PostSecret

Photo blog 'Torn Lives' fills in the blanks

Fans of blogs like PostSecret, magazines like Found, and of the strange allure of snapshots might want to take a look at a Tumblr blog called Torn Lives.

The site asks viewers to submit photos that have bits torn or cut away, and to include a short text that will somehow lend the incomplete photograph a sense of poetic wholeness (or at least poetic mystery).… Read more

Going dark means crazy day for anti-SOPA site owners

With sites like Reddit, BoingBoing, PostSecret, and I Can Has Cheezburger blacked out today in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act, you might think this would be a peaceful, relaxed Wednesday for the people who run them. You'd be wrong.

All across the Internet, sites like those and many others stood up to register their opposition to SOPA and PIPA. But for some of those who have gotten the most attention for their activism, today has actually been crazier than usual, despite not having to constantly update their publications all day.

"Today … Read more

PostSecret shuts down iPhone app due to abusive posts

PostSecret, the popular blog and new-media project that's long given people a place to share their deepest, darkest thoughts, today announced it has shut down its young iPhone app due to malicious postings.

PostSecret founder Frank Warren, who receives hundreds of postcards and letters from strangers every week and posts about 20 of them on his blog on Sundays, said he's "pained" by the close of the PostSecret app, which launched in September. But its demise is due in part to its success.

"Although today--the first day after the death of the app--is painful, it … Read more

Behind the scenes with PostSecret

GERMANTOWN, Md.--When postal carrier Sonia Warren was given a new assignment last May, route 46 in this town about 30 miles from Washington, D.C., she had no idea that one of the people she'd be delivering to was among the most famous people in the world with her last name: Frank Warren.

To the uninitiated, Frank Warren is the founder and curator of the PostSecret project--an ongoing collection and public presentation of the heartfelt secrets of strangers from around the world. Each week, Warren receives hundreds of postcards (see video below) and letters from these strangers, and … Read more

Road Trip 2010 ready to roll through East Coast

SAN FRANCISCO--Each summer for the last four years, I've been lucky enough to get to pick a region of the country and spend several weeks driving around, writing stories and taking photos of some of the best geek-oriented destinations I could find.

In 2006, it was the Pacific Northwest. In 2007, the Southwest. In 2008, it was the Southeast. And in 2009, I traveled through almost the entire Rocky Mountain and Continental Divide region. Over the four years, I've covered 18,528 miles and visited dozens of the most interesting research labs, military bases, aviation facilities, NASA centers, … Read more

The making of a PostSecret book

For many of the devoted fans of the PostSecret project, Frank Warren's constantly updated collection of secrets anonymous people have sent him on postcards, buying Warren's books is a no-brainer.

Already, he has had four PostSecret books published, and for several months, he has been encouraging submissions of new secrets for the next hard-copy installment, "Confessions on Life, Death&God." And on May 19, he wrote on Sunday, as part of his weekly online presentation of a set of new secrets, he worked late into the night in a New York hotel laying out on … Read more

The 404 328: Where we're gonna live to 200

Steve Guttenberg, the Audiophiliac, joins the show today to talk about the coming "singularity."

For those of you not from the future, the "singularity" is a concept from Raymond Kurzweil's book "The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology." According to him, human beings will eventually live forever because of nano-machines that will repair our bodies and miracle drugs. That's about as deep as the show gets today. Again, you don't really want us to be discussing the ever-increasing amounts of entropy in the universe.

Steve is generally disappointed with the quality of the sound systems at the New York auto show. You'd expect that a $200,000 Bentley would have pretty great speakers, but you'd be wrong.

Also on today's show, we've got more Twitter stories: 1) Justin is attempting to bring back the $5-dollar Italian BMT from Subway with the world's first Twitition (that's Twitter + petition); 2) Post Secret meets Twitter with SecretTweet.com. Honestly, it's one of the most depressing Web sites ever. Kind of like a not-funny fmylife.com.

Finally, it's the weekend, so we know you have the time. Be sure to send in your call backs! We need them!

EPISODE 328 Download today's podcast |  Subscribe in iTunes |  Subscribe in RSS… Read more

On PostSecret tour, a WoW confession

WALNUT CREEK, Calif.--There probably aren't very many people in the world who could inspire someone to stand up in front of a crowd of 800 strangers and admit to a World of Warcraft addiction.

It might sound like a joke, but in the case of Frank Warren, the founder and curator of the ongoing PostSecret project, people are always baring their souls to him, either via the privacy of an anonymous postcard or letter, or in the case of his many public speaking engagements, in front of hundreds, or even thousands, of people they've never met before. … Read more

'I Can Has Cheezburger' book missing online vibrancy

If you're a big fan of LOLCats like me, then you probably are very familiar with Icanhascheezburger.com, a community site where the most active practitioners of the phenomenon involving funny pictures of cats mixed with odd, badly spelled phrases ply their trade daily.

To the uninitiated, LOLCats can be hard to decipher, especially given that many of them are subtle meta references to the phenomenon itself. So regular Icanhascheezburger.com visitors are well-versed in phrases involving things like "Ceiling Cat...," "I'm in ur...," "...ur doing it wrong" and so on.

Over the last year-and-a-half, the site has become massively popular, with tens of millions of monthly visitors and even a series of spin-off sites, all in spite of the fact that it was hardly the originator of the phenomenon.

Now, the creators of the site have cobbled together several dozen LOLCats from the site into I Can Has Cheezburger? the book. A slick little volume subtitled, "A LOLCat colleckshun," it features the famous fluffy gray cat so familiar to fans of the site on the cover.

I was really looking forward to the book, as I figured it would cull the best of the site's thousands upon thousands of user-created entries. And since I can always feel confident that a visit to the site will have me ROFLMAOing--rolling on the floor laughing my (butt) off--I expected that the book would induce much the same reactions, except even more concentrated.

Sadly, that wasn't the case. … Read more