John Lennon was tragically assassinated in 1980. But according to some people, the Beatle never completely left the earthly realm. And your bird can sing In 1995, the three surviving Beatles at the time — George Harrison, Paul McCartney, and Ringo Starr — reunited for the first Beatles recording in decades. They added their vocals […]
“bathroomreader.com” got its name from the Bathroom Reader book series. Now you know!”
Bing. In development, Microsoft’s search engine was codenamed “Kumo,” But Microsoft went with Bing because focus groups said it reminded them of “the moment of discovery.” The company also liked that it was short, easy to spell, and transferable to languages other than English. (Detractors jokingly claim BING is an acronym for “but it’s not Google.”)
Yelp. The business listings and ratings site is in many ways an Internet version of the Yellow Pages. In fact the “yel” in “Yelp” comes from “yellow,” and the “p” comes from “pages.”
Happy 15th birthday Google!
It seems that anything you do online has the word Google attached to it today. Our online lives are filled with Gmail, Google Docs, Google Plus, Google Maps, Google Earth, Youtube, Piacasa, and most importantly, Google Search! So, how did Google get its name? Here is an piece from Uncle John’s Top Secret Bathroom Reader for Kids Only!
In 1998 Sergey Brin and Larry Page were looking for money to help start their company, so they boasted to investors that their new search engine could find a googol pieces of information, which is the word for the numeral “1” followed by 100 zeroes. One investor liked them, and immediately wrote a check made out to “Google.” The name stuck.
Tired of spoilers on online? What you need is a ‘No More Spoilers on Twitter’ app! Gone are the days of watching a TV show on the channel it airs at the time it. Most American homes now have some form of “time shifting” solution when it comes to TV, from the good old VCR to digital video recorders like TiVo to watching the shows online, either a couple days later via Hulu or a couple of months (or years) later in season-long viewing binges on Netflix.
A diehard fan of a show will watch it as soon as possible—when it airs—and many of those fans like to share their thoughts online, while it airs. So if you’re not going to get around to watching Mad Men the night it first airs, you’d better not go anywhere near Twitter. Mad Men fans will discuss plot points, twists, and, to use the parlance of the Internet, “spoil it.”
Boston teenager Jennie Lamere loves to use Twitter to connect with her friends and follow celebrities, but she hated how she would often inadvertently find out the results of her favorite show before she watched—the reality program Dance Moms. So for a student-computer-programming contest, she designed a Twitter application called Twivo. The program works like this: You install it and tell it what shows you don’t want to know anything about. Twivo then blocks all references to the show on your Twitter feed—the text is blacked out—no more spoilers on Twitter. Lamere won the contest; the app may be available to the general public in just a couple of months…hopefully before Breaking Bad starts up again.
Get ready for UncleJohn’sBathroomReader.xxx – coming to your internet any day!
Oh, no, wait, really. That sounded funny in our heads – for about 1.23 seconds – but now that we think about it a bit more…no. Really. Uh uh. No with a capital N.O.
Back to the story:
Web addresses ending in .xxx have gone on general sale, as legal efforts continue to scupper the domain name.
Some 100,000 addresses have already been purchased in a restricted sale. The first pages went live in September.
Much more on the whole “.xxx” story here. (They’ve apparently become available to the general public only yesterday.)
Hooo-oot! The internet has a new star. Paul “Yosemitebear Mountain Giant” Vasquez took a video of a double rainbow at his property in the vicinity of Yosemite National Park in California. And he talked about it. On the video. It has received more than 2 million viewers on YouTube in less than three days. It is, in a word, high-larious.
We should note that Vasquez insists he was not under the influence of any illegal substances at the time. He was just “happy.”
Somebody went on to add some music:
Here’s an Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader salute to Yosemitebear Mountain Giant, our brand new favorite practically famous person. Oh, and here’s a pic:
On this date five years ago the very first video ever was uploaded to internet video behemoth YouTube. It was created by YouTube cofounder Jawed Karim, and is just 19 seconds long. And I know it might be difficult to believe, with the millions of horrible rotten awful just plain dumb videos that have been uploaded to the site in the time since, but this very first video just might be The Most Boring YouTube Video…Ever. Even more boring than this one, which, you might like to know, is titled, “The Most Boring YouTube Video…Ever.” Go ahead. Watch and decide for yourself:
Today is the fifth anniversary of the very first video upload to internet video behemoth YouTube. It’s just 19 seconds long and was made by YouTube cofounder Jawed Karim. And I know itit might be hard to believe, with the millions of horribly awful videos that have been uploaded to the site over the last five years, but this very first one is a strong contender for The Most Boring Video in YouTube History. I kid you not. Watch:
