Albino Blacksheep

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Albino Blacksheep
URL http://www.albinoblacksheep.com
Commercial? No
Type of site Entertainment website
Registration Optional
Owner Steven Lerner
Created by Steven Lerner

Albino Blacksheep is a website based in Toronto, Ontario that posts humorous and artistic member-submitted digital media. Most of these are movies or games created with Adobe Flash. The website also features image galleries, audio files, and text files. Additionally, there is a mobile section that provides ring tones, screensavers, and wallpaper for mobile phones.[1] The website was ranked fourth in blogs of the year (2005) by Blogpulse.[2]

In addition to the media available on the website, there is also a large user community that takes advantage of the forums and Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel; members of which often offer tutorials on the production of the type of media found on Albino Blacksheep.[3]

Contents

[edit] History

Albino Blacksheep was founded in 1999 by Steven Lerner (also known as "Sners") to promote his band of the same name, which was started in 1996. In 2000, Lerner took a web design course and redesigned the website. This new incarnation contained rants, graphical images, and a video stream from Lerner's video camera. Perhaps Lerner's first famous work was in 2003, with his site's Google bomb for French military victories.[4] Since then the site has been growing in popularity, currently receiving about 1.50 million pageviews per day.[5]

Albino Blacksheep is also famous for being a major animutation (a Flash animation style created by Neil Cicierega in 2001) portal, of which Bagadada Bop!, JamezBond, and Irrational Exuberance (Yatta) are the most popular.[citation needed] Most recently, The Fingertips Project, a collaborative animutation with multiple animators, has increased Albino Blacksheep's image as a showcase for animutation.[citation needed] The website also helped the band Tally Hall achieve some notability after posting their music video Banana Man.[6]

On April 1, 2007, Lerner changed the homepage to a joke homepage, designed to make people think that the site had been bought and turned into "Google Animations". The joke was reinforced by a fake blog stating that "Albino Blacksheep has been acquired by Google Inc. for roughly $32 million in stock options. The deal was discussed over a casual breakfast in Mountain View, California between the Canadian-born founder of Albino Blacksheep and the Google co-founders and CEO. Plans are underway for Google Inc. to tie its services and software into the former Albino Blacksheep website which will go by the new name Google Animation."

[edit] Name

According to Steven Lerner, the creator of Albino Blacksheep, the name is an intentional oxymoron; by definition, a black sheep cannot be an albino because it quite obviously possesses skin pigmentation. The name also describes being an outcast or different with the term blacksheep. [7]

[edit] Notes and references

  1. ^ Mobile Section on Albinoblacksheep.com.
  2. ^ Top Blogs from Blogpulse.com, retrieved January 31, 2007.
  3. ^ Tutorial Section on Albinoblacksheep.com
  4. ^ French twist from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, posted March 25, 2003.
  5. ^ Site Stats as of March 23, 2006.
  6. ^ Quirky Michigan band pops into Rehoboth by Kim Silarski of the Gannett News Service, posted December 17, 2005.
  7. ^ The Meaning by Sners of Albinoblacksheep.com.

[edit] External links