This Is Why Sir Tim Invented Teh Webz

At the end of last week Sir Tim Berners Lee, inventor of the world wide web, finally got with the cool kids (well, the vaguely hip middle class intelligentsia) and joined Twitter.

And since then I’ve seen two things that would make him proud that he did (invent the web that is, obviously he shouldn’t be proud that he’s joined Twitter and is being followed by over 12,000 people already but only following 31 in return, like some bald, white male version of Oprah).

First is the marvelous video you can see below. A stop-motion tribute to that classic 60s anthem, Right Said Fred, from which the greatest 2/3 bald gay trio of the 90s took their name. Doesn’t it make you proud to be alive?

Slightly less impressive, but almost as wonderful, is this little YouTube Easter Egg: go to any YouTube video and replace the word ‘watch’ in the URL with ‘warp.swf’. When you do, you’re presented with a graphical representation of where that video sits in the YouTube universe, allowing you to see how it relates to other videos, and from there on to videos that they relate to.

You kind of have to play around with it to see what I mean, though there are a couple of screen-grabs that might help: the one above is the original Lego video and its immediate neighbours, the one below shows what I’d got to after browsing for a few seconds – somehow I’d ended up on a video showing me how to make the sounds for the letters V & W. A sneaky branding exercise by a german car manufacturer perhaps?

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