The contest for the new Mister Wong logo has started. Starting now, you can vote for your 12 favorite out of over 1800 submitted designs.

The German based company Mister Wong removed their old logo, of a Chinese man, after being criticized and accused of racism.

Picking a new logo through the community is of course also a great publicity stunt.

The thousands of possible logo’s are categorized in the categories Abstract, Animals, Cartoon, Fantasy, Nature, Symbols and Typography.

It’s also a great study guide to get some ideas for your own logo (like the not-yet-existing-logo for this weblog).

There have been major lengthy discussions about the addition of avatar photographs the past year. 50% is against and 50% is before but I noticed that the “aye” camp apparently won since it is now possible to add your avatar picture to your profile.

Kwero is the dutch Yahoo Answers, which recently started.

It has several categories like the english questions variants and somehow brings along the same addictiveness of both answering questions and responding to questions.

On a Question on Sonja Bakker, I quoted this fabulous quote (only understandable for Dutch persons): “Sonja Bakker is een gewichtconsulent, ze heeft een cursus bij de LOI gedaan. Diëtisten zijn vier jaar in opleiding.”

If you have knowledge on some area, visit it and help some people out, you can win some neat money prices by answering questions.

I’m sort of a social network gypsy This could be the title of a song but it’s the best way to describe my behaviour on the social net. I travel from social environment to social environment and every week my focus lies in another area.

I wonder if more end-users fall into this category?

I tend to stay a week or two very active on a forum / social network / mailinglist / blog / community, create my profile, chat a bit, do something useful for the community and then tend to move on to shift my eye of sauron to another place. Usually I am triggered to visit a place because I read about it somewhere, found some old bookmarks or just googled on related questions in my mind and find some really useful communities.

The bad thing about this behaviour is that my e-mail box grows with reminders and invites and updates, my passwords list become infinite and my time slowly grows to minus 24 hours availability. The good thing is that I meet quite some interesting people, read a lot and keep up2date with the latest buzz.

In my mind is now to set up a social network gypsy community. A sort of AA for all those web2.0 travellers who can share their stories with one another. It’s like the tavern where the party settles for a moment after a long quest and finds new quests to accept solely or with some heroes found in the tavern.

Numpa, de Nederlandse Twitter, was de afgelopen maanden nog ‘in beta-versie’ online, maar is nu volwassen! Sinds begin deze week is Numpa 1.0 live, en fors vernieuwd ten opzichte van de beta-versie.

Zo kent Numpa nu channels, waarbinnen mensen met een gemeenschappelijke interesse (koken, film, politiek, design, etc.) elkaar treffen. Ook kunnen gebruikers zelf channels aanmaken; open toegankelijk voor alle ge

Gamers and their Avatars – fascinating slide show from the New York Times.

We all know Second Life, but now Multiverse 1.0 has arrived and has received 4 million in funding (IBM has also mentioned it will be working with the Multiverse world-building platform in some form.)

Multiverse connects virtual worlds created by anyone of the 11.000 teams already. It’s open for you and me to create a virtual world. Multiverse CEO and Co-Founder, Bill Turpin, and the other Multiverse co-founders who are veterans from Netscape?s early days, helped create much of the core technology that fueled the growth of the World Wide Web.

If you want to try it just download the free Multiverse browser and well… start travelling and gaming:) But remember it’s only just in prototype phase!

Meet me in the Dark Horizons Universe as “Cogmios”!

1. check the forums for development of 3d worlds. Hmmm…. I need a new server.

2. check the wiki for lots of info

3. check the tutorials

This is what I read in a comment here, I’m going to copy it and read it again in a few years time.

Multiverse has one of the most terrible business models EVER. They are literally relying on hobbyists and amateur start-ups to make some of the most complex and expensive pieces of software imaginable.
Whoever approved 4 million in funding for Multiverse needs to have their business sense
seriously examined.

A LOT of caution is warranted with Multiverse.

This whole thing could have taken place in 1990 as this happened
in MMOs before, around 1990 when the text codebases like DIKU
started coming out. Did it allow many people to make text based MMOs? Sure.
There are about 1,500 text based MMO?s running on a primarily text interface.
98% of them have about 5 players and are nearly identical to each other.

To run worlds of the size that the average hobbyist will attract, you don?t need anything more than the Neverwinter Nights toolset really.
I can?t say I see how academics, for instance, will particularly benefit from Multiverse.
If you just want a cheap way to create a virtual world to study, text has been available for a decade and a half.
Yes you won?t get many users, but then, you?re not going to get many users with a nearly budget-less graphical MMO which are the only things that will be developed using Multiverse,
and you?ll have far less content and far less depth due to the cost of producing the models/textures/animations.
Far less ability to actually produce something interesting.

The odds of any hobbyist developer ever producing a MMOG using multiverse that would make it to market and get published are slim to none.
The odds of a professional developer using multiverse to develop a MMOG are 100% zero.

Someone made a real bad investment.

This is however, I think, exactly why some nerdy people are drawn to Multiverse You know… the spots where regular people don’t go (at the beginning). And well… I’m there.

I will be very honest.

In terms of tasks to be performed in our household, like doing the laundry, the floor, gardening, ironing etc… my wife is way ahead of me. But his may change. Today I discovered Chore Wars.

Chore Wars lets you claim experience points for household chores. By getting a few people in your house or workplace to sign up, you can assign experience point rewards to individual chores, and see how quickly each of you levels up.

Experience points are tracked both as weekly high-score charts, and as ongoing character sheets – every time you rack up 200XP of chores, your character gains a “level”, and their class changes to match the type of chores that they’ve been doing.

Actually …. this is quite fun and… it can be extended to create a party with people from other households too. So we can watch who of our friends gains the most experience with e.g. “Ironing”. Let’s start and signup.

I choose an avatar and then can choose 6 chores where I am good at to determine my starting class and stats, I then immediately jump to my profile:

You can choose to hide your profile from others but I have choosen to make it public, you can find mine here.

Since I don’t have a party yet I will invite my wife and see who gains the most experience in what task. Ok. Let’s create my first adventure.

Let me create the adventure on setting out the trash next thursday morning We get awared 50 XP for completing the task and can earn news stats alongside. There is even a 10% chance we will find a golden helmet!

Okay, the adventure has been created and it is shown as an adventure which anyone in our household now can claim to increase their XP:

This is REALLY cool! I can now setup tasks for any of our household tasks and gain a huge amount of XP alongside it. But… however cool, I have yet to experience how long this thing will last. I have the feeling we may at most enter some adventures and then proceed as usual. Anyway try it yourselves at Chore Wars and let me know.

Maarten always watches  (the same DVD of) the TeleTubbies in the morning. He points to his chair where a sticker of the TeleTubbies is placed, then says “TeTe” and walks to the remote control and points his finger to it while looking at us all excited. Even though I’m getting mentally disturbed by just hearing these irritating “uh oh”’s yet again.

When we then start the DVD he goes all wild and dances around the floor in the morning.

I got an e-mail from freebase that I’ve been granted 5 free invites to freebase:

“Greetings.
We’ve made some good progress in alpha and would like to continue to
grow the user community with your help.
All existing Freebase users have been granted 5 additional
invitations. If you know anyone you’d characterize as a ‘data
fanatic’ or a developer, please invite them to join.”

So for those of you who are interested leave a comment and I will send you and invite.

It’s about film, sports, politics, music, science and everything else all connected together. Our contributors are collecting data from all over the internet to build a massive, collaboratively-edited database of cross-linked data. It’s a big job and we’re just getting started.

Here is an example of an instance of the data type “religion” :

UPDATE: The NEW Numpa code AND explanation is now here: numpa.cogmios.nl

Numpa was recently launched and is the dutch counterpart to Twitter. I tried it out and it’s addictive as Twitter. It can even post to Twitter so you can use Numpa as your primary blogging tool.

If you want to use it and want to place your latest messages on your weblog then use this little javascript thingie I produced:

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://numpa.cogmios.nl?t=user&u=cogmios&n=3″></script>

replace “cogmios” with your own loginname and change the number 3 to the number of posts you want to display on your site. If you want something else just leave it in the comments. I’ve put a demo here.

I found it at the top spot of del.icio.us so … let’s see what the buzz is about. I think I’m joining my 2500th social network now.

The 07-07-07 group on flickr asks to post pictures from the 7th july 2007. The photographs wille be assembled in a book and the profits will go to Unicef.

There will be only 7777 members allowed and I was #7038 so… you will have to hurry to be included!

p.s. I got my invitation via 7.

I’ve seen this picture of Ken Wong popping up on so many websites and blogs that I hereby declare this painting an official internet meme.

It’s so very interesting to watch a new iMeme being born. When Digg was ordered to remove the HD-DVD key yesterday and promptly removed it, a zillion users protested and Digg gave in.

In the meanwhile the code was out and spread like mad over the Internet, buttons, registered urls, cartoons, newspostings, cafepress shops (always a good indication), you name it. Undoubtly we will have 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0 tattoos tomorrow on the social buzzing network. (update: about 2 hours after i posted this blogposting: tattoo)

Some humoristically state that this was the biggest HD DVD marketing stunt ever.

The interesting thing though is to analyze how a new iMeme is being created. It’s a sort-of viral marketing to the max. What if you knew how to manipulate the internet to bring your meme to every corner of the world in 1 day?

I think what I have to do is to make a list of let’s say 100 Internet memes “all your base are belong to us“, “the star wars kid“, …  and then try to find out why they became popular.

In the first place, I think, it resembles a mob. There is one or just a couple initiators who lit the fire and it helps if there is a common place like a forum to bring it to fire. Since there is no police on the Internet it therefore soon burns like hell. The message should also be simple and short. Maybe just a sentence which attracts attention. Maybe there should also be a sort of in-group feeling when the meme is e.g. typed in your own blog. I don’t know.

The second thing is the “events” that follow and which follow a certain pattern: e.g. frontpage of digg, reddit, then cafepress shops with the meme, then bbc frontpage, then tattoos, wikipedia entries being edited like mad, etc… I wonder if there is a default pattern in there.

In my Amazon wishlist there is the book “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die“, maybe this contains the answer.

The MapMyName project is trying to get every Internetter on one map, join their cause and map yourself (via beertjes).

I couldn’t resist uploading my newly created cartoon avatar

Via grow-a-brain I found this absolute great Digg T-shirt.

In the same posting he made an idea enter my mind … the “send me stuff and I will review it” button… hmmm…. a whole community, marketplace of bloggers accepting stuff and reviewing it. Somewhat like reviewme but then without the money…hmmm…

Op FOK is een speurtocht gestart naar jeugdfoto’s van BN’ers, (grotendeels via schoolbank).

START bij topic 1 en dan kom je vervolgens bij de vervolgtopics. Het is echt vreselijk leuk om de jeugdfoto’s te zien van al die beroemdheden, het zijn er honderden. Aanrader!

Here is something I put together in about 30 minutes, 80 lines of code/html. If you want something to improve in it, just e-mail me.

more ps home movies
via secondlifecrew
via iimail

Randstad Uitzendbureau opens a virtual office in Second Life. The new location offers openings in both virtual jobs to earn L$ and real jobs for €.

So ofcourse I went there and checked it out. Here you see me waiting in the Randstad lobby for a job as a cook. I have to start somewhere before I can open my own restaurant.

Twitter: What are you doing?
…addictive!

On 15-7-2006 I posted a religious question in the Invisible Pink Unicorn community, bbhh, and only now I discovered my fellow believers answered me, I will post it here in case you were wondering the same:

If you need access to Orkut, contact me and I will send you and invite.