October 11, 2005

News.com.au on the Snakes on a Plane meme — the Delicious community has been covering this one closely (via) #

Commodore Music Store — very bizarre; too bad, I was hoping for something like this (via) #

Verisign buys Moreover for $30m — Kottke points to thoughts by co-founders Denton and Galbraith (via) #

Google adds tagging to search history — no social aspect yet, but I bet it's coming #

Heatmapping Google Earth — dynamic data viz using Django and Google Earth layers #

October 10, 2005

Video: Charade, full-length film from 1963 — Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn thriller slipped into public domain because of a clerical error (via) #

Oracle's purchase of InnoDB affects MySQL users — catching up on news I missed while at Web 2.0 last week #

VGMaps, Vector Overlays for Google Maps — fusing Flash and GMaps; try the subway maps example #

Video: Rhythm of Life — excellent Guiness ad (via) #

Doctor Doom's Top Ten Euphemisms for Sex — Mike should be writing for McSweeney's #

Stanford wins $2 million DARPA Grand Challenge — more importantly, five teams' robot cars crossed the 135-mile finish line (via) #

Yahoo! Podcasts — thus marks the point where nobody trusts what I link to #

October 9, 2005

Kotaku's rant on Arnold Schwarzenegger — blocks the sale of violent video games to minors, in contrast to his history of movie violence #

International coalition of government poised to take control of Internet from U.S. — dissolving ICANN and handing the root servers over to the UN #

Cool musicians who blog — an excellent roundup (via) #

Marios 64 — 64 pixel Marios in famous costumes #

MySpace user found dead — final blog posts on LJ and MySpace usually get thousands of comments by mourners and onlookers #

October 7, 2005

Adam Kalsey's Tagyu — utility to auto-discover tags from content or websites; click a tag to view suggested tags for Delicious pages #

Google Reader — Google launches their web-based feed reader #

Tristan runs the numbers on the Weblogs Inc sale — breaking down value by blog and sector #

October 6, 2005

Mark Pilgrim writing Greasemonkey scripts for every microformat — I love that guy (via) #

LiveMarks — viewing Del.icio.us popular in real time; Joshua must hate this, though #

Salon redesigns — it reminds me of Slate (via) #

Kottke says Verisign bought Weblogs.com for $5M — a match made in hell (via) #

How many blogs did AOL buy? — 85 total, but only 31 are active (via) #

HBO poisoning BitTorrent downloads with bad seeds — their time would be better spent working on a distribution model instead of fighting it (via) #

First PSP trojan found in the wild — not a virus, just malicious software (via) #

AOL buys Weblogs Inc., including Engadget — I heard $40 million, but take it with salt; seems like an unusually expensive content play #

October 5, 2005

Synchroedit, open-source real-time multiuser web editor — whew, that's a mouthful; sounds like the open-source version of Jot Live #

Yahoo buys Upcoming.org! — have you heard the news? Waxy is going to Yahoo! #

Yahoo and Upcoming, Sitting In A Tree

Posted October 4, 2005 by Andy Baio

Two years ago, I launched Upcoming.org and announced it to the world. Today, along with my partners Gordon Luk and Leonard Lin, I’m unbelievably proud to announce that Upcoming.org is now a member of the Yahoo! family.

I’ve always had a warm and fuzzy feeling about Yahoo. It’s been my browser homepage since forever, and I still have akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo/ stuck in muscle memory. Recently, the nostalgia has been replaced by admiration as I’ve watched them making smart decisions, acquiring great companies (Flickr, anyone?), and hiring all of my friends. The end result is that they’re doing some of the most interesting work online, and I found myself linking to them more and more over the last year.

So when Stewart asked if we’d be interested in coming to Yahoo, we were surprised and flattered. It’s immensely satisfying for a company as interesting and high-profile as Yahoo to validate the hard work we’ve done, and to see the future potential for growth.

After all, Upcoming was always a side project, fueled by passion and caffeine in the spare hours when we weren’t at our respective day jobs. When I think about how much we were able to pull off with so little, and what we’ll now be able to do with the staggering resources Yahoo has to offer… Well, it blows my mind a little. Sunnyvale, here we come!

I’ve posted more details on Upcoming.org, and both Gordon and Leonard have written about it on their own sites. For Yahoo’s take on it, Paul Levine from the Yahoo! Local team wrote about the news on the company blog.

Oh, and a profound thanks to everyone who’s supported the site since the beginning. I kiss you!

October 10, 2005: Thanks so much to Leonard for answering questions and covering e-mails while I was at Web 2.0 last week. We’re all getting ready for the big move later this month, but I’ll be around by e-mail and IM if you want to say hi.

October 4, 2005

Ning.com goes live! — 24 Hour Laundry's stealthy startup is an oddball social software playground; like Second Life for web apps, this is mind blowing geek cool #

October 3, 2005

Gametap goes live — two week free trial to play hundreds of retro games, from Pitfall to Myst (via) #

October 2, 2005

PDF: Towards Decentralized Recommender Systems — good thesis on an interesting topic #

Interactive Fiction Comp 2005 entries are available for download — or just wait for me to link to the winners in a few weeks #

37 Signals' Writeboard launches — nicely designed wiki with clean change tracking, but I'm surprised it's not real-time like Jot Live (via) #

October 1, 2005

Comment spammers linking to innocent blogs to discredit spam blacklists? — an excellent example of how blacklists fail as spammers adapt #

Tim O'Reilly tries to answer, What Is Web 2.0? — trying to wrangle an amorphous blob #

Metroblogging gets ripped off by scam artists? — designed by a Romanian IT company that makes Texas Holdem clones #

Google confirms plans to offer free San Francisco wifi — expect the cable/DSL companies to retaliate by pushing legislation (via) #