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.

Sweden.se (the official Sweden tourism website) is holding their first ever web film festival, which will be live streamed through the site.

A small but vibrant community is developing around the extreme pogo stick.

We’ve written previously about the reverse trend of internet memes inspiring honest-to-goodness books, but it appears that the web’s influence on real life as reflected in popular media knows no bounds following news that five of New York Magazine’s most prolific commenters have made the unprecedented leap from peanut gallery to professional.
The five vocal contributors will be lending their unique perspectives to a series of chatroom-style ads for British bank HSBC. The campaign is tied to the bank’s “Soapbox” television and print ads, which feature conversations on hot button topics such as education, the economy and the environment. For the online component [...]

Without coming across as too macabre and curmudgeonly, we’ll simply say that with dawn of the internet, the business of death has gotten a lot more complicated these days. Consider that wills once existed for the sole purpose of ceding ownership of physical objects, and quests for immortality - things like cryonics, transhumanism, fountains of youth and religion (ahem) - remained firmly planted in the realms of fantasy, but as the lines between our real and digital worlds continue to blur, these customs have changed. The things we leave behind, from virtual businesses to entire online lives, now have an immaterial existence and longevity all [...]

Webdesigner Depot has compiled an exhaustive list of 50 different data visualization examples from around the web. All bases are covered here, from social media ecosystem mapping to music visualization. There are hours of really interesting stuff to wade through.
Seen above: The Hierarchical Structure of the Internet and Arc

The ease in which YouTube has allowed users to share digital video has helped enable a variety of projects that exist as offshoots of the service: the video mashup, web vlogging stars, and now, frame by frame visualization tool yooouuutuuube.com. Perhaps a little less known is You 3b. A project of former Eyebeam fellows, You 3b allows for the live remixing of YouTube videos.
On May 16th at Postmasters in New York, the  Artists Meeting collective will be using the program to live-remix YouTube videos into media art tryptichs.
They explain:
Today anyone can be a star. The famous, the infamous and the [...]

Google News Timeline is a new feature on Google Labs that offers search results chronologically, displayed on a graphical timeline. Users can search through stories published in magazines, newspapers, blogs, on certain days and related to specific topics or search terms. Results show up on a slideable, zoomable horizontal timeline, so you can read in order of occurence and or/mention. With Google News Timeline, searchers see headlines as more than just singular articles – but rather longer, richer stories that continue on with updates, corrections, and follow-ups over time.
Google News Timeline

A father and son team looking to gain media attention for their new marketing website have created a viral campaign which attempts to raise donations and awareness for the homeless.  When marketer Kevin Dolan found himself out of a job, Dolan and his son Sean set out to create a marketing company on their own.  Enter pimpthisbum.com, a viral campaign that the Dolans hoped would rapidly attract new clients and media interest.  Since launching their website in February, 2009 Pimp This Bum has received over half a million hits.  The site follows the life of Tim Edwards, a homeless man [...]

For 3 days in May, Portugal will be the center of the post-digital world, playing host to the 8th annual OFFF Festival. The event celebrates new visual culture with its 2009 theme: “This isn’t flying, this is falling with style – fall gracefully @ OFFF”. The showcase of top digital artists, web, print and interactive designers, motion graphics studios, and musical acts offers insight into the newest media platforms and what’s yet to come.
In addition to a main stage with presentations from artists and collectives, the OFFF Festival will feature live electronic music performances, a showplace of immersive digital arts [...]

New Math is an interesting concept from writer and artist Craig Damrauer, illustrating the meaning of words and ideas using arithmetic equations.
[via Super Colossal]

BusinessWeek has an interesting article that surveys the landscape of volunteer workers on the web. They wonder why, especially considering the wobbly economic state the world is in, do so many people freely offer their time and efforts online? What BusinessWeek discovers, is that for many members of this “volunteer economy” 15 minutes of fame and a sense of social value drive their behaviors, rather than a desire for monetary gain.
BusinessWeek reports:
It’s dawn at a Los Angeles apartment overlooking the Hollywood Hills. Laura Sweet, an advertising creative director in her early 40s, sits at a computer and begins to surf [...]

Projects like the Internet Archive let web users visit old versions and archives of websites via url search, but a new service called Zoetrope will offer new, interactive ways to “browse backward” through time. Developed by research scientist Mira Dontcheva of Adobe Systems, the soon to be released tool offers visual browsing with a click and drag scrollbar, moving the user backward and forward through time by hours, days, or months. Specific details and pieces of data (i.e., the price of a toy on Amazon.com) can also be zoomed in on by placing a cursor “lens” over that area of [...]

Consider any free time you thought you had gone for the foreseeable future, as you spend your days wandering through the virtual halls of what might be the world’s largest museum (…of museums).  The Museum of Online Museums is a project begun by Coudal Partners, a design, advertising and interactive studio based in Chicago, as a means of preserving and sharing the vast array of the Internet’s archives that span the culturally significant to the obsessively bizarre. The “galleries” which are updated continuously, but are additionally overhauled once a quarter, are broken up into four sections: “The Museum Campus” featuring [...]

We recently came across SnagFilms, a great website that hosts and streams hundreds of full-length documentaries for free. Covering everything from Super Size Me and Heavy Metal in Baghdad to obscure international films by unknown filmmakers, the site has plenty of content for anyone who enjoys sitting down and watching a good documentary.
The films all seem to play pretty smoothly and have a clean and intuitive organization.  But what we liked best was the ease with which users can share videos.  With just a few clicks, a small player with the desired film can be living on any of your [...]