Every Tuesday on Moncrieff, Darragh Doyle in live in studio with Sean, offering him a choice between the red and blue pills of what's igniting the Internet this week. Will flames surge or singe this week?
- Upping the ante on karaoke:
That’s Tom Bleasby duetting with Jessie J on her recent hit Flashlight. It’s had more than four million views on YouTube and 10.3m views on Facebook. Tom though has never met Jessie J.
In fact, Bleasby was just one of more than 115,000 people who sang Jessie’s song Flashlight with her, as part of a promotion in music app Sing! Karaoke. The app allows musicians to record videos singing one half of a duet, leaving space for fans to record their own contributions then share the results online.
Smule also recently launched a feature called “group video” for the Sing! Karaoke app, which automatically turns footage of groups of singers around the world performing the same song into single, edited videos.
Here’s an example with people duetting on Ed Sheeran’s Thinking Out Loud.
You can sing your favorite songs from a huge catalog of hits, create original open mic recordings, and collaborate with singers from all around the globe. The app's available on both iOS and Android.
If you have any childhood writing, scribbles, poems or literature hanging around at home, there’s a good chance Mortified would like to hear from you.
Mortified began curating material in 2002 when the discovery of an unsent teenage love letter led to an email asking people if they knew anyone who wanted to share their childhood writings on stage. That email went viral and responses poured in from strangers near and far.
They encourage people everywhere – even those with no interest in appearing on stage – to unearth the strange stuff they created as kids and share them with at least one person. They say, “You’d be surprised what you discover in the process.”
Adults share their most embarrassing childhood artifacts (diaries, poems, letters, lyrics, plays and even home videos) on stage, on podcast, on YouTube and even in Mortified books. Adults share their stories about their first kiss, their most embarrassing moment – it can’t all be calling the teacher mammy – or the more intimate details.
It’s been largely American until now – there are some 20 podcasts over on the website – but but now they’re looking for Irish participants.
Find out more: http://www.getmortified.com/participate/
We’ve talked about Periscope before – launched in March around the same time as Meerkat, and available on Android since May 26th, but it’s really coming into its own now, especially, gladly, with Irish twitter users.
For those of you who don’t know, Periscope allows you to point your smartphone at whatever you’re doing, and it live streams it to the audience. If you have chosen to share it on Twitter, people can find it that way. Your live stream stays up for 24 hours but you can also download it to your phone and upload it on YouTube or other websites.
While viewers are watching they can type messages to you that come up on your phone – similar to texts in a radio show – and you can choose to interact with the text or not – almost like reading it out on air.
Periscope lends itself massively to outdoor events – I periscoped a few things from the main stage at Body & Soul this weekend – and to tourism. Got tourists coming to your venue – show them around! We could see periscopes from houses for rent, in restaurants, in museums and more.
Interesting conversations happening now around copyright and around permissions, as will always be the case with such technologies involving cameras, but could we find the next news reporters via Periscope? Available on both iOS and Android.
From the same people that brought you Pubs with a Fire, it’s now 'Pubs With a Beer Garden', an interactive, crowd-sourced website showing you your nearest pub with a beer garden.
According to the website there are some 77 pubs with beer gardens in Dublin city centre and they’re looking for your recommendations of where your local one is. Just log on to the website and help them out!
SunCalc is a little app that shows sun movement and sunlight phases during the given day at the given location. You can see sun positions at sunrise, specified time and sunset.
This is great for anyone who is buying a house, or gardening, who’s going on holidays, who is shooting videos or photos or who just wants to avoid the sun for some reason.
Just go to the website, choose your location and time of day and it will do the rest for you.
- the most pointless website ever?
- Go to the website
- Move your mouse and wait
- The website generates a picture of someone or something pointing to the exact position of your mouse cursor
Far more entertaining and stupid than you can imagine, you’ll find yourself spending minutes moving your mouse and wondering how they got the photos together of people pointing at seemingly random locations. A wonderful waste of time.
- And finally... how to write an earworm
A song from the writer and producer of Carly Rae Jepsen’s Call Me Maybe and other hits, explaining what you need to make an award-winning pop song of your own – written because people wouldn’t stop asking him how…
To see what digital depths Darragh plumbed last week, click here.
