Tweekly is an automated Twitter service that snags your weekly top artists from Last.fm and then posts them into your stream for you. Some may not be down with automatic twittering but at least the information is pretty interesting. See also: Top Last.fm for Tumblr. Heads up via JAson. According to Ronnie, Flump will allow you to download all the images from a public Flickr account to your local drive. This is particularly handy for creating a safety backup of your own account but also possibly great for snagging a bunch of inspirational images from a random stream.

You know the drill.

• Gohn Joodman - just plain weird but seemed appropriate with Halloween right around the corner.
• Symphony of Science - followup to A Glorious Dawn, only featuring a wider variety of scientists. It's not quite as good but does get better on repeated views... Bill Nye is sort of undeniable. I foresee a plethora of these being released.
• How Things Are Made: CDs - Very educational piece via Casey.
• Kramer's Entrance - this isn't particularly funny but just oddly impressive that someone took the time to actually compile it.
• New Robotic Hand 'Can Feel' - again, not funny, but absolutely insane that this technology is not just something you see in movies. Honestly floored this is real.
• Bottle Bank Arcade - this is the third in the series of videos from VW's The Fun Theory - small experiments to inspire change through fun. If you've not seen the Piano Staircase or World's Deepest Bin - do so now.

BONUS

• Turkey
• Lights Over Paris: Crack the Code - very curious bit of possible satire. Real or not, a lot of money was spent.
• Guitar Mouth - I was torn on if this guy was impressive or douche-y.. I think it's both.

Have a great weekend.

Many thanks to Demetre for the heads up on the relaunch of The Beast is Back - the portfolio of Christopher Lee. There is a slew of great work to check out - FOX animation boards, Isometric DirecTV, Monster, My Friend prints and a myriad more. Every project is worth investigating.. every single one.

Jamie sent over this great collection of Color photography from Russia dating back to the early 1900s. The photos have a surreal quality to them due to the negative development process - using seperate red, green and blue filters to create multiple glass plate negatives that overlaid create the final color versions. Talk about innovation!

While the internet was all abuzz with talk of the freshly unveiled Raindrop project yesterday I found myself a bit more interested in the Mozilla Labs Prism project. Basically it's the same thing as Fluid - creating site specific browsers (SSB) that can be docked but, for whatever reason, I am enjoying it more than my experience with Fluid. The lack of gMail new message notification is a bit of a bummer but I do like the idea of a window dedicated to a particular site.

MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta at the Web 2.0 Summit this week:

"I think that what you see in the space more than anything else is if you don't keep innovating and moving forward you get in trouble," Miller said in his talk on Thursday morning. "You can't stop, you have to keep going, and (MySpace) didn't keep going, it kind of stopped."

This article goes into more of what he said and what the future of MySpace may be but it's a pretty huge thing to admit that your multi-million dollar company stopped innovating and is pretty much stalled out entirely.

A lot of people have tried to convince me that Facebook and Twitter will never suffer this same fate and I have to disagree.. there will always be a new innovator that everyone flocks to. I guess only time will tell!

It might only be a developer release but as soon as I saw this I reported immediately the download zone to snag a copy of Google Chrome for Mac. Not that I really want another browser to test for but I'm intrigued to see what all the hub-bub is about. Thus far it's been a very smooth experience.. imported all my settings perfectly and renders pages accurately and snappy. At the very least it will be nice to know that Chrome won't be a problem for developers but, rather, just another welcome option.

Limewire and The Scene have put together a compilation of seventeen Nashville bands and are offering it as a free download to all who are interested. Overall, it's a great primer into some of the best rock / indie rock / non-country that Nashville has to offer. I wouldn't call it comprehensive but it has a lot of quality stuff included. If you are familiar with the bands, spread the word and get someone into it who may not know the bands. If you are unfamiliar with the bands, I can wholeheartedly endorse 90% of the tracks included as worthy of regular rotation.

Time and again it is proven that the simplest site concepts are the ones that stir the most in-depth browsing. My Parents Were Awesome is a repository of vintage photography of, one assumes, peoples parents. Sometimes it's tough to remember that parents weren't always parents and were just.. ya know.. people. There's a very good-natured and nostalgic feel to the majority of photos; a heart warmer for sure. Via Jeremy.

If you had told me a week ago that one of the most interesting and entertaining interviews I could read would be one with Bronson Pinchot I would not have believed you. However, having now read through a good portion of it I can say just that - interesting, entertaining and just plain compelling. He's certainly been around the block in terms of experience and tells it like it is; though never in a spiteful way. Highly, though surprisingly, suggested read.

Honor Student clued me in to What the Movie - an online repository of movie screen grabs where you are meant to specify what film it's from. Some of them are pretty easy, some not so much. Regardless, it's fun to browse through the images even if you don't know the proper answer.

37 Signals have announced a new free service entitled Haystack. The intention is multi-faceted.

1. It gives designers a place to showcase their works and potentially bring in clients.
2. It gives designers unable to take on a certain job the ability to point clients to another designer / pool of designers that they could possibly use.
3. It gives clients the ability to find designers / developers within a certain region and/or a certain budget.

While I am sure there are other services of this nature that already exist I like the looks of Haystack. It's a very fresh launch so there are some edges to smooth out (i.e. searching for a designer based on zipcode or searching by region would be nice) but it looks promising.

• New Google Music Service Launch Imminent - I am very curious how this is going to work out. I'd really love it if there was a Bandcamp-esque side to it where bands could manage / sell their own music but I have a feeling it will be more like an Amazon MP3 / iTunes competitor only.
• Bing, Google add Twitter Search - apparently there's a big deal about to go down that will make live Twitter search results integrate into Google and Bing. The actual integration probably wouldn't happen for a few months but that's the plan. This is, for whatever reason, a rather big deal.

A friend of mine recently clued me in to the works of Giorgio Moroder and his album E=MC². His volume of work is vast - particularly when it comes to production credits and influencing others. He's done soundtrack work for a number of films (including American Gigolo, The NeverEnding Story, Scarface and Metropolis (1984)) and is considered an innovator in the field of electronic music.

All that aside, the music on this album sounds like a dance-y ELO and I'm not sure how anyone could be against that.

I've been enjoying this preview set of images from Dan Witz showcasing his Dark Doings series of documentation of his street art. The idea is incredibly simple but the results work quite nicely. I love the presentation style on the images as well.. an additional nice touch.

You can see even more of these pieces over on his official site.

Just a heads up to all of you out there who have only seen Season 1 of The IT Crowd - the second and third series are now available on Netflix - instantly and physically. Get to it!

Yesterday, Barnes and Noble announced their new digital eBook Reader; Nook. Personally, I have little interest in owning an eBook Reader and continue to prefer the old fogey style of a tactile paper book with turned pages but I do appreciate a good bit of product design. Obviously the Nook is going to try and go head to head against the Kindle and, from the tech specs, it looks like it could do it. Obviously the experience of using it is the real indicator of superiority but based on looks and offerings it might actually make a go of it.

It should come as no surprise that as a nerdy youth I found great amusement in the works of Monty Python. I loved Holy Grail, Meaning of Life, Life of Brian and even Now For Something Completely Different - despite many of the jokes being entirely British and/or above my comprehension level. That being said, the six-part documentary that IFC is showing; Monty Python: Almost the Truth (The Lawyers Cut) has been a nice treat to encounter. The interviews are candid (no punches pulled) and it gives a great bit of insight into the goings on of the troupe when they were creating some of the greatest comedy. Highly recommended.

I've never been a part of an official press release before so I'll do the right thing and post it verbatim:

And The Relatives to Release New Album on theory 8 and yk records in February 2010.

Nashville based trio, And The Relatives, are teaming up with theory 8 and yk records to release their debut LP in February of 2010. The band has two previous EP releases, Talking to My Fingers and Animals, the latter of which is available now for a free download on Bandcamp.

The band will be performing at the 2009 CMJ Music Marathon twice, once on Wednesday night, Oct 21st, at The Charleston in Brooklyn at 11pm and again, opening the After The Jump Showcase at The Cake Shop at 7pm on Thursday, Oct 22nd.

This marks the first co-release for theory 8 records, sharing the duties with yk records. The co-release venture will provide top of the line art direction and limited edition packaging from yk while theory 8 will handle the digital distribution and marketing.

Long story short, one of my favorite bands in town has been gracious enough to let me help out on the packaging for their forthcoming album. It won't be out until mid-February but I'm excited at the prospect of it.

If you don't have the Animals EP yet please do yourself a favor and get it immediately (or, at the very least, stream the crap out of it).

The team behind Samorost and Samorost 2 have developed a new game, entitled Machinarium, that works along the same lines. You are presented with a scene and an obstacle that you must decipher. It's a simple bit of fun but completely efficient at providing a proper amount of distraction. I'm actually considering buying the full version now that I've blown through the demo.