Spoken word beat poetry album (untitled)
Funding goal: $149,000. Time taken: 4 days.
An ingenious commentary on modern-day culture and the new aesthetic, Spoken word beat poetry album (untitled) eschews the poetic form by taking pages from public domain works and performing them in an authentic beat poet style. Tracks include Treasure Island (page 47) and The Balkans: A History of Bulgaria. Can be played on an iPhone.

A lovely cake
Funding goal: $20. Time taken: 30 seconds.
Reward for backing this project: a photo of the cake.

Night star
Funding goal: $12,100,000. Time taken: 7 hours.
Ambitious project to establish a satellite of the earth with a quarter of its diameter. Will have dry seas, craters, and plenty of dust. The idea is that it will reflect the sun at night time, when sunlight is traditionally unavailable: an ingenious solution to an age-old problem. Fully compatible with iPhone use.

Gamey gamey game game game
Funding goal: $1,000,000. Time taken: 1 day, 3 hours.
Gain a new insight into the world around you by playing Gamey gamey game game game, an indie product that takes game dynamics and applies them to the real world in a visceral way. String yourself out on bourbon and take to the streets, whispering obscenities to pets, while evading capture for as long as you can. Take beautiful tilt-shift photos of bewildered dogs and share them on your iPhone.

German
Funding goal: $450,000. Time taken: 3 days, 2 minutes.
For too long, Germany has been without a language of its own. This unique social project aims to establish a form of communication for Europe’s highest exporting nation, including a full grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation instructions. Reward for backing this project: contribute your own compound noun. German will be usable on the iPhone.

Dopamine Rush is a new web community that provides a dopamine rush to its users by pointlessly awarding points when someone clicks on your name.

Explanation:

Patent pending. By Hanjabanja.

Badgeclout: the gamified reputation system that’s pay to play. To assign whuffie to a person, you have to buy it, in the form of virtual gifts like Rolodexes and heart-shaped boxes of chocolates. These gifts can then be traded or assigned like currency. Obviously, the whole thing sits on top of Twitter.

Frolickinbrine: “curse” your Facebook friends. If they’re cursed, an increasing number of sorry events befall their profile, until seven days later it meets its doom. They can escape their fate by performing tasks, like “liking” a brand or cursing their friends.

Idcheckintothat: “check in” to your partners. Leave tips and ratings. Get recommendations.

Badgermatic: iPhone app that automatically inserts a badger into the background of any picture you take. $1.99. Further woodland creatures – and, inexplicably, a squid – are available via in-app purchase.

Teadar: location-aware mobile app for ex-pat Brits in America. Tired of having tea alone? Finds other British people in need of tea in the neighborhood, finds a place that doesn’t serve it in horribly-diluted form in a giant paper cup, and then negotiates biscuits for you all.

Urban Harmony: a mobile app that listens for those people who play music on their phone speakers at the backs of buses and trains, and then harmonizes with them, Barbershop-style.

At Rum & Monkey, we love our audience. You’ve been here with us since the beginning; on January 30, 2002, when we pulled the giant “on” switch and the city lights all flickered out – we like to think with joy – you were ready and waiting for the products of our fecund finger-tappings.

The Internet, however, has moved on. It used to be enough to tack up a page and leave it sitting there, winningly smelling up its corner of the web while people stopped by to copy embed codes into their MovableType weblogs. These days, you’ve got to throw up – literally throw up, projectile-style – brand pages on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, RedTube and Grindr, and ideally track the hell out of your visitors and sell inferred knowledge about the HIV status of their children to the dazed, pockmarked remnants of the KGB, operating (as everyone knows they are) from a warehouse loft in Sunnyvale.

With this in mind, some time ago, we added a Facebook “like” button to all of our pages. Most people don’t know this, but in exchange for doing so, Facebook provides detailed demographic information to site owners, using the profile details of people who didn’t log out of their site and happen to stop by our site. (Seems legit to us.) Our visits and pageviews are pretty awesome, but we’ve been stabbing in the dark – now, for the first time ever, we could analyze the demographics of our site and better serve you, the user.

This is absolutely true: the key demographic for Rum & Monkey is 14-year-old Indonesian teenage girls.

“No way,” we said.

As it turned out: way.

Shit.

We’ve been running this site for nine years, people. We’ve run articles about Sarah Palin, Robert Mugabe and George W Bush. We’ve called Ariel Sharon an evil criminal, we’ve discussed the finer points of New Labour politics in Britain, we’ve made web toys about the looting in New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina (all in the best possible taste, of course). Our hope – nay, our plan – was to attract a disaffected audience with the same disjointed sense of humor.

Now, it could be that Indonesian teenage girls have a particularly adept understanding of global sociopolitical current events, and have been attracted by our intelligent but irreverent coverage of same. More likely, though, they don’t give a shit, and have been skipping right past all that stuff to the Name Generator Generator, rendering our tears, sweat and that time we locked a team-member in his room for three days entirely pointless.

Which is not to undervalue Indonesian teenage girls. I’m sure you’re all great, and you’re in an up-and-coming part of the world that’s rising beyond its troubled past and is sure to blossom in your lifetime. That’s awesome. We just don’t know how the shit to write for you.

So, girls, answer us this: what can we do better? How? Why?

Everyone else out there who’s tried to run a website: how do we pivot from this?

And finally, to the three people who have actually been reading for the LolPalins and the Señor Peegs and all the rest of it: thanks. It means a lot.

Hi, America! Al Qaeda here. We’d like to thank you for changing your way of life in response to our activities over the last ten years. It’s fun to visit an airport or public place and see that familiar Al Qaeda stamp! Thanks to our friends at the TSA for making this possible.

We’d like to let you know about some other things we’ve been doing:

We’ve poisoned the french fries. Every french fry you buy in the continental United States is infected with terrorism. The same goes for fried dough, fried butter, and anything from Jack in the Box.

We’ve been broadcasting subliminal messages on the Fox News Channel. It’s basically our channel now. Every time you watch Fox News, you’re inundated with terrorist messages and become a sleeper Al Qaeda operative yourself. We also broadcast hypnotic messages in music played from cellphone speakers on public transport.

American cheese is un-American. ‘Nuff said, we think.

It’s pretty obvious that you should be avoiding Two and a Half Men. But did you know that Al Qaeda is responsible for the programming of America’s Next Top Model? You will smize in hell!

We have sent a large contingent of terrorist operatives who will bicycle on the wrong side of public roads, and on the sidewalks. Further terrorist contingents cram too many people into the segments in revolving doors and randomly come to a stop in crowded pedestrian areas.

The giant TVs at all Costco entrances are set to explode randomly.

Chihuahua dogs, when combined with handbags, will form a complete dirty bomb.

The cast of Jersey Shore join together like Voltron to create one big mega-terrorist.

We certainly don’t think that you should alter your lives in response to this new information.

Best regards,

Al Qaeda