Elemin has great sense of typography, good white space balance, and minimal graphics. It is a piece of art crafted with modern technology — Google font, CSS3, Javascript and HTML5. WordPress post formats was incorporated which allows you to write about various post types such as photo, gallery, video, quote, etc. (very much like Tumblr). The design is completely fluid and responive. This means the layout automatically adapts based on the user’s viewport. The layout never breaks no matter of what screen resolution it is being viewed on. It works on all desktop and most mobile devices such as iPhone, iPad, Android, and Blackberry. To see this in action, visit our demo site and resize your browser window or check it with a mobile phone.

I’ve also taken the time to update the lifestream – it’s now cleaned up and has Kivasupport, yay! There’s also support for comments now on lifestream posts, so that might be worth checking out as I normally share more across the web than I do here on the blog (e.g. my shared items in reader). I’ve taken on a monster-project to finally backup all of my images on Flickr, I expect to be done by 2015 or so.

Cheerio

Not only has Justin Bieber passed 300 million views, the video has only been on YouTube for 6 months compared to 9 months for Gaga. Just amazing.

Here’s the complete top 10 live.

“Kiva’s mission is to connect people, through lending, for the sake of alleviating poverty.”

Today I’d like to congratulate myself for reaching 500 bucks lent out via Kiva! I reached it today when I lent the modest sum of $25 to Zikusooka Women’s Group-lugazi in Uganda. I think Kiva is fantastic and it’s really one of those places online were I can sit around browsing for a good hour or so, reading all of the amazing stories told by not-so-lucky entrepreneurs. Most of whom are driven, passionate, and possess all other possible traits that might be wanted in an entrepreneur in the “western world”.

The facts and history of Kiva is really something. In total, good people have contributed with over $155,400,000 to support other human beings around the globe that really just need a break to get themselves going.

Even though I thought that I’ve tried to keep my portfolio diversified as best as I could, meaning that I thought I hadn’t favourized any particular sector or country – it seems I was mistaken. This image shows a snapshot of my present and past loans:

As you can see, my favorite entrepreneurial country to lend to has been Peru, and it seems I’ve had a bit of a crush for the retail-sector when it comes to my “investments”. Luckily I browsed to the Kiva App Gallery by mistake today and found the KivaFolio-app. KivaFolio is an app that helps analyze your Kiva portfolio’s diversity across different sectors and countries, and recommends fundraising loans that would help to balance the portfolio. Great!

After taking the app for a test run it seems I should be lending more money to agriculture in Ecuador, Kyrgyzstan, Kenya, and Tajikistan. Maybe you should too?

Unbelievable, wouldn’t you say? Kudos to Gary.

To start things up I’ve implemented disqus for handling comments. It’s an excellent framework that allows users to login using e.g. their Twitter or Facebook identities. As you might recall, I did some ‘ugly hacks’ to enable a Facebook Connect and Twitter Connect earlier. Disqus also has a neat feature called social media reactions which monitors conversions around your posts, so no need to use the backtype plugin or similar to bring the conversation back. I’d also like to reserve some extra kudos to the DISQUS-team, especially Giannii – they’re absolutely fantastic at getting back to you if you have a problem and seem to monitor conversations regarding disqus in every space.

I’ve also finally got around to writing somewhat decent about me and follow me pages as well as mashed up my social presence to a lifestream page by using the excellent wp-lifestream plugin. Following a tip from Andreas Karman (Swedish post), I cleaned up the archives a bit using smart archives reloaded.

And as a bonus to all iPhone users, you now have an iPhone optimized site if you visit this blog in Safari on your iPhone, compliments to wptouch. Rumours also has it that the feed wasn’t working earlier, that’s now solved.

Puh. Maybe it’s finally time to create some content? It’s just that WordPress is to fun to mess around with.

“Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently on display until Sept 09 at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab (Please contact us if you want to show it next!). It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.”

Very interesting, would you agree with your Personas?

I just watched the beautiful “HOME” documentary by Yann Arthus-Bertrand. It has +1M views on YouTube after about a month. I’d warmly recommend it to anyone who hasn’t seen it yet. A bit “propagandic” in an Inconvenient Truth way, but hey – it’s only the truth this time around too. Some key takeaways:

• 20% of the world’s population consumes 80% of its resources
• The world spends 12 times more on military expenditures than on aid to developing countries
• 5,000 people a day die because of dirty drinking water. 1 billion people have no access to safe drinking water
• Nearly 1 billion people are going hungry
• Over 50% of grain traded around the world is used for animal feed or biofuels
• 40% of arable land has suffered long-term damage
• Every year, 13 millions hectares of forest disappear
• One mammal in 4, one bird in 8, one amphibian in 3 are threatened with extinction. Species are dying at a rhythm 1,000 times faster than the natural rate
• Three quarters of fishing grounds are exhausted, depleted or in dangerous decline
• The average temperature of the last 15 years have been the highest ever recorded
• The ice cap is 40% thinner than 40 years ago
• There may be at least 200 million climate refugees by 2050

Scary.

The smiling 10-inch tall Tweenbots were made out of a cardboard body, and equipped only with a flag stating its intended destination. They can only move in one direction (forward), which made them reliable on the kindness of passing strangers to guide them. This means that the passing people would have to stop, read the flag, and then set the robot free to continue its journey in the right direction to reach their goal.

The mission was to get from the Northeast to the Southwest Corner of Washington Square Park. It took the Tweenbot 42 minutes, the number of people who intervened was 29 (!) Hidden cameras were then set out to capture the random acts of kindness.

What happened is actually quite astonishing in today’s fast paced environment, I would love to see this experiment being carried out in multiple big cities to see how people in different cultures react. What would happen if the Tweenbot was set free on Sergel’s Torg in Stockholm? I’m pretty convinced that the risk of this robot not making it is far greater in Stockholm than New York — something that makes me sad.

I’m especially fond of this encounter:

“One man turned the robot back in the direction from which it had just come, saying out loud to the Tweenbot, “You can’t go that way, it’s toward the road.”

Read more at Tweenbots.com.