guest post by Doctor Popular

“In a year of firsts for presidential candidates, a phenomenon that’s taking even seasoned analysts by surprise. A growing grassroots movement, born on the internet, to elect a virtual unknown to the highest office in the country.”

The brilliant folks at Paltalk have created an awesome viral video campaign that allows anyone to insert their own name into a newsreel about America’s next hot presidential candidate, for instance “Frank Chu”.

The video is slickly produced and the customizable graphics fool most folks upon first watch. To create your own campaign news footage, go to news3online.com and follow the steps to either email a video to your friends or create an embeddable flash file. Note: To embed the file in WordPress, you may need to turn off your WYSIWYG editor in your WP options before posting.

Despite titling their page “Viral marketing interface”, the advertising is actually minimal and non-obtrusive, they don’t even require a sign up or email. Kudos on the cool prank.

Here’s the Finnish rock band Leningrad Cowboys joined by the Red Army Choir doing a cover of the southern fried rock classic “Sweet Home Alabama” by Lynyrd Skynyrd.

via Rob La Gesse

Mozilla Labs recently introduced Ubiquity, an experiment that will allow users to control their browser with language-based instructions and create on-demand mashups.

The overall goals of Ubiquity are to explore how best to:

- Empower users to control the web browser with language-based instructions. (With search, users type what they want to find. With Ubiquity, they type what they want to do.)

- Enable on-demand, user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs. (In other words, allowing everyone–not just Web developers–to remix the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or what they are doing.)

- Use Trust networks and social constructs to balance security with ease of extensibility.

- Extend the browser functionality easily.

Chop Shop just came out with another great t-shirt, “Rock Star” (men’s version & women’s version) featuring 28 classic rockers from 1965-1975.

See Previously:

- weGo T-Shirt By Chop Shop Featuring 55 Famous Vehicles
- Internet Meme T-Shirt by Chop Shop
- weRobot, 51 Robots on a T-Shirt

illustration by Chop Shop

Magnum Opus Productions out of Van Nuys, CA made a really cool skateboarding video shot at 120 fps on a Red One Camera, a new high-resolution digital video camera that features high quality and performance at lower cost than traditional professional cameras. The music used in the video is “It’s Alright” by Bang Gang.

via Today and Tomorrow

Google Reader is my main feed reader and an indispensable tool in the arsenal of web services I use daily. It helps me keep up with all of the blogs I follow and I also use it to share items on our Link Blog, so it’s great to see that our friends at Common Craft were commissioned to make the video “Google Reader in Plain English”.

Laughing Squid is headed to New York for Web 2.0 Expo (9/16-9/19) and while there we are organizing a NYC Drinkup on Saturday, September 13th at M1-5 in Tribeca.

photo by Scott Beale

O’Reilly and TechWeb are organizing the first ever Web 2.0 Expo in New York which is taking place September 16-19 at The Javits Center. The conference features a full schedule of keynotes, speakers and workshops, as well as Web2Open which is free with an Expo Hall pass. They are offering Laughing Squid readers a $100 discount off for the conference, just enter the code “webny08bd28″ when you register.

Web 2.0 Expo is for the builders of the next generation web: designers, developers, entrepreneurs, marketers, business strategists, and venture capitalists, people who have experiences to share and a passion for learning - the hot new thing, lessons from failures, innovations and inspirations, and the practical applications of all of the above.

I’ll be in NYC for Web 2.0 Expo and I’m organizing a Drinkup for the Saturday before the conference on September 13th. If you are in town early, please join us.

The Cat House on the Kings, is no-cage, no-kill, lifetime cat sanctuary and adoption center run by Lynea Lattanzia in Parlier, California. There are currently over 700 cats living on the 12 acre sanctuary and all of them are up for adoption. Here’s more info on how you help out by making a donation, sponsoring a cat or volunteering.

Our mission is to place rescued cats and kittens into loving, permanent homes; to provide a safe, happy and healthy home for unwanted cats and kittens in a unique, no-cage facility; to prevent pet overpopulation through spaying and neutering; and to educate the public about responsible pet ownership.

Jack Perez made a really great mini-documentary about The Cat House on the Kings.

via Neatorama

For those of you not making the trek out to Burning Man this year, Camp Riverton is organizing Balsa Man this Saturday, August 30th at Baker Beach (the location of the original Burning Man events) where they will be burning a tiny man made out of, yes you guessed it, balsa wood. Here’s more information on Balsa Man.

Balsa Man is a 3’ tall replica of Burning Man. Here are some photos of it being built.

See Also: How To Experience Burning Man 2008 Remotely

photo by Colin Fahrion

Legendary Sci-Fi author Ray Bradbury shows us his vision of 2001 in a commercial for Sunsweet Prunes.

via Boing Boing

Can’t make it to Burning Man 2008 this year? Here are a few ways you can experience the event remotely through the wonders of the Interweb.

The Burning Blog

John Curley has been doing a fantastic job writing updates and posting photos to The Burning Blog, documenting the construction of Black Rock City this year and on through the start of the event.

Photos

Throughout the week people will be uploading photos from the Playa. Here are all the photos tagged “burningman2008” on Flickr sorted by interestingness.

Danger Ranger has been uploading some wonderful photos of Black Rock City.

Make sure to check out the great DPW Mug Shots series by Serra.

Current & TV Free Burning Man

Current will be covering Burning Man again for the third straight year with TV Free Burning Man, uploading videos from the playa and streaming the burn live on Saturday, August 30th at 9pm EST/PST. This year they are encouraging Burning Man participants to come to the Current camp and make their own videos as part of their “Postcards From The Playa” program.

Twitter

With the combination of the wi-fi cloud and proliferation of iPhones, there many updates on Twitter from Burning Man this year. Twitter Search will bring up all of the mentions of “burningman” and we recommend following our Burning Man friends @danger_ranger, @sfslim, @actiongrl, @josephpred, @tomprice, @spanktar and of course @theburningman.

Black Rock City Webcam

HyperJohnGraham is running his live video stream of Burning Man from center camp and Burning Man has also mounted a live webcam on the top of the Burning Man office in Gerlach, where you can watch as people come and go from the event.

Burning Man Information Radio (BMIR)

You can listen to a live audio stream of Burning Man Information Radio (BMIR).

IRC

The Burning Man IRC channel is located at #burningman on irc.freenode.net.

Black Rock City OpenStreetMap on Flickr

An OpenStreetMap has been created of Black Rock City using geotagged photos.

See Previously:

- Burning Man 2008: Building Black Rock City

MetaFliter has a great round-up of US Presidential campaign ads starting with Dwight D. Eisenhower vs. Adlai Stevenson in 1952 all the way through the 1996 election.

Here’s a hilarious video of elements having various “reactions” at a “Chemical Party”. It was produced by the European Commission to help promote research careers at Marie Curie Actions.

See Previously: The Periodic Table of Videos by The University of Nottingham

via Nick Douglas

Flickr has just added a new fullscreen photo sideshow feature that can be embedded on websites and blogs. The slideshows also have the ablity to include videos.

“Citizen’s Cry” is a PSA produced for Palm’s Mobilize the Vote 2008 campagin to help inspire the youth of America to vote. The video was directed by Corey Rosen, with executive producers Hooman Khalili and Adam Ottley.

This video is a call to the American millennial generation, and the rest of the country, to speak now with our vote, so that our silence will not echo for generations to come. The “Citizen’s Cry” makers are targeting the millennial generation specifically because less than 50% of them have ever voted in a presidential election.

So not everyone is exited about the FaceYourManga avatar craze that has been sweeping the tubes recently, especially on Twitter. A group of anti-FaceYourManga vigilantes have formed StopTheManga to reverse the “Mangagtar” trend and help convince people to use real photos as their avatars.

See Previously: FaceYourManga, Create Your Own Custom Avatar

Thanks to Ron Richards for the tip!

image via StopTheManga

The new Samsung Omnia (i900) Windows Mobile PocketPC comes with a very unique unboxing experience.

Several American activists have been arrested and detained in China for promoting pro-Tibet messages in Beijing during the 2008 Olympic Games. The protests were organized by Students for a Free Tibet and among those being held are Graffitti Research Lab founder James Powderly and Alive in Baghdad videoblogger Brian Conley.

More Coverage:

- Boing Boing
- New York Times
- Associated Press
- Free Tibet 2008

Engrish Funny, the latest website from the guys behind I Can Has Cheezburger?, features photos of humorous English translations from around the world.

Michael Arrington recently did a TechCrunch interview with I Can Has Cheezburger? CEO Ben Huh about his LOL empire.

See Previously: Totally Looks Like, Famous People & Their Look-Alikes