The Gong Show

Yesterday I attended McSweeney’s Presents: The World Explained last night with a few NYC entrepreneurs last night. The evening started with dinner, which was excellent because I had a chance to geek out and live vicariously through startup stories and new tech. Then, we headed over to the show at Symphonyspace up on the UWS.

The show featured four comic writers was some unrehearsed, slightly-drunk indie-rock mixed in between each speaker. The speakers were:

• Rodney Rothman – author of Early Bird
• David Rakoff – from This American Life on NPR
• John Aboud – from Modern Humorist
• John Oliver – who is a correspondent on The Daily Show

All of the speakers supplemented their comedy with illustrations and video projected on to a screen. I think all speaking engagements should take advantage of rich media if possible. They were all better for it.

John Oliver was definitely the highlight of the night. He had the best stage presence and delivery, which makes sense based on his practice with the Daily Show. He set speeches by both Bush and Osama to rocking 80′s power ballads to show that politics could learn a lot about presentation from sports. You really would have to see the clip to appreciate it, and I can’t find a copy online… Apparently he’s done this before, but that makes sense because the material is too good to just do once.

If you want to recreate the experience of seeing Bush’s infuriating warhawking set to a power ballad. Press play on both pieces of media below at the same time. (if you’re reading in RSS, click through to this post to try it out)

Overall it was a great night.

Just started playing around with Tumblr based on a recommendation I received tonight. It is an excellent example of beauty through simplicity. Subtle colors, simple rounded corners, ample use of white space to focus attention. Anyone designing a web service could learn a lot from an hour with Tumblr.

It’s also not beautiful design in a way that is distraction (like many “beautiful” flash interfaces). Often times web2.0 interfaces are considered well-designed because they’re novel and fun to play with (think “tag clouds”). Not Tumblr… I think it’s well-designed because you don’t feel like there’s an interface you’re working with at all… the interface melts away, and you simply get things done quickly and without error.

My tumblr page is andrewparker.tumblr.com. I’m not sure if I’ll keep it up or not. I might just dump a few of my RSS feeds (del.icio.us, flickr, blog, etc) into it… but that would kinda defeat the point. However, just because it’s not necessarily useful to me, doesn’t change the fact that it’s dropdead gorgeous. Great stuff.

Check out the Projectionist to see just how awesome tumble blogs can be.

Indeed, one of the Union Square Ventures portfolio companies, added GeoRSS support today. Now you can take a feed of jobs from Indeed and automatically pin the individual jobs on a map. Pretty cool.

Has anyone out there seen any other interesting applications of GeoRSS? Support by Yahoo and Google is out there, but interesting uses/mashups based on this support seems to be limited. Give me a shout if you’re using GeoRSS for anything cool.