March 17, 2014
The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web and other information on the Internet created by the Internet Archive, a non-profit organization, based in San Francisco, California. It was set up by Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat, co-founders of Alexa Internet, which provides commercial web traffic data, and is maintained with content from Alexa (currently a subsidiary of Amazon.com). The service enables users to see archived versions of web pages across time, which the Archive calls a ‘three dimensional index.’
The name Wayback Machine was chosen as a droll reference to a plot device in an animated cartoon series, ‘The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.’ In it, Mr. Peabody and Sherman routinely used a time machine called the ‘WABAC machine’ (pronounced ‘Wayback’) to witness, participate in, and, more often than not, alter famous events in history.
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January 25, 2014
People of Walmart is an entertainment website founded in 2009 by brothers Andrew and Adam Kipple of Harrison City, PA featuring user-submitted photos of socially awkward or undesirable Walmart shoppers.
The brothers and their friend Luke Wherry started the site after seeing a woman in a t-shirt that read ‘go f*** yourself’ with a 2 year old in a harness and a man with a beard reminiscent of those worn by ZZ Top at a South Carolina Walmart. They created the website to share what they find truly remarkable, ignoring more stereotypical redneck or mullets. In addition to avoiding the ordinary, the trio refuse to post photos of people who are disabled or working Walmart employees.
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November 5, 2012
Hot or Not was a rating site that allowed users to rate the attractiveness of photos submitted voluntarily by others. The site offers a matchmaking engine called ‘Meet Me’ and an extended profile feature called ‘Hotlists.’ It is owned by Badoo Trading Limited (a dating-focused social discovery website, founded in 2006 by Russian entrepreneur Andrey Andreev), and was previously owned by Avid Life Media (who owns a dating web site named ‘Ashley Madison’ that is geared toward married individuals looking for an additional relationship).
‘Hot or Not’ was a significant influence on the people who went on to create the social media sites Facebook and YouTube. The site was founded in 2000 by James Hong and Jim Young, two friends and Silicon Valley-based engineers. Both graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in electrical engineering, with Young pursuing a Ph.D at the time.
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September 15, 2012
Yahoo! Answers (formerly known as ‘Yahoo! Q & A’) is a community-driven question-and-answer (Q&A) site or a knowledge market launched by Yahoo! in 2005 that allows users to both submit questions to be answered and answer questions asked by other users.
The site gives members the chance to earn points as a way to encourage participation and is based on a service developed by Naver (a popular search portal in South Korea).
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September 11, 2012
Stuff White People Like (SWPL) is a blog that takes a satirical aim at the interests of North American ‘left-leaning, city-dwelling, white folk.’ The blog was created in 2008 by a white Canadian, Christian Lander, a Los Angeles copywriter who grew up in Toronto and graduated from McGill University. Lander co-authored the site with his Filipino Canadian friend Myles Valentin, after Valentin teased Lander for watching the HBO television series ‘The Wire.’
Although the blog ‘has spurred an outpouring from those who view it as offensive and racist,’ it is not about the interests of all white people, but rather a stereotype of affluent, environmentally and socially conscious, anti-corporate white North Americans, who typically hold a degree in the liberal arts. Lander claims to be lampooning contemporary versions of bohemian/hipster culture, and jokingly refers to other classes and subcultures of white people as ‘the wrong kind of white people.’ Despite the site’s satirical edge, Lander regards the people he describes with affection and numbers himself among them, describing himself as ‘a self-aware, left-wing person who’s not afraid to recognize the selfishness and contradictions that come on the left.’
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July 26, 2012
The Hidden Wiki is a website that uses hidden services available through the Tor network. The use of Tor to provide anonymity allows the site to advertise links to a range of other sites, including ones offering illegal drugs and child pornography. The site provides a range of links in a wiki format to other hidden services and sites on the clearnet (sites that can be accessed in a standard browser).
These include links to child pornography sites, sites selling drugs and other contraband such as the Silk Road. Scot Terban, an independent security researcher, commented: ‘It’s kind of like any black market operation except this one was in cyberspace and pretty much completely anonymous. Because it was anonymous, people felt free to trade openly in illegal things, mess around by putting up ads for services like hired assassins, and in the end, became a haven for pedophiles and their content.’
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July 26, 2012
Silk Road is an online marketplace that its operators run as a Tor hidden service (anonymous and encrypted). Visitors must use Tor software to access the marketplace. The majority of products that sellers list on Silk Road qualify as contraband in most jurisdictions. ‘NPR’ has referred to the site as the ‘Amazon.com of illegal drugs.’ Buyers and sellers conduct all transactions with bitcoins (an encrypted digital currency).
Although the bitcoin’s exchange rate may fluctuate greatly in short periods of time, most of the prices on Silk Road are bound to United States dollar to prevent too drastic inflation or deflation. Buyers can register on Silk Road for free, but sellers must purchase new accounts through auctions to mitigate the possibility of malicious individuals distributing tainted goods.
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July 19, 2012
Women in Refrigerators (or WiR) is a website that was created in 1999 by a group of comic book fans. The website features a list of female comic book characters that had been injured, killed, or depowered as a plot device within various superhero comic books. Also, the site seeks to analyze why these plot devices are used disproportionately on female characters.
The term was coined by comic book writer Gail Simone as a name for the website in early 1999 during on-line discussions about comic books with friends. It refers to an incident in ‘Green Lantern’ in 1994, written by Ron Marz, in which Kyle Rayner, the titular hero, comes home to his apartment to find that his girlfriend, Alex DeWitt, had been killed by the villain Major Force and stuffed in a refrigerator.
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July 2, 2012
Everything is Terrible! is a Chicago-based video blogging website launched in 2007 that features clips of VHS tapes from the late 20th century. The project was founded in 2000 by a group of friends while at Ohio University. They search at thrift stores, garage sales, and ‘bargain bins’ for the worst and most outrageous VHS tapes in which to share with each other. The website has also been attempting to amass the largest collection of tapes that feature the film ‘Jerry Maguire’; according to member Ghoul Skool: ‘We always have noticed since the beginning that there seems to be nothing but just ‘Jerry Maguire’ tapes filling our nation’s thrift stores. I don’t know why.’
The people behind ‘Everything is Terrible’ also perform live shows wearing cloaks and gold VHS tapes around their necks to showcase their new VHS discoveries. In 2009, the website released a video titled ‘Everything is Terrible! The Movie,’ which featured the same type of VHS clips that would be featured on their website. The ‘A.V. Club’ called the video ‘a portal into a world halfway between showbiz and real life—a look at how the people who make entertainment for a living think the rest of us saps actually live,’ adding that it’s ‘simultaneously enlightening, hilarious, and deeply sad.
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May 8, 2012
The Khan Academy is a non-profit educational organization, created in 2006 by American educator Salman Khan (who has three degrees from MIT (a BS in mathematics, a BS in electrical engineering and computer science, and an MS in electrical engineering and computer science), and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
With the stated mission of ‘providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere,’ the website supplies a free online collection of more than 3,100 micro lectures via video tutorials stored on YouTube teaching mathematics, history, healthcare and medicine, finance, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, economics, cosmology, organic chemistry, American civics, art history, microeconomics, and computer science.
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April 11, 2012
ccMixter.org is a community music site that promotes remix culture and makes samples, remixes, and a cappella tracks licensed under Creative Commons available for download and re-use in creative works. Visitors are able to listen to, sample, mash-up, or interact with music in a variety of ways including the download and use of tracks and samples in their own remixes.
Most sampling or mash-up web sites on the Internet stipulate that users forgo their rights to the new song once it is created. By contrast, the material on ccMixter.org is generally licensed to be used in any arena, not just the ccMixter site or a specific contest. The ccMixter site contains over 10,000 samples from a wide range of recording artists, including high profile artists such as Beastie Boys and David Byrne.
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April 11, 2012
WhoSampled is a website and database of information about sample-based music founded in London. WhoSampled compares original songs with covered songs or songs that ‘borrowed’ samples, it serves as a historical line of where songs have come from and where they’re going. Registered users can submit information about a sample, remix or cover and subject, waiting for moderator’s approval that will let the entry to be published on the site.
The visitor of the site gets a comprehensive list of who that artist has sampled and how, and how that artist him/herself has been sampled. The comparison of original song and the song that sampled, covered or remixed it, is done side by side with embedded tracks or videos. All audio and video clips shown on the site are embedded links to content hosted by third party services, such as YouTube or DailyMotion. The process and idea of the site of being a tool for research and music discovery, is similar to another project called Music Genome Project, both wanting to ‘explore the DNA of music.’
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