Real Life Van Gogh
Reborn in Second Life

Virtual Starry Night - Vincent's Second Life

Virtual Starry Night - Vincent’s Second Life landing point

Virtual Starry Night - Vincent’s Second Life museum is fashioned after Van Gogh’s painting, “Cafe Terrace at Night”

Virtual Van Gogh

The Virtual Starry Night - Vincent’s Second Life museum offers much of what you’d expect in a real life museum—with a touch of Second Life (SL) surrealism.

The museum exhibits 70 virtual works by Vincent Van Gogh with descriptions and historical facts about the Dutch Post-Impressionist. Befittingly, each of the 20 rooms housing the exhibit is set in perpetual twilight and the outer grounds of the museum feature overlook balconies, fountains, and garden terraces abutting a reflective and restful sea.

Unlike real life museums, this SL version includes teleportation, 3-D tours and experiential paintings that visitors can virtually “step into” to peruse selected works.

Worth the Teleport

If you like something you see, reproductions are for sale at the museum store, including virtual floral arrangements. You can even take home a reproduction of Van Gogh’s famed Starry Night for a reasonable L$35 (35 Linden dollars) the equivalent of about 12 US cents.

Appreciating Culture Clash

A confluence of culture, The Virtual Starry Night - Vincent’s Second Life museum is a metaphor for today’s brand marketer—an emergent culture where old and new collide in ever-changing venues of communication.

Visit the museum.

[ via: malburns ]

Facebook Overtakes MySpace
in Daily Reach

Alexa chart indicating Facebook's overtaking of global daily reach among social networks
Three month comparison of Facebook vs. MySpace daily reach

23 Nov 07: According to Alexa statistics, Facebook now reigns supreme among social networks

Eclipsing MySpace

As the Alexa chart (above) shows, Facebook has overtaken MySpace in global daily reach. They also jumped a significant five places in daily traffic rank, confirming that thus far, Microsoft partnered with a winner and it didn’t tarnish Facebook’s popularity.

We’ll have to wait and see what Google and the OpenSocialites have to say about all that. Stay tuned.

[ via: Shel Holtz ]

Top 20 Things to Know
First Thing in the Morning

Our latest top 20 list of inane musings from the Brainstorm office white board: Top 20 Things to Know First Thing in the Morning

(at right)

Is Twitter Down?

Tracking Twitter’s on again, off again status—in no uncertain terms. Lighthearted, yet useful. Visit the site here.

[ via: Steve Rubel ]

A Grand Idea

$1000. Write away.

Need some cash—right away? In celebration of The Marketing Technology Blog hitting the triple quadruple (1,000 posts, over 1,000 unique visitors daily, and over 1,000 feed subscribers) Doug Karr, FormSpring, and eight other sponsors are ponying up a cool $1,000 to the best blog post featuring a sentence or two about each of the contest sponsors.

Check out the rules for yourself and write on.

More Thought

.THINK now listed on Alltop.com

under Branding. Grouped by topic, Alltop aggregates stories from “all the top” sites across the web (that’s their story and we’re sticking to it). View our .think listing, here: branding.alltop.

RapidoStart (Mac)

Here’s a free Mac app allowing you to call up, via customized abbreviations, any text string you copy and paste frequently. Best of all the text is placed pre-formatted - returns, bullets and all. It’s become a staple here at Brainstorm. You can download your own at app4mac.

PimpMyNews

If you can get past the vapid brand identity and UI, PimpMyNews, the talking social news site, is an interesting concept. The site will read your RSS feeds to you over your mp3 player, iPhone, etc. or computer.
[via: PR-Squared]

The iPlanet

NPI’s personal cosmos transport. Like Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine Happiness Machine, the iPlanet, a holiday product parody, promises a “thoroughly self-absorbed social media experience.”

Twitter Unseat Email?

Robert Scoble explores the notion in this BusinessWeek piece re: the running debate over where we’re headed with aging, albeit ubiquitous, email paradigms versus spam-free Tweets.
[via: Scobleizer]

Track the Hive’s Buzz

Aggregate the aggregators at Popurls.com—simultaneously follow the most current posts from all the top sites like Digg, Newsvine, YouTube and Flickr. Or, “find your favorite thing,” over at Buzzfeed.

Fountain

Peter Bruhn’s Swedish type foundry is preparing a new freshet of fonts to flow forth and flourish among us—according to Typographi and Bruhn himself.
[via: Sheer Brick]

Design by Metaphor

A word from A List Apart about design based on simile.

Master’s Color Palettes

Looking for a digital color scheme that will last the ages? Colour Lovers explores masters inspired color schemes.

Visualizing Volumes

Can’t see how your two soda bottles a day are impacting the environment? Chris Jordan’s images will help you visualize it. View his amazing statistical depictions at Running the Numbers, An American Self-Portrait.

Steve Jobs Unveils the Apple iRack

Regardless of your geopolitical views you’ll likely appreciate the satirical humor of this product parody sketch run amok.

Qbesq

Okay this would just be a goofy flash-based Spirograph-esque toy if it didn’t generate downloadable .svg (Scalable Vector Graphic) files—which it does. Pattern enthusiasts, meet Qbesq.

Those Funny Googlers

Here’s Google’s take on the phrase, “Across the pond.” Visit Google Maps, enter New York to London in the search field, scroll to step #24.

Tip: Reducing Firefox Memory Usage

How to reduce Firefox from a memory hog to a piglet. Caught this Firefox usage tip over on Ade Olonoh’s blog (see comments).

CSS Developments

If you’re a developer or just interested in CSS, check out this article entitled, #IEroot — Targeting IE Using Conditional Comments and Just One Stylesheet,” over on the PIE site.

The History of Branding

An iconic-rich, one-click site on how hundreds of the planet’s most noteworthy brands came to be. Updated daily.

The Hexafluoride Float

From the Bonn Physikshow—A lesson on YouTube regarding the denser than air properties of hexafluoride (likely sulphur hexafluoride) gas.

Worst Website Design, Ever?

Enter at your own risk. A proof of concept that design does matter. Havenworks.com hailed on Digg recently as perhaps, “…the most poorly designed website in the world!”

50 Essential Bookmarks

Originally published in Communication Arts November Design Annual 2006, here’s their list of 50 essential bookmarks. Conspicuously missing, sites such as Delicious, Technorati and Lifehacker.

Greetings Earthling

Sure to appeal to the megalomaniacal extraterrestrial in all of us. World, meet geoGreetings. When you care enough to send a satellite image.

A Modern Medium

An interactive glimpse into the the random and spontaneous feedback Jackson Pollock once realized in his medium—sans the clean up.

Impressive Product

Pressed toast with panache. From the, “Table Manners Collection,” Delfts Toast Pan by Minale Maeda. As seen on “ohmygooshness.”

Other Thoughts

Items we find compelling, of late.

Our latest top 20 list of inane musings from the Brainstorm office white board: Top 20 Thoughts on What No.15 Means

(at right)

.think Flickr

Objects of interest, engaging designs, diagrams, downloadable visuals and any other imagery we felt worth sharing.

Top 20 Top 20 Things to do (we did)
on the 4th of July

  1. Enjoy an apple pie in a Chevrolet…or a nutrition bar in a Smart Car
  2. Wax my upper lip
  3. Overdose on televised sports
  4. See Wall-E
  5. Midnight Parade – Anderson
  6. Read the Declaration of Independence (first part anyway)
  7. Blow off steam, or digits
  8. Enjoy the neighbors’ fireworks, late at night, for weeks
  9. Populate FunctionFox
  10. Rest my dogs
  11. Wax the car
  12. Wax nostalgic
  13. Watch fireworks…Just a thought
  14. Groove to the sounds of Baghdad (try Quantum Sonic Orchestra…or the Bamboos–nostalgia circa 1977)
  15. Fret all night that Homeland Security doesn’t run a keyword analysis and cough up #16
  16. “Celebrate the independence of your nation by blowing up a small part of it”
  17. Grill some burgers & dogs cats
  18. Hope it doesn’t rain cats, burgers and dogs
  19. Grill the Burgher – and his dog – get to the bottom of this “independence”
  20. Join the kids in the bike parade
  21. Celebrate with the Katzenbergers
  22. See the entire board