Read Write Web points us to an interview that Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google gave at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Orlando 2009 on what the web will be like in five years.

Embracing the chaos of their new ‘open forums,’ Gawker now features a tip-sharing box that gives commenters the ability to post directly to the site using a hashtag-based system.

theblogpaper is a user-generated blog-newspaper hybrid that has recently appeared in London.

I Hate Young People is a website that encourages people to “rant, rave and vent” over what they dislike most about young people (and vice versa).

This past June, Google invited fans to take the Google Chrome icon and rebuild it in an original way.  The end design created and ultimately launched by Google needed to stand out on the desktop, look stable yet dynamic, and use color to show some Google branding.  Through the design process, another quality that became important to the team was to make the icon feel like a real, tangible object so that clicking on it would be like pressing a real button.
As one might expect, user submissions were pretty inventive – some fans submitted videos of how they approached the [...]

At the NY Tech Meetup in February, we got a peek at a new mobile service called omgicu. After its launch a few weeks back, there has been a lot of buzz–and debate–about it. omgicu can be described as a real-time version of Gawker Stawker, enabling anyone to “spot” celebs and blast it out Gossip Girl-style to anyone who has opted in for area alerts. We recently sat down with Hugh Dornbush, the company’s founder, to talk about the evolution of celebrity media, our genetic drive to gossip, and birdwatching.

What inspired you to create the service?
I was in mobile for [...]

Bloc Party has gone the way of crowd-sourcing for their latest video. Made up of mostly fan-submitted mobile phone footage, the video for the group’s song Ares (Villains Remix) has a great raw feel, pulling together a colorful cross-section of different perspectives. Watch the results below.

[via Metro UK]

“This is this is the second notice that your vehicle’s factory warranty is about to expire,” or so says the automated voice at the other end of the phone, regardless of whether or not you actually own a car in the first place. An annoyance that has hit a nerve with the American public and recently some are starting to strike back with hassling calls of their own. The Wall Street Journal examines the ethical and legal ambiguities involved with this brand of consumer vigilantism following a thread that appeared on the popular link sharing website Reddit.com, outing one of the [...]

At our 2009 New York conference, a panel led by Florian Peter (CScout) discussed how creators and the community openly come together to develop new thinking and make ideas happen. John Geraci (Outside.in), Scott Heiferman (Meetup), Avner Ronen (boxee) and Domenico Vitale (PI&C) explain how they leverage open communities to develop new products, services and experiences for the benefit of everybody concerned.

Photographer Katie Sokoler recently took to the city streets with her whimsical take on shadow play, installing life-size paper cutouts of silhouettes engaged in playful acts around her Brooklyn neighborhood. As unsuspecting pedestrians happened by these 2D dopplegangers, she snapped photos of the unlikely relationships. The resulting images draw beauty out of the everyday while serving as welcome reminders of our awareness or lack thereof as we hurry through life.      
[via Katie Sokoler]

UK digital company +Good have created Twitter Magnets – a free piece of “internet tom-foolery” for your Twitter account.  Claiming to be the first fridge magnet / Twitter mash-up, users can drag and drop each magnet word into a central dropzone, creating poems of up to 140 characters.  The poems can then be submitted onto your own twitter account.  +Good also has a TwitterMagnet Twitter account which acts as a live feed on the Twitter Magnet poems that are submitted worldwide.
[via The Inspiration Room]

In an effort to figure out what half an hour from his apartment actually looked like, programmer and designer Jonathan Soma created triptrop NYC, a handy interactive map based on a combination of subway travel and walking.  Users can easily view their approximate travel times between destinations or compare commutes from two separate locations – i.e. if you really want to see what the effect of moving to Sunnyside, Queens would be. In a world filled with increasing predictability, the only problem might be, that we’re quickly running out of excuses for being late anymore.

Over the weekend, the Public Ad Campaign organized groups of New Yorkers to go around and whitewash illegal street-level billboards located throughout the city that the Department of Buildings is apparently too busy to enforce despite their stricter registration program. The coordinated effort not only served as a reminder of the advertising that targets us at every turn, but also proved to be a valiant attempt at citywide beautification. The whitewashed ads were instantly transformed into blank canvases for teams of street artists to reclaim as ad-hoc gallery spaces. Though we personally feel that the contrast created by leaving the [...]

Virgin Atlantic recently unveiled an in-flight entertainment service that lets travelers browse a video collection of entrepreneurial business ideas.  The dedicated channel, dubbed PitchTV, hopes to attract the airline’s business passengers and allows a simple way for those interested to contact the entrepreneurs directly.  It’s an innovative way to connect new ideas with the necessary venture capital to make it possible.
Those with ideas can upload videos to Virgin’s website and those with the highest rating will be featured on the airline’s service, which is rotated monthly.  One interesting idea we found was ShareMeme, a mini-service that allows you to contact [...]

A recent New York Times article reports on a number of start ups that are geotagging news stories in communities normally underrepresented in major papers.  EveryBlock, Outside.in (co-founded by PSFK Conference speaker John Geraci), PlaceBlogger and Patch are each bringing together various news sources to compile a site dedicated to your community or even specific city block.  Many of the sites draw on publicly available information like crime reports or restraurant health code violations and brings you the most up-to-date information in one place.
Chicago-based EveryBlock has quickly expanded to 11 major cities around the US and brings together blog posts [...]