Channel 101 refers to themselves as, “the unavoidable future of entertainment.” The concept is simple. Folks submit pilots for TV shows about anything they want (some are quite interesting). The submissions are reviewed by the Channel 101 team and are either flushed, or moved to live audience battle. Channel 101 has a monthly live screening of the accepted pilots (in LA) open to the public. The people in attendance vote to determine which shows are worthy, and which shows should die a horrible death. Five shows are chosen to become prime time TV shows. The creators of those shows then move on to create new episodes which go through the same process (voting etc.). If a show is rejected, or not chosen in the live screening, it is trashed, or if it is a returning show that doesn’t live up to the previous episodes, it is canceled. There is a handy video demo of the process here.

Each month’s accepted shows are available on the Channel 101 website. One of my favorites is The House of Cosby’s. It’s about a guy that loved the comedy of Bill Cosby that he built a cloning machine and from a single Cosby hair, cloned multiple versions of Bill each with their own special powers.

Mentos: The Miracle [via iFilm]
Sacrilegious? maybe… Funny? definitely!

The next version of Microsoft Windows (previously named Longhorn) has now been officially titled Windows Vista.

Whatever happened to naming software releases by number? It seems like a few years back marketing departments got a hold of software versioning and started using buzz words to describe the next version of software upgrades instead of the easier to follow version numbers.
A few that stand out in my mind:

• Macromedia MX (and MX 2004)
• Adobe CS (and CS2)
• Windows ME, XP, and now Vista

With the launch of Google Earth, and the Google Maps API, it was only a matter of time before the hacks started to filter out.

Google Maps Mania is a blog that is constantly coming up with cool links to hacks and fun stuff you can do with Google Maps. There are some really creative people out there messing around the Maps API.

Google Earth Hacks is another site that has a huge collection of fun things to add to Google Earth (the program I mentioned here). Google Earth has a plug-in system that allows for building on top of the application. The downloads area of this site hosts hundreds cool locations and little downloadable add-ins for the Google Earth Software.

Finally, the last one… the “fun” Google Map hack is a game called Tripods. The game is a multiplayer game that takes place in (the map of) New York. You have to destroy tripods running around the city without getting killed yourself.

The name .mp3 is 10 years old as of July 14th

I talked about Flickr Geoblogging and GreaseMonkey in earlier posts. Well, some smart folks have combined the two to make it easier to geotag your Flickr photos. Now by simply installing a couple GreaseMonkey scripts you can easily find the longitude and latitude points needed to submit your photos to the Geobloggers database. There is a step by step tutorial available here.

If all that isn’t cool enough, the new Google Earth can also load these locations and images. You can see all my geotagged images in Google earth with this download (must have Google Earth installed for this link to work). Or you can view the closest 50 geotagged images in Google Earth with this download (this also requires Google Earth).

Check out this movie (flash) of an incredible concert played entirely with Windows SNDREC32.exe and the default windows sounds.