VideoSurf Brings Video Search to Twitter Jun 18, 20098:00 PDT

Videosurf.com is now powering video searches from within Twitter!

Anyone on Twitter (whether they follow @videosurf or not) can now search through VideoSurf’s rapidly growing index of over 50 billion visual moments from great sites like YouTube, CNN, ESPN, Hulu, MTV, MSN, Comedy Central, and more without ever leaving their Twitter stream. By combining the Twitter API and the bit.ly API with our own VideoSurf API, VideoSurf has created a mashup that gives you one more reason to watch video all day long.

Performing a VideoSurf search on Twitter is easy:

1. In the Twitter post field, simply type @videosurf

2. then type “s” (as in search)

3. then a description of the video you want to search for

VideoSurf’s New Release Jun 10, 20097:59 PDT

VideoSurf’s latest release is out and we’ve got some exciting new developments to share with you.  In addition to the updated look and feel, we made some big improvements to key areas including search relevancy (spam detection, video deduplication), people spotlighting, and our homepage.  This new release is all about helping you find what you’re looking for, faster.  Whether that’s a search result, a celebrity, or a cool video to watch, we’re working harder to make sure you spend less time searching and more time being entertained.

Oblivion Mods, Dirty Dozen and Counting Feb 26, 200912:05 PST

by Lisa Gus

The fourth installment of Bethesda Softworks’ epic Elder Scrolls RPG series – TES IV: Oblivion – has been flying off store shelves like yummy rats-on-a-stick since 2006. Unless you’ve been living in cave (or a dungeon), you know that Oblivion is one of – if not THE – most replayable games available on the market. The reason: its robust modding community and powerful tools made available to all by the good folks at BethSoft.

Whether you are a wet-nosed newbie looking for your first goblin to spank (er… kinky?), or an uber-nerd looking for new cruel and unusual ways of making the game more difficult and fun, here’s the list for you.

1. FCOM
Download Link

Yes, this unwieldy acronym, which might as well stand for “F**k! Come on, motherf****r!”, attributing to the relatively complicated installation process and compatibility rules, will nevertheless make the biggest impact on the gameworld and gameplay, making this THE must have mod out there.

It is not just a stand-alone mod, but rather the glue that holds together lots of different mods that sounds like a “Who’s Who” list of Oblivion modding – Francesco’s Levelled Creatures and Items, Oblivion WarCry, Oscuro’s Oblivion Overhaul, and Martingen’s Monster Mod, to
name a few.

FCOM adds hundreds of new monsters, items, and NPCs – even quests. And between all the included mods, there are plenty of (often optional) gameplay changes that will make your Oblivion experience fresh and exciting.

The 8 Most Overlooked Technological Replacements of Recent History Feb 25, 20091:04 PST

by Chris Peters

Our world is constantly changing. It boggles the mind to think how different society is today compared to only a couple of decades ago. A cornucopic array of technological advancements have altered our daily lives to the point where we take things for granted that only a handful of years ago would have seemed impossible. The iPod is barely eight years old, the kindle approximately 18 months, and the bacon explosion a mere few months. The world changes fast, my friends. And when you don’t pay attention, in the blink of an eye, aspects of it can change and you might not even notice. Here’s a look at some of the most overlooked changes.

Encyclopedias

Not only were they huge, heavy and took up an entire bookshelf, but they sounded just horrible when you copied from them for a school report and tried to pass it off as your own work. Now, the unlimited amount of data available through the Internet allows for instant access to information on nearly any subject you could think of.

Remember Encarta? The encyclopedia that came as a set of discs bundled with nearly every desktop computer sold in the ‘90’s. Nowadays even the word “CD-Rom” is outdated.

Perhaps the worst casualty of the evolution of the encyclopedia has been the encyclopedia door-to-door salesman. How many children dreamed of one day peddling these chronicles of human achievement across the nation like some modern day bard? The open road, the lonely housewives, the wild nights. But now they are no more.

Boom Goes the Dynamite - From Ball State to Oscars Glory Feb 23, 20093:10 PST

If you watched the Oscars last night, you may have noticed Will Smith flub his lines from the teleprompter. Before snapping out of it, he made fun of the moment with a reference to Boom Goes the Dynamite. Some of the audience noticed it, but many others just laughed with the herd or missed the reference altogether. In case you missed the biggest Oscars moment of Will’s career, check it out:

This may seem like a throwaway line. But sports fans and the tech savvy recognized this line immediately thanks to the painful telecast of Brian Collins–an undergraduate at Ball State at the time. If you missed this piece of internet gold somehow in the past 3 or 4 years, prepare to cringe:

Smith’s reference is not the first adaptation of the line. It’s just the most recent and definitely the highest profile to date. Since Brian became internet-famous, the first adopters were the anchors on ESPN’s Sportscenter, where Scott Van Pelt uses the phrase all the time while giving highlights. It’s become so trivial that you can hear it on any given morning.

But sports can be a culture unto itself. Brian went viral online, and sports fans picked it up years ago (especially college students). It would be another step altogether before Boom hit the mainstream. Enter Family Guy:

Since Family Guy, it’s been on Veronica Mars:

After Veronica Mars it was on How I Met Your Mother (Season 4 Ep. 3 - “I Heart NJ”):

Finally, Stephen Colbert caught the fever last October during his “Sport Report” on The Colbert Report:

So now you know what everyone was laughing at. But what about poor Brian? Turns out he has the last laugh. After graduating from Ball State with a degree in Telecommunications, Brian Collins went on to become a reporter for KXXV in Waco, TX. Expect to see Brian and his catchphrase as he rises the ranks of the media, either giving basketball highlights or covering terrorist attacks.