Nick and Amelia's Lazy Sunday

My 9-year-old nephew and 7-year old niece perform “Lazy Sunday.” (Watch the original.) Need I say more?

Download: Nick and Amelia’s Lazy Sunday.mp3

January 21 Update: I just received an e-mail from NY Daily News reporter Julian Kesner, who wrote a profile on Andy Samberg and “Lazy Sunday” last month. Julian heard about Nick and Amelia’s MP3 and sent it to Andy Samberg. Andy wrote back and said, “That might be my favorite thing of all time ever.”

January 22: ADM of the excellent Amy’s Robot blog remixed the original video with Nick and Amelia’s audio. The results are surreal, and iPod-compatible!

January 24: Two 11-year-old boys recreated the video, with the help of their dad. Apparently, there’s a market for SNL Kids.

Suck.com, Gone for Good?

Suck.com, one of the most important and influential webzines, appears to be offline permanently, replaced by a porn search portal.

The strangest part is that the domain continues to belong to Lycos, with Hotwired acting as the nameservers. If you query ns1.hotwired.com for the suck.com domain, it returns 198.65.105.202, an IP address of a Verio server currently hosting over 36,000 domains. The server is owned by a company called ParkingDNS.net, which seems to be hosting nothing but Parkingdots.com affiliate search portals.

It also appears that there’s no complete archive of Suck.com remaining anywhere online. Because the new owners have blocked web crawlers, Archive.org has purged blocked access to the archived version of the site. (Last year, Suckarchives.com expired and was snatched up by a squatter.)

If permanent, this is a tragedy for anyone who cares about the web’s history. Does anyone at Lycos know what’s going on? Also, if anyone out there has a complete copy of the Suck archives, please get in touch. (If you need to submit it anonymously, that’s fine.)

Update: Interesting stuff in the comments below. Greg Knauss, himself a Suck.com contributor, is proxying requests to the old Suck.com server through his own server at suck.eod.com. Also, Mike at Injoke.com posted a 200MB torrent of the entire Suck.com archive. Update: Boy genius Aaron Swartz is mirroring the Suck.com snapshot from Mike’s torrent. Nice work!

This doesn’t change the fact that every link to a Suck.com article is still broken, but at least the articles aren’t lost.

January 2, 2006: Suck.com is back! Someone out there must have the inside story of what went on over the past few days.

Dogwelder's "My Humps"

When Luke Gattuso isn’t putting bananas on his head, he’s busy making wonderful things that make me smile.

His latest is a cover of Black Eyed Peas’ “My Humps,” a song that represents a low point not only for popular music, but for humankind.

The only thing that could possibly be better than his MP3 version is syncing it with the original video. Download this now.

Quicktime: dog_eyed_welders_-_my_humps.mov (11MB)

XviD: dog_eyed_welders_-_my_humps.avi (10MB)

(Thanks, Chrominance!)

House of Cosbys, Mirrored

So, I moved to Palo Alto and finally started at Yahoo last week. (Summary: Fascinating place to work, brilliant people, kooky corporate culture, boatloads of potential.) Things are finally starting to settle down, which means the dry spell on Waxy will be ending very soon.

In the meantime, I’ve been meaning to post this for the last couple weeks… The House of Cosbys, which I wrote about recently, was finally taken offline by Bill Cosby’s lawyers. In its place, the videos have been replaced with this message. The original videos are now very difficult (if impossible) to find online.

I’ve decided to archive them on Waxy for as long as I possibly can. They deserve to be seen, so watch them, mirror them, torrent them, and don’t let them disappear again. March 14, 2006: See below for news!

House of Cosbys: Episode 01 HD from Justin Roiland on Vimeo.

House of Cosbys #1 – High Quality Quicktime

House of Cosbys #2

House of Cosbys #3

House of Cosbys #4

House of Cosbys #5 (warning: offensive content; unofficial, fan-made response to cease-and-desist)

Listen Up, Theo (House of Cosbys music video, not safe for work)

Curiosity Cosby Blooper Reel

If you have any other House of Cosbys-related videos, please e-mail me. Feel free to post links to mirrors in the comments.

November 13: CommonFlix is hosting BitTorrent downloads of each video. Also, thanks to Alex for the music video!

November 16: Thanks again to Alex, I think I have the complete collection online for posterity.

January 22, 2006: Temporarily redirecting to the Google Video mirrors to alleviate some bandwidth limitations.

March 14, 2006: I got cease-and-desisted for mirroring these videos. Please use a mirror below to watch or download them and stay tuned to the main posting for news and updates.

* Google Video

* YouTube

* Download.com

* CommonFlix (BitTorrent, formatted for iPod)

* EOD.com (thanks, Greg!)

* Watching Paint Dry (thanks, Alek!)

* Stroeck.com (thanks, Michael!)

* Nonstuff.com (thanks, Robert!)

* I’m Just Sayin’ (thanks, Krup!)

* 1hug.com (thanks, David!)

Yahoo and Upcoming, Sitting In A Tree

Two years ago, I launched Upcoming.org and announced it to the world. Today, along with my partners Gordon Luk and Leonard Lin, I’m unbelievably proud to announce that Upcoming.org is now a member of the Yahoo! family.

I’ve always had a warm and fuzzy feeling about Yahoo. It’s been my browser homepage since forever, and I still have akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo/ stuck in muscle memory. Recently, the nostalgia has been replaced by admiration as I’ve watched them making smart decisions, acquiring great companies (Flickr, anyone?), and hiring all of my friends. The end result is that they’re doing some of the most interesting work online, and I found myself linking to them more and more over the last year.

So when Stewart asked if we’d be interested in coming to Yahoo, we were surprised and flattered. It’s immensely satisfying for a company as interesting and high-profile as Yahoo to validate the hard work we’ve done, and to see the future potential for growth.

After all, Upcoming was always a side project, fueled by passion and caffeine in the spare hours when we weren’t at our respective day jobs. When I think about how much we were able to pull off with so little, and what we’ll now be able to do with the staggering resources Yahoo has to offer… Well, it blows my mind a little. Sunnyvale, here we come!

I’ve posted more details on Upcoming.org, and both Gordon and Leonard have written about it on their own sites. For Yahoo’s take on it, Paul Levine from the Yahoo! Local team wrote about the news on the company blog.

Oh, and a profound thanks to everyone who’s supported the site since the beginning. I kiss you!

October 10, 2005: Thanks so much to Leonard for answering questions and covering e-mails while I was at Web 2.0 last week. We’re all getting ready for the big move later this month, but I’ll be around by e-mail and IM if you want to say hi.

ETech 2006 Call for Participation

The last chance to submit proposals for the Emerging Technology 2006 conference is this Monday, September 19. The overall theme of the conference is the progressive trend toward making technology useful, helping us rediscover what’s meaningful instead of overwhelming us with information. But it’s just a theme, so don’t let it hold you back if you have a great idea.

This year, I’m honored to be sitting on the program committee with such geek luminaries as Clay Shirky, Tom Coates, Cory Doctorow, and Rael Dornfest. (I’m not sure how that happened, but I suspect a bug in Rael’s committee nomination code.)

Anyway, get those proposals in! I promise to selfishly try to design a conference that I’d want to go to.

Upcoming.org Badges

We added badges over at Upcoming.org! This is something I’ve wanted to do since the site launched, but didn’t have the time or resources to pull off until now. Read more about the change, along with Gordon’s formal introduction to the community.

Neat, huh?

Feist and the State of Music Videos Online

My favorite new artist is Feist, the genre-defying Canadian singer-songwriter formerly with Broken Social Scene. Her album was released in France in mid-2004 but only found a U.S. release in April, and I’m in love with it. Like I usually do when I get obsessed with a musician, I went looking for any related media I could find about her.

It’s a bit disheartening that the only place I could find high-quality music videos of her were in Usenet, and even those were ripped from MTV2 UK’s “120 Minutes” show. After doing a little research, the state of music videos online is just generally poor. Music videos are promotional material to spur album sales, right? Then why do we need to suffer through postage-stamp video and buffering Realvideo streams to watch a well-produced advertisement? I’m not asking for DVD-quality here; just something on par with Apple’s movie trailers.

One reason could be the bandwidth concerns, but that’s getting cheaper every day (and there’s always BitTorrent). Or maybe the labels are worried they’d be giving something away they could potentially profit off of? I don’t know, but that seems desperate. There are exceptions, like the Decemberists distributing a music video over BitTorrent, but they’re very rare.

Anyway, I’m hosting high-res MPEG videos for “Mushaboom” and “One Evening” below. If there are record labels or legal websites distributing video downloads of this quality, let me know.

Download: Mushaboom (MPEG, 27MB)

Download: One Evening (MPEG, 25 MB)

Oh, and if you’re a fan, don’t miss the video of her live KCRW performance.

House of Cosbys, You See

I know it’s strange to break a two-month silence for something like this, but I don’t care. This is my blog, dammit, and I’ll rant about six-month-old memes if I want.

For the last few weeks at work, we’ve been obsessed with House of Cosbys. So obsessed that other departments are starting to worry about us; it’s consuming our lives. I first linked to it back in March, long before the recent legal threats from Cosby himself, so I don’t know why it’s taken this long to infiltrate our brains. (I suspect one too many late nights on a recent deadline is ultimately to blame.)

But it has, so I want to share some Cosbyana for other potential Cosby-heads out there. If you haven’t seen the first episode, watch the high-res House of Cosbys pilot before proceeding.

To kick off Cosby Fest 2005, I’m hosting the entire Bill Cosby Talks To Kids About Drugs album from 1971. Don’t miss “Dope Pusher,” a song about hard drugs sung/screamed by Cosby and a choir of kids, backed by some serious funk. Download it now.

I’m Web-Surfing Cosby, You See

  • Outtakes from the Curiosity Cosby recording sessions
  • Amazing Cosby Team Triosby fan art one and two, from Episode 3
  • House of Cosbys exit theme song MP3s
  • Listen Up Theo, a not-safe-for-work House of Cosbys music video
  • Cosby Core tattoo
  • Cosby stencils and graffiti (and more) on Flickr
  • Cosby Show Season 1 was just released on DVD
  • Little Rascals/Bill Cosby urban legend on Snopes
  • The Bill Cosby Fun Game, Cosby goes on a murderous rampage
  • The Pac Man and Cosby Show, a comic apparently made by a blind man using MS Paint
  • Dear God, this has to stop now.

    Yahoo Launches My Web 2.0

    In the next evolution of search engines, Google and Yahoo both announced new versions of their personalized search efforts. Google launched their personalized search. And moments ago, Yahoo launched My Web 2.0 (screenshot). Caterina announced it first on Flickr.

    I was invited to a private demo of My Web 2.0 at the Yahoo campus a couple weeks ago, and I’ve been beta-testing since then. Aside from the awkward name, I’m impressed. At the very least, it blows Google’s offering out of the water, and follows in a recent trend of Yahoo’s smart moves and acquisitions.

    My initial impression was that it was, depressingly, a Del.icio.us killer. (I later changed my mind; more on that later.) It lets you share bookmarks with a clean interface, and it supports tagging and annotation, RSS feeds, and an open API. But My Web 2.0 improves on other social bookmarking services in two very important ways:

    1. Social networking. With My Web 2.0, you can decide to share individual bookmarks with the world, limit them to only your social network, or keep them private. The application of this is in browsing and searching pages that your friends (and their friends) bookmarked. If you’re looking for a restaurant recommendation or product review, for example, their bookmarking history and annotations are very useful input. If your friends actually use it, this becomes an essential way to search the web.

    2. Search. Because Yahoo’s indexed nearly every webpage you can bookmark, users are able to search the full-text of every webpage they’ve ever indexed, instead of just the bookmark name, description and URL.

    After mulling it over, I don’t think that My Web 2.0 and sites like Del.icio.us are mutually exclusive. Because they both have open APIs, it’s very possible to export your Del.icio.us bookmarks to My Web 2.0 for searching functionality or use a third-party service that posts to both. More importantly, they feel different and will likely be used for different purposes. Matt has some thoughts on what makes each unique.

    And because it’s Yahoo, their massive user base potentially translates into a huge network effect. As more people use the service, the more invaluable it becomes for everyone.

    The first post to their new blog has a brief To-Do list of upcoming features, but it doesn’t mention the three important items that were raised during the beta testing. First, tagging, saving, and annotating bookmarks should all be done inline within search results. The popup windows stink. Second, there should be no distinction between Yahoo’s normal search and My Web 2.0 search. It should simply be “Search.” Finally, using the social network tools should require only the bare minimum of interaction with Yahoo 360. 360 is too bulky for something as simple as managing a contact list.

    These issues aside, Phil brought up the issue of context. Does bookmarking make sense in the context of searching the entire web? Does your social network have enough breadth to make a dent in normal search queries? Maybe not, and if casual web users don’t see the immediate benefit to themselves, they may never start to participate. If so, the network effect may never materialize. We’ll see.

    For Yahoo and Google, the benefits are clear. By collecting aggregate information about bookmarked sites, they’ll be able to increase the relevancy of their search results and marginally combat the spam problem. And if their users get hooked on social bookmarks, they’ll be locked in forever.

    Update: Yahoo’s announcement. Also, commentary by Ross Mayfield, Matt Haughey, Jeremy Zawodny.