Illustration by Yiying Lu

Yiying Lu, the infamous creator of the Twitter "Fail Whale" (FW), has a new web site, What is Fail Whale?, dedicated to explaining the history of the web 2.0 iconic image. If you just can't get enough of the Blue One, now you can feast your eyes on FW inspired art, videos, fashion, and even drinks.

The drink might come in handy next time you're greeted by FW when trying to tweet -- though it seems to be increasingly rare these days -- which has lead to FW "sightings." Aw, the web. :)

Photo courtesy of IBM.

So how exactly does one become a master inventor? What makes someone qualified to be a master inventor? Those are exactly the questions we asked Andy Stanford Clark, IBM Master Inventor and home automation guru.

Andy looks like a pretty unassuming guy, but don't let the smile fool you. He's a visiting Professor at Newcastle University, a member of MIT Media Lab Steering Committee, has been granted 11 patents, has 33 patents pending, and has 30 additional invention disclosures. Whew... and that's not even the tip of the iceberg.

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To Twitter-philes, Yiying Lu isn't a household name, but she should be. She is the creator of the omnipresent "FailWhale," a lovely illustration of a whale being lifted and carried by birds. Twitter chose to use this illustration when the service was unavailable or overloaded, and as such it gained the nickname of the FailWhale.

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About 8 months ago I blogged about a Twitter mashup called Politweets that tracked pre-nomination candidates across the twittersphere. Nowadays there are a couple of newer, better tools that I wanted to spotlight.

The first is Twitter's own Election page at http://election.twitter.com. It's a real-time stream of every tweet in the public timeline that mentions any of the candidates. It also has a brief collection of popular election tags (e.g. Tina Fey, Bailout) at the top of the page. You can also filter by candidate, so you can monitor the tweets only about Obama, McCain, or either of the VP candidates.

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I found this via Amber MacArthur's blog while perusing my feeds. Not sure how I missed this one by a fellow named Ben Walker from the U.K., but now I can't stop singing the chorus of this song! For all the good humor on the Internet, I'm still waiting for a huge backlash against the insiderishness of videos like these. For now, though, enjoy this gem!

Oh, and, duh, here's Ben Walker's twitter and Amber Mac's twitter.

[ Via: via: AmberMac ]

It's Rambo 3 Live! A no-holds barred public live commentary of my experience watching Rambo 3 in bite-sized Twitter nuggets. Attending is easy, just watch my Twitter stream during the event. Participation is optional.

WHEN: Tuesday, August 26th @ 9PM PST
WHERE: http://twitter.com/rickrey

From my Facebook Event page:

While watching Rambo 2 (First Blood: Part II) the other night I thought to myself - wow, there is so much great Twitter material here. Unfortunately I was too involved with the gripping plot to turn away and grab my laptop.

So on Tuesday night, August 26th I'm going to live Twitter my experience watching Rambo 3 for what I believe is the first time. This is a landmark Twitter experiment and I may lose many followers - a risk I'm willing to take.

If following the action isn't enough, you can simultaneously Twitter your own Rambo 3 experience at exactly 9:00PM PST. I'm pretty sure it's in stock at every Blockbuster worldwide.

Sign up to "attend" this live Twittervent on Facebook or Upcoming.org. If you want to participate, give me a heads up.

Here's a site that I totally dig! I learned about it from popSiren. Bgpatterns.com allows you to create cool tiled backgrounds that you can download. You choose an image then adjust the size and opacity. You can also play around with the colors and canvas.

The @ symbol was an option so I couldn't resist using it for my Twitter account.

I found this design that someone else had made and put it as my desktop.

Go get to create'n and show me a picture of your design!