Tumblr is what I’d call a miniblogging platform = multimedia-enhanced microblogs (like Twitter). It’s designed for short blog posts of text with a link, a photo, an audio clip or a video. I haven’t actually used it, but I’d recommend you check it out if you want to publicly post your photos or stuff you find around the web (remember when “blog” was short for “weblog”?). Tumblr is the hot platform of the moment for online humour.

Two of the biggest Tumblr blogs are conceptual political humour: Kim Jong-Il Looking at Things and Uncomfortable Moments with Putin. Their brilliance unfolds by looking at posts in series; I’ll quote this cross-over even though it won’t make much sense:

The two leaders laughed awkwardly at Putin’s suggestion of a blog called ‘Uncomfortable Moments with Putin Looking at Kim Jong-Il Looking at Putin’.

Alison turned me on to Unhappy Hipsters, which adds mocking captions to photos from architecture and interior design magazines; eg:

To break free from the tedium of her own cliche—that was her Christmas wish.

The other Tumblr blog I’ve really been enjoying is Fuck Yeah Dementia (obviously questionable for work). It posts the best of 4chan macros (especially NSFW), lolcats, animated GIFs and other visual nonsense. (I’ve spent hours trapped in the infinite scrolling thumbnail archive.)

The future is blogs that aggregate blogs that aggregate blogs, all the way down. And when they feature humour objects, it makes me feel like I’m going insane, but in a funny way.

I have no interest in the World Cup. But it turns out that the vuvuzela horns are a particularly good meme. Here are some of the best images:

And some combos with other memes:

This Is Sparta

Dramatic Chipmunk

Kanye Interrupts

Insanity Wolf (NSFW)

Internet memes are created in deep, dark parts of the Internet. Around the time of All Your Base Are Belong To Us, the majority of memes came from SomethingAwful.com’s forums. At least since lolcats almost all of them have come from 4chan.org. It is an inscrutable place; one cannot go to 4chan to learn about Internet memes.

Encyclopedia Dramatica is a wiki that tracks and documents Internet memes, and therefore I find it invaluable for being hip. Unfortunately, every page on Encyclopedia Dramatica is one link away from Not Safe For Work material. And by NSFW, I don’t mean porn, I mean violates Canada’s Hate Speech laws. So I usually avoiding linking to it.

I just discovered a sister project to Encyclopedia Dramatica that aims to filter out the NSFW material: WhatPort80.com (port 80 is the part of the Internet that the web runs on). It still contains entries like pedobear, but the Internet is the Internet.

Jakob Nielsen has posted the top 10 things that annoy website users the most. The ones that bug me the most are:

Search and Structure Not Integrated

I notice this most when online shopping when I have a general idea of what I want, so I search for something similar and then try to navigate to the thing I want.

Uncontrollable Navigation Elements

Almost no stupid navigation tricks work in Mobile Safari. And there are no mobile sites that are as powerful as the full sites (best example: Facebook). So when I’m on my iPhone, sometimes I can be bothered to make a note to myself to do something online next time I’m on a full computer, sometimes I just don’t bother.

Imagine you’re running an organization that runs a bunch of applications on a bunch of different computers. These applications need to coordinate or exchange data over a network. So how do you hook them up?

The traditional solution is to hook each application to every other application that it needs to talk to; this architecture is technically known as a Big Ball of Mud. A better solution is to use something like a postal service that accepts standard-sized letters. The post office can handle things like forwarding addresses, queuing letters when mailboxes are full, broadcasting to all mailboxes, etc. This architecture is known as Message-Oriented Middleware.

There are lots of MOMs you can buy and run on your own servers. But if your applications are communicating over the web, there is no good option. (Email is much more complicated than it looks, HTTP requires running web servers all over the place, and nothing else is well-supported.)

Twitter, originally developed for use by humans, is a great option for web-based MOM. It allows an application to push messages out to queues that other applications can poll. It works with a variety of interfaces and there are libraries or example code in most programming languages. Granted, messages are restricted to 140 bytes, but that ought to be enough for anyone.

Ironically, Twitter’s performance sucks because it’s simulating MOM on database-centric architecture. It’s generally accepted that it needs to be rebuilt on a lower-level MOM.

As Simon remarked, this site was made for me: Яolcats takes a real Cyrillic animal macro and then provides a different English translation to make a joke about Soviet (usually) or contemporary Russian society. (The real translations are often provided in the comments, but they always suck.) The best of:

Aaaaah… Pig iron, your musk is that of glorious industry…

Cease your protests, the deal is done! You are to make a fine wife for uncouth American businessman!

Do not despair, Laika! Comrade Khrushchev honours you! Our love was but a dalliance! Your ascent to the cosmos will strike terror into the West!

Puppy: Can I conjure happiness from physical things?
other: You can try.
Puppy: This experience made me weak-willed and afraid
other: With this effort you will come up short every time.

Google Reader is a feed reader (I used to say “aggregator”, but nobody ever knew what I was talking about) for blogs and stuff. Every time I see a blog post I like, I have three actions available:

• Email it to specific people who I think will like it
• Star it for future use in my own blog post
• Share it with people who are friends with me in Google’s social networking universe

(I wish I also had the option of posting it to peoples’ Facebook walls.) If an item is light or I just don’t have anything to say about it, I’ll share it instead of star it. For me, MentalPolyphonics is not a collection of “this neat thing I just saw” but instead “this cool idea I just had”; I don’t want my intensely cool ideas lost in a sea of throw-away macros.

But I worry that sometimes I share stuff just because I’m too lazy to wrap it in a blog post. And I know I’m providing a valuable service by filtering sites like PunditKitchen that shouldn’t be wasted on just my friends. So I’m going to try wrapping up my shared content for each week into a single post, let me know what you think.