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hi! i’m Tom, founder and creative director of POKE.  i live in CT, work in NYC, munch on tasty digital cookies, collect lunchboxes, take lots of photos and buy lots of t-shirts.  mmm…cookies. i’m passionate about creating a safe internet for kids, cookies, really great Italian cooking, all kinds of dogs, digital photography and the power of technology and how it affects our daily lives. i’d love to tell you i read a lot - but i just don’t. so there. Psychotic.

Entries in awesome (9)

The two coolest things you'll find online today.

1. Turntube

Cross fade YouTube videos and create playlists. ‘nuff said.

2. KickAss

Bored? How about turning any webpage into an awesome time-killing totally nostalgic asteroids game. In seconds. Thought so. Try it on my site, here. Just click this: Kick Ass!

Rad, right?  Want to blow up any webpage? Drag those same words to your toolbar. Head to your favorite site. Hit the button. Bam. Yer Welcome.

<3,

me

(thanks @neonarcade for the tip on Kick Ass.)

the coolest friggin' way to find music. 

Alrighty. I was browsin’ the interwebs looking for a few new ways to discover music because welp, my collection sucks. And after a pile of usual (and not so usual suspects) I found a few that are pure awesome. Longer post on the lot of them coming, but for now meet my new favorite way of discovering music - Shuffler. Internet-radio made by music blogs. (Think Blip.fm but (you do know what Blip is, right?) but across the internet instead of locked in one site.

Huh? Think of it this way. You’re channel surfing the music web. The web is your player, bloggers are your dj’s. It’s rad. I wish I thought of it. It leverages the Mesh. It’s Simple Smart and Social. And now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve have some new music to go listen to.

best business card ever

Hats off to the smartest nerd writer creative director dude I know: Peter Knierim.

Peter recently got shafted by “the man”. In a classic reversal (and armed with a sharpie) he equally flipped “the man” the bird AND made an awesome self promotion in the process.  Go Pete!

Enjoi.

 

did you know?

The latest Did You Know video will blow your mind with interesting facts and figures about the social web and how it’s changed your world.  Here’s a uber-post of all of them, starting with the latest (version 4). (Also, see below for some screen grabs if you don’t have the time to watch).


Version 3:


According to Digital Inspiration, This video is part of the popular “Did You Know” series that originally started out as a PowerPoint presentation [Shift Happens} and, once people caught on, the presentation was converted into a video by xplane. You can watch all the previous versions of the “Did You Know” series here or download source presentations and high-res videos from the Shift Happens wiki.

Version 2:



And finally, Version 1:



Screen grabs:

internet facts

youtube facts

online advertising

shrinking mobile devices

meet ScaryGirl. go. play. now.

I’m not going to waste your time with commentary on this one. It genius and beautiful.

Go. Play. Now.

just in case you go back in time and want to be awesome

Nuff said. This made me laugh. A lot. Now you will too. You’re welcome.

Also, buy me one, k? Thx.

Click image for larger version.

creativity monday: sketch projection

Tape, tape, tape….. what to do with all those random roles of tape hiding round your office and in your home? Why not Tape 4 Fun and plaster it all over your (friend’s) wall?!

See more T4F goodness here.

about Shantell Martin:

Since graduating from London’s Central Saint Martins University of Art & Design with first class honors in graphic design and illustration in 2003, Shantell Martin has been expanding conventional definitions of drawing, using it as a base from which to storm and occupy the design, fashion and music scenes. Now based between Tokyo and New York, Martin has been a much sought-after resident and guest VJ at some of the city’s most experimental club nights and has collaborated with some of the best-known names in the fashion and music industry.

Like her drawings, Martin herself seems to be in an unstoppable state of constant and conscious movement: by turn illustrator, designer, VJ, artist, videographer and more, each persona is linked by the common thread of her trademark continuous-line style, each project a further entanglement of disciplines and an exploratory step into a new world the artist creates as she moves through it.

enjoi!

tune in to twitter radio

from the site:

Mark McKeague, a student at Queen’s University Belfast, has invented a radio that tunes in to and broadcasts messages posted on the social-networking site Twitter. In addition, the tweets are sorted by sentiment, such as happy or sad, based on their content. McKeague, who studies music technology, has created an interactive version of this radio twitter that allows people to listen to messages posted on the website in real time.

“I came up with the idea when thinking about the amount of information that is being broadcast on the internet, through numerous social networks and personal sites,” said McKeague in a press interview. “There is so much information being broadcast and most of it goes unread and unnoticed. I wanted to find a new way to use this information.”

McKeague found a radio when he was home for Christmas and liked its old-fashioned style and feel. He took it apart and added an Arduino microcontroller, commonly used in DIY electronics projects, that picks up on the radio’s tuning dial. He added a connection to the radio’s speakers and wrote software to download tweets and send them to the radio.

Via: Technology Review

awesome. radio head. animation.

Just found this here whilst bouncing around the interwebs this evening. It appears to be entirely made in flash, which is awesome in it’s own right. But then it is an animation of one of my all-time favorite songs (Radiohead: Creep), insuring that I would pass the link on to you. Enjoi!