Howard Stern‘s intimately live-Tweeted account of Private Parts this past weekend brought renewed attention to the old, good idea of using social media as a platform for making movie-watching and other entertainment-consumption a more intimate, communal experience. And it just so happens that friend of Geekosystem Philip Bump has recently rolled out a project focused on just that.

Terrible Movie Night is a sort of crowdsourced Mystery Science Theater 3000: Viewers watch a chosen bad movie on Netflix at a predetermined time, and as they’re watching it, they take to Twitter or Facebook to comment as the movie progresses. What differentiates Terrible Movie Night from, say, a bunch of friends deciding to get together and do this informally is its timeline system: Commentary on the movie is archived by time stamp, and so the wisecracks of the users aren’t just a transient communal experience, but are preserved for posterity.

Yeah, so I took my iPad to Africa. Contrary to what Gizmodo‘s Joel Johnson considers, don’t go selling your laptop just yet. But you know who liked it? The lions.

I realize just how gratuitous that photo is. But the lions were legitimately interested in the iPad’s multi-touch technology. (Probably. I didn’t really get out of the truck. They seemed interested in it.)

(Before we dig too far into this, you may want to visit the 56k Modem Emulator, to establish the proper sonic mood. Ah, that beloved squeal.)

A colleague (who is handsome and wise) recently discovered an old Media Metrix report delineating “World Wide Web Audience Ratings” for December 1998. It’s a remarkable study, categorizing thousands of sites and conglomerated web companies.

This thing is like finding election results from 1880; like coming across the original Billboard music chart. It looks familiar, like you should know all of the component elements, but it’s unrecognizable. As though they’re all brands made up for movies.

The Rankings
Home and Work, Combined
We’ll start where the report starts – at those sites most popular when combining home and work visits. (Please see above diagram for clarification.) Before I list them, I want you to try and think up what the top fifty websites were in 1998. Got it?

Yeah, you’re wrong:

Within minutes of the earthquake just off of Chile’s coast early this morning, the US Geological Survey had it pegged – an 8+ on the Richter scale, ten times as strong as Haiti’s 7.0.

A short time later, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration presented a map of expected energy distribution throughout the Pacific Ocean. In other words, where one could expect tsunamis. Hawaii, it appeared, was well within the danger zone.

The state moved into action, sounding tsunami warning alarms before sunrise, evacuating beaches and low-lying areas, sending boats out of harbors and into the open sea, where surges of high water posed no harm. KHON Fox 2 in Honolulu went on the air, exploring possible ramifications and providing updates.

Then someone put a camera in front of his TV, aimed it at KHON, and put it on Ustream.tv. At its peak, the stream had over 80,000 viewers.

Yes, I watched Pretty in Pink last night. I’ll pretend it was because my wife hadn’t seen it, but it’s actually because I still dream of working in a record store with a Smiths poster on the wall.

With Chatroulette tearing up the Net, I was struck by this scene which, frankly, I’d forgotten: (Please forgive the awful camerawork; I’m not the responsible party.)