io9
spock
Posts Tagged “Web”
spock
mad social science
Your Future Will Be Filled with Promiscuous Friends
Reality television, consumed with liberal doses of MySpace and Facebook, will make friendships of the future far more promiscuous. So says a newly-released study about people who invest a lot of time in creating profiles of themselves online (which is increasingly all of us). The authors of the study have discovered an intriguing trend in the way people are re-define "friendship" after hanging out a lot online. The good news is that current trends all point to more casual sex for people who "friend" each other online. More »
obsidian
Podcast the Power Grid Apocalypse with JC Hutchins
Late last year, a terrorist attack took down the U.S. power grid for two weeks. What happened next is up to you: at least, it is if you are participating in JC Hutchins' new experiment in science fiction podcasting. The author of mega-hit SF podcast 7th Son (soon to be published as a book from St. Martins) has just launched a new project called Obsidian about this alternate-history terrorist blackout. Already, audio and video files like this one are rolling in from fans who want to expand the apocalyptic world Hutchins developed in 7th Son. More »
flurb
New Issue of Rudy Rucker's FLURB Hits the Interwebs
Science fiction writer Rudy "Postsingular" Rucker has just posted issue #5 of his speculative fiction webzine FLURB, which is always full of bizarro delights. In this issue, Terry Bisson writes about a superhero called Captain Ordinary who teleports around the world via hidden portals in Starbucks outlets, triggered if you order the right kind of soy latte. John Shirley gives us a tasty excerpt from his dark new cyberpunk novel Black Glass Samples, and Nathaniel Hellerstein takes on the persona of the entire Web to humbly request that people stop accusing it of trying to end the world. Plus, there's a lot more, including a new story from Rucker and plenty of Rucker's art too. [FLURB]
lunchtime reading
Disarming a Landmined World in Eliot Fintushel Story, Free Online
In a war-ravaged future where most urban areas are riddled with mines, a de-miner's only friends are New York street kids and his bomb dog Uxo (short for unexploded ordnance). In the short story "Uxo, Bomb Dog," available from excellent scifi blog Futurismic, author Eliot Fintushel creates a wry, sad portrait of a man who has devoted his lonely life to de-mining open spaces so people can walk freely in parks again. Eventually, the government sends him a human partner and the two of them turn their de-mining into a kind of strange comedy act, attracting locals to watch them de-mine fields while dispensing Smokey the Bear-style wisdom about how to avoid getting your face blown off while walking across Central Park ("Use your pate! Circumnavigate!") Yes, it's today's lunchtime reading. More »
Automated Science Fiction Convention Finder
You know you're living in the future when somebody builds a web application to help you find the science fiction conventions nearest to your zip code. Over at BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow points us to the just-born "Convention Finder," a creation of SpaceWesterns editor Nathan Lilly. Now it's up to us to help make Convention Finder a success by adding every convention you know about to the database. Says Lilly: "Spread the word to your various fan groups and/or, if you know of a convention that's coming up in your area that would be of interest to geeks in general, please feel free to submit it yourself to the convention finder (just make sure that you have the venue's zip code)." [Convention Finder via BoingBoing]
You know you're living in the future when somebody builds a web application to help you find the science fiction conventions nearest to your zip code. Over at BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow points us to the just-born "Convention Finder," a creation of SpaceWesterns editor Nathan Lilly. Now it's up to us to help make Convention Finder a success by adding every convention you know about to the database. Says Lilly: "Spread the word to your various fan groups and/or, if you know of a convention that's coming up in your area that would be of interest to geeks in general, please feel free to submit it yourself to the convention finder (just make sure that you have the venue's zip code)." [Convention Finder via BoingBoing]
advertising
Creepy Corporate Data-Sucking Machines of the Future
It's time to monetize your datastream. You're generating all this data while you surf the web: what you buy, what you read, where you work, where you vacation, your current favorite music/video, where you bank, and of course what you're talking about in email. Shouldn't there be some way to commoditize all that? I mean, shouldn't you be putting all your personal web data together into a handy UDP, or unified data profile, and selling it to the highest bidder? Absolutely. And in the year 2024, a nice company called Datapoints wants to help you to do just that. The Datapoints site, written in hilarious biz-speak, is one of the only deliberately science fictional corporate websites I've ever seen. More »
exosquad
Free Humanity from Neosapien Rule!
Over a century from now, humanity lives at peace and is colonizing Venus and mining Mars. They invent a bulky race of blue workers called neosapiens, which are specially engineered to thrive in the harsh conditions offworld. But then the neosapiens rise up against their human masters, crushing everything in their paths! Only the Exosquad with their Exoframe mecha outfits in the Exofleet can possibly stop the neosapiens! Luckily they do, and that's where the awesome anime-influenced, mid-1990s US cartoon series Exosquad begins — in the aftermath of the neosapien uprising. Now that the first season is available for free on Hulu, you should check out this nearly-forgotten cult hit for yourself. More »
advertising
Mind Control Is Just a Click Away
The goal of most advertisers is, frankly, to bypass your rational brain and reach down into the murky depths of your limbic system to control your desires. And the Web has given advertisers powerful new mind-control tools, allowing them to generate fake "buzz" for products by implanting references to, say, Hewlett Packard on YouTube or Cisco on Wikipedia. The idea is to make people think that their "friends" online like a product and artificially jumpstart a word-of-mouth recommendation for the product. At a South by Southwest panel Friday about the worst viral media advertising, several marketers and critics gathered to discuss the most heinous and failed examples of ads that are turning our mediascape into a William Gibson or Philip K. Dick nightmare. Two ad campaigns stood out as the worst. More »
heroes
Suresh Explains Evolution to You on the Interwebs
The last time we saw him, he was betraying all his ideals and messing around with a cheerleader's magical healing blood, but none of that stops Dr. Mohinder Suresh from setting up his own website. Yes, it's part of the Heroes Evolutions multimedia marketing program we wrote about last week. Don't you want to learn more about Heroes' craptacular version of evolutionary science? More »
wild cards
When is a TV reality show not a TV reality show? When it's a multi-author blog in support for the latest in the Wild Cards series of anthologies. American Hero, the TV show at the center of Inside Straight, the eighteenth book in the series released last month, has made the leap off the printed page to become a site allowing readers to follow - and maybe interact with - the fictional characters competing to become America's next superhero sensation.
More »
American Hero Lets Readers Inside Wild Cards
When is a TV reality show not a TV reality show? When it's a multi-author blog in support for the latest in the Wild Cards series of anthologies. American Hero, the TV show at the center of Inside Straight, the eighteenth book in the series released last month, has made the leap off the printed page to become a site allowing readers to follow - and maybe interact with - the fictional characters competing to become America's next superhero sensation.
More »
heroes
Heroes 360 is a lot more than your basic network half-assed attempt at a web presence for a show. This site for NBC's mutant soap opera is packed with original content like Heroes web comics, blogs, stories, and interviews. New stuff goes up every week, and this is only going to happen more now that the writer's strike has made comics one of the only formats where you'll be able to see your favorite Heroes characters for the next three months. Here's our quick guide to getting started with the Heroes site.
More »
'Heroes' Web Comic-Palooza For Three More Months
Heroes 360 is a lot more than your basic network half-assed attempt at a web presence for a show. This site for NBC's mutant soap opera is packed with original content like Heroes web comics, blogs, stories, and interviews. New stuff goes up every week, and this is only going to happen more now that the writer's strike has made comics one of the only formats where you'll be able to see your favorite Heroes characters for the next three months. Here's our quick guide to getting started with the Heroes site.
More »
apocalypse
Searches for "End of the World" Are Skyrocketing on the Internets
Smartypants futurist Jamais Cascio has noticed something especially eschatological in the search logs for his blog, Open the Future. A few months ago, "end of the world" suddnely become the most popular search term leading people to his writing. Just to illustrate the weirdness, he's created a graph showing how the phrase stacked up against other search terms like "anthrax" and "astroid strike." Check out the results, with handy color coding. More »
watch this show
Lady Wasteland is a Dystopia on the Verge
Tonight is the fifth episode of the kickass postapocalyptic Web TV show Lady Wasteland, which will pick up right after our heroine (the titular Lady Wasteland) gun-fu'd her way out of a robbery, rescued a guy and his kid, got shot by a mysterious someone, had her blood drunk by zombies, then narrowly escaped. Plus, civilization has collapsed and we don't know why. This cool show, co-created by Mark Roush, is a near-future version of Firefly with scrappy heroes on a brokedown frontier. It's exactly the kind of show that should get picked up by SciFi Channel now that Battlestar Galactica is heading into its final season. More »
dystopia
Lady Wasteland Kicks Ass After the Apocalypse
Tonight a new post-apocalyptic Web TV show launches with a bang — or maybe that's a whimper. Lady Wasteland tells three interconnected stories about life after a mysterious force brings down civilization. There won't be any guys in tankers searching for spam here. Show creators Mark Rouche and Greg Demchek say they were inspired by Cormac McCarthy's book The Road and the movie Children of Men, both of which are character-driven, realistic dramas about the bleakness of life after society's death. The show, a stylish cross between Xena and Firefly, is grim and very promising. Also, seriously action-packed. More »
post-apocalypse
A Fresh Apocalypse Every Day
Do you feel like you're falling behind when it comes to the latest developments in post-apocalyptic pop culture? Now you never have to be out of the end-of-the-world loop again, thanks to the Quiet Earth blog, a fantastic compendium of all things apocalypse devoted to "making the post-apocalyptic genre mainstream." Hold the right-wing nut jokes, please. The team of 7 smart weirdos who run this site cover everything from books to video games, and they find some of the most obscure freaky shit I've ever seen. More »
review
The book version of acclaimed webcomic Shooting War just came out. Set in 2011, Shooting War follows a videoblogger to Iraq, where the war continues, worse than ever. The comic, originally posted at Smithmag.com, explores the (bleak) future of mainstream media as well as the mainstreaming of bloggers and vloggers. The book version adds 110 pages of new material and smooths out the webcomic's sometimes jerky flow.
More »
Four Years From Now, Iraq War Is Much Worse
The book version of acclaimed webcomic Shooting War just came out. Set in 2011, Shooting War follows a videoblogger to Iraq, where the war continues, worse than ever. The comic, originally posted at Smithmag.com, explores the (bleak) future of mainstream media as well as the mainstreaming of bloggers and vloggers. The book version adds 110 pages of new material and smooths out the webcomic's sometimes jerky flow.More »
tyranny
