the Los Angeles Junior Philharmonic Orchestra.³
4. The maximum distance fleas tend to migrate is around 220 yards. A flea jumps up to a foot at a time and can jump more than 600 times an hour when questing for a host. In comparison, mosquitoes tend to migrate up to 1.5 miles.⁴
5. Joe Theismann of the Washington Redskins infamously had his career come to an end on a nationally televised Monday Night Football game at the hands of New York Giants linebacker Lawrence Taylor, after a failed attempt at a flea-flicker which didn’t fool the Giants’ defense. Upon tackling Theismann, Taylor’s entire weight came crashing down on Theismann, severely breaking his leg.⁵

Ok, so here are my next 5 to tag. I won't waste my time calling out some B or C-list bloggers. In fact, screw the A-list as well:

George W. Bush
Pope Benedict XVI
Steve Jobs
L. Ron Hubbard
Kim Jong Il

Nothing like the fall season: leaves turning, Congress churning, and nerds spurning. For me, free Maker's Mark on the rocks is all the motivation I need to sneak into the Web2.0 party tossed by About (pronounced "a-boot") and Why-Bang, among others. However, it seems these conference attendees feel guilty about all the free hooch they drank in the late 90's. Or maybe nobody told them the rules. As you can see by the graph, this party peaked for roughly 8 minutes. Only, it wasn't your usual type of peaking. It was the peaking where you think "this party is about to get good". Then it doesn't. It just stays in the "about.com to get good" zone. Maybe that was intentional. Luckily, I had a good menagerie of co-conspirators. Unfortunately, I was not able to debut my new web2.0 logo, which is for my heavy metal band Fauxstor's first album "Veb Zwei Punkt Null":



That's right: web2.0 shininess. As Cameron puts it, "specular hi-lights are the new ball-and-swoosh".

But alas, the unveiling was not to be. All I wanted was a fourth drink, and everywhere I turned, bartenders were shutting down. It was as if people had to go to some sort of conference in the morning. So, where are tonight's parties?

I love how the internet so fully gets off on itself, that half of the "web 2.0" companies are founded on making you pimp the internet to other pimps who already have a paddock full of links. It's as if the "attention economy" has a twin-turbo bolted on, further feeding on itself and compressing more and more media into less and less time.

Please cue up that famous scene from The Paper Chase: "Welcome to the Fall semester of Web 2.0, all you social bookmarking services. Look to your left. Now look to your right. In a year from now, one of the companies beside you will be dead, and the other will be pwn3d by yahoo, google, amazon, ebay, microsoft, or c|net. And the third one of you will be re-launching as a business intelligence company."

We even have smaller web hoogies to make it easier to cram these little proxies of our internet memory onto the page. What, you are still bookmarking shit in your browser? That kind of web usage is for your grandma, you fucking n00b. Since you are probably already forgetting this post before you even get to the end of it, let me help you out:

Okay, now you can resume abusing whatever memory-loss-inducing drug you were doing right before clicking on the socially bookmarked link that took you here. Just be sure that for every shared link you click, you share at least two more. Soon, every article and blog post will look like the Million Dollar Homepage, except it will be packed full of social bookmarking services.

But wait, there's more...tagging! Yeah, I'd tag that shit. I'd tag the holy living hell out of it. Then I would write my dissertation on the fundamental shift in language theory that tagging has produced. Tag this post with "sign", "signifier", and "signified". Be sure to add "web2.0", "hate", and "calliope". We wouldn't want you to have trouble finding it again.

And as soon as you observe this link, another link across the universe disappears. Hopefully.