GraphJam, I'm on it

You may have heard of GraphJam. Especially if you regularly visit sites like ICHC. Then you know what it is. If not, let me try to explain.

GraphJam is a site with, as the name implies, graphs. Afaik initially started out as graphs about songs, for example lyrics breakdowns. But the song chart meme became a bit lame, after the 8th Doo Wah Diddy Diddy Dum Diddy Doo graph.

So people also started making graphs about other pop culture phenomena and general things (like: Time needed to buy jeans; Women: 4 hours; Men: 4 minutes).

All graphs on the site are user-submitted. So after my Creation of a universe video, I got this idea for a graph about the LHC, made the graph and submitted it. It got listed on the Vote pages on GJ, where people can vote thumbs-up or thumbs-down on graphs. If they're good enough, they'll be featured on the main site. And after a few days I noticed my graph had 95 votes, of which 91 thumbs-up and only 4 thumbs-down.

So today my graph got listed for real and people generally seem to like it, with 4.5 pies in 144 votes currently. And comments like "love it", "sexy graph" and sparking discussions about the fate of the Earth (linked to Ghostbusters). Is it really that good? Well decide for yourself. Anyway, I'm proud of it :D



Oh yeah! The GraphJam people have put an interesting video about the LHC on the same page, be sure to watch it!

Creation of a universe

Big Bang - a universe is born.

We travel through space and time, to a planet called Earth, where in Switzerland at CERN a particle accelerator known as the LHC shoots two protons into eachother. And deep within that LHC...

Big Bang - a universe is born.

We travel through space and time...

What if -we- are living on a yet undiscovered particle deep within an enormous LHC?



(If you don't get it: this is not the destruction of a universe. What the video shows is an artist's (me :D) interpretation of what goes on inside the LHC, at subatomic level. We keep zooming in, the second Big Bang is the size of a pea or so. It looks like it's as large as our universe, but it's not. We zoom in further and further. Could we go on endlessly? If we can have a tiny Big Bang, could our Big Bang also appear to be as tiny to somebody millions of times larger than our universe?)

User Generated Content Database

I once found a link in the Revver forums to the ugcDb. I was told I should register there. I followed the link, but couldn't easily figure out what it was and how it worked, so I left it, thinking I'd check it out sometime later.

As it turned out, 'later' was now. I registered yesterday and that already made it clearer to me what it's for.

First, the name. User Generated Content Database. Is that a Content Database generated by users? Yes and no. Mainly no though. It's a Database containing User Generated Content. Think about YouTube. The site itself is quite small really, just a few pages. But it's the content that makes it popular and that content is generated by users.

But one person may also have a Blogger account and a deviantART account. Of course people often use the same username, but there are most likely more people called Daedalus out there. So, if you want to know, how do you find out what one person actually made and what he appeared in?

So there's the ugcDb, which links all the accounts for one person together and even lists what the person did for the content. For example, I can appear as my avatar Daedalus Young in a photo made by Torley. I personally am in no way connected to Torley's flickr account, so I did not create his content. Rather, I am an actor in his content. So I can now be linked to that photo. Anybody interested in me (I know, I know, but it's a nice fantasy to think someone actually is) can look me up and see not only my mad art and video skillz, they can also see I can pose an avatar in the 3D Virtual World of Second Life, owned by Linden Lab, but Content generated by Users (disclaimer in the left sidebar plzkthx).

In this way, the ugcDb is much like IMDb, only not for Movies, but for online content. I think in this world, focussing more on the internet, with things like Creative Commons becoming more popular, user generated content becoming more professional (for example lonelygirl15, also on ugcDb), this database could become a very useful resource.

Their search could be improved though, if you search for my full name, I'm not found, search for my first name only to find me.

If you want, you can add yourself, but it's also possible to add other people (and works). I currently only added myself, I think it's up to everyone to add themselves. What if I add someone who doesn't want to be added?

Oh, and the cool part is you can put up a button on your blog or site :D See: