January 24, 2005

Unusual articles on Wikipedia — heavy metal umlaut is on there (via) #

Kottke on the maximum Starbucks density — current winner is downtown NYC with 169 stores in a 5-mile radius #

Bugs Bunny in drag — for those who were worried about Spongebob's pro-gay agenda (via) #

Long-lost video of Steve Jobs introducing the Mac in 1984 — taped off public TV, finally available online #

Google Video Search coming soon? — the directory and subdomain now temporarily redirect to the homepage #

Firefox's lead engineer Ben Goodger hired by Google — this suggests that the Google Browser is definitely a reality (via) #

Insecure vs. confident weatherman videos — both are painful to watch #

Street art in Counterstrike Source — anyone can make custom graffiti in CS:Source (via) #

Just A Plant, a children's story of marijuana — the next book should be "Poppies Are Pretty: A Children's Guide to Opiates" (via) #

2005 Bloggies nominations — the Bloggies need a "Best Linkblog" category (via) #

CD Baby rewrite in Postgres and Ruby — one developer's move away from PHP and MySQL (via) #

Hurricane Electric ISP adds automatic BitTorrent hosting for clients — drop a file in a directory, and it's automatically tracked and seeded locally; wonderful! (via) #

Non-desktop uses for a Mac mini — some great ideas here for DIY projects (via) #

Google rumored to offer voice-over-IP phone service — a bold move, but I wouldn't be surprised to see Google buy a Skype competitor (via) #

Collaborative fiction writing with SubEthaEdit — I'll bet it would work great for screenplays and sketch comedy, too (via) #

Snarkout essay on Will Eisner — tons of great links about Eisner and the Spirit #

Are design contests worth the time and effort? — B. Adam Howell asks contest winners if they got any business after winning #

Washington school district bans Halo 2 tsunami fundraiser — they cited violent games and the Columbine shootings (via) #

January 23, 2005

Habbo Hotel gets $23m in funding — one of the most successful and profitable multiplayer worlds, despite its lo-fi approach (via) #

Flash: Jon Udell's Wikipedia case study on the heavy metal umlaut — this is essential viewing for anyone with any interest in Wikipedia (via) #

Darwinia demo released — a real-time strategy game with a completely unique look, independently published (via) #

Phrack to publish its last issue — publishing since 1985, I used to read the hacker e-zine religiously in my BBS days #

Google raises word limit to 32 — before, you were limited to 10 words in a single query #

MP3: Ben Folds and Rufus Wainwright duet on Wham's "Careless Whisper" — the live version of Philosophy is nice, too #

Drivey, monochrome driving sim for Windows — also: history of driving games (via) #

Five terrible fake Livejournal memes — from Merlin Mann's 5ives (via) #

MoonEdit, multiplatform collaborative text editor — like SubEthaEdit, but for both Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD (via) #

Ivan Brunetti's Doodle-A-Day — his galleries of vintage postcards and art are good, too #

Wired cover story on Firefox — it's tempting for the media to put one face on a much larger project #

Target selling Mac mini — but only on their website, I believe (via) #

Johnny Carson passes away — even to the end, he was writing jokes and secretly sending them to Letterman (via) #

January 22, 2005

NYC radio station skit mocking tsunami victims — you'd think as New Yorkers, they'd empathize with the disaster (via) #

January 21, 2005

Exeem open beta released — yeah, but it has spyware with no opt-out; better wait for an updated ExeemLite (via) #

Google to provide AdWords API to advertisers — I could imagine uses for an AdSense API for publishers, as well #

Paul Ford's Three Favorite Computer Games of 2004 — the Will Oldham MMORPG should be called "Palace" #

A post about Sally Forth, the main character in Sally Forth (via) #

Video: Innernet, parody of Justin Hall's breakdown — some context; created by this guy #

Convert Tivo-to-Go to MPEG files — DRM, be gone! (via) #

Jacob Weinstein on the movie industry's screener DVDs — they're hassling award voters, or not sending out screening copies at all (via) #

Boing Boing Statistics

Posted January 21, 2005 by Andy Baio

Today is the fifth anniversary of Boing Boing’s relaunch, the day they switched from a traditional webzine to uber-blog.

To commemorate the birthday, the gang released a complete dump of every Boing Boing entry for free download. I’m hosting the torrent on my tracker, and I pulled together some statistics. (Is anyone surprised?)

Try my new Boing Boing Statistics. Most notably, use the keyword tracker to search the popularity of keywords over time, broken down by author. This is outstanding for looking at trends, or the uniquely quirky obsessions of each author.

Let me know if you have any suggestions, or have found other uses for the data dump.

January 22, 2005: By request, here’s a direct download of the 5-year archive.

January 20, 2005

Justin Foster signs up for free trade magazines — you, too, can get free subscriptions to Pig International, Aqua, Firehouse, and Tissue World #

January 19, 2005

Image: Sega's next football game — with EA's monopoly on NFL or ESPN rights, Sega doesn't have much left (via) #

mp3Blog Toplist, gauging popularity by multiplying Del.icio.us users by Technorati inbound links — Alf also made toplists for blogresearch and games #

Sparklines for representing Wikipedia activity — a brilliant idea they should try to reproduce as soon as possible (via) #

NYT journalist's followup on two girls he freed from Cambodian sex trade — he purchased them for $450 in 2003, turning journalism into activism (via) #

Photographs of Signs Enforcing Racial Discrimination — boy, I'm glad nobody cares about race anymore (via) #

Ourmedia launching this weekend — platform for free hosting of personal video content, partnered with Archive.org (via) #

PubSub tracking over 8 million blogs/feeds — wow, that easily trumps Technorati's 6.2 million blogs (via) #

Geocities 1996 — the best CSS Zen Garden theme ever (via) #

Ta-Da Lists — 37signal's free shared to-do lists; I've already set one up for Upcoming.org #