Judit & Judit reenact famous internet memes in a ad for the Swedish cable provider Com Hem to celebrate ten years of providing broadband services.

This is a tribute to all of you who make the Internet what it is without you there would be empty and meaningless. We would therefore like to say a big thank you to all ROTFL: s, LOLS, WTF’s and FTWs you have given us over the years (we are celebrating ten years of broadband provider).

via Urlesque

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Shrinkage Is Good has created an interesting infographic that shows Internet Speeds & Costs Around The World (here’s a larger version).

via Zach Klein

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Yahoo! is pulling the plug on GeoCities today with very little explaination why.

We have enjoyed hosting web sites created by Yahoo! users all over the world, and we’re proud of the community you’ve built.

However, we have decided to focus on helping our customers explore and build relationships online in other ways. Beginning on October 26, 2009, you will no longer be able to use GeoCities to maintain a free presence online — but we’re excited about the other services we have designed to help you connect with friends and family and share your activities and interests.

The xkcd website pays homage to Geocities as it leaves the internet.

Jason Scott and the Archive Team have created The GeoCities Project and are working non-stop trying to download GeoCities before it shuts down.

To give an idea of some of the valuable internet history being lost with the shutdown of GeoCities, Jason has created an exhibition “This Page Is Under Construction”, to showcase some of the wonderful “Under Construction” GIFs they have downloaded.

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At this year’s Arse Elektronika 2009 sex and technology conference, noted computer historian Jason Scott gave an excellent talk on “The Atomic Level of Porn”, where he discussed the early history of adult content on the internet and it just so happens that Eddie Codel captured it all on video. At one point in the talk Jason volunteered me to act with him the crudely animated sex sequence in Custer’s Revenge.

photos by Scott Beale

Here are a few photos I shot at Jason’s talk.

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Electronic Frontier Foundation presents The 18th Annual Pioneer Awards on Thursday, October 22nd during the Web 2.0 Summit at The Westin San Francisco. An annual fundraiser for EFF, this year’s ceremony honors Limor “Ladyada” Fried, Harri Hursti and Carl Malamud, along with a keynote by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman.

Awarded every year since 1992, the Pioneer Awards recognize leaders who are extending freedom and innovation on the electronic frontier.

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guest post by Violet Blue

Comedy is truth: While some of us scratch our heads and wonder how an environment for jobs like “social media guru” and pay-per-Tweet advertising can exist, others create scathingly brilliant and hilarious videos about an environment that is so very ripe for parody. As of today, no one’s done it better than Markham Nolan and his public service announcement video The Social Media Guru. It’s also a promo for Xtranormal Beta, text-to-video moviemaking software that we hope will be available for Mac users sooner than later. Still, the truth hurts. Telling us he’ll gladly give us a special offer for advice on our Twitter accounts (translation: “I’ll sit on your Facebook and whack you up the Twitter. Financially.”) Nolan peels back the rich tapestry of bullshit and delivers line after line of painfully familiar, nonsensical promises that the douchiest of exploitative social media consultants seem to be offering. We OH, and we weep.

We hope you watch this video and learn many ways to monetize your Twitter followers.

via edrabbit

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photo by Scott Beale

Last Wednesday Chris Hardwick invited me to a taping of his show Web Soup at the G4 studios located at the Comcast Entertainment Group building in LA’s Miracle Mile. On show Chris shares ridiculous videos they find on the web or submitted by viewers, along with the occasional field report. It’s a really fun show and Chris is a great host.

I shot a few behind the scenes photos while at the taping of the show which airs tonight and each Tuesday night at 8pm ET on G4 after Attack of the Show.

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Joe Stump has released Take Me To The Internets, a free iPhone app that helps you discover the internet’s funniest websites by shaking your iPhone to load a new website. Joe has included content from Laughing Squid on the app as well.

Daniel Brusilovsky recently did a review of Take Me To The Internets on TechCrunch.

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The Hierarchy Of Digital Distractions (larger version), an interesting visualization on levels digital activity by David McCandless on Information is Beautiful.

via Waxy

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Urlesque is proposing that on 9-9-2009 we all take a break from posting about cats on the internet. Instead they suggest that you blog about many of the other wonderful non-cat animals out there. I’m just as guilty as anyone else when it comes to gratuitous cat blogging, so we shall join them in solidarity.

Urlesque is organizing a web-wide ban on cat-related coverage on 9.9.09 — A Day Without Cats on the Internet. Why only one day? Well let’s be honest, that’s probably only as long as we’ll last before a hilarious video comes crashing into our inbox. But for one day, we will abstain… for you… for the cats.

Here is the press conference with Urlesque’s Stephen Lenz and Kelly Reeves.

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photo by Matt Sayles

Today is the 40th anniversary of the first packet switched computer network which was established between two Interface Message Processors (IMP) located at Leonard Kleinrock’s lab at UCLA and Douglas Engelbart’s lab at SRI, creating what is now known as the Internet.

Mario Armstrong and Xeni Jardin talk about the birth of the Internet on the NPR show “Tell Me More” and Xeni has posted a video on Boing Boing of Kleinrock explaining how it happened.

via Boing Boing

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photo by Scott Beale

Tim Hwang has just announced ROFLCon II in Spring 2010, a follow-up to last year’s ROFLCon, the infamous conference on Internet culture and memes held at MIT.

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“Internet People 2″ by brentalfloss, SharkeyeJones and Spintown7.

Spintown explains how the video came together:

Awhile back I won an auction brentalfloss was holding on E-Bay. I decided to have him write a sequel to my favorite viral video “Internet People”. I picked who was going to be in the song, and brentalfloss did an incredible job of including every single person/item I wanted. Then I got SharkeyeJones to provide me with art work for the video. He did a great job of giving me exactly what I asked for in each illustration.

This sequel video was inspired by the 2007 video “Internet People” by Dan Meth.

via Veronica Belmont

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Violet Blue has just launched vb.ly, “the internet’s first and only sex-positive url shortener”, built by Ben Metcalfe and hosted on our new cloud hosting service.

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Kevin Kelly has been taking submissions for The Internet Mapping Project where he asks people to “Please draw a map of the internet, as you see it”.

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Denial-of-Service (Dos) attacks have been launched today against Twitter, Facebook and LiveJournal. Twitter and LiveJournal were taken completely offline and Facebook service has been degraded. Wired Epicenter has more on the DoS attacks.

Somebody needs to call a cyber plumber to come out and fix the tubes.

UPDATE 1: Google was also being targeted in today’s online attacks.

UPDATE 2: Facebook is saying that today’s DoS attacks targeted one specific user.

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photo by Scott Beale

Happy System Administrator Appreciation Day to all the awesome sys admins out there who keep our servers running. We would like to give a special shout out to Laughing Squid Web Hosting sys admin Frank Escamilla.

Here’s helpful advice on the proper use of the System Administrator’s valuable time.

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Wow, this is huge, Amazon.com has just bought Zappos.com for $847 million.

Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh sent a letter to his employees about the acquisition and Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos made a video regarding the announcement.

This morning, our board approved and we signed what’s known as a “definitive agreement”, in which all of the existing shareholders and investors of Zappos (there are over 100) will be exchanging their Zappos stock for Amazon stock. Once the exchange is done, Amazon will become the only shareholder of Zappos stock.

UPDATE: Here’s the press release from Amazon.com.

via TechCrunch

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Firefox 3.5, the long awaited upgrade to the popular open source browser, has just been released by Mozilla and with it comes a significant boost in speed and performance, as well as new and improved features.

Firefox 3.5 is the best performing browser Mozilla has ever released and delivers radically improved JavaScript performance, a new Private Browsing mode, native support for open video and audio, and Location Aware Browsing. The newest version of Firefox is more than two times faster than Firefox 3 and ten times faster than Firefox 2 on complex websites. With extensive under-the-hood work to support new technologies, Firefox 3.5 is the most powerful and complete modern browser and helps upgrade the Web experience.

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Microsoft hired ad agency Bradley and Montgomery to create a bizarre series of online ads starting Dean Cain to promote Internet Explorer 8.

via idsgn

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