Tina Fey Makes Google’s Eric Schmidt Really, Really Uncomfortable

What ladyparts have to do with Mark Twain and making Google blush.

We love Tina Fey. (Really, who doesn’t?) It’s been a grand year for her, from becoming the third female and youngest ever recipient of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor — and giving a brilliant acceptance speech that unequivocally validates it — to the publication of Bossypants, her most excellent and impossibly funny new book about modern comedy, that whole gender thing and, well, life.

Once in a generation a woman comes along who changes everything. Tina Fey is not that woman, but she met that woman once and acted weird around her.”

This month, she brings Bossypants to the fantastic Authors@Google. Besides Fey’s characteristically awesome brand of awkward, it’s particularly priceless to watch Google’s Eric Schmidt — who’s had quite a year himself — fumble with various politically incorrect phrases and, you know, “women things.”

via Open Culture

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Life in a Day: Google Crowdsources Humanity

Documenting the world, or how to take one of 6.7 billion pathways to Sundance.

What does “humanity” actually mean? How do the 6.7 billion lives around the world, with their daily triumphs and tragedies, amount to one cohesive human story? That’s exactly what Google is trying to document in the freshly launched Life in a Day project — a cinematic experiment to document a single day, as seen through the eyes of people around the world. (Sound familiar? Very familiar? Just sayin’…)

Google is crowdsourcing submissions from filmmakers and ordinary folks alike who, on July 24, will have 24 hours to capture a snapshot of their lives on camera. The project is a partnership between YouTube, LG, director Kevin Macdonald, and legendary producer Ridley Scott of Blade Runner and Thelma & Louise fame.

Dubbed “the world’s first user-generated feature film,” Life in a Day is set to premiere in January 2011 at the Sundance Film Festival. (Here’s what festival director John Cooper has to say about the project.) Creators whose footage makes it into the film will be credited as co-directors, and the 20 top contributors will get to attend the premiere at Sundance.

We’d be remiss if we didn’t reiterate the striking similarity of the premise to the One Day on Earth project, with a dash of 8 Billion Lives mixed in. So while being backed by Google and Ridley Scott certainly gives Day in a Life the leverage to gain critical enough a mass to offer a truly comprehensive snapshot of humanity, we’d have to extend a slight eyeroll at all the gushing about how “innovative” and “groundbreaking” the effort is.

Still, we strongly encourage you to take part — if anything, it’s a fun experiment and any opportunity to feel even a little bit more connected to our fellow human beings is an opportunity worthwhile.

via

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Historypin: Past Meets Present in Street View

What urban storytelling has to do with the end of WWII and Google Maps mashups.

Photographic Time Machine is one of our all-time most popular articles, but it spotlights projects that, while fascinating, are one-off art experiments. How fantastic would it be if there were a broader, more expansive platform for intersecting past and present through historical photography, a digital time machine of sorts? Well, now there is. Enter Historypin — a mashup of modern mapping and archival photos that offers a new way to explore and share history.

Developed by We Are What We Do, the social movement behind Anya Hindmarch’s now-iconic I’m Not a Plastic Bag bag, in partnership with Google, the project pulls photos from various national archives and private-sector collections, and “pins” them over Google Maps Street View to create a fascinating fold in the space/time continuum.

Archival photos can both be dated and geotagged, painting a precise portrait of how specific locations have changed. Users can even submit their own and write stories about them, adding a wonderful urban storytelling component akin to Hitotoki.

From 19th-century views of Baltimore and Potomac Railway Station to London’s iconic High Street on Victory in Europe Day in 1945, Historypin features nearly 2,000 photos and stories pinned just a couple of days after the official launch and has the potential to become the largest user-generated archive of historical images and stories, documenting not only how the physicality of our world is changing but also how our experience of it is responding to those changes — a priceless timecapsule of cultural change.

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Google Groupies Galore: Goollery

What album covers have to do with shoe shopping and Renaissance paintings.

The open-source movement is among the great cultural feats of our time. And the move towards open API’s, inviting derivative, often collaborative work, is a major force driving this new paradigm. Google was arguably the pioneer there, releasing the Google Maps API in June 2005, and following up with API’s for many of their other products. More recently, the Android API has generated a number of fascinating independent developments in today’s white-hot area of augmented reality. So: How does one keep up with all the API wonderfulness out there?

Enter Goollery, a comprehensive gallery of Google-related projects from around the world.

Inviting you to browse by Google product or project date, the collection features such gems as a map of where iconic album covers were shot, to an artist who paints scenes and locations he has only experienced via Street View, to Layar, the new critically-acclaimed augmented reality browser for Android.

Among our favorites is the Tate’s mashup, which lets you explore locations depicted in artwork from the National Collection of British Art using Street View. Looking at place from a Renaissance painting and seeing it today somehow captures our cultural evolution on a multitude of levels, from the aesthetic to the social to the environmental.

Explore Goollery for more fascinating celebrations of voyeurism and the freedom to roam around in other people’s data.

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