Links time again

This week, no particular theme, just links aplenty:

General YouTubery

How to download YouTube videos as MP4 files. You might be breaking the user agreement thingy, mind. But then again you might not. No-one seems quite sure.

Your inbox is probably already infested with video-clips of cats doing cute things, I know... But still, cats playing the theremin? Come on, you know you want to :)

Since, erm, it's pretty much the whole point here, a short animation about procrastination.

Some arty stuff

If photos of interesting artworks, with the occasional YouTube video thrown in, all lovingly presented beneath enigmatic snippets of song lyrics sounds like your kind of thing, then head on over to The Lucky Charm blog (cereal-hoarding leprechauns, thankfully, noticeable only by their absence).

Chances are you might also enjoy a stay at Motel De Moka: a tasteful brew of art, mp3s, song lyrics, poetry, and the odd bit of Spanish. Muy bueno.

For the more inadvertent face of representation, Faces in Places collects photos illustrating our in-built propensity to spot faces pretty much anywhere we care to look.

Possibly the most beautiful sheets of blank A4 you'll ever see.

And it's quite surprising what you can do with a watermelon too...

Some newsy stuff

The BBC's latest Pods & Blogs podcast featured a couple of interesting newsy sites:

According to the spokesman interviewed, pundits and public alike will soon be going head-to-head to prove their prescience on Hubdub.com, a news prediction game. If you're in the business of tech predictions, a good Hubdub ranking might one day be as important as a well-read blog, they said. But you probably knew that already, didn't you?

Ever wanted to be an interviewer? Well, Yoosk won't quite let you do that, but it will ask politicians and celebrities questions on your behalf. If your fellow users have given them at least 100 votes, that is. Yesterday on Yoosk, it was the turn of the London Mayoral candidates, minus Ken and Boris so far, though...

ITN have just added a News channel and a Music News channel to their previous YouTube offerings. That should perhaps have been in the YouTube section, but frankly the thremin playing cats were more interesting.

Oh, and small-minded self-righteousness and xenophobia just got a makeover. Great. They must have been at a loose end after the Diana inquiry (which should be a worry to us all, I suspect)...

And finally...

This Dear God site seemed like it might have been a nice quirky idea for this slot...

But yikes, is that depressing!

Seriously, you won't be able to make it through more than a few posts without losing the will to live. So instead, to rather belatedly celebrate the new Portishead album, and because even a Portishead song sung by the cold dead cicuits of a machine is infinitely cheerier than that God site, here's Roads sung by a computer.

It has a girlfriend, too. She's called Audrey. Sometimes they do duets.


AN UPDATE ON LAST WEEK'S LINKS:

Here's a review of the Flock social browser.

There was a link to it on the e-learning blog I linked to last week, but it looks like I left out one of the bigger language learning social network sites, iTalki.