What is it about this one irrational number that makes tech geeks go nuts? Every year on Pi Day - that's today, March 14 (you know, 3.14) - there are Pi parties, Pi recitation contests and, of course, pie for Pi.

The whole thing really goes nuts on March 14 at 1:59 a.m. and p.m. local time - because, after all, Pi is 3.14159… The festivities - particularly the big mama of them all at the San Francisco Exploratium museum going on today - would make Archimedes proud. The ancient Greek mathematician gets credit for popularizing the mathematical constant, of which references can be found as early as biblical times. And Albert Einstein, born March 14, would be psyched, too. He couldn't have calculated gravitational field theories without Pi, now could he?

Check out the infographic below for a ton of facts about pi - the only error I found in it is the fact that Archimedes was its publicist, not its identifier. Pi is far, far older than even that ancient Greek. (And don't stop there, more Pi stuff below...)

Can't get enough? Try these Pi facts size on for size. There are Pi clubs around the world - including Japan - where people competitively recite as many digits of Pi as they can. I actually saw a guy named Koroyuki Gotu recite Pi from memory on stage at the NHK Broadcasting Center in Tokyo. It was at once fascinating and boring. In 112 hours, he recited Pi accurately to 42,195 places.

Did you know you can use Pi to calculate everything from the circle the size of the universe to the height of an elephant to your hat size?

Hats, Elephants And The Entire Universe

For the hat size, measure the circumferance of your head and divide the result by Pi and round it off to an eighth of an inch.

To figure out how tall a particular elephant is, just measure the diameter of its foot and multiply the result by two. Then multiply that result by Pi.

As for the universe, a mathematician I interviewed years ago told me it was possible to calculate a circle the size of the entire known universe down to a proton. And supposedly you'd need only the first 39 digits of Pi to do it. You can't make this stuff up.

There are also plenty of conspiracy theories surrounding Pi. With a number infinitely long, geeks are always looking for their own social security numbers, password ideas and repetitive structures that might suggest something strange is going on with this crazy constant. Some readers will be relieved to learn that Satan — if indeed the signature for the demon is 666 — doesn’t make an appearance until position 2240.

The most interesting thing to note about Pi is its amazing flexibility. Pi is employed in harmonic motion theory, superstring equations and, as mentioned above, Einstein's gravitational theory.

Pi Videos

As promised, here are a two videos that are perfect for celebrating Pi. The first shows Pi as it would sound to music. The second is an explainer of Einstein's relativity theory and its real-llfe applications. It is, after all, not just Pi Day. It's Einstein Day, too.

The sound of Pi:

Here's Einstein and the theory of relativity explained, excellently, by the fine folks at The Science Channel.

Happy Pi Day. And Happy Birthday, Dr. Einstein. Wish you were here.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

The world has just gotten a cool new free virtual museum, the one that Google built.  

Aptly named Google’s Cultural Institute, the Internet-based multimedia site showcases first-hand testimonials, photographs, artifacts and manuscripts that until last Wednesday, you had to take a plane trip or at least pay an admission fee to see.

A Museum Milestone

Museum of Polish History called the Cultural Institute “a real revolution." Avner Shalev of Yad Vashem - also a Cultural Institute partner - said of the project, “it might be seen as one of the major milestones in modern history.”  Not only is Google’s Cultural Institute providing public access to documents otherwise previously unavailable for mass consumption, the project is “taking away the notion of physical custody of archival material” noted Razia Saleh of the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory in a mini-doc about the project.Building on the success of Google’s Art Project launched in February of 2011 in conjunction with now over 150 museums, Google partnered with 17 additional foundations and museums to launch 42 free digital exhibits as part of the Cultural Institute.

Not A Light-Hearted Experience

The 42 exhibits are a solid foundation and focus on World War II, the Holocaust and South African politics. Light-hearted or uplighting fare is few and far between. Google’s Mark Yoshitake has acknowledged the project will expand in the future though.

The exhibits themselves are displayed on a horizontal timeline, with navigation predominantly left and right arrows on both sides of the screen (you scroll across as opposed to scrolling down). This orientation makes sense when thinking about how exhibits are displayed in the real world, and Google has done a good job with its darker color scheme in keeping the site beautiful but solemn.

My Personal Thoughts

Eager to experience this revolutionary and game-changing web project, I spent a couple of hours perusing the site’s offerings. It wasn’t a life-altering experience, but I could immediately see its usefulness, especially if I was researching a moment in history covered by one of the digital exhibits. 

Personal items that you would only see in a museum were also included in the exhibits, including photographs of Frank’s infamous diary in the Anne Frank exhibit, and pictures of locks of hair in the Tragic Love at Auschwitz exhibit. These items were diligently added by curators trying to create in-depth stories about their subjects - and I certainly appreciated them. But I couldn’t help but feel their impact on me was cheapened when viewed through the Internet as opposed to me seeing it in person.

In a good museum, getting lost can be half the fun. Google’s Cultural Institute isn’t built yet for this type of free-form exploration, though I was able to achieve a bit of that same sense of discovery by browsing through the photo collections of LIFE and Getty Images, a search that was surprisingly clunky for a Google product. While browsing, I found this 1985 photo of former Libyan leader Gaddafi and a whole section of photos about the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. As a refugee from a former Soviet Union-occupied country, I was disappointed by the lack of cohesive exhibits about the USSR (or Hungary), but the vast photo collections might one day be organized like the previously mentioned 42 exhibits. (Some additional treats I found: this photo of a gay couple walking by graffiti on the Berlin wall, Boris Yeltsin making a fist while a portrait of Lenin looks on, and an anti-NATO communist propaganda poster from 1981.)

Would I visit the Cultural Institute again? Definitely. But it in no way replaced the experience of an actual museum. If anything, it made me appreciate my local (and physical) institutions a bit more.

A week after allegations of high-level Wikipedia editors promoting paid content, questions remain on how much damage the actions will inflict on the popular wiki site.

The story broke September 18, when CNET reporter Violet Blue posted a detailed analysis of internal Wikipedia discussions surrounding the apparent activity of former Wikimedia UK Chair Roger Bamkin and a Wikipedian-in-Residence Maximillion Klein, who were apparently using their positions within the Wikipedia editorial process to push content onto Wikipedia's Did You Know section on the site's home page.

These allegations have been vehemently denied by both men, but two days after the first CNET story broke, Bamkin stepped down from his Trustee position.

"Roger has always conducted himself with openness and honesty with regards to his business interests, which the Board greatly appreciates. However we have reached the decision together that it is best if Roger steps back from the Board, and thus the Board has accepted his resignation. I look forward to working with Roger in future," stated current Wikimedia UK Chair Chris Keating.

(For more on Wikipedia controversies, see Why Wikipedia Doesn't Belong In The Classroom and Why Wikipedia Does Belong In The Classroom.)

The Pitch Of Gibraltar

Throughout the controversy, Bamkin and Klein, while not exactly denying that they were working with the British territory of Gibraltar to create a separate Gibraltarpedia site for the purposes of increasing the amount of information about the territory on Wikipedia. Links to the Gibraltarpedia section appeared 17 times on the Wikipedia front page in August, 2011, which is a relatively high rate of occurrence.

Klein's consulting business untrikiwiki previously advertised SEO consulting services that implied that the firm could take advantage of Wikipedia as a very powerful SEO source. Language previously appearing on the untrikiwiki site included the following:

“A positive Wikipedia article is invaluable SEO: it's almost guaranteed to be a top three Google hit. Surprisingly this benefit of writing for Wikipedia is underutilized, but relates exactly the lack of true expertise in the field. ... WE HAVE THE EXPERTISE NEEDED to navigate the complex maze surrounding 'conflict of interest' editing on Wikipedia. With more than eight years of experience, over 10,000 edits, and countless community connections we offer holistic Wikipedia services.”

Since the story broke, that language has been removed, and Klein has issued a rather cool response on his blog:

"We’ve never made a single edit for which we had a conflict of interest on Wikipedia – ever. Although we have advertised such a service, we’ve not aggressively pursued it – and we have not accepted any clients interested in on-Wikipedia work." 

Yet there is still the odd presence of Gibraltarpedia on the Wikipedia home page, and a £1 million investment in the project revealed by Gibraltar's own Tourism Board, which Blue uncovered in a follow-up story Sept. 20.

Money? Yes. Scandal? No. 

But just because there was money changing hands, Wikimedia UK insists that there was nothing improper going on.

"Roger [Bamkin] has always been open with Wikimedia UK about his commercial interests and has declared them in public at appropriate times. He has not voted in any Wikimedia UK decisions about Monmouthpedia since the start of his consultancy relationship with MCC or on any decisions about Gibraltarpedia or QRpedia. All our decisions about this have been taken by the other trustees, with the aims of the charity in mind. Roger has not received any Wikimedia UK funds for any of these projects, except for out-of-pocket expenses incurred in his role as a volunteer in the early development stages of Monmouthpedia before becoming a consultant, paid in line with our normal expenses policy," Wikimedia UK said in a press statement.

While all may be above board within Wikimedia's own standards, there is little doubt that this will undermine the level of trust people place in Wikipedia as a source of information. That trust was never universal, but Wikipedia, for all its faults, has usually seemed moribund by its own policies and biased outside influences, not improper internal manipulations.

Wikimedia may benefit from this in the long run; by experiencing this crisis, as unsavory as it may be, the non-profit organization behind Wikipedia may learn more about what not to do and how its members should conduct themselves. SEO businesses that advertise themselves as Wikipedia experts, however, may end up suffering more obstacles in their paths, if Wikimedia does take the right lessons away from this incident.

But that remains to be seen. Wikipeida is about to wrap up its 12th year of operation, and if the team hasn't figured out a strong ethical stance and operational response by now, I find it hard to imagine that this incident, another in a line of problems, will be the one that finally gets things on track.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

My friend Matteo thinks I'm crazy for what I'm not carrying. "Deficiente," the 31-year-old engineer from Parma, Italy, says. 

"Man, how can you not have a phone? You must be the only person in Italy without one."

I'm traveling overseas without a phone, smart or otherwise. Many would say it's not smart. Maybe even dumb. I say it's one of the best ways to truly get to know a country, despite the inherent communication challenges.

I'm not saying it's easy, and I'm most certainly not an anti-tech snob.

It can be hard to forage through a new culture by yourself and rendezvous with your local host laterwithout the advantage of a phone. And exchanging email addresses at a club usually isn't as sexy in analog mode as it is with digital. But try harder. Forget getting the number. Take her home. Tonight. 

Being "disconnected" makes you more connected to your environment and the people around you.

No mobile to use to check Google Maps, decipher a word or check the rating of a hotel.

Which means ... what?

Which means you have to think fast, be creative and inquisitive, and talk to people—sometimes in their language.

It's hard. Almost blasphemous for most Americans. But try learning a few basic phrases. Better yet, listen to the way the words roll off the tongues of native speakers. Now you try. When you sit down to order dinner, do as they do. Watch eyes light up and smiles beam. You're no longer the ugly American, now you're the American not the like others. Gee, thanks guys ....

You're saying, Adam, how will I get from point A to point B? And how do I figure out the exchange rate and how much to tip? Simple. Pick up a map. And. Read. It. Forget the exchange rate. If you're in Europe the dollar's under water, and if you're in the developing world, the dollar is king.

And there is no tipping anywhere besides the United States, Canada, and sometimes Britain. So bugger all that. 

When you're forced out of your comfort zone, things get interesting. You have to make an attempt, because if you don't, you're going to be stuck in your room. Alone. 

It's not always easy throwing technology to the wind. You may recall a time when people didn't have mobile capabilities. How did they survive travel back then (how did we survive anything, you may wonder)?

They did it by putting one foot in front of the other, deciding what to do, pulling out a travel guide or phrase book when things got tough, and maybe even sticking out a hand.

"Hi, my name is Adam, and I'm American."

Trust me, people won't flail or flinch. Here's your chance to dispel the myths the rest of the world has learned watching "Jersey Shore" and "Jackass".

It's your chance to be you; to share, to take a chance, to not feel compelled to look down every 15 seconds for a status update and to tweet. It's worth the effort. Besides, pretty soon you'll be back home and able to fill every waking moment with texting and mobile surfing.

Eh. F*****g Americans.  

Tell me your experiences outside your country in the comments. Did mobiles save or shrink your vacation? Do you have any useful anecdotes for others? Share them!

IMDb.com, the 57th most trafficked site in the world, was born in the late 1980s on a Usenet board called rec.arts.movies where movie buffs swapped lists of actors, casts, directors and other trivia. But lists are only so useful. 

In October 1990, someone asked the board, "Does anyone out there have a Unix or C program which can 'interrogate' the actor/actress files? What I want to be able to do is to type in an actor/actress' name and get out a list of all the films which they appeared in." Col Needham, a British film buff who regularly posted to the message board, replied, "Well I can't provide you with exactly what you want, but I have a Unix script which might be of some use." A month later he posted an update to a list of to the board and in that message offered the scripts to anyone who wanted them.

I have produced a set of Unix scripts to create a movie database using the information on the lists. They make it easy to search for all appearances by an actor/actress or all the cast and director of a particular movie and are available by e-mail if you missed them.

Needham would soon take his creation to the nascent World Wide Web. But until then, if you wanted movie trivia - say, for instance, a list of thousands of dead actors and the movies they were in - you signed onto rec.arts.movies and looked for a posting like this:

(Editor's note: This post was originally published by our partners at GeekSugar.com.) Have you ever been hit by filtered photo regret? You took a memorable photo, but a hasty filter decision left you with an image too vintage and dreamlike.

The Normalize app for iOS ($1) lets you revert your once-oversaturated photos back to their original levels.

Take back the natural look of vacation photos with a quick run through the app. Even handier is that Normalize also doubles as a run-of-the-mill photo enhancer, so when a picture comes out too dark or the white balance is off, the app works double duty to transform the image.

Are there any Instagrammed or filtered photos you'd like to revisit in their original state?

More from GeekSugar:

• Foreign Finds: 6 Cool Apps Created Overseas
• Are You Fed Up With Your Ereader?
• The Lowdown On Downloading Podcasts
• The Geek's Complete Guide To Fall TV
• Balancing Act: 8 Apps For Work-Life Harmony

South Korean popster PSY’s “Gangnam Style” is an absurdist tour de force of a four minute viral video. It's also an object lesson in how YouTube is driving global culture. Now that kpop (short for South Korean pop music) has broken through to the mainstream, get ready for a whole lot more of it.   

Uploaded to YouTube on July 15th, Gangnam Style, by 34-year-old singer Park Jae-Sang,  has racked up 52.8 million views, collecting at least 2 million views every day since August 1. The video occupies the #2 spot on YouTube’s yearly chart, second to the infamous agit-prop film Kony 2012. 

Western press mentions of "Gangnam Style” abound, from France and Canada. The Atlantic “dissected” all the “subversive meanings” behind the song and video this week, and the Washington Post noted the “invisible horse dance” craze sweeping the media. Predominantly male (and not kpop friendly) redditors went gaga for Gangnam Style with the video sitting on the front page of the social news site on July 30. Gangnam Style even beat Justin Bieber as the most watched video on iTunes.

No other kpop song has seen this kind of global reception. Even Stephen Colbert’s fake feud with Rain in 2007 and 2008 did not bring Western success to the Kpop star. The song's words are very South Korean specific, referring to a ritzy neighborhood in the capital city Seoul.  The song wasn’t made for a global audience, and its reach has startled even PSY.

How did this happen? The answer isn’t just that the music video is ridiculous. Kpop has been creeping into the mainstream international market for years. YouTube has been instrumental in exposing the music to the global audience.

Because of the large fan base in Asia, any new music video uploaded to YouTube enjoys at least half a day on the video-sharing site’s front page due to high view counts. Today’s example is kpop girl group KARA’s latest video, sitting at the number 3 spot on YouTube’s music charts with 2.3 million views, right under “Call me Maybe” (which is under, you guessed it, "Gangnam Style").  

Not only do kpoppers use YouTube to stay on top of new hits (as it is nearly impossible to get the music outside of South Korea), kpoppers also make fan videos discussing the over-the-top fashion sense of kpop bands, unboxing videos of elaborate kpop merchandise, and English translation videos. 

The global success of “Gangnam Style” might very well change the musical, and cultural, landscape, especially if the Justin Bieber collaboration pans out. 

A 1995 public service announcement created by 5th graders to tout the brand-new Internet is making the rounds online, and for good reason: Their predictions all came true.

These Ray Bjork Elementary School students living in Helena, Montana produced a video answering the question, "Why should I be on the Internet?" Their answers, describing the state of the Internety "by the time we're in college," are jaw-droppingly true to the reasons we're all online today. They even knew we would be obsessed with cats, highlighting what appears to be a contemporaneous “Feline Information Page.”

Viewers in 1995 were impressed, too. According to the video's YouTube description, "the production won a local local ADDY Award in 1996 for Best PSA."

It's a rough time to be a social marketer, and getting rougher: Mountain Dew announced a naming contest for its new Apple flavor over the weekend. As if on cue, Internet pranksters hijacked the contest. Not content with stuffing the virtual ballot box, they defaced the contest website with videos, offensive banners and in-jokes.

PepsiCo, maker of Mountain Dew, shut down the “Dub the Dew” contest site early Monday morning. The soft drink company was by no means the first victim of the notoriously juvenile Web community known as 4chan.

The hijinks began as a post on 4chan’s infamous /b/ discussion board that put out a call to take part in Operation: Gushing Granny. The operation's stated mission was to name the new Apple-flavored drink "Gushing Granny."

A /b/ user shared 4chan’s digital mayhem on the social news site Reddit early Sunday evening under the title “/b/ Destroys Another Online Contest.” The post hit Reddit's front page within hours. 

From there, the contest attracted a wider audience of miscreants, as reflected by the top contest names. “Hitler Did Nothing Wrong” and “Diabeetus” soon became the top voted names. One audience member offered to raffle a virtual hat in a popular multiplayer online game in return for votes for his Mountain Dew name submission, drawing new waves of voters both for and against it.

By 1am Pacific on Monday, messing with Mountain Dew had become the hottest activity for anyone on Reddit and 4chan's /b/ board at that hour. It wasn’t long before tricksters added to the Mountain Dew page a link to the rock video for Rick Astley's 1987 pop hit "Never Gonna Give You Up" (an Internet in-joke known as a rickroll) as well as Web banners “saluting” Islamic extremists. 

PespiCo pulled the plug on the after-hours fun, but not before someone mirrored its site to memorialize the Web reprobate party.

Online promotions staged by commercial entities are an increasingly popular target of online jokers. In July, Walmart’s social media campaign with rapper Pitbull was taken over by Something Awful writers David Thorpe and John Hendren. However, in that case, the prank worked out well for the retailer, in the form of hundreds of free press mentions. Thorpe told ReadWriteWeb the Walmart Pitbull hijacking became popular because it was a “collaborative prank.”

Given how easy it is to appropriate crowd-sourced marketing campaigns, perhaps marketers would be smart to design their social media campaigns deliberately to be hijack-able. 

It was the New York Times op-ed that wasn’t. After months of careful planning, Internet activists hailing from WikiLeaks, Anonymous and Yes Men quietly unfurled a very convincing New York Times web page on a lazy Sunday morning. The article fooled everyone for several hours as readers shared it widely via social media, and then enjoyed a second life as media commentators caught on and fulminated over the injustice of it all. Lost in the media kerfuffle, however, was the prank's point - which counterintuitively supported the New York Times.

The bogus article, attributed to columnist and former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, was published on July 29 under a URL similar to that of New York Times opinion articles and tweeted from a Twitter handle that looked nearly identical to Keller's. In 2010, Keller had helped the New York Times publish secret documents procured by WikiLeaks, but later he distanced himself from the organization's methods, drawing a sharp line between leaking and journalism. Titled "WikiLeaks, a Post Postscript," the fake article stated, "I find myself in the awkward position of having to defend WikiLeaks," and asserts the organization's First Amendment rights. Keller's fans were surprised by the turnaround and shared the article extensively.

At first, Keller himself appeared to accept the article as his own work. A link to the article appeared in his real Twitter stream, only to be deleted hours later. Keller called the shenanigans “childish” and “immature satire;” in short, he didn't find it funny. As word of the hoax spread, journalists made it clear that the stunt rubbed them the wrong way, going as far as to criticize the writing in the fake op-ed (some of which was cribbed from Keller's own work). “I wonder if WikiLeaks might be mounting a stealth campaign to keep copy editors employed,” Andrew Beaujon mused  on Poynter.

One Twitter supporter summed up journalist reaction succinctly with the tweet, “@wikileaks' triumphant #hoax of the @nytimes shows folks writing about it utterly lack #humor.”

More important, the mainstream media's defensive reaction missed the point. The hoax wasn't meant to be funny or to offend, and it didn't involve any illegal activities such as hacking. “Nothing was hacked except reality,” said an online activist involved in the prank. The activist, who is also associated with the Occupy movement, asked to remain (literally) anonymous, saying “I didn’t participate to get famous.”

The fake op-ed was part of a larger campaign that rolled out simultaneously but received much less notice. Concocted in March, the hoax included four additional elements: a fake corporate blog post from PayPal uploaded the same day, the exploitation of the Helvetica font on Twitter when viewed on smartphones (the “i” and “l” letters are virtually indistinguishable), a made-up conservative grassroots campaign called Block The New York Times that purportedly accused the New York Times of treason for publishing WikiLeaks-related documents, and a fake subset of Anonymous whose sole mission was to take down Block The New York Times.

The sham conflict between Block New York Times and Anonymous, which was hardly noticed by the mainstream press, was meant to dramatize how easily the New York Times could be censored in a variety of ways: pressure from fringe political groups who don’t value the First Amendment, prosecution by the government, or financial blockade like the one WikiLeaks is facing.

“We were trying to build attention to the possibility of this happening [to the New York Times]” said the activist, equating WikiLeaks' release of secret documents to investigative newspaper journalism. “We were trying to start the conversation. WikiLeaks here has been prevented from delivering news with this financial blockade.” In other words, if they could do it to WikiLeaks, they could do it to the New York Times.  

“Julian [Assange] has a much better sense of humor... but [he and Bill Keller] come from very different backgrounds,” concluded the Anonymous source.  

Image courtesy of Flickr/Adobe of Chaos

Following the tragic Colorado shooting in Aurora last week, many Americans turned to social networks and the Internet to express their grief, offer condolences, or raise money for the victims. Trolls were no exception, and they too came out to play on this information highway.

Shortly after the shootings, on July 21, a James Holmes Tribute page appeared on Facebook. The page included photoshopped photos of Holmes and a slew of jokes, such as rhyme games featuring Holmes' last name: “If James Holmes were short, he’d be James Gnomes.” The page caught the nation's attention with a plethora of press mentions, hand-wringing and speeches on the state of youth today. Facebook removed it on July 26 despite the fact that it did not violate Terms of Service. 

But this kind of provocation, or trolling, may be more than it seems; it may be the social side of grief in a networked world. Whitney Phillips, a University of Oregon ethnographer who focuses on online media, concluded in a study published last year that RIP trolling is a “social critique on the way we live our Web lives.” Indeed, it’s hard to look at the commotion around the James Holmes Tribute page and not see layers and layers of social commentary, intentional or not. Posting on Facebook was an integral part of the national grieving process, from numerous memorial pages for the shooting victims to the sudden scramble to find Holmes' real Facebook page. Mocking society's addiction to Facebook would, of course, be best done on Facebook. 

The James Holmes fan page that prompted the most public outcry was liked only 888 times but actively discussed by 3,000 people at all times. Holmes tributes in general were dwarfed by the dozens of Facebook groups calling for the death penalty for Holmes. Apparently it was more socially acceptable to call for the death of Holmes on Facebook than to give him a tribute page. Most egregious of all, apparently, was joking about the tragedy or its perpetrator. 

On the tribute page in question, the most ferocious comments came not from trolls, but from angry users whipped up by the press coverage. Facebook users threatened to shoot the page's creator, wished him or her a slow death, and generally behaved in a way that normal Internet watchers would mistake for trollish behavior. 

“Wishing death on someone is [definitely] worse than making a harmless joke on Facebook” wrote Jadehh Munro in a Facebook comment thread, responding to angry users who threatened to kill the person who posted the tribute page.

It doesn't matter where the dozen or so Facebook users behind the joking spend most of their time - 4chan’s notorious /b/ board, an Encyclopedia Dramatica IRC channel or a Something Awful forum. After the Colorado shooting, they came to this digital place, hung out, told jokes and laughed. Phillips advised against framing the page as “an emotional or coping mechanism” because “trolls motives may vary,” but, when you imagine the amount of time the Facebook creators spent making their pages, it’s hard not to think the trolls were grieving in their own way.

Of course, that doesn't make the jokes polite or tasteful. “It's important to place these sorts of transgressive behaviors in context, but it's also important not to sugarcoat the behaviors,” Phillips wrote in an email. “They troll because it upsets people, and because they derive amusement from their targets' distress. National tragedies are a perfect opportunity to capitalize on heightened sensitivities, and so that's precisely what they do.”

But free speech covers impolite and distasteful statements. And on Facebook - if the site will allow - we can all grieve together.

Social image site Stipple is relaunching Thursday with new tools and indexing features designed to fix the perpetual problem of image attribution and introduce brand-new sales channels through the use of images alone - for all Web users.

Stipple uses what’s known as in-image tagging to let certain Stipple participants to tag an image with information about the picture, or add links back to the participants' Web site.

What is intriguing about this kind of tagging is the way Stipple managed it: instead of embedding the information within the image file itself, typically done with the use of metatags, Stipple can examine images for similarities to other baseline pictures, such as an article of clothing or a certain vehicle model. Tagging images by the way they look, through pattern matching, means that stripping out this meta information becomes nearly impossible.

When a similar image to the indexed image appears on a site scanned by Stipple, Stipple will insert tiny blue tags that appear when the image is passed over with the mouse. When the the cursor passes over the tags in a picture, up pops a little window with links to a vendor or a catalog entry… anything the vendor wants readers to see associated with the image.

In-Image Tagging For Everyone

Just as important, beginning Thursday, Stipple is no longer letting advertisers and brand-owners have all the fun: the tagging service is now available to all Stipple users.

The company is also announcing a new Stipple browser extension that will let users see information on Stippled images on whatever Web site they might appear.

Stipple CEO Rey Flemings described the immediate benefits of Stipple’s tools to its users:

“We ensure that information follows the photo,” Flemings explained. This is critical in an age of hyper-republication, where no one - not individuals and not brands - have control over their images. “Stipple is hoping to solve the problem of image attribution.”

Now that the service is open to all Stipple users, any one can assign the attribution they want to images uploaded to Stipple. And not just attribution.

Real-Time Links

For example, Flemings demonstrated how real-time links to information from product catalog can follow an image of a pair of shoes no matter what website that image ends up on.

Image creators can also take advantage of this service. Photographers can tag their images, and then sell rights to use them for micro-payments. Or ship prints of the image to whoever wants to pay for the privilege.

Flemings also stressed the capability to interject storytelling within images, by attaching videos and text to an image.

It’s not just about setting up creative storytelling and making new sales channels. There is also the promise of gleaning a rich treasure trove of data from Stippled images.

Fleming explained how one large advertiser tagged images for the recent Euro 2012 soccer tournament. On one day of the matches, 152 tagged photos were viewed, receiving a total of 303,962 pageviews. Of the images that were tagged, 64,522 users moused over the tagged images, and 97% of those users actually moused over the Stipple tags themselves, likely curious to see what they represented.

That’s a lot of data to use in a marketing campaign. Even better for the advertiser in question was the click-through rate on those Stipple tags: 1.08%. For “regular” Internet ads, you’re typically thrilled if you get users to click through more than 0.3% of the time.

That kind of interaction and data should be attractive to marketers, but also to anyone who wants to know how their images are used. By opening its door to more users, Stipple hopes to make its in-image tagging service a more ubiquitous Web feature.

There are a lot of ways to get your 2012 Olympics fix. Here's how to do, whether or not you're a cable subscriber.

The Herp Derp Web Extension is a browser plug-in that aims to make YouTube comments palatable by making them read “herp derp.” The world needs such a function, as conventional wisdom would have it, because YouTube comments are the scum of the Internet, a repository of "everything that is terrible about humanity." But is that a reason to censor them?

Herp Derp is getting rave reviews. As one user put it in the Chrome store yesterday, it's “the best browser plugin ever created.”

Please.

Perhaps Tanner Stokes, the creator of the extension, is just having a laugh, as are the reviewers. But signs point to their being all too serious. Here's Stokes' list of comments that deserve the herp derp treatment: “FIRST,” “omg justin bieber,” “lol FAKE” and “your dumb.”

OK, they're not Shakespeare. But people were writing “FIRST” as an Internet comment long before YouTube existed. “FIRST” is an Internet comment staple and an Internet culture mystery that various media outlets, like Buzzfeed, have been trying to solve for years. So why would Stokes call it out as a problem with YouTube? 

As for people who write “lol FAKE,” they're clearly going to the trouble of questioning what they're watching. Remember folks, you can’t trust everything you see on the Internet.

The comment “your dumb” is not particularly offensive - unless bad grammar ruins your day - nor is it characteristic of YouTube at large. Questioning someone’s intelligence is, I hate to break it to Stokes, common on various Web platforms, be they social networks or news sites.

Similarly, “omg justin bieber” isn’t inherently a YouTube phenomenon, though the 18-year-old megastar did get his start on the site. By expressing his desire to censor this comment, Stokes admits that he watches videos with Bieber in them. How else would he know? Rabid fan girls don’t write “omg justin bieber” on videos that don’t include the singer. Just sayin’.

The trolls who so trouble Stokes come out to play around trending videos or clips picked up by mainstream media. Thus the Herp Derp plug-in's core user base consists of people whose YouTube habits don’t extend beyond the latest viral video. Herp Derp users likely don't visit YouTube to educate themselves or engage with the community. They don't visit the YouTube channel of the White House, Reuters, TED Talks, a premium content channel, a YouTube celebrity or tutorials on DIY projects. If they did, they wouldn't find themselves mired in comment threads running amok to the point where they need to be censored.

No YouTuber worth his or her salt (i.e., the hundreds now making at least six figures a year in a YouTube career, and the hundreds of thousands who want to make YouTube their career) would ever use the Herp Derp extension. In fact, they rely on comments from their fan base to run their business. Many of them say that the instantaneous feedback they receive through comments is incredibly helpful, and that - surprise! - intellectually satisfying conversations often emerge.

If it's fun to censor YouTube comments, why not those at Huffington Post, Boing Boing, Yahoo or Fox News? Trolls are everywhere. They're not confined to YouTube. Free speech is a fundamental Internet value, and YouTube is an important Internet community. Censoring YouTube comments undermines Internet culture as a whole.

Traveling by train from Glasgow to London can be such a bore - but not when you're sitting next to fascinating people like Tim and Freya. Scottish comic and writer Janey Godley overheard the soon-to-be-ex lovers squabbling and seized the opportunity to live-tweet the event. Analyzing Godley’s technique, we’ve uncovered some tips to help you, dear reader, better share other peoples' business with the Internet at large. 

Along the way, Godley demonstrated that live-tweeting an overheard conversation is an excellent conversation starter about privacy and technology in the modern era - but no one would have paid attention if Godley hadn't so brilliantly condensed the unhappy couple's trauma into a gripping, illustrated, 100-tweet drama.

Not only that, she managed to serve both the Internet audience and her subjects, who, though they weren't aware that they were providing entertainment for a global audience, will be able to look back on a difficult moment and laugh heartily at their foibles.

Study the master's work, and learn.

• Determine that you are actually going to live-tweet this lovers' quarrel, or friendship brawl, whatever it might be. 

“There is another watcher to this story just spotted a man watching me watching them he has raised an eyebrow at me.”

Godley noticed another observer in the course of her eavesdropping, but he foolishly kept the incident to himself. Had he posted it on Twitter or Reddit, he would have captured a portion of Godley's notoriety as the latest “Internet sensation,” thus amassing new followers and press mentions.

• Avoid making your activity known to those about whom you are tweeting. 

“Tim is back he is looking at me suspiciously hope he can't see me tweeting.”

Godley recognized this important rule. Don't risk eye contact with your subjects, as it could reduce your resolve or, worse, cause the observed parties to move beyond earshot. 

• Render dialog accurately. 

"'Am pregnant' Freya just said to Tim. Oh My FUCKING god isn't she is going to take morning after pill DO I STEP in?"

"Freya just said 'well I might not be pregnant but am thinking of not taking the morning after pill which is same thing'."

"Tim 'you pretended to be pregnant Freya'"

 "'I didn't pretend I said I might be you always make me the liar Tim' says Freya 'I wish I recorded what u said' says Tim."

Godley was careful to transcribe everything the couple said, word by miserable word. Did Freya say she was pregnant, or didn't she? Both, as it happened. Her subjects will thank her later, when her record will serve to remind them both of exactly what they said.

• Attend to subtle details that may reveal your subjects' identities.

“He said a mate follows me on twitter and he recognised the names and description.”

Here, Godley commented on Tim’s email to her (“a bit embarrassed”) three days after she live-tweeted his breakup. The maestro's lesson is clear: Report any clues about your subjects' identities that you derive from their statements. That way, their friends and family can recognize them and notify them of your generous sharing.

• Use humor! 

“Freya 'Debra needs grooming' please oh fuck please let Debra be a horse and not a child."

Godley is no Louis C.K., but she sure knows how to deliver a zinger. Jokes or banter will keep painful tales light enough for enjoyment by the broader Internet audience.

• Describe the setting, actions, and especially subjective impressions of your characters.  

"He (Tim) is staring at floor Freya is eating a sandwich in a furious chompy manner as if it was his limp cock (am guessing)."

There's more to the scene than dialog. If you're having trouble coming up with words that adequately describe the poetry of the situation, always remember that you can simply snap a picture.

Walmart's Facebook campaign for Energy Sheets, a caffeinated equivalent to Listerine strips, promises to send rapper Pitbull to the Walmart store with the most likes on Facebook. But what happens if the Walmart store with the most likes is on a tiny Alaskan island, accessible only by plane or ferry?  

The campaign to send American rapper Pitbull to the Alaskan island Kodiak was hatched by David Thorpe and Jon Hendren, two writers of the comedic Internet culture website Something Awful, on June 29.

"Pitbull is having a contest where he'll visit the local Walmart that gets the most FB Likes. @fart and I are sending him to Kodiak, Alaska," wrote Thorpe on Twitter. Thorpe's tweet was shared more than 700 times before being posted on Reddit, where it shot to the front page and kicked off a frenzy of Facebook likes. 

To date, more than 62,000 people have liked the Facebook page for Walmart store 2711 in Kodiak, Ala., population 6,130, according to the 2010 census. Even though the campaign to send Pitbull to Kodiak started as a joke by writers known for making fun of everything - Thorpe is encouraging his fans to use the hashtag #exilepitbull - Kodiak Walmart employees have embraced the prank and very much want Pitbull to visit them.

"We’d love to have Pitbull visit us. The weather is better here this time of year anyway," wrote a Walmart Kodiak employee on a group shot of the staff holding a Pitbull banner on their Facebook page. "Thanks for your support - did you know that Kodiak is actually a real fun town! It’s just that some of our ‘party animals’ happen to be bears, moose, seals, eagles and fish" reads another employee comment. (The Kodiak Walmart sells hunting supplies, bear repellent and snow shoes.) 

Pitbull, on the other hand, doesn't seem nearly as thrilled about visiting the tiny frozen island, rather, he's expressed a desire to go to Miami instead with a #keeppitbull305 hashtag. (That Walmart store only has 909 likes.) The rapper has been a good sport throughout the whole thing though, tweeting at Thorpe to join him in Alaska if he does end up there. 

Jon Hendren admitted to ReadWriteWeb he wasn't expecting this kind of community response, saying "I think we joked that it might get a few thousand if we're really lucky, and maybe [W]almart's marketing people would hold an emergency meeting or something, tops." As for all the media attention, from NPR, CNN, to Mashable, Hendren called it "scary," before adding "I'm about 20% sure that if Dave [Thorpe] goes along to Alaska, he will be eaten by a bear or hit with an errant tranq dart."

You might think your existing broadband Internet connection is fast enough. It’s not. When it comes to Internet speeds, more is always better. That’s why we all owe some sincere gratitude to the intrepid men and women who bring truly high-speed Internet into our homes.

This post is a message of sincere appreciation - a love letter if you will - to the cable guy who recently upgraded the Internet connection in my San Francisco home. Whether you know it or not, you’ve made my life better in so many ways.

I’ve had broadband access at my home since DSL came to San Francisco in the 1990s. So I didn’t think getting faster service would make all that much of a difference in my life. Boy was I wrong.

My family and I just upgraded our cable Internet service from about 10 Mbps to 50 Mbps. And then we bought a new Wi-Fi router to extend that service to all our wireless devices. Now, 10Mbps isn’t that slow, and 50Mbps is far from the fastest service around (heck, ReadWriteWeb’s headquarters clocks in at an awesome 100Mbps). But I am still stunned at how much the change is affecting how we all use the Internet. And how much I want to hug the Astound cable guy who brought it to us.

Easy Upgrade

Compared to the early days of broadband, the process was amazingly simple. The Astound technician came out to our 115-year-old Victorian with a new Cisco DPC3010 cable modem (actually showing up in the first half hour of the promised 4-hour window!) The tech replaced our old unit and checked out the cabling in less than an hour. Bam, the speed of our hardwired connections instantly quintupled! No fuss, no muss.

Except that the increase was only visible on wired connection, not the fleet of smartphones, tablets, laptops and other devices where we do most of our work (and play). They got a bump to about 20Mbps. Faster, but suddenly pokey next to the wired connections.

Even though we had a relatively recent Belkin router using the modern 802.11n Wi-Fi specification, it simply couldn’t keep up. The tech - remember how much I love him? - recommended getting a new router that supported the DOCSIS (Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification) 3.0 standard. And because we have a mix of Apple, Windows and other devices in the house, my spouse decided to choose simplicity over economy and we splurged for an Apple AirPort Extreme Wi-Fi router.

Although its $179 price is almost double that of competing devices with similar specs, it was by far the easiest router to install and configure that I’ve ever used. Everything was up and running within five minutes, with none of the false starts and geeky questions I’ve encountered setting up other wireless systems over the years. I wouldn’t have chosen it, but I can’t say I missed the headaches.

More importantly, though, suddenly every device in the house was testing out at 50Mbps downloads. 

Faster Everything

The conventional wisdom holds that just about any broadband connection is sufficient for browsing the Web, and that faster connections don’t really provide much benefit in this regard.

Thanks to our cable guy, I can confidently state that conventional wisdom is dead wrong.

Web browsing at 50Mbps is noticeably faster and less annoying than browsing at 10Mbps. In most cases, pages begin loading faster and images show up along with the text, not a second or two later. Downloading large files, from software applications to data sets to high-resolution images is now something we do in real time, rather than a process we start and let run in the background. 

If general browsing got a mild boost from the faster speeds, working with Software as a Service (SaaS) applications delivered over the Internet enjoyed a serious kick in the pants. Gmail and Google Docs suddenly seemed almost as fast as email or productivity software running on a local machine.

Better Streaming

Perhaps the biggest, most noticeable improvement came when consuming streaming content. At 50Mbps, YouTube and other online videos leap into action, instantly jumping ahead with plenty of buffer room. Nice to see on the desktop, but positively intoxicating on an iPad or other tablet, which now seems seamlessly connected to the entire Internet. (I murmur soft words of thanks to the cable guy every time I watch anything on a tablet.)

I now find that I want to have the iPad close at hand at all times, because it’s just so darn easy to watch anything online as soon as I can type it in. Just as important, I’m now wondering why I need a tablet with 64GB of storage space when I can grab stuff from the Net just as quickly. (That makes my new Google Nexus 7 tablet seem more inviting.)

Not surprisingly, that holds true when using streaming media services - whether on a computer, iPad or big-screen TV. Services such as Hulu or HBO Go perform almost as well as our satellite TV service - and our Apple TV box delivers a more TV-like experience than ever before. If it weren’t for live sports, I’d already be considering cutting the cord. (I worry that the cable guy wouldn't like that, though.)

Better Backups and Sharing

All of the members of my household rely on Dropbox to sync and share files, and some of us even pay for extra space. And one of us relies on Apple’s iCloud to sync huge chunks of data among many devices. But syncing all that data to new devices used to take hours, and it churned through much of our 100GB per month data cap. No more. At 50Mbps down and 6Mbps up, those syncs and backups happen much faster. Syncing and backing up to the cloud now seems like a much more reasonable option than it used to.

Upload speeds are often the Achilles' heel of cloud services, but 6Mbps is fast enough to help ease the bottleneck. Still, if the cable guy wants me to buy him chocolates, it would be nice to have upload speeds closer to the downloads.

Bigger Data Limits

When you add up all this stuff, it’s pretty clear that my family is likely to churn through a lot more bandwidth every month - and we were already incurring fees by exceeding our old plan’s limit of 100GB per month. The new plan ups our data transfer limit to 300GB per month, but with the extra speed encouraging all these new uses, we’re actually worried we may blow past that figure as well!

We made the switch because we cycle through a lot of data in our house, and it seemed to make sense. But I think we were all surprised at how much a five-times boost in speed changed the quality and quantity of our Internet usage. I’ve become an instant convert to the idea that the future of the Internet requires that everyone get not just broadband, but really fast broadband.

I hear that Verizon FiOS now offers up to 300Mbps. A week ago, I would have said that’s ridiculous. Now I’m wondering if those speeds will ever be available in San Francisco (if not from FiOS, which apparently won't be built out any more than it already has been, then from another provider). Sorry cable guy, I appreciate how much you’ve done for me, but if the phone company guy shows up with six times faster service, I’m going with him.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.