’S HERTOGENBOSCH, the Netherlands — High on the cathedral in this trim Dutch town, amid a phalanx of stone statues of local noblemen, crusaders, saints and angels, one figure stands out. Smiling faintly, with lowered eyelids, one of the angels wears jeans, has a laptop bag slung over one shoulder and is chatting on a cellphone. The angel gets about 30 calls a day on the phone.

Cat cafés are huge in Japan right now. As the name suggests, these are coffee shops where cat lovers go to sip overpriced lattes and hang out with an adorable smoosh pile of kitties. In the past five years, exactly 79 such cafés have popped up all over Japan. What’s weird is that the café cats aren’t expensive pedigreed felines like Persians or those other ones with the funny bendy ears, they’re just the everyday mixed breeds you might find in the back lot of your local supermarket, cats who, in the immortal words of Brian Setzer, “slink down the alley, looking for a fight/Howling to the moonlight on a hot summer night.” Likewise, in the past few years, there’s been an explosion of photo books and DVDs featuring average-joe cats. If people are so fascinated by what are essentially domesticated alley cats, why don’t they just swoop one up from the legions of strays all over Japan and take them home? I’ll tell you why: because landlords in Japan are dicks.

Egal ob Modelcontest, Wahl zum besten Design oder Summe X für den eigenen Verein. Das Internet ist voll von Abstimmungen bei denen, auf den ersten Blick, jeder die gleiche Chance hat zu gewinnen. Solle man meinen. Denn was bei online Gewinnspielen schon seit langer Zeit Realität ist, entwickelt sich zum Trendsport für gelangweilte Forenuser: “Votings riggen” (Abstimmungen manipulieren). Dabei muss es nicht einmal etwas zu Gewinnen geben, im Vordergrund steht der Spaß und das “We Win”-Gefühl. Besonders erfolgreich in der Wahlmanipulation ist ein kleine Gruppe die sich in der weltweit größten Pokerschule Pokerstrategy.com kennengelernt hat. Wir haben exklusiv einen Insider für euch interviewet.

This fascinating PBS documentary, titled The Entrepreneurs and filmed in 1986, offers a rare glimpse of Jobs’ original vision with NeXT, from his aspirations for higher education and simulated learning environments to his decision-making process on price point and product features to his approach to company culture and motivational morale.

In Seoul, it was hard for Lee to walk down the street without being mobbed. To Koreans, he was known as Tablo, a chart-topping rapper who was also married to one of the country's most prominent movie stars. Until recently, he had been one of Korea's biggest celebrities. Now his career was in tatters, he'd parted ways with his record label, and his family was receiving death threats.

It was a fascinating conversation, particularly given the participation of Anonymous, though as he noted, no one person can truly speak for a distributed network.

One of the things that the anonymous hacker said is that Anonymous is “the conscience of the Internet”. Given I have delved deep into the concept of the global brain, this struck me as a fascinating metaphor.

Monsters and monster stories suit the culture that creates them. You can see this pretty easily by looking at the ancient monsters that ancient cultures created.

It's Friday January 16th. On Youtube, the user 'boxxybabee', has 21,800 subscribers, 1.4 million video views and over 38,000 comments on her videos and channel, yet she only signed up 8 days ago, and has only 3 videos. Many people were, and are confused. How did this happen? By documenting what I personally saw, I will show you.

Jaron Lanier's recent lengthy essay about Wikileaks is not really about Wikileaks; thus, it is unsurprising that he misses the central lesson of this affair. From the beginning, he makes the fundamental conceptual mistake of conflating individual human beings and powerful institutions, like governments and corporations; he then takes off on a dystopic vision of a world dominated by an imagined "nerd supremacist" ethic of complete transparency, collapse of private life, and unrestricted information flow, in which humanity is the slave of the machine.

In RiP: A remix manifesto, Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor explores issues of copyright in the information age, mashing up the media landscape of the 20th century and shattering the wall between users and producers.

The film's central protagonist is Girl Talk, a mash-up musician topping the charts with his sample-based songs. But is Girl Talk a paragon of people power or the Pied Piper of piracy? Creative Commons founder, Lawrence Lessig, Brazil's Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil and pop culture critic Cory Doctorow are also along for the ride.

My talk at Lift seemed to go down quite well but I remember leaving the stage thinking of all the things I'd meant to say; my own fault for trying to cram an hour of stuff into 20 minutes. So I thought I'd try and elaborate on some of it here. This post is what I meant to say while standing in front of this picture of one of Roo and Leila's tapes.

This week The McKinsey Quaterly asks: what does stimulating the creativity of animators have in common with developing new product ideas or technology breakthroughs? Apparently, a lot.

DIGITAL ARTS AND CULTURE BETWEEN POP AND SUB, HIGH AND LOW, ON AND OFF

Just a site poking a little fun at life in Germany from an American perspective.

By the way, we love Germany. It is pretty awesome. Except for the weather.

Here you find links and information about nearly 175 free
PDF mags from all over the world with main focus on art, design, illustration and culture...

C/O Berlin ist ein Labor, in dem Grenzen über einzelne gestalterische Disziplinen hinaus experimentell ausgelotet werden. Das kreative,
künstlerische Leben wird besonders anhand der renommierten Fotografieausstellungen sichtbar, die C/O Berlin konzipiert und koordiniert – international, vielseitig, aktuell.

Getragen wird C/O Berlin von Neugier, Leidenschaft und Professionalität.
Der Name C/O Berlin steht für Initiative und Flexibilität. Das „Care of“ als postalische Abkürzung für Umtriebige und örtlich ungebundene, international Agierende wird ergänzt durch das „Taking care of“ des privaten Engagements.

C/O Berlin handelt dort, wo andere Einrichtungen noch diskutieren, und setzt Zeichen für neue Wege im Kulturbereich.

The era that defined Wall Street is finally, officially over. Michael Lewis, who chronicled its excess in Liar’s Poker, returns to his old haunt to figure out what went wrong.

This paper has three parts. We start by briefly exploring what we mean by collaboration and why organisations and individuals should build their collaboration capability. Then, based on that understanding, we lay out a series of steps for developing a collaboration capability. We finish the paper with a simple test of your current collaboration capability.

The project has three general objectives. The first objective is to describe kids as active innovators using digital media rather than as passive consumers of popular culture or academic knowledge. The second objective is to think about the implications of kids' innovative cultures for schools and higher education and to engage in a dialogue with educational planners. The third objective is to advise software designers about how to use kids' innovative approaches to knowledge and learning in building better software. This project will address these objectives through ethnographic research in both local neighborhoods in Northern and Southern California, and in virtual places and networks such as online games, blogs, messaging, and online interest groups. Our research sites focus on learning and cultural production outside of schools: in homes, neighborhoods, after-school, and in recreational settings.

Shorpy.com | History in HD is a vintage photography blog featuring thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to 1950s. The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago.

WNYC 93.9 FM and AM 820 are New York's flagship public radio stations, broadcasting the finest programs from National Public Radio and Public Radio International, as well as a wide range of award-winning local programming.