Lookbook.nu

Lookbook.nu is an invite only fashion community inspired by various "street" fashion blogs on the web. Lookbook was started in April 2008 by Yuri Lee and Jason Su in their San Francisco apartment. Lookbook claims to be an "international experiment in style" and with members in over 80+ countries this certainly seems to be the case. Each member must be invited and is then given a code which allows them to begin posting looks of their own, "hyping" other members looks and commenting on them. The site is set up like a true democracy with each member able to "hype" a given look. The looks with the most hype are featured on the homepage. A look is simply a full body picture(s) showing your whole outfit or at least three quarters of it. Users also label and tag all their clothes so that other users can find where they got the various items. Additionally each user has one heart to give out each day to one look that they deem captures the best fashion for that day. The main reason for the invite code is to keep those rather unsavory youtube-ish denizens out such as spammers, haters, bots and annoying children. For instance all comments on each look must be constructive feedback meaning they are positive and never hateful. In many ways Lookbook is what Facebook started as before all the riffraff were ushered in with a huge welcome mat. Lookbook deals with "street" fashion which is hard to define and although I am tempted to say it simply means hipsters who actually care what they look like, I will refrain. Street fashion is fashion that originates outside of the studios and design houses. It is usually centered on a youth movement and seems to emerge in urban centers. Street fashion may use elements from the studios but maintains a strong grassroots aspect. Examples include punks, hippies, goths, skinheads and hip hop fashion. It is easy to understand when examining one of these past street fashion trends. For example the goths took various high fashion items like extreme black leather coats or boots and incorporated them into their all black look. These boots and coats were never meant for this type of look by the studios but the goths took them and made their own street style. Of course the goth scene has faded back into its subculture beginnings and Lookbook deals with more current street fashions. Currently street fashion seems to be manifested by Urban Outfitters, American Apparel and stores like them and many of the Lookbook outfits feature clothing from these stores. It also works the other way around. Websites like Lookbook and other street fashion sites influence U.O. and A.A. and what they put in their collections each year. Overall I think Lookbook is an extremely cool site and I would love to be a member although I don't think I am proficient enough in photography to really make it work. Perhaps if a certain talented photographer I know could help me out . . .

College Humor

Collegehumor.com is a humor web site that targets college males. Ricky Van Veen, Jakob Lodwick, and Josh Abramson founded the web site while they attended various colleges. Abramson says, "We wanted to start an advertisement-based business because at the time the advertising market was pretty hot and we'd seen other people develop web sites that were popular making a lot of money". Abramson and Van Veen were best friends from middle school in the Baltimore area and in 1999 they launched CH at Wake Forest. Abramson went to the University of Richmond and later they added Lodwick who attended Rochester Institute of Technology. As the site grew Van Veen recruited Zach Klein, a friend from Wake Forest, to help them run the site. In the beginning the site was a place to collect all the funny emails, pictures, and links that college kids love to send around. This idea took off and the founders decided they might be able to make a full-time career out of it. The foursome stayed in San Diego while Klein finished college then made the move to New York City. They started in a 4,200 sq. ft., five bedroom, renovated flat in the Tribeca district. They all lived together and the 5th bedroom served as their "offices". Van Veen served as the editor in chief, Abramson handled the business end of things, Lodwick dealt with the technical side and Klein worked on the overall design. The key to their web site was the user-generated content. Fans from all over the country send in media constantly and they post a big portion of it on their site and then people pick what they "like" most and vote for it. Much of the work is done for the founders. They simply collect the media in a single easily navigatable location. 

Sometime in 2003 the site exploded and began averaging at least a million unique visitors a month. They also launched BustedTees.com a humor t-shirt web site that ties into the content on CH. By 2005 the site was averaging millions of unique visitors a month. They employed 17 people and had offices located in New York. Companies like Ford and Universal were advertising on their site. They made $6 million in advertising revenue in 2005. They set up a parent company called Connected Ventures which included CH, Vimeo, Defunker, and BustedTees. They published several books and reportedly had a movie development deal with Universal, although nothing has come to fruition yet. 

Today, CH continues to grow and expand. Ricky Van Veen lives in a renovated apartment several floors above the CH offices which take up an entire floor of a building in the Tribeca district. The founders sold a controlling stake in Connected Ventures to InterActiveCorp, but the company was making $5-10 million a year before they sold it. The site now averages 7 million unique visitors per month. They have added the CHTV aka College Humor TV or CollegeHumor Originals. These are short videos that include parodies, music videos, college sketches, etc. that mimic the type of content CH's fans enjoy. Van Veen is still the chief editor and the creative director and works with a number of employees turned actors to produce a variety of videos including the Hardly Working and Jake and Amir series. CH also finished its first season of the College Humor Show which aired on MTV and included six episodes. 

Pandora

For those of you who do not already use Pandora, you should definitely try it out. The official url is www.pandora.com. It is a website that takes all the bands/artists and all the songs that you like and picks music you would like based on the music genome project. You have to give it a chance to make several selections. One tip for success is to add a lot of the songs that you like to give it a broader sense of your style and characteristics. I have identified the most common elements in the music I like. They are as follows:

-major key tonality

-minor key tonality

-extensive vamping

-subtle use of vocal harmony

-basic rock song structures

-punk influences

-electric rock intrumentation

-electric rhythm guitars

-electric guitar riffs

-a vocal-centric aesthetic

I have found many new bands/artists that I really like on Pandora including Roisin Murphy, Albert Hammond Jr., Hot Chip, Electrelane, Evangelicals, Modern English, Japan, Electric President, Love Is All, Pinback and Black Kids just to name a few. I highly recommend Pandora.