This Is Not Tom

..........Hello?

Hello...........

..........Uhh... is this Tom?

No, I'm afraid this is not Tom...........

..........Ok, thanks. Sorry to bother you. I'll keep looking.

*click*

All across the internet, this is dialogue occurs between the curious viewers of Thisisnottom.com and their Google search results pages. Thousands of people are trying to figure out the extremely difficult riddles that are posted there. This is what appears on the first page of Thisisnottom.com.

I, myself, have only gotten through this one. It took surprisingly long, and as with any riddle, it seemed completely easy once I figured it out.

Riddles, of course, have been around for ages. But they haven't been on the internet for even just two decades. Having riddles on the internet opens up so many new options. Answers to the riddles can be hidden in hyperlinks anywhere on the site. They can be typed into URL's. They can be entered as passwords. There are many ways of submitting an answer to a riddle, and there are even more ways of finding out the answers to riddles. In the past, the only way to figure out a riddle was to use logic or otherwise your own mind. Online riddles can do this, and they can also use the internet as a massive database of knowledge, allowing for riddles that involve a little bit of trivia. Online riddles open up an entire new aspect of riddling.

On Letters

In the previous post, I discussed LetterPlayground, which gave people a place to express their creativity about letters - the symbols they are surrounded with.

And it got me thinking.

That's all that letters are; they are just symbols, used to create meaning. And that's how letters began in the first place. Letters became symbols because they represented sounds of particular objects. For instance, the letter T and its design originated from the word Tree. This occurred because people wanted to communicate the word Tree and needed a way to visualize it.

Photo from Flickr

Then the idea of letters became more solidified, and they became fairly concrete conceptions. At LetterPlayground, designers create visual representations of the letters. In this way, letters have come full circle - from pictures to symbols, and back to pictures again. But this time, the pictures are different. They are being created for fun rather than for the purposes of developing a way of communicating. To quote Alanis Morissette, isn't it ironic?