The Big Picture is featuring some amazing night photos of London shot by Jason Hawkes as he was flying above the city in a helicopter.

photo by Jason Hawkes

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Photos of London From Above at Night by Jason Hawkes

Matt Koval has unearthed a rare video of a pre-web version of YouTube from 1985.

via Google Blogoscoped

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Pre-Web Version of YouTube in 1985

Mythbusters hosts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman demonstrate the difference between CPU and GPU by painting the Mona Lisa in 275 milliseconds using a 1100 barrel paint ball gun earlier this week at NVIDIA’s NVISION 08 show.

via TG Daily

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Mythbusters Paint Mona Lisa With 1100 Barrel Paint Ball Gun

Proof that every vote makes a difference, red won by just two votes in our poll for the next Laughing Squid sticker color. We will be printing these soon through Sticker Giant, adding it to existing our line-up of stickers.

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Red Wins As Color of Next Laughing Squid Sticker

Robbie shot 3038 photos with his Canon 5D over a period of 3 days of his life in and around Boston. He then created a video of all of the photos played at hi-speed in the order they were shot, set to the song “Lightspeed Champion” by Dry Lips.

via Cartoon Brew

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Video of 3038 Photos Shot in 3 Days of Life in Boston

guest post by Simone Davalos

Michael Weiss-Malik, a Google employee, wanted to make his marriage proposal to his girlfriend Leslie really, really memorable, so he did what an self-respecting Googleplex geek would so, he put his proposal up on Google Street View.

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My name is Michael Weiss-Malik, and I work for Google. I don’t work on the Street View team, but I interact with them pretty regularly. They decided to coordinate a pre-announced Street View run outside Google’s Mountain View offices, with the idea that Googlers could line up along the street and appear in the imagery. So I put together my “Proposal 2.0″ billboard and showed up, hoping that it’d be readily visible. And it was![snip]

But my original proposal was quiet and low-key. It was just some simple heart-felt words exchanged during a quiet night at home. And while Proposal 1.0 had plenty of sentiment, it was lacking in pizazz. So I did what any Silicon Valley geek would do: I decided to upgrade to “Proposal 2.0,” a new improved online version. I proposed to Leslie from inside a Google Street View panorama. I dare say that it’s the first time anyone in the history of mankind has proposed marriage in quite this way, and it went live on Google Maps on August 5, 2008.

Visit Marry Me Leslie to see some history, learn how he did it, and tell Leslie whether or not to say “yes”.

via TechDigest

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Marry Me Leslie: Proposal 2.0 Using Google Street View

Nikon has announced their new D90 camera, a 12.3-megapixel DSLR that retails for $999.95 and includes the ability to shoot 24fps 720p HD video.

Commercial photographer Chase Jarvis had a chance to try out the camera in advance, making a video as he and his crew tested out several D90’s.

In related news, Canon announced their new 50D DSLR.

Check out the D90 write-ups by Thomas Hawk and David Pouge (New York Times).

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New Nikon D90 Camera, Includes Ability To Shoot 720p HD Video

The UnConvention and ad agency Campbell Mithun have joined forces on the campaign “Make an Effort” to help residents of Minneapolis-Saint Paul to find unconventional ways to welcome their visitors as they arrive next week for the Republican National Convention.

See Previously: My Yard Our Message, Non-Partisan Political Yard Signs

via AdFreak

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The Republicans Are Coming! Make An Effort

Backtype is a new web service that just launched that helps you track and search your friends comments from multiple sources. You can also claim accounts associated with your domains. TechCrunch is referring to it as the “Twitter For Comments”.

BackType is a service that lets you find, follow and share comments from across the web. Whenever you write a comment with a link to your website, BackType attributes it to you. We give comment authors a profile featuring all the comments they’ve written on the Internet.

Here’s the Laughing Squid account on Backtype.

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Backtype, Helping You Track & Search Comments

guest post by Doctor Popular

“In a year of firsts for presidential candidates, a phenomenon that’s taking even seasoned analysts by surprise. A growing grassroots movement, born on the internet, to elect a virtual unknown to the highest office in the country.”

The brilliant folks at Paltalk have created an awesome viral video campaign that allows anyone to insert their own name into a newsreel about America’s next hot presidential candidate, for instance “Frank Chu”.

The video is slickly produced and the customizable graphics fool most folks upon first watch. To create your own campaign news footage, go to news3online.com and follow the steps to either email a video to your friends or create an embeddable flash file. Note: To embed the file in WordPress, you may need to turn off your WYSIWYG editor in your WP options before posting.

Despite titling their page “Viral marketing interface”, the advertising is actually minimal and non-obtrusive, they don’t even require a sign up or email. Kudos on the cool prank.

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Your Name Here ‘08, Custom Viral Video For The 2008 Election

Here’s the Finnish rock band Leningrad Cowboys joined by the Red Army Choir doing a cover of the southern fried rock classic “Sweet Home Alabama” by Lynyrd Skynyrd.

via Rob La Gesse

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Leningrad Cowboys & Red Army Choir Cover Sweet Home Alabama

Mozilla Labs recently introduced Ubiquity, an experiment that will allow users to control their browser with language-based instructions and create on-demand mashups.

The overall goals of Ubiquity are to explore how best to:

- Empower users to control the web browser with language-based instructions. (With search, users type what they want to find. With Ubiquity, they type what they want to do.)

- Enable on-demand, user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs. (In other words, allowing everyone–not just Web developers–to remix the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or what they are doing.)

- Use Trust networks and social constructs to balance security with ease of extensibility.

- Extend the browser functionality easily.

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Ubiquity for Firefox, Connecting The Web With Language

Chop Shop just came out with another great t-shirt, “Rock Star” featuring 28 classic rockers from 1965-1975.

See Previously:

- weGo T-Shirt By Chop Shop Featuring 55 Famous Vehicles
- Internet Meme T-Shirt by Chop Shop
- weRobot, 51 Robots on a T-Shirt

illustration by Chop Shop

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Rock Star T-Shirt by Chop Shop

Magnum Opus Productions out of Van Nuys, CA made a really cool skateboarding video shot at 120 fps on a Red One Camera, a new high-resolution digital video camera that features high quality and performance at lower cost than traditional professional cameras. The music used in the video is “It’s Alright” by Bang Gang.

via Today and Tomorrow

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Skateboarding Video Shot at 120 FPS on a Red One Camera

Google Reader is my main feed reader and an indispensable tool in the arsenal of web services I use daily. It helps me keep up with all of the blogs I follow and I also use it to share items on our Link Blog, so it’s great to see a Common Craft video on “Google Reader in Plain English”.

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Google Reader in Plain English by Common Craft

Laughing Squid is headed to New York for Web 2.0 Expo (9/16-9/19) and while there we are organizing a NYC Drinkup on Saturday, September 13th at M1-5 in Tribeca.

photo by Scott Beale

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Laughing Squid NYC Drinkup on September 13th at M1-5