For the last 10 years, I've tracked the online distribution of Oscar-nominated films, going back to 2003. Using a number of sources (see below for methodology), I've compiled a massive spreadsheet, now updated to include 310 films.

This year, for the first time, I'm calling it: after three years of declines, the MPAA seems to be winning the battle to stop screener leaks. But why?

A record 37 films were nominated this year, and the studios sent out screeners for all but four of them. But, so far, only eight of those 33 screeners have leaked online, a record low that continues the downward trend from last year.

(Disclaimer: Any of this could change before the Oscar ceremony, and I'll keep the data updated until then.)

They may be winning the battle, but they've lost the war.

While screeners declined in popularity, 34 of the nominated films (92 percent) were leaked online by nomination day, with 25 of them available as high-quality DVD or Blu-ray rips. Only three films -- Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, My Week with Marilyn and W.E. -- haven't leaked online in any form (yet!).

If the goal of blocking leaks is to keep the films off the internet, then the MPAA still has a long way to go.

There are a number of theories about what's causing the decline.

It could be attributed to tighter controls -- personalized watermarks, the aggressive prosecution of leakers, and greater awareness of the risks for Academy voters.

But the MPAA may have little to do with the decline. Oscar-nominated films could be coming out earlier in the year, making screeners less important.

Or maybe the interests between the mainstream downloader and industry favorites is diverging? If the Oscars are mostly arthouse fare and critical darlings, but with low gross receipts, they'll be less desirable to leak online. It would be very interesting to track the historical box office performance of nominees to see how it affects downloading. (Maybe next year!)

The continuously shrinking window between theatrical and retail releases may be to blame. After all, once the retail Blu-ray or DVD is released, there's no reason for pirate groups to release a lower-quality watermarked screener.

The chart below tracks the window between U.S. release and its first DVD/Blu-Ray leak online, which shows how the window between theatrical and retail release dates is slowly closing since 2003.

Whatever the reason, online movie releasing groups are taking longer to pirate movies than ever. When I first started tracking releases in the early- to mid-2000s, the median time between theatrical release to its first leak online was 1 to 2 days. Now, that number's crept up to over three weeks.

The rise in leak time correlates with a dip in popularity for lower-quality sources, like camcorder-sourced footage. This year, only eight of the 37 nominees (21 percent) were sourced from camcorder footage. (This is likely because there are fewer blockbuster nominees than in the mid-2000s.)

As the industry slowly transitions from physical media to streaming video, it'll be interesting to see if the downward trend continues, or if the ease of capturing streaming video spawns a new renaissance for screeners. Last year, Fox Searchlight distributed screeners with iTunes, and all were quickly and easily pirated.

The Data Dump

Skeptical of my results? Want to dig into it yourself? Good! Here's the complete dataset, available on Google Spreadsheets or downloadable as an Excel spreadsheet or comma-separated text file.

Methodology

I include the full-length feature films in every category except documentary and foreign films (even music, makeup, and costume design).

I use Yahoo! Movies for the release dates, always using the first available U.S. date, even if it was a limited release, falling back to the first available U.S. date in IMDB.

All the cam, telesync, and screener leak dates are taken from VCD Quality, supplemented by dates in ORLYDB. I always use the first leak date, excluding unviewable or incomplete nuked releases.

The official screener release dates are from Academy member Ken Rudolph, who kindly lists the dates he receives each screener on his personal homepage. Thanks again, Ken!

For previous years, see 2004, 2005, 2007, 2008 (part 1 and part 2), 2009, 2010, and 2011.

Virtually every project I've ever worked on is threatened by this legislation:

Upcoming.org faced copyright complaints for event posters and listings that users added to the site.

Kickstarter gets DMCA takedowns from artists who find their work used in pitch videos, and from project founders quarreling with each other.

Supercut.org indexes hundreds of video remixes that reuse copyrighted content.

Kind of Bloop faced a lawsuit over the cover art.

And here on Waxy.org, I've had a number of battles over copyright. Among them, I received a cease-and-desist from EMI for being the first person to host DJ Danger Mouse's Grey Album on the web, from Disney for hosting the Kleptones' Night at the Hip-Hopera, and from Bill Cosby for hosting House of Cosbys, which was clearly fair use as a parody.

Every cease-and-desist and DMCA request I've received wasn't fun to get in my inbox, but it allowed me to deal with the issues directly with the copyright holder or using the due process of the court system.

Imagine, instead, a world where a bill like SOPA or PIPA passes. A copyright holder could bypass due process entirely, demanding that search engines stop linking to my sites, ad providers drop me, and force DNS providers not to resolve my domain name. All in the name of stopping piracy.

The chilling effect would be huge.

Every online community that allows for community-contributed content -- discussion forums, imageboards, Usenet newsgroups, photo sharing communities, video sites, and many more -- would be forced to pre-emptively self-censor, shut down, or risk getting blown off the net entirely.

That fucking sucks.

Everything I love about the web requires the unfettered freedom to build new ways to let people express themselves, and with that, comes the risk of copyright infringement.

Breaking the web isn't a solution.

Please take 10 minutes today to call your representatives -- or show up in person! --and let them know you won't stand for this. SOPA and PIPA must die.

A couple things struck me about this video.

First, I'm surprised that a full-length, 2.5-hour very slight remix of a popular film can survive on YouTube for over six weeks without getting removed. Now that it's on Kottke and Buzzfeed, I'm guessing it won't be around for much longer.

But I was just as amused by the video description:

"The legendary movie itself placed into chronological order. If you'd like me to put the full movie itself up, let me know and I'll be glad to oblige. Please no copyright infringement. I only put this up as a project."

These "no copyright infringement intended" messages are everywhere on YouTube, and about as effective as a drug dealer asking if you're a cop. It's like a little voodoo charm that people post on their videos to ward off evil spirits.

How pervasive is it? There are about 489,000 YouTube videos that say "no copyright intended" or some variation, and about 664,000 videos have a "copyright disclaimer" citing the fair use provision in Section 107 of the Copyright Act.

Judging by his username, I'm guessing crimewriter95 is 16 years old. I wouldn't be surprised if most of those million videos were uploaded by people under 21.

He's hardly alone. On YouTube's support forums, there's rampant confusion over what copyright is. People genuinely confused that their videos were blocked even with a disclosure, confused that audio was removed even though there was no "intentional copyright infringement." Some ask for the best wording of a disclaimer, not knowing that virtually all video is blocked without human intervention using ContentID.

YouTube's tried to combat these misconceptions with its Copyright School, but it seems futile. For most people, sharing and remixing with attribution and no commercial intent is instinctually a-okay.

Under current copyright law, nearly every cover song on YouTube is technically illegal. Every fan-made music video, every mashup album, every supercut, every fanfic story? Quite probably illegal, though largely untested in court.

No amount of lawsuits or legal threats will change the fact that this behavior is considered normal — I'd wager the vast majority of people under 25 see nothing wrong with non-commercial sharing and remixing, or think it's legal already.

Here's a thought experiment: Everyone over age 12 when YouTube launched in 2005 is now able to vote.

What happens when — and this is inevitable — a generation completely comfortable with remix culture becomes a majority of the electorate, instead of the fringe youth? What happens when they start getting elected to office? (Maybe "I downloaded but didn't share" will be the new "I smoked, but didn't inhale.")

Remix culture is the new Prohibition, with massive media companies as the lone voices calling for temperance. You can criminalize commonplace activities from law-abiding people, but eventually, something has to give.

Best viewed in HD fullscreen.

Top
briocloud, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8Uj1cV97XQ
jamiehall1615, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuWEx6Cfn-I

Bottom
OperationLeakS, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjnR7xET7Uo
asucd, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AdDLhPwpp4

Out of curiosity, I tried to see who the mystery blogger was.

He was using all the ordinary precautions for hiding his identity -- hiding personal info in the domain record, using a different IP address from his other sites, and scrubbing any shared resources from his WordPress install.

Nonetheless, I found his other blog in under a minute -- a thoughtful site about technology and local politics, detailing his full name, employer, photo, and family information. He worked for the local government, and if exposed, his anonymous blog could have cost him his job.

I didn't identify him publicly, but let him quietly know that he wasn't as anonymous as he thought he was. He stopped blogging that evening, and deleted the blog a week later.

So, how did I do it? The unlucky blogger slipped up and was ratted out by an unlikely source: Google Analytics.

Reverse Lookups

Typically, Google will only reveal a user's identity with a federal court order, as they did with a Blogger user who harassed a Vogue model in 2009.

But anonymous bloggers are at serious risk of outing themselves, simply by sharing their Google's Analytics ID across the sites they own.

If you're watching your pageviews, odds are you're using Google to do it. Launched in 2005, Analytics is the most popular web statistics service online, in use by half of Alexa's top million domains.

For the last few years, online SEO tools have published Analytics and AdSense IDs for the domains they crawl publicly, typically for competitive intelligence, such as ferreting out your competitor's other websites.

But in the last year, several free services such as eWhois and Statsie have started offering reverse lookup of Analytics IDs. (Most also allow searching on the Google AdSense ID, though I wasn't able to find an anonymous blogger sharing an AdSense ID across two sites.)

Finding anonymous bloggers from Analytics is less likely than other methods. It's still more likely that someone would slip up and leave their personal info in their domain or share a server IP than to share a Google Analytics account. But it's also more accurate. Hundreds or thousands of people can share an IP address on a single server and domain information can be faked, but a shared Google Analytics is solid evidence that both sites are run by the same person.

And unlike any other method, it can unmask people using hosted blogging services. Tumblr, Typepad and Blogger all have built-in support for Google Analytics, though reverse lookup services haven't comprehensively indexed them. (Note that Wordpress.com doesn't support Analytics or custom Javascript, so their users aren't affected.)

Just to be clear, this technique isn't new. The first Google Analytics reverse lookup services started in 2009, so the technique's been possible for at least two years. My concern is that it isn't nearly well-known enough. It's not mentioned in any guide to anonymous blogging I could find and several established bloggers, engineers, and entrepreneurs I spoke to were unaware of it.

Unmasking an anti-Mac blogger may not be life-changing, but if you're an anonymous blogger writing about Chinese censorship or Mexican drug cartels, the consequences could be dire.

I decided to see how pervasive this problem is. Using a sample of 50 anonymous blogs pulled from discussion forums and Google news, only 14 were using Google Analytics, much less than the average. Half of those, about 15% of the total, were sharing an analytics ID with one or more other domains.

In about 30 minutes of searching, using only Google and eWhois, I was able to discover the identities of seven of the anonymous or pseudonymous bloggers, and in two cases, their employers. One blog about Anonymous' hacking operations could easily be tracked to the founder's consulting firm, while another tracking Mexican cartels was tied to a second domain with the name and address of a San Diego man.

I've contacted each to let them know their potential exposure.

Protecting Yourself

Some of the most important and vital voices online are anonymous, and it's important to understand how you're exposed. Forgetting any of these can lead to lawsuits, firings, or even death.

If you're aware of the problem, it's very easy to avoid getting discovered this way. Here are my recommendations for making sure you stay anonymous.

1. Don't use Google Analytics or any other third-party embed system. If you have to, create a new account with an anonymous email. At the very least, create a separate Analytics account to track the new domain. (From the "My Analytics Accounts" dropdown, select "Create New Account.")
2. Turn on domain privacy with your registrar. Better, use a hosted service to avoid domain payments entirely.
3. If you're hosting your own blog, don't share IP addresses with any of your existing websites. Ideally, use a completely different host; it's easy to discover sites on neighboring IPs.
4. Watch your history. Sites like Whois Source track your history of domain and nameserver changes permanently, and Archive.org may archive old versions of your site. Being the first person to follow your anonymous Twitter account or promote the link could also be a giveaway.
5. Is your anonymity a life-or-death situation? Be aware that any service you use, including your own ISP, could be forced to reveal your IP address and account details under a court order. Use shared computers and an anonymous proxy or Tor when blogging to mask your IP address. Here's a good guide.

Stay safe.

Instead of asking a question, he bellowed, "Welcome to ACTION CASTLE! You are in a small cottage. There is a fishing pole here. Exits are out."

An awkward pause, followed by some giggling from the audience. "Is it our turn to say something?" said Mike.

"I don't understand 'is it our turn to say something,'" said the young man.

Instantly, Mike and Jerry understood, along with everyone in the audience born before 1978.

"Go out!" said Jerry.

"You go out. You're on the garden path. There is a rosebush here. There is a cottage here. Exits are north, south, and in."

The game was afoot.

They were playing Action Castle, the first of a series of live-action games based on classic text adventures from the late '70s and early '80s. Game designer Jared Sorensen calls the series Parsely, named after the text parsers that convert player input into something a computer can understand.

In Parsely games, the computer is replaced entirely by a human armed with a simple map and loose outline of the adventure. No hardware and no code; just people talking to people.

It's a clever solution to complex problems that have plagued game designers for decades. How do we understand the player's intent? Can we make AI characters act human, instead of like idiot robots? Is it possible to handle every edge case the player thinks of without working on this game for the next 10 years?

Making computers think and react like us is hard. So instead of making software more human, some game developers are trying to make humans more like software.

It's a similar approach used by Amazon for Mechanical Turk — their motto is "artificial artificial intelligence." By layering an API over an anonymous human workforce, developers can solve problems that are best tackled by humans, but without the messiness of actual human communication.

Projects like Soylent add another layer of abstraction, invisibly embedding Mechanical Turk in Microsoft Word to crowdsource tedious tasks like proofreading and summarizing paragraphs of text. The effect feels weirdly magical, like technology that beamed in from the future.

In the gaming world, this substitution usually feels less like magic and more like robotic performance art. These performers are software-inspired actors — people pretending they're videogames.

Nobody knows more about acting like a videogame than webcomic artist Andrew Hussie. Since 2006, he's been running MS Paint Adventures, a series of increasingly insane reader-driven comics in the style of text-based graphical adventure games.

His first adventure, Jailbreak, started with a series of simple drawings posted on a discussion forum. With every new post, commenters would suggest new commands to further the gameplay, which he'd rapidly draw.

Hussie didn't invent the genre — that honor likely goes to Ruby Quest and other denizens of 4chan's gaming forums — but he certainly popularized it.

In the process, he became the world's most prolific web cartoonist, sometimes updating up to 10 times a day.

To get a sense of the scale, Problem Sleuth, his second adventure, spanned over 1,600 pages in one year. Homestuck, his latest adventure, contains a staggering 4,100 pages so far, making it the longest webcomic of all time in a mere 2.5 years. And he still has a ways to go, with act five (out of seven) wrapping up just last week. (By comparison, the Guinness Book of World Records cites Mr. Boffo creator Joe Martin as the world's most prolific cartoonist, with a mere 1,300 comics yearly.)

Over time, Hussie's experimented with the amount of reader input. With Jailbreak, he drew the first command posted after every image, but as the adventures grew in popularity — it currently averages 600,000 unique visitors daily — this grew wildly impractical.

"When a story begins to get thousands of suggestions, paradoxically, it becomes much harder to call it truly 'reader-driven,'" wrote Hussie on his website. "This is simply because there is so much available, the author can cherry-pick from what's there to suit whatever he might have in mind, whether he's deliberately planning ahead or not."

With his newest adventure, Hussie leans on reader input less frequently and less directly, but involves the community in other ways. (For example, they just published their eighth soundtrack album of songs entirely created by fans. Don't get me started on the cosplay.)

MS Paint Adventures goes where no videogame can possibly go, with insane storylines, shifting rules, and a ridiculous number of objects to interact with.

In any game, every object or action added to the game multiplies the number of possible interactions. Add a gun, and the programmer needs to deal with players shooting every single other object in the game. Add a lighter, and you'd better prepare for players burning everything in sight. Math geeks call this combinatorial explosion.

Homestuck's bizarre alchemy system supports 280 trillion combinations. But Hussie doesn't need to draw them all, only the ones readers actually try.

Reader-driven games give the illusion of limitless options, at the cost of scale. Even at 1,600 pages per year, player demand far outstrips the efforts of a single cartoonist.

Frustrated with emotional expression in computer games, game design veteran Chris Crawford set out to build Storytron, a storytelling engine intended to model the drama and emotional complexity with computer-generated actors. Eighteen years later, Crawford is still working on it and emotional AI seems just as far out of reach.

Jason Rohrer, creator of the critically acclaimed art-game Passage, tackled the problem of emotional depth in a different way — he replaced the computer AI with a human.

Last year, he released Sleep Is Death, a quirky storytelling environment that connects a single player to a single "controller" over the network. The player has 30 seconds to make any move they can think of, and the controller scrambles to manipulate the scene to respond using a set of drawing tools.

The world is completely open-ended. The only limitation is the imagination of the player and controller.

As you'd expect, the results vary wildly, often depending on the relationship between the participants, but it's always surprising in a way that many traditional videogames aren't. Try browsing through SIDTube, the community-contributed gallery of Sleep Is Death playthroughs, and you'll find everything from a child's eye view of Hiroshima to meditations on growing old with friends.

Every playthrough is completely unique, a singular experience improvised by two people. Is that a game or performance art?

Earlier this year, a German theater group named Machina eX began staging live performances based on "point-and-click" adventure games like Secret of Monkey Island and Machinarium.

On the surface, Machina eX resembles other immersive performances like Tamara or Punchdrunk's Sleep No More, with audience members following oblivious actors around elaborately-designed rooms.

In Machina eX's performances, actors periodically get stuck in a loop, like a game paused. The audience must step in to solve the puzzle by manipulating objects in the room before the story can continue.

Each of these projects pull together elements of improvisational theater, performance art, and role-playing games.

But it's the lens of videogames that separates them from Dungeons & Dragons, TheatreSports, and countless other collaborative games.

Each game borrows the conventions of a familiar game genre, preparing anyone who plays it with a set of expectations — the fundamental rules, terminology, constraints, and affordances are all well-known. Even better, storytellers can subvert any of those expectations at any time.

And unlike a game engine, human storytellers can go off-script. In the case of MS Paint Adventures, they can even switch game genres entirely, as Andrew Hussie's done with Homestuck's evolution from adventure game to Sims-style simulation to traditional RPG to whatever the hell this is.

Using live, real-time human ingenuity as the engine for videogames creates completely new, unexpected experiences unlike anything you can code.

In The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson imagines a world where AI is extremely powerful, but still not convincing enough to convincingly simulate human behavior. Instead, AI characters are replaced by "ractors" — paid human actors who perform in virtual worlds for entertainment and education.

Even the all-powerful Wizard 0.2, the most powerful Turing machine in the land, is actually only used for data collection and processing — the real decisions are made by the man behind the curtain.

Chris Crawford and Peter Molyneux spent years trying to find Milo, but I think we'll be waiting for a while yet.

In the meantime, I'm going to go pretend a game or two.

To cap it off, I spent a night revamping Supercut.org into a comprehensive, browsable database of supercut videos, with the help of Twitter's Bootstrap CSS toolkit.

I'm very happy with how the site came out, so let me know if you have any suggestions and please submit any videos I missed. I also just added RSS and you can now follow @supercutorg for updates. Thanks!

For the last few years, I've tracked a particular flavor of remix culture that I called "supercuts" -- fast-paced video montages that assemble dozens or hundreds of short clips on a common theme.

Many supercuts isolate a word or phrase from a film or TV series -- think every "dude" in The Big Lebowski or every profanity from The Sopranos -- while others point out tired cliches, like those ridiculous zoom-and-enhance scenes from crime shows.

Since 2008, I've added every supercut I could find to a sprawling blog post. With nearly 150 of these videos, and more being added weekly, it's turned from a blog post into a minor obsession.

Earlier this year, I collaborated with NYC-based artist Michael Bell-Smith on Supercut.org, a 24-hour hack to make a supercut composed entirely out of other supercuts, along with a randomized supercut browser.

Today, I'm happy to announce that I've relaunched the site to let you browse the entire collection in different ways, subscribe to updates, or submit your own to the growing list. I'm also releasing the entire dataset publicly, which you can download at the end of this post.

To understand the rise of this new genre, let's take a look back at how it began and how it's evolved in the last three years.

The Proto-Cuts

While the web popularized the genre, the art world was experimenting with similar film cut-ups for years before YouTube was a gleam in Chad & Steve's eyes.

Brooklyn-based critic Tom McCormack wrote the definitive history of the supercut, tracing its origins back to found-footage cinema, like Bruce Conner's A MOVIE from 1958.

But it wasn't until the 1990s that clear descendants of the genre emerged. Matthias Müller's Home Stories (1990) reused scenes from 1950s- and 1960s-era Hollywood melodramas, filmed directly from the TV set, to show actresses in near-identical states of distress.

Christian Marclay's Telephones (1995) showed famous actors answering ringing telephones in a string of surreal, disjointed conversations throughout Hollywood history. Edited together, the cadence and rhythm of nonstop clips feels very reminiscent of modern supercuts.

Apple tried to license Marclay's film for the launch of the iPhone in 2007, but he refused. Instead, they made their own, borrowing the idea wholesale. (Marclay decided not to sue.)

As far as I can tell, the earliest supercut native to the web was Chuck Jones' Buffies from 2002, which isolated every mention of "Buffy" from the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

While there were rare exceptions, supercuts really didn't start proliferating online until around 2006. Why then? The likely cause: YouTube.

Before YouTube, it was incredibly difficult to both find and share video. After YouTube's launch in 2005, searching through big chunks of film and TV's recorded history became simple. Perhaps more importantly, sharing the video with others didn't require server space, a huge amount of bandwidth, and a deep knowledge of video codecs. It just worked.

The result was that clips were easy to find and even easier to distribute. Combined with the rise of BitTorrent and the availability of affordable, easy-to-use video editing software like iMovie, it was the perfect environment for video remixing. The only missing ingredient is the time and passion to make it happen.

Supercut as Criticism

When I first started tracking the trend in 2008, almost every example was created by a superfan. Creating videos with hundreds of edits takes a staggering amount of time, and the only people willing to do it were those who were in love with the source material.

In the last three years, the form seems to have evolved from fan culture to criticism.

Rich Juzwiak may have started the trend by calling out reality TV contestants for their overused "I'm not here to make friends" trope. That directly led to supercuts criticizing lazy screenwriting, from "We've got company" to "It's gonna blow!"

But recently, it's being used for more serious criticism: calling out politicians and the news media. The Daily Show pioneered the reuse of archival news footage and quick edits to point out the absurdity of the news media and political figures, but online video remixers are taking it much further.

Video remixing group Wreck & Salvage took Sarah Palin's speech about the Arizona shootings and removed everything but the sound of her breathing. The result, Sarah's Breath, was a creepy example of supercut as political speech.

In March, artist Diran Lyons released one of the most epic supercuts ever -- chronicling every time President Obama says "spending" in the complete video archive posted to the White House website. The result is six minutes long with over 600 edits.

The results are effective. Just as it was used to point out film cliches, a supercut sends a message about a public figure's speech in a very short period of time. For that reason, I wouldn't be surprised to see supercuts make their way into 2012 campaign ads.

Breaking It Down

I wanted to learn more about the structure of these videos, so I enlisted the help of the anonymous workforce at Amazon's Mechanical Turk to analyze the videos for me.

Using the database of 146 videos, I asked them to count the number of clips in each video, along with some qualitative questions about their contents. Their results were interesting.

When looking at the source of the videos, nearly half come from film with a little over one-third sourced from TV shows. The rest are a mix of real-life events, videogames, or a combination of multiple types, as you can see below.

According to the turker estimates, the average supercut is composed of about 82 cuts, with more than 100 clips in about 25% of the videos. Some supercuts, about 5%, contain over 300 edits!

I asked the turkers whether each supercut was comprehensive, collecting every possible example, or if they were just a representative sample. For example, collecting every one of Kramer's entrances from Seinfeld vs. a selection of explosions from action films. The results were split, with about 60% comprehensive. This could be attributed to film cliche supercuts, which don't attempt to be thorough.

Finally, I was wondering whether each video's creator was a fan or critic of the source material. The workers surveyed said that most supercuts were created by fans, about 73% of the time. This style of video remixing may be useful for criticism, but for now, it seems to mostly be a labor of love.

The Data Dump

Want to do your own analysis, or do some video remixing of your own?

You can view the full supercut database below or on Google Docs, or download the data as a comma-separated text file or Excel spreadsheet.

And, of course, let me know if you find any that I missed!

As part of the arrangement, I retain joint copyright and can republish my columns here after 24 hours, which I'm very happy about.

My first column went up on Wired yesterday, a thinly-disguised rant on Google's removal of the + operator from search, which I noticed last Wednesday.

Obviously, this change isn't the end of the world, but it got me thinking about how the importance of alpha users changes as services grow in popularity. I hope you enjoy it.

Google+ is the fastest-growing social network in history, with 40 million users since its June launch. To help them focus, Google's quietly shuttered a number of products, removing iGoogle and Google Reader's social features and closing Google Labs, Buzz, Jaiku and Code Search in the last two weeks alone.

But in doing so, they also killed off one of its oldest and most useful tools, from its most popular product.

On Wednesday, Google retired a longer-standing "plus": the + operator, a standard bit of syntax used to force words and phrases to appear in search results. The operator was part of Google since its launch in 1997 and built into every search engine since.

Unlike their other recent closures, the removal of + was made without any public announcement. It could only be found by doing a search, which advised the user to double-quote the string from now on, making "searches" look like "awkward" "Zagat" "reviews."

Google wouldn't disclose exactly why they phased it out, though it seems obvious that they're paving the way for Google+ profile searches. When Google+ launched, instead of adopting Twitter's @reply syntax, they coined their own format for mentioning people — adding a plus to the beginning of a name — triggering the future conflict with the + operator.

The fate of the "+" symbol was clear: protect a 12-year-old convention loved by power users, or bring Google+ profile searching to the mainstream? It was doomed from the start.

Geeks from Reddit and Hacker News were quick to condemn the move.

To understand why they're upset about a single character, let's step back to Google's launch in 1997.

Why It Matters

For the first 12 years of its life, from its launch until early 2009, Google worked like this: every term you searched for appeared on every web page in its results. Nerds call this an "and" search — a search for "cherry pie" becomes "cherry AND pie."

By comparison, the popular convention at the time was to return pages with any of the search terms present — an "or" search. The results were noisy and unhelpful.

Google's own help page, archived in February 1999, explained it:

Google only supports "and" queries. That is, it only returns pages that include all the query terms. The + operator, which enforces "and" behavior on some search engines, is unnecessary on Google.

At the time, this new feature was a godsend for savvy users. Because every term appeared in results, you could continue to refine your queries by simply adding new words to the search bar until you found what you were looking for.

As Google grew in popularity, this didn't scale. Non-technical users don't know what search terms to use or how to use search modifiers, and they shouldn't have to.

Instead, Google needed to read minds to find what their mainstream audience was looking for, even if it meant ignoring what they actually wrote.

They started with the introduction of spelling suggestions, with "do you mean?" prompts introduced in 2003. By 2009, these were so successful that Google replaced the user's search with the corrected words by default, though they always explicitly explained the change.

In January 2009, however, Google began experimenting with silently ignoring search terms completely.

For anyone deep-diving Google for the dark corners of the Internet, this change was hard to swallow. For the first time, searches were unreliable — an "or" search instead of an "and" search.

Journalists and software engineers, two classes of people who commonly search for obscure terms, objected to the change most.

"It's incredibly annoying," wrote Peter Rojas, gdgt founder and co-founder of Engadget and Gizmodo. "I hate how they don't want you to do searches for exactly the words you've entered and nothing else."

"I also use + constantly. It's such a long-standing convention," wrote Mat Honan, senior reporter for Gizmodo and former contributing editor to Wired.

Even Matt Cutts, head of webspam at Google, personally agreed. "My fingers are crossed for coming up with a better approach to this," he said on Twitter. "As a power user, I want my escape hatch/safety valve for 'Yup, I want exactly that weird word' too."

So, should we just "search" "like" "this" forever? Naturally, enterprising hackers are already routing around the perceived damage.

The Alternatives

As Google marginalizes its core base, it's opened the door for smaller, more nimble startups, such as DuckDuckGo, a one-man project that's quickly becoming the go-to search engine for discriminating nerds.

With a corpus of powerful search modifiers and a hard-line stance against tracking and personalization, it was created and maintained for the last four years by a single engineer, Gabriel Weinberg. This month, Weinberg announced DuckDuckGo accepted funding from Union Square Ventures and hired his first full-time employee.

For those unwilling to leave Google's deep index, there are other solutions. One pseudonymous hacker made FindErr, a simple proxy that adds quotes to every search before shuttling the user off to Google.

My personal favorite is this simple userscript created by electrotype for Hacker News, which instantly adds quote marks to every submitted search. It works in Chrome natively and Firefox with the Greasemonkey plugin.

Too Hardcore

As a service grows in popularity, alpha users outlive their usefulness. The core users that helped build a service by word-of-mouth often find themselves dwarfed in numbers by people with very different needs.

Take the recently-announced changes to Google Reader, for instance. Reader is the most widely-used and deeply-loved feed reader ever made, steamrolling over several startups in the mid-2000s in the process. Any startup would be thrilled to have their devoted audience; within Google, Reader seems like a distraction.

Last week, the Reader team announced the removal of all of its social features, used by a relatively small but rabid fanbase.

Courtney Stanton, a Boston-based product manager, called Google Reader "the best social network created so far" in a passionate rant on her blog. "For me, this is the destruction of the only online space I truly give a shit about."

There's no easy solution. Should a company be expected to maintain features indefinitely because a tiny fraction of their base loves them? There are tangible costs to maintaining old code, and fringe features can clutter an interface, making user experience worse for those that don't use them.

For those people, removing features is more than an inconvenience. It shatters an entire community. But, ultimately, their usage is a rounding error in the overall product activity.

With Google Search and the + operator, the consequences are far less dire. I asked Google what inspired the + removal, and how they balance the needs of power users with those of their mainstream base. "We're sensitive to the needs of both newer users and 'power users' alike, and we're always looking for ways to improve search for both groups," a Google spokesperson said. "We make changes to search after rigorous testing shows that they improve the user experience."

At Google's scale, user testing can hide the behaviors and passions of entire subcommunities. The long-term implications of small changes like these are very hard to predict, especially with early adopters.

Who knows? If Google's search engine dominance started with an "and," it might just end with a "+".

Based on the dates mentioned in the Knowledge Navigator video, it takes place on September 16, 2011. The date on the professor's calendar is September 16, and he's looking for a 2006 paper written "about five years ago," setting the year as 2011.

And this morning, at the iPhone keynote, Apple announced Siri, a natural language-based voice assistant, would be built into iOS 5 and a core part of the new iPhone 4S.

So, 24 years ago, Apple predicted a complex natural-language voice assistant built into a touchscreen Apple device, and was less than a month off.

(Thanks to Hugh Dubberly for the video, who helped create it for ex-CEO John Sculley's EDUCOM 1987 keynote in six weeks on a $60,000 budget.)

This is my guide to PDX for people like me: people who geek out about good food, beer, comics, and computers. It's for people who want to experience the best of Portland in a short period of time, with a heavy focus on new stuff: many of the places listed here have opened in the last year.

One thing you'll notice is that most of the best stuff isn't in the downtown area. To really experience Portland, you'll need to cross the bridge to the east side. But don't worry, PDX is tiny and nothing will take you more than a few minutes by bus, bike, or taxi.

If you want any other suggestions, or have suggestions of your own, let me know!

View Waxy.org's Essential Guide to Portland 2011 in a larger map

Restaurants

Tasty N Sons (NE)
If you have to choose one place to eat breakfast in Portland, go here. Imagine tapas-style small plates, but focused only on breakfast staples. Brunch daily from 9am, get there early.

Meat Cheese Bread and Bunk Sandwiches (SE)
These two restaurants are focused on making the best sandwiches in Portland. If it's late, try the new Bunk Bar in inner SE, which brings their sandwiches to a bar-like setting.

Salt & Straw (NE)
New this summer, Tyler Malek's creative flavors and farm-to-cone ingredients make this the best ice cream around. Try the pear w/blue cheese, honey-strawberry-balsamic with black pepper, or special flavors made with local microbrewed beers.

Pine State Biscuits (NE/SE)
Heart-stopping, delicious biscuit sandwiches. I don't think there's a bad thing on the menu, but the Reggie and Moneyball are particularly great. If you skip breakfast, their NE location stays open until 1am on Fridays and Saturdays.

Screendoor (SE)
Portland meets the South, with farm-to-table comfort food. Surprisingly great for vegans, with a menu of local organic sides and salads that changes weekly. Best fried chicken I've ever had.

Apizza Scholls (SE)
Slice ranked it as one of the top five pizzerias in America, and the #2 pizza on the West coast in their March Madness bracket. Just get there when they open, or be ready to saddle up with a couple beers and wait.

Pok Pok (SE)
2011 James Beard-winning chef Andy Ricker kicked off a culinary renaissance in Portland with his frontyard grill-turned-restaurant empire. Inspired by Thai street food, you won't find chicken panang anywhere near Pok Pok's eclectic, face-melting menu. While you wait, grab a drink at the Pok Pok-owned Whiskey Soda Lounge across the street. And try a drinking vinegar, you won't regret it.

Grüner (SW)
Delicious Alpine cuisine, my favorite new restaurant in the downtown area. They also just opened Kask, their newly-opened casual bar adjacent to the restaurant.

Wafu (SE)
Opened last month, this is the best ramen in Portland and the most inspired Japanese in town. They're still working out the kinks, but even their worst is better than most cities' best.

Food Carts and Late-Night Dining

The food cart scene in Portland is ridiculously amazing, a food culture revolution with over 670 carts in 25 "pods" (groups of carts), some spanning full city blocks. They can be a little hit-or-miss, but there are some amazing gems to be found. New this year: carts serving alcohol.

Note: Voodoo Donuts is for tourists. Like Le Bistro Montage, Whiffies Fried Pies and Potato Champion, these late-night staples became famous with locals by being open when bars let out. They should only be consumed drunk. (And even then, you can do better.) Any other time, they're just mediocre.

Pyro Pizza, Whiffies fried pie, and Potato Champion poutine, photo by Stacy Clinton

Cartopia (SE, weekends until 3am)
This collection of carts on SE Hawthorne at 12th is more known for its late-night hours and raucous vibe than the quality of its food. But if you're hungry after a late night of drinking, it's definitely worth trying Pyro Pizza's wood-fired oven-in-a-cart and the crepes from Perierra Creperie. New this week and running until the end of October, is Hospitality Suite, the nation's first cocktail cart, run by the Oregon Bartenders' Guild to showcase Portland Cocktail Week.

Nong's Khao Man Gai (SW)
Bangkok-born Nong Poonsukwattana offers only one item on her menu — khao man gai, a uniquely Thai street dish made from poached chicken and rice and sauce. Arguably the best cart in Portland, located at the SW 9th and Alder cart pod, the largest in town. Closed Sundays.

LeRoy's Familiar Vittles (SE)
The best BBQ in town comes from this food cart on SE 48th at Division, in the only cart pod in town with its own full bar, pool table, and piano. Try the mac & cheese. Close runner-up: Podnah's Pit BBQ on NE Killingsworth.

Three Pigs Deli (NW, weekends until 4am)
Another brand-new addition to Portland's late-night dining scene, Three Pigs is a tiny deli downtown serves delicious sandwiches made from fresh, local ingredients, some grown behind the counter. They have lunch hours, but quality late-night food is so rare, this is worth seeking out at night.

Drinking

Portland's a big beer town, home to more microbreweries than any city in the world, though the distillery and cocktail scene's grown in recent years. Here are my picks for the absolute best.

Hair of the Dog Brewing, Photo by throgers

Hair of the Dog (SE)
This microbrewery is beer geek heaven, capturing five out of RateBeer's top six Oregon beers. A perfect place to try some of Portland's best beer, though their tasting room has quirky hours, open only from 2-8pm, Wednesday through Sunday.

Bye & Bye/Sweet Hereafter (NE/SE)
The Bye & Bye on NE Alberta and the Sweet Hereafter, its newly-opened sister on SE Belmont, are distinctly Portland institutions — vegan bars with food that's shockingly tasty even for die-hard omnivores like me (try the chili pie!). Great beer list, delicious and strong cocktails served in Mason jars, comfortable vibe, and plenty of seating make this a great meeting place.

Bailey's Taproom (SW)
There isn't much atmosphere here, but Bailey's makes up for it with the most interesting taplist in Portland — 20 beers rotating daily, selected by mega-beer geeks.

Green Dragon (SE)
With 50 beers on tap and huge indoor/outdoor spaces, this place is great for meeting large groups of people. The food menu and taplist can be hit-or-miss, but there's always a handful of great beers in the mix. If you're feeling experimental, try Cascade Brewing across the street, quite possibly the only brewery in the U.S. focused exclusively on sour ales.

Distillery Row (SE)
If you're here on a weekend, take an hour to sample Portland's craft distillery movement on foot, doing tastings from House Spirits and Deco Distilling to New Deal and Integrity. If you can only choose one, New Deal's the best deal, with eight excellent liquors for $5.

Townshend's Tea House (NE)
There's no shortage of good coffee in Portland. (Stumptown, Ristretto, and Barista are all safe bets.) But I'm not a big coffee drinker so I tend to head to Townshend's, the best tea in Portland. Their bubble tea is best in town, with a wide range of flavors and your pick of tapioca, aloe or fruit jellies.

Attractions

Ground Kontrol at night, photo by Incredible Ape

Ground Kontrol (NW)
World-class '80s video arcade and pinball gallery that turns into a 21+ bar after 5pm. Absolutely essential geek visit.

Powell's Technical Books (NW)
Everyone knows about Powell's Books, but geeks may be more interested in Powell's Technical, an essential resource for modern and vintage books on science, math, computers, and engineering. It recently relocated directly across the street from the flagship store.

Floating World Comics (NW)
Portland has some great comic shops, but for art/indie/experimental comic lovers, Floating World can't be missed.

Counter Media (SW)
On the other side of Burnside from Powell's, Counter Media is a wonderful bookstore carrying a carefully-curated collection of indie comics and graphic novels, with crazy fetish stuff in the back. When you're done, hit up Reading Frenzy next door for some of the best of Portland's local zine scene.

Billy Galaxy (SW)
Though often wildly overpriced, this is nostalgia heaven. Go buy that Burgertime lunchbox you've always wanted.

Have a great time!

Lately, I've been interested in seeing how game modders and mappers have recreated the World Trade Center, the events of September 11, and the WTC Memorial in various game engines. Some of these are profane and offensive, quite likely made by teens that have no first-hand memory of the disaster, but most are intended as tributes. Here's the best of what I was able to find.

But it's shaping up to be more than that. Creative fakesters are using the blank slate to turn Heello into the parallel-universe version of Twitter.

A world in which Heello was cofounded by Ev Williams (@ev), who acts as CEO and gives away free iPads to Heello users.

Where CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk) reports all the news in ALL CAPS, including breaking news reports like "JUSTIN BIEBER" and "I JUST UNLOCKED THE 'I'M ON A BOAT' BADGE ON FOURSQUARE."

A world where Mark Zuckerberg (@MarkZuckerberg) is a profane, sexist womanizer.

And where major web services (past and present) flirt and snark at each other, like @Tumblr, @Color, @4chan, and @Pownce.

Of course, Heello wouldn't be complete without its own Social Media Experts. "Please Check Out My Blogpost 'How To Drive Qualified Traffic To Your Blog Via Heello.'"

Heello is like a blank-slate Twitter with no moderation or verification. I doubt the Heello team wanted or expected this behavior, but they inadvertently created a perfect playground for parody and meta-commentary, like Uncyclopedia or Encyclopedia Dramatica's parallel world versions of Wikipedia.

It should be fun to see how they respond.

Update: Marshall Kirkpatrick, lead writer of ReadWriteWeb, comments, "They told me they were going to remove any of these that weren't clearly satires. That's a real shame and shows a lack of sense of humor." The first casualty was @ev, which was deleted shortly after this post was published.

Five things I never knew about Monopoly's official rules:

1. If a player decides not to buy a property, it immediately goes up for auction by the bank and is sold to the highest bidder. This blew my mind.

2. Houses must be built, and sold, evenly across a color-group. For example, you can't build three houses on Park Place without having two houses on Boardwalk first.

3. It's the property owner's responsibility to ask for rent. If you forget to ask for rent before the end of the next player's turn, you're out of luck.

4. Rent is doubled on properties without houses in a monopoly.

5. Income tax is calculated from your total net worth, including all properties and buildings, not just your cash. And you have to decide whether to pay 10% or $200 before you add it up.

While these official rules gradually disappeared from common play, other unofficial "house rules" came to take their place. We always put funds collected from Chance/Community Chest cards into a "kitty" that was given to whoever landed on Free Parking. Many others gave $400 when landed on "Go," or didn't allow rent to be collected while in jail.

Many of us learned Monopoly like we learned the rules of dodgeball or rock-scissors-paper — spread by word-of-mouth from family and friends.

It's interesting to see a commercial game see the same sort of cultural variation as other children's folk games.

But maybe that's appropriate for a game that was itself derived from another board game. Contrary to popular belief, Charles Darrow didn't invent Monopoly in 1933 from scratch. It was heavily based on The Landlord's Game, an innovative board game patented in 1904 by Lizzie Magie, to be a "practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences."

The Landlord's Game and its variations like "Auction Monopoly" and "The Fascinating Game of Finance" spread by word of mouth throughout the early-20th century with evolving rules and hand-drawn boards, popular among the Quakers and used as a teaching aid for university students.

In 1933, Charles Darrow played a homemade version of The Landlord's Game printed on oil cloth, saw the market potential, and tried to patent the new "Monopoly" as his own. After finding great success selling handmade versions, he sold the rights to Parker Brothers. Parker Brothers bought Magie's patent for $500 to have an undisputed claim to the board game, but was threatened by other popular competitors and homemade variations. Through a process of litigation, acquisition, and quiet settlements during the late-1930s, Parker Brothers wiped all the other derivative versions of The Landlord's Game off the map.

By the 1970s, Parker Brothers' revisionist history was canon — the official Monopoly rules and a 1974 book on the history of the game stated that the game was created solely by Charles Darrow.

So, when someone says you're playing Monopoly wrong, tell them you're playing your own version... just like Darrow did.

Because everything is a remix.

Me: Can I make a suggestion?
John: Sure.
Me: You guys should make a sweet tea.
John (emphatically): No.
Me: Why?
John: Because it's disgusting. I make all the iced tea myself. Simple syrup's over there. If you want to ruin it, go ahead.

Some people would get turned off by this, others would be downright pissed. But this is exactly what I like in a business, and it's why I eat there at least once a week.

John's singular, uncompromising vision is why the food is so damned great. He's not trying to make a restaurant that makes everyone happy; he built a place that he'd want to eat at, and if you don't like it, piss off.

The same goes for the web. I'd rather use a service that has a strong, single-minded vision, even if some of the decisions aren't exactly how I'd want them, than a washed-out, milquetoast service created by committee, designed to meet market demand, that tries to make everybody happy.

Another way to put it: if someone out there doesn't hate your product, it's probably not worth using.

I'm cross-posting it below, for posterity. Hope you enjoy it!

During the Twitter Town Hall collaboration with the White House, President Obama posted a single tweet to @whitehouse, asking this question:

This was historic for two reasons: it was the first time that a President has ever posted directly to a social network from the White House. Second, it was the first time the President's directly asked for feedback from users of a social network.

There was some great analysis of the Twitter Town Hall activity, including TwitSprout's infographics and Radian6's detailed postmortem on Wednesday. Both focused on the #askobama questions that were asked before and during the Town Hall. Using ThinkUp's data collecting responses to the President's first tweet, I'd like to focus specifically on responses to the President's question above.

We've been using ThinkUp to archive and analyze the White House's Twitter account since May 1, 2009 and, as we've shared before, have gathered a pretty amazing corpus for analysis. With that, it's useful to see how people responded to this new kind of personal, inquisitive behavior relative to past activity.

The short version: the response to the President's tweet drew more than three times the number of responses as the nearest runner-up, and more than six times more replies than anything posted in the last year. There were over 1,850 responses to his deficit question, topping the two Grand Challenges questions from April 2010 combined. You can see them all on the White House's ThinkUp.

By comparison, the chart below shows the top ten most-replied tweets since the White House started using Twitter.

It's worth noting that eight out of the top 10 most replied were all posted in the last six months, suggesting that the White House's New Media team is increasing its effectiveness in engaging its audience on Twitter, even as that audience grows.

This tweet was the most effective the White House has ever been at drawing a behavior response from its followers. This is interesting, because it differs from typical tweets in two ways:

• It is personal (using the President's "- bo" signature)
• It asks a concrete question

While some of the response could be attributed to the focus on the Twitter event, it's likely that continuing this question-answer process with a personal touch leads to deeper and richer engagement.

Who talks to @whitehouse?

To help determine the subject expertise for each of the respondents, I used the Twitter API to retrieve the lists that each person belonged to. My hope was that the list names could act as tags, like on Delicious or Flickr, to help group and categorize individuals.

Because lists are often used for personal use, the most frequently-used list names include some unhelpful ones like "friends" and "people," but many can be used as useful categories like "politics," "writers," and "tech." Here's a Wordle of the top 100 most frequently used.

Lists that @whitehouse responders belong to

These lists let us examine the responses from different facets. Here are the top five responses from people most tagged with "politics" or "political":

Compare that to people tagged with "tech" or "technology":

As you'd expect, the responses are very different from people tagged "green":

It's surprising how useful these results are, considering how limited Twitter Lists are exposed throughout the interface. This suggests that Twitter List memberships can be a useful measure of determining a user's authority in subject areas, which we'll be looking into for ThinkUp.

The Answers

When asked where to reduce spending, 479 people (about 25%) included some variation of "war," "defense" or "military." Other popular suggestions included raising taxes/ending the Bush-era tax cuts (11%) and tax subsidies for oil companies and farming (6%). People seemed to be evenly split between those who want to protect Medicare and Social Security and those who want to see it overhauled.

With regards to where to invest for the future, the most popular was education, with about 17% of responses including terms like "education," "school" or "teachers." 6% want to see renewed investments in energy, 5% on infrastructure projects, and 2% in health care. (Surprisingly, only 15 people mentioned decriminalizing marijuana.)

For the full set of responses, you can browse them all on ThinkUp. Or, if you like, the entire dataset is available on Google Docs or embedded below.

Conclusion

For us, it's been fascinating to see an American President use social media to directly ask questions and get answers. We hope other government agencies are taking note of how powerful the combination of a direct question, authentic voice, and an audience can be for democracy. And these lessons extend to the private sector, as well: every company can learn how to better interact with their community from this national experiment in democracy.

The next step, of course, is to make sure those answers are useful enough to inform decision-making. If our representatives are listening, and people feel they're being heard, everyone benefits.

We're happy for people to reuse our findings. Any questions about these results can be addressed to research@expertlabs.org.

Note: I posted this on Twitter and Maisel's Facebook wall before it was deleted, but I'll repeat it here: I understand you may have strong feelings about this issue, but please don't harass him publicly or privately. Reasonable discussion about the case is fine; personal attacks, name-calling and abuse are not. We're all humans here. Be cool.

Still want the full story? Read on.

(Note: This post was reviewed by both my and Jay Maisel's legal counsel.)

Remember Kind of Bloop, the chiptune tribute to Miles Davis' Kind of Blue that I produced? I went out of my way to make sure the entire project was above board, licensing all the cover songs from Miles Davis's publisher and giving the total profits from the Kickstarter fundraiser to the five musicians that participated.

But there was one thing I never thought would be an issue: the cover art.

Before the project launched, I knew exactly what I wanted for the cover — a pixel art recreation of the original album cover, the only thing that made sense for an 8-bit tribute to Kind of Blue. I tried to draw it myself, but if you've ever attempted pixel art, you know how demanding it is. After several failed attempts, I asked a talented friend to do it.

You can see the results below, with the original album cover for comparison.

In February 2010, I was contacted by attorneys representing famed New York photographer Jay Maisel, the photographer who shot the original photo of Miles Davis used for the cover of Kind of Blue.

In their demand letter, they alleged that I was infringing on Maisel's copyright by using the illustration on the album and elsewhere, as well as using the original cover in a "thank you" video I made for the album's release. In compensation, they were seeking "either statutory damages up to $150,000 for each infringement at the jury's discretion and reasonable attorneys fees or actual damages and all profits attributed to the unlicensed use of his photograph, and $25,000 for Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) violations."

After seven months of legal wrangling, we reached a settlement. Last September, I paid Maisel a sum of $32,500 and I'm unable to use the artwork again. (On the plus side, if you have a copy, it's now a collector's item!) I'm not exactly thrilled with this outcome, but I'm relieved it's over.

But this is important: the fact that I settled is not an admission of guilt. My lawyers and I firmly believe that the pixel art is "fair use" and Maisel and his counsel firmly disagree. I settled for one reason: this was the least expensive option available.

At the heart of this settlement is a debate that's been going on for decades, playing out between artists and copyright holders in and out of the courts. In particular, I think this settlement raises some interesting issues about the state of copyright for anyone involved in digital reinterpretations of copyrighted works.

There are a lot of myths and misconceptions about "fair use" on the Internet. Everyone thinks they know what fair use is, but not even attorneys, judges, and juries can agree on a clear definition. The doctrine itself, first introduced in the 1976 Copyright Act, is frustratingly vague and continually being reinterpreted.

Four main factors come into play:

1. The purpose and character of your use: Was the material transformed into something new or copied verbatim? Also, was it for commercial or educational use?
2. The nature of the copyrighted work
3. The amount and substantiality of the portion taken, and
4. The effect of the use upon the potential market

For each case, courts take these factors into account and render a verdict, occasionally contradicting the opinions of past judges and juries.

The crux of our disagreement hinges on the first factor — whether the Kind of Bloop illustration is "transformative."

In his influential paper on fair use, Judge Pierre N. Leval wrote, "Factor One is the soul of fair use." Stanford's Fair Use Center asks, "Has the material you have taken from the original work been transformed by adding new expression or meaning? Was value added to the original by creating new information, new aesthetics, new insights and understandings?"

From the beginning, Kind of Bloop was a creative experiment. I was drawn to the contradiction between the textured, subdued emotion in Kind of Blue and the cold, mechanical tones of retro videogame music. The challenge was to see whether chiptune artists could create something highly improvisational, warm, and beautiful from the limited palette of 1980s game consoles. (I think we succeeded.)

Similarly, the purpose of the album art was to engage both artist and viewer in the same exercise — can NES-style pixel art capture the artistic essence of the original album cover, with a fraction of the resolution and color depth of an analog photograph?

It reinforced the artistic themes of the project, to convey the feel of an entire album reimagined through an 8-bit lens. Far from being a copy, the cover art comments on it and uses the photo in new ways to send a new message.

This kind of transformation is the foundation of fair use. In a 2006 verdict, the court found artist Jeff Koons' use of a fashion photo "adds something new, with a further purpose or different character, altering the first with new expression, meaning, or message."

I don't think there's any question that Kind of Bloop's cover illustration does the same thing. Maisel disagreed.

The second fair use factor is the nature of the copyrighted work. Works that are published and factual lean towards fair use, works that are unpublished and creative towards infringement. While Maisel's photograph is creative, it's also primarily documentary in nature and it was published long before my illustration was created.

With regard to the third factor, although the illustration does represent the cover of Kind of Blue, it does so at a dramatically reduced resolution that incorporates few of the photograph's protectable elements. Courts routinely find fair use even where the entirety of an image is used.

The fourth factor considers the impact on the market value of the original work. It's obvious the illustration isn't a market substitute for the original: it's a low-resolution artistic rendering in the style of 8-bit computer graphics that is, at best, of interest to a few computer enthusiasts.

And it's worth noting that trying to license the image would have been moot. When asked how much he would've charged for a license, Maisel told his lawyer that he would never have granted a license for the pixel art. "He is a purist when it comes to his photography," his lawyer wrote. "With this in mind, I am certain you can understand that he felt violated to find his image of Miles Davis, one of his most well-known and highly-regarded images, had been pixellated, without his permission, and used in a number of forms including on several websites accessible around the world."

In practice, none of this matters. If you're borrowing inspiration from any copyrighted material, even if it seems clear to you that your use is transformational, you're in danger. If your use is commercial and/or potentially objectionable, seek permission (though there's no guarantee it'll be granted) or be prepared to defend yourself in court.

Anyone can file a lawsuit and the costs of defending yourself against a claim are high, regardless of how strong your case is. Combined with vague standards, the result is a chilling effect for every independent artist hoping to build upon or reference copyrighted works.

It breaks my heart that a project I did for fun, on the side, and out of pure love and dedication to the source material ended up costing me so much — emotionally and financially. For me, the chilling effect is palpably real. I've felt irrationally skittish about publishing almost anything since this happened. But the right to discuss the case publicly was one concession I demanded, and I felt obligated to use it. I wish more people did the same — maybe we wouldn't all feel so alone.

If you feel like it, you're still welcome to buy digital copies of Kind of Bloop (without the cover art) at kindofbloop.com. Donations can be made to the EFF, and you'll get a rad 8-bit shirt for joining. And if you have any ideas for an alternate album cover that won't land me in court, bring it on!

Special thanks to my lawyers (Chris, Erica & Ben), the EFF, Fred von Lohmann, and the team at Kickstarter for moral support.

I'm collecting examples of reinterpretations of copyrighted works, like the ones interspersed in this post. Here's some more I found:

* Thomas Hooper's pixel recreations of famous album covers
* Norn Cutson's Record Collection, a book of illustrations based on album covers
* Format Magazine's hip-hop albums recreated in LEGO
* Videogame Minimalism, available as shirts
* Justin Russo's Minimalist Videogame Posters
* Howie Green's paintings of famous album covers
* Cliff Chiang's '80s album covers recreated with comic book heroes
* Brandon Heinley's pixel recreations of famous images in art and culture
* Collection of famous album covers in LEGO
* Benjamin Shaykin's Lo-Res Books, book covers abstracted to the edge of recognition
* Graphic Nothing's minimalist art and album cover remixes
* Kirby Ferguson's Everything Is A Remix is a thought-provoking and entertaining demonstration of how remixing is fundamental to all creativity, with hundreds of examples from Star Wars to Apple.

I've turned off comments, but I'd love to hear your thoughts and any more relevant examples. Send me an email or instant message, or find me on Twitter.

It's a tour de force hack — an interactive pastiche of 1980s computer history, tying together public archives of Usenet newsgroups, BBS textfiles, software archives, and historical computer networks into a multiplayer adventure game.

Among its features:

• Connect to over 24,000 simulated hosts, with logged-in ghost users with historically-accurate names culled from UUCP network maps.
• Hacking metagames, using simplified wardialers and rootkit tools.
• User classes that act as an achievements system.
• Group chat with relay, and one-on-one chat with send or talk.
• Reconstructed Usenet archives, including the Wiseman collection.
• A BASIC interpreter with historical programs from the SIMTEL archives.
• Standalone playable games, including Rogue and a Z-code interpreter for text adventure games like Adventure and Zork.
• Hidden hosts and programs, discoverable only by hacking Telehack itself.

The entire project was engineered by "Forbin," an anonymous Silicon Valley engineer named after the protagonist of Colossus: The Forbin Project. Like the chief engineer of the film, Forbin's created a networked supercomputer that defies all expectations. (Hopefully it won't gain sentience and enslave the human race.)

I had to know more. With the help of Paul Ford, I interviewed Forbin about the project — using Telehack's send utility, naturally. Read on for the full interview about his motivations, how it's built, and why he's chosen to remain anonymous.

Andy Baio: So, first off, I want to tell you how much I'm in love with Telehack. You've made something truly unique... I'd love to hear about your inspiration for building it.

Forbin: Thank you. I'm glad that people are enjoying it. The inspiration was my son. I had shown him the old movies Hackers, Wargames, and Colossus: The Forbin Project and he really liked them. After seeing Hackers and Wargames, he really wanted to start hacking stuff on his own.

I'd taught him some programming, but I didn't want him doing any actual hacking, so I decided to make a simulation so he could telnet to hosts, hack them, and get the feel of it, but safely.

What did he think?

He really liked it. At first he thought it was all real, and he was actually hacking into government computers and such. It was great. Eventually though, like Santa Claus, he figured out he wasn't really wardialing all those systems.

He's been my best beta-tester. :)

Hacking a host on Telehack

When do you think he'll be ready for real-world hacking? Is there a path to graduation from Telehack?

Telehack can help you learn commandline basics. I've told him not to ever enter any real systems without permission.

I'm curious if you've played Digital: A Love Story. It seems like Christine Love was trying to do something similar — conjuring an earlier time in computing history, but without worrying too much about historical accuracy.

I played a bit of Digital: A Love Story. I thought it was wonderful. I really liked the atmosphere it evoked. That was the same effect I was going for in Telehack, but in a different way. Silent, no sound... Just green text and more code, but the same emotion.

Regarding historical accuracy, one of the surprising things about Telehack is how those old systems were hard to use. Whenever a movie or a book looks back at the past, it can look through a set of lenses that make the past seem more engaging and accessible, and sometimes add a narrative. Someone on Hacker News referred to Telehack as "MovieOS," and that's exactly right.

There are actual TOPS-10 systems on the net you can get accounts on. They're not easy to get into. I wanted to reduce the usability barriers to the old commandline interfaces, while giving the same feel of the systems, and blend some of the good things I remembered from various systems together.

Telehack seems to borrow quite a bit from modern videogame theory... Integrated tutorials, slowly ramping up difficulty, multiple avenues to exploration without a linear path. Paul Ford suspected you're a game designer.

I have done some computer games, although that is not my profession. I really admire the advances that have occurred in game design, although I'm not much of a gamer myself. Mostly, I wanted to help newcomers get across barriers of accessibility which is what the old tutorial manuals were all about.

Read an old DECsystem-20 manual. It tells you, in excruciating detail, how to type control-C to interrupt a program. It turns out people still need to know that but aren't being told anymore.

The other part is that the system is open-ended. It has all this old code that is animated by resurrecting an interpreter for a dead language. People can run programs again that haven't been run — and experienced — for 20 years. And see old files through a lens that makes them look like they used to. That's fun.

Speaking of old files, the way you used the textfiles.com and Usenet archives feels brand new. You've created a playful environment for exploring archival material in a new way. It made me wonder what other data sources could be reinvented by making them game-like.

What Jason Scott did with textfiles.com is heroic. He's saving away all this stuff that is completely unique, and irretrievable otherwise. But to make people want to see it, byte by byte, I thought it would be neat to offer it up, a piece at a time, in a format similar to how the files were originally experienced.

You dial some modem number — not busy! It actually connects and then you see what files they have and download some of them. Most of them are crazy stuff but period-relevant. So it's a way to animate old text files.

Same thing with the Usenet archive, although my Usenet reader needs some work. It's pretty crufty. There is so much in there, I haven't really found a good way to get people back into it yet.

Folks would wait in anticipation for Usenet — the daily poll — where your modem would call some hub and get you the news. I have to find some way to bring that back to the archive.

Google Groups doesn't give that feeling. Neither does Telehack's usenet command currently. Still noodling on that.

Reading Usenet posts from 1982

Does it advance in real-time? Are you adding "new" articles to the archive in a rolling period?

No, although that's a good idea for a way for it to be more dynamic and engaging.

You've been adding features incrementally since you launched it, but how long did it initially take you to build from conception?

If you type uptime, it says sysgen was 454d ago at 07-Mar-10 20:26:00. That's when I started working on it. Not full-time, there were months when I didn't have any time to work on it. It's mostly been a small side project.

What was the hardest thing to get right?

There is one feature that works in the telnet interface, but not in the http client yet — the baud rate simulation. If you dial or wardial into a host and you're connected to Telehack with telnet, it will actually give you a 2400 or 9600 or whatever connection, but that doesn't work on the html interface yet sadly.

It's not the same when you dial into a host and the text renders instantly. For the full authentic feel, you should have to wait for the lines to appear slowly, as we once did. :)

I keep my 300 baud VicModem on my desk as a reminder of how good we have it now.

300 baud was really slow! I started there too, with a Hayes on an Apple II. Type baud 300 on Telehack, it's hard to see how we could use those systems, but we did. They were amazing, even at that speed.

I'd love to hear more about the technology behind it.

Telehack is built in Perl, in a single process, in an epoll-driven event loop. There are two interpreters — Z-code, which is an interpreter called Rezrov in CPAN, and a BASIC interpreter, which I wrote. Currently it doesn't fork any external code. Various functions, including the 6502/VAX CPU and such, are simulated.

Any plans to open-source any of it? I'm sure some of the community would love to hack on Telehack, to extend it in different directions.

Yes, I plan to open it up at some point.

So, I have to ask: why the anonymity? The mystery definitely adds to the fun, but most people would love to take credit for such an impressive project.

Well, I have a day job, and I didn't want this to be a distraction. I also made this for my kid, but didn't really want to expose him to a larger internet just yet.

Are you worried that coming out from behind the curtain will bring attention to him too? I'm the parent of a six-year-old, and can definitely appreciate that.

At an earlier point in my career, I got a lot of press for a project I did. The intense interest from that made me very cautious about what I put online. I took down my personal photos and such. I would be sad if I felt like I had to take down Telehack.

Makes sense. What have you thought about the reaction? Like several others, when I first saw Telehack, I completely underestimated its depth. It seems like an deep rabbit hole that endlessly rewards curiosity.

I'm extremely happy that people are enjoying it. I was a bit sad that some commenters initially dismissed it as a simple JS shell. It was pretty cool when the first person found ptycon and the secret entry points in the system monitor.

With zero fans, I'd be pretty disappointed. With any n > 0, I'm happy. I don't expect it's a huge audience though. Doesn't have to be. It's an artistic/historical project to me.

Viewing users on NYU's cmcl2 network circa 1988, and me.

You've done some incredible data archaeology here — reconstructing 25,000 hosts from the early Internet, along with the people that used them at the time. One guy on Hacker News was able to find himself and his two best friends at the time logged into the host he first used when he get online. How did you do it?

Well, a lot of this information is available online, but you need to look at the right way to interpret it.

Were you able to find yourself in the archives?

Yup, I'm in there.

Any specific rules for how you scattered the text and game files across hosts?

There is some topic-clustering for the text files, the rest is mostly random. But I'm still working on the game parts of this thing.

If Telehack ever takes off, would you ever consider doing it for a living? I have no idea what you do for a living, but I can't help but think you've missed your true calling as a game designer.

Well, thank you for that. :-) I'll have to get back to you on that. At this point, I'm mostly interested in fleshing it out, so I'm happy with it.

Telehack's a pastiche of many different systems, networks, and tools from the mid- to late-1980s. It's rich with nostalgia. Is there anything you miss from that era?

Good question. The commandline was a universal language. You had to learn it, there was a curve, but it wasn't that hard. Heck, we were all being taught it in the new classes in middle school. But the GUI's mission was to kill it.

My worry is that the CLI was symbolic, algebraic, whereas the GUI is... pictorial, or one-step, or something.

hosts | grep foo

It's important that you understand that. If you're graduating from any university today, it's an algebra more important than... uh, algebra, maybe.

I actually don't miss anything from that era. But I want the best of what was known then to propagate today.

The other teams were a humbling roster of creative geeks, including Ricardo "mrdoob" Cabello, Ben Cerveny, Jeri Ellsworth, Zach Lieberman, Kellan Elliott-McRea, Chris "moot" Poole, Bre Pettis, and Erica Sadun.

I was paired with Michael Bell-Smith, whose digital art I'd admired and linked to in the past. It was a perfect match, and we're very happy to announce the result of our collaboration: Supercut.org (warning: NSFW audio).

Supercut.org is an automatic supercut composed entirely out of other supercuts, combined with a way to randomly shuffle through all of the supercut sources.

The Idea

When we first started work on Friday morning, Michael and I started brainstorming what we wanted to accomplish: something visual, high-concept (i.e. explainable in a tweet), and hopefully with a sense of humor.

We quickly realized that our interest in supercuts was fertile ground. Michael's work often touches on structural re-edits and remixes, such as Oonce-Oonce, Battleship Potemkin: Dance Edit, Chapters 1-12 of R. Kelly's Trapped in the Closet Synced and Played Simultaneously, and his mashup album mixing pop vocals over their ringtone versions.

Both of us were fascinated by this form of Internet folk art. Every supercut is a labor of love. Making one is incredibly time-consuming, taking days or weeks to compile and edit a single video. Most are created by pop culture fans, but they've also been used for film criticism and political commentary. It's a natural byproduct of remix culture: people using sampling to convey a single message, made possible by the ready availability of online video and cheap editing software.

So, supercuts. But what? Making a single supercut seemed cheap. I first suggested making a visual index of supercuts, or a visualization of every clip.

But Michael had a better idea — going meta. We were going to build a SUPERSUPERCUT, a supercut composed entirely out of other supercuts. And, if we had time, we'd make a dedicated supercut index.

Making the SuperSupercut

There were three big parts: index every supercut in a database, download all the supercuts locally, break each video into its original shots, and stitch the clips back together randomly.

Using my blog post as a guide, Michael added every supercut to a new table in MySQL, along with a title, description, and a category. While Michael did that, I wrote a simple script that used youtube-dl to pull the video files from YouTube and store them locally.

To split the clips, we needed to find a way to do scene detection — identifying cuts in a video by looking at movement between two consecutive frames. But we needed a way to do it from my Linux server, which ruled out everything with a GUI.

After some research, I found a very promising lead in an obscure, poorly-maintained French Linux utility called shotdetect. It did exactly what we needed — analyze a video and return an XML file of scene start times and durations.

The most challenging part of the entire day, by far, was simply getting shotdetect to compile. The package only had binaries for Debian and the source hadn't been updated since September 2009. Since then, the video libraries it needed have changed dramatically, and shotdetect wouldn't compile without locating them.

Three frustrating hours later, we called in the help of one of the beardiest geeks I know, Daniel Ceregatti, an old friend and coworker. After 20 minutes of hacking the C++ source, we were up and running.

With the timecodes and durations from shotdetect, we used ffmpeg to split each supercuts into hundreds of smaller MPEG-2 videos, all normalized to the same 640x480 dimensions with AAC audio. The results weren't perfect — many scenes were broken during dialogue because of camera changes — but it was good enough.

As ffmpeg worked, I stored info about each newly-generated clip in MySQL. From there, it was simple to generate a random ten-minute playlist of clips between a half-second to three seconds in length.

With that list, we used the Unix `cat` utility to concatenate all the videos together into a finished supersupercut. We tweaked the results after some early tests, which you can see on YouTube.

While the videos processed overnight, we registered the domain, built the rest of the website, and designed our slides for Saturday's event — taking time out for wonderful Korean food with the fellow team of Ben Cerveny and Liz Magic-Laser. I finally got to sleep at 5:30am, but I'm thrilled with the results.

The Future

There were several things we talked about, but simply didn't have time to do.

I'm planning on using the launch of Supercut.org to finally retire my old supercut list by adding a way to browse and sort the entire index of supercuts by date, source, and genre. Most importantly, I'm going to add a way for anyone to submit their own supercuts to the index.

And of course, when any supercut is added, it will automatically become part of the randomized supersupercut on the homepage: an evolving tribute to this unique art form.

The JSON API was created by Sam Rose, a 20-year-old student from Wales and an active contributor in the ThinkUp community. His 7,000 line contribution -- composed of 40% new tests and 40% documentation -- earned him first place in the ThinkUp bounty contest and a brand new iPad 2. Congrats, Sam!

I thought it'd be fun to try building a hack with his new API, so I made a simple visualization of your entire Twitter archives in ThinkUp — ThinkBack, a ThinkUp-powered time capsule. Take a look at my history, or on the @whitehouse account to get the gist.

ThinkBack analyzes your entire Twitter history, extracts entities from the text, and colors them based on category. Grouped by month, it also gives you a quick glimpse at your posting activity over time.

For the entity extraction, I used an excellent free web service called AlchemyAPI to extract people, places, events, product names and other keywords from everything I've ever posted. They provide a category for each, which I assigned a color.

I also tested two other free web services that offer entity extraction, text-processing.com and Zemanta. Finding and categorizing keywords from short status updates is no small feat, but AlchemyAPI does a remarkable job. (If you'd like to play around with all three, support for both Zemanta and text-processing.com is commented out in the source code, but easily swappable with AlchemyAPI.)

ThinkBack also uses four typefaces from Google Web Fonts, my first time using them and dead simple to implement. For free fonts, the quality's surprisingly great, with several faces commissioned by Google itself. For a quick, free hack, it's a great alternative to Typekit.

I also used a very simple PHP templating language called RainTPL, which I chose as a lightweight alternative to Smarty. In practice, I found it too simple. Its handling of complex data structures and loops required me to jump through hoops that shouldn't be necessary. (I'll stick with Smarty next time.)

Anyway, you can download the code here, it only requires PHP and access to a recent version of ThinkUp. Feel free to fork it and submit a pull request for anything you add!

Those unique set of circumstances create a serendipity machine, and the people I meet each year keep me coming back, even as it busts at the seams. To that end, please track me down or say hi! That's why I'm there. And here's where you'll find me:

Worst Website Ever II: Too Stupid to Fail
Monday, March 14 at 11am
Hilton, Salon D

After a three year absence, I'm bringing Worst Website Ever back to SXSW with an all-star lineup of designers, developers, and entrepreneurs. Join us as these very talented people pitch their worst website/app/startup ideas to a live audience in short, five-minute rounds.

This year, the lineup's pretty amazing:
Gina Trapani (Lifehacker, Expert Labs)
Jeffery Bennett, (BetamaXmas, 2008's runner-up with Image Search for the Blind)
Josh Millard, (Metafilter, viral musician)
Jonah Peretti, (Buzzfeed, Huffington Post)
Mike Lacher, (Wonder-Tonic, Wolfenstein 1-D, Geocities-izer)
Ze Frank (The Show, Star.me)

And like last time, it's judged by a real VC, Rob Hayes from First Round Capital. Winner gets funded!

ThinkUp: Austin Meetup
Saturday, March 12 at 5pm
The Ginger Man, outdoor patio

Curious about ThinkUp, or want to meet the people behind it? I'll be joining Gina Trapani, Amy Unruh, Jed Sundwall, and other developers/users of ThinkUp at our second SXSW meetup. Come on out! We'll be in the back patio of The Ginger Man, if weather permits.

Stalk Me

This year, I'll be tracking interesting sessions on Lanyrd, and evening events on Plancast. And, of course, I'll be mentioning any unusually great activity in real-time over on Twitter.

See you there!

I'm surprised and grateful that The Daily executive and legal team never tried to shut it down. On the contrary, when asked directly about it, publisher Greg Clayman said, "If people like our content enough to put it together in a blog and share it with folks, that's great! It drives people back to us." They seem like a nice bunch of folks, and I hope they succeed with their big publishing experiment.

But now that I'm ending it, I can finally address the most common question — how did I do it?

The Daily: Indexed is just a list of article headlines, bylines, and links to each article on The Daily's official website. Anyone can grab the links from the Daily iPad app by clicking each article's "Share by Email" button, but that would've taken me far too long. So, how to automate the process?

When you first start The Daily application, it connects to their central server to check for a new edition, and then downloads a 1.5MB JSON file with the complete metadata for that issue. It includes everything — the complete text of the issue, layout metadata, and the public URLs.

But how can you get access to that file? My first attempt was to proxy all of the iPad's traffic through my laptop and use Wireshark to inspect it. As it turns out, The Daily encrypts all traffic between your iPad and their servers. I was able to see connections being made to various servers, but couldn't see what was being sent.

Enter Charles, a brilliantly-designed web debugging proxy for Mac, Windows, and Linux. By default, Charles will listen to all of your HTTP network traffic and show you simple, but powerful, views of all your web requests. But it can also act as an SSL proxy, sitting in the middle of previously-secure transactions between your browser and an SSL server.

After grabbing the JSON, I was able to write a simple Python script to extract the metadata I needed and spit out the HTML for use on the Tumblr page. Here's how to do it.

Configuring Charles

1. Download and install Charles on your desktop machine. On your iPad, navigate to http://charlesproxy.com/charles.crt to trust Charles' SSL certificate.

2. For Mac users, start Network Utility to get your desktop's local IP address. Start your iPad, make sure it's on the same wireless network as your desktop, and go into Settings>Network>Wi-Fi. Select the wireless network, and click the right arrow next to it to configure advanced settings. Under "HTTP Proxy," select "Manual." Enter the IP address of your desktop for "Server" and enter in "8888" for the port.

3. Now, start Charles on your desktop and, on the iPad, try loading any website. You should see assets from that website appear in Charles. If so, you're ready to sniff The Daily's iPad app.

Indexing the Daily

1. Start the Daily app on the iPad. Wait for it to download today's issue. In Charles, drill down to https://app.thedaily.com/ipad/v1/issue/current, and select "JSON Text."

2. Copy and paste the raw JSON into a text file.

3. This Python script takes the JSON file as input, and spits out a snippet of HTML suitable for blogging. I simply pasted the output from that script into Tumblr, made a thumbnail of the cover, and published.

The End

So, that's it! Hope that was helpful. If any fan of The Daily out there wants to take over publishing duties, I'll happily pass the Tumblr blog on to you.

So I went ahead and made one for them! Introducing, The Daily: Indexed...

Why did I do this? The Daily's publishing free, web-based versions to every article, but without an index, it's (deliberately) hard to find or link to the individual articles from the web. And since the iPad app only carries today's edition, it makes finding any historical articles you've paid for nearly impossible.

I love that this kind of experimentation is happening in journalism. I love journalism dearly and want to see new models emerge, and charging for content is a great way to align a media organization's interests with those of its readership. That said, if you do charge for access, you can't publish free versions to the web and hope that people don't find them.

I'm also very curious about their reaction. This isn't illegal or a copyright violation — all I'm doing is linking to the versions they're publishing on their site. The ability to link to any webpage without permission is part of what makes the web great, and it should never be discouraged. It's also worth noting that Google's slowly indexing all the articles too, and search engines aren't blocked in their robots.txt file.

But I'm still recovering from a legal nightmare last year (more on that soon), so if asked to stop publishing and delete the Tumblr, I will. (Lawyers: My email address is at the top of this page.)

In the meantime, enjoy!

(Special thanks to Rex Sorgatz for the inspiration.)

Update: At The Daily's press conference, editor-in-chief Jesse Angelo addressed the question of public sharing on the web.

"For the pages in the application that we can do it, we create mirror HTML pages. Those pages are out there on the web — they can be shared, they can be searched, you can find them out there... We know there are billions of other people sharing content on the web, and we want to be part of that."

Thanks to Ryan Tate for the video.

February 4: Some people seem to have been a bit confused by my original post, so I edited it a bit, explaining a bit more clearly why I made this. I never thought that The Daily actually forgot to make a homepage/index; that was tongue-in-cheek. I also added a comment answering some of the frequently asked questions about the project.

Since I couldn't find an exhaustive list (this TV Tropes guide to "Deconstruction Games" is the closest), I thought I'd try to pull one together along with some gameplay videos.

This is just a starting point, please post your additions in the comments or email me and I'll add them in. Note: I've tried to stay away from specific game parodies (like Pong Kombat or Pyst), and stick to games that comment on game design, mechanics, or culture.

Sadly, the charts were completely useless to me — a pile of mostly-indistinguishable lines. Along with one out of every 14 American males (about 7%), I'm red-green colorblind.

This is hard for non-colorblind people to understand, so I pulled together a couple examples. Here's a split comparison of the original chart, showing what people with normal vision see compared to me and my broke-ass eyes.

(Click to view large.)

Two simple solutions:

1. Label your lines. When you have more than three data points in a line chart, legends fall apart quickly whether you're colorblind or not. A label next to each line makes any chart much more readable. Here's a quick remake I whipped up. (Thanks to Greg for helping me get the colors right.)

(Click to view large.)

2. Pick colorblind-safe colors. If you have to use a legend, be kind and pick something people like us can see. Photoshop's supported drop-dead simple colorblind simulation since CS4, or you can check your images or webpages for free using the Vischeck colorblind simulator.

When doing the right thing is this easy, it's really disturbing when it's dismissed as a waste of time.

A couple years ago, I contacted the husband-and-wife team behind Snopes, the essential resource on urban legends, to let them know about a similar issue. The red/green icons they use to indicate true/false urban legends looked absolutely identical to me. I let them know about the problem and prepared alternate GIFs for them, with a darker red and lighter green. (Incidentally, that's why colorblind people don't have trouble with stoplights.)

They not only refused the new images, but actually added a new entry to their FAQ, defending their position:

We chose our red-yellow-green coding system because its "traffic light" pattern can be understood by most of our readers with little or no explanation. While we understand that about 8% of our readership experiences some form of color blindness and therefore cannot distinguish the different colors of bullets, other alternatives we have tried have proved confusing to many of our non-color blind readers. Therefore, we have chosen to stick with a system that works very well for 92% of our readers.

Instead, they recommended hovering over every icon to see the tooltip text. I absolutely adore the work they do on Snopes, but that interaction's left a sour taste in my mouth ever since. It just doesn't seem defensible — is slightly darkening a shade of red and brightening a green too much to ask?

I wouldn't expect anyone to be able to perfectly anticipate every person's needs; accessibility is extremely hard to get right 100% of the time. But if your ultimate goal is conveying information, open ears and a little empathy can go a long way.

Update: Alex Bischoff took the three images I made for Snopes, and wrote a user script that replaces their images with mine. Install it here for your browser of choice.

Yesterday morning, along with an anonymous group of spectators, I updated the ever-growing spreadsheet now spanning the last nine years of Oscar-nominated film. I added this year's 29 nominees to the list, a collection of 274 films in total. (You can read about more sources and methodology at the end of the entry.)

Don't miss the Statistics sheet, which covers all the aggregate year-by-year stats. Download or view it below, or read on for my findings. As always, if you have any additions or corrections, let me know.

View full-size on Google Spreadsheets.

Download: Excel (with formulas) or CSV

Findings

Note: These numbers will change as we get closer to the ceremony, and I'll do my best to keep them updated until Oscar day.

Continuing the trend from the last couple years, fewer screeners are leaking online by nomination day than ever. Last year at this time, only 41% of screeners leaked online; this year, that number drops again slightly to 38%.

But if you include retail DVD releases along with screeners, 66% of this year's nominated films have already leaked online in high quality. This makes sense; if a retail DVD release is already available, there's no point in leaking the screener. But I think it's safe to say that industry efforts to watermark screeners and prosecute leaks by members have almost certainly contributed to the decline.

The gap between theatrical and DVD release dates seems to have stabilized, hovering around 105 days for the last few years. This year, the gap between US release to first leak seems to have dipped slightly, from a median 23 days last year to 17 days.

The chart below shows how camcorder and telesync leaks for Oscar-nominated films continue to decline in popularity, while nearly every nominated film is eventually leaked on DVD. (The only exception seems to be 2008's Il Divo, which never appeared to get a US retail release.)

One prediction: The end of the DVD screener is near. This year, Fox Searchlight distributed three screeners with iTunes — 127 Hours, Black Swan, and Conviction — to all 93,000 voting members of the Screen Actors' Guild, marking the first time a major studio's used Apple's service for screener distribution.

Voters get the additional convenience of being able to watch films on their computers, Apple TVs, iPads and iPhones, while studios save the time and expense of distributing physical media. If this experiment's successful, it seems likely other studios will follow.

Miscellanea

Some random notes:

• This year, three films were leaked online within a day of their theatrical release — Iron Man 2, Alice in Wonderland, and Harry Potter.
• The Rabbit Hole screener was leaked online eight days before its theatrical release, while Winter's Bone was the slowest to leak online (so far) at 125 days after its theatrical release.
• Oscar-nominated films tend to get released late in the year, but how late? More nominated films have been released on December 25 than any other day, but the median date is October 20.
• For the first year, the first high-quality leak of a film — Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — was a PPV rip, most likely from a hotel's new movie releases on pay-per-view.
• Retail Blu-Ray rips are now frequently being leaked online now before retail DVDs, so I've modified the "Retail DVD" column to include them.

Methodology

As usual, I included the feature films in every category except documentary and foreign films (even makeup and costume design). I used Yahoo! Movies for US release dates, always using the first available date, even if it was a limited release. Cam, telesync, R5, and screener leak dates were taken from VCD Quality, with occasional backup from ORLYDB. I always used the first leak date, with the exception of unviewable or incomplete nuked releases.

Finally, the official screener dates came from Academy member Ken Rudolph, who lists the date he receives every screener on his personal homepage. Thanks again, Ken!

For previous years, see 2004, 2005, 2007, 2008 (part 1 and part 2), 2009, and 2010.

It's a stunning experiment of forced transparency, prying open government against its will without much care or concern about the ramifications. Wikileaks is the Pirate Bay of journalism — an unstoppable force disrupting whole industries because they can.

To help make sense of my own opinions about it, I rounded up some of the more interesting responses and visualizations. Enjoy.

Our goal's to help government make better decisions about policy by listening to citizens in the places they already are: social networks like Twitter and Facebook.

Our first project is ThinkUp, an open-source tool for archiving and visualizing conversations on social networks. It started with Gina scratching a personal itch, a way to parse and filter @replies. But it's grown to be something more: a tool for policy makers to harness the collective intelligence of experts.

There's tons to do, but I'm particularly excited to tackle ThinkUp's ability to separate signal from noise, making it easier to derive meaning from hundreds or thousands of responses, using visualization, clustering, sentiment analysis, and robotic hamsters. I'm planning on building some fun hacks on top of ThinkUp, as well as keeping an eye open for other vectors to tackle our core mission.

Officially, I started on Monday and it's already been an incredible week. I flew to Washington DC, attended the FCC's first Open Developer Day, and a day of meetings with various groups at the White House.

What I found was inspiring: a group of extremely clever and passionate geeks, working from within to make things better. Some agencies are definitely more clueful than others, but it was clear that they want our — and your — help. I was skeptical at first, but they're sincere: they want meaningful public participation and they need smart people to make it happen.

Want to join in? The easiest thing to do would be to install ThinkUp on your server. Give it a try, see what you think and, if you can, contribute — code, design, and documentation are all welcome.

If you've read Waxy for a while, you'll know I very rarely touch on political issues here. It's not that I'm apolitical -- like anyone, I have opinions, but I don't often feel engaged enough to write about it.

So, why would I go to a Gov 2.0 non-profit? For three main reasons:

1. It's important. To tackle our most serious national issues, we need better communication between government and citizens. I want my son to grow up in a world where he doesn't feel disconnected and disillusioned by government, and I want government to meet the needs of the people, rather than favoring those with the most money or the loudest voices.
2. It's exciting. Technology is quite possibly our best hope of breaking down that divide, using social tools to disrupt the way that governments are run and policy is made. I love designing and building tools that use social connections to tackle difficult problems, and it feels like government is an area ripe for disruption.
3. I love the team. I've known Anil and Gina for years and have long admired their work. They're both extraordinarily talented and creative people, and I feel lucky to call them both friends. The opportunity to work with them was too hard to pass up.

How can I pass that up?

And what about Kickstarter? I recently stepped back into my original advisory role, and will continue to help out the team however I can — dispensing unsolicited advice, recruiting new projects, writing the occasional article, and evangelizing for them around the world, like I did at Free Culture Forum in Barcelona two weeks ago. Kickstarter's leading an indie-culture revolution, thanks to amazing leadership and a brilliantly creative team, and it was a pleasure working with them.

This isn't a change in direction for me, but a change in focus. Both Kickstarter and Expert Labs are bringing smart people together — people who might never connect otherwise — to create things, to change things, to make the world a better place. I can't wait.

Proof!

If you were using Memeorandum Colors, here's the updated Greasemonkey script and Firefox extension. (Unfortunately, it won't work in Chrome because they haven't implemented cross-site requests in user scripts yet.)

Now, a funny story. On Monday afternoon, I was alerted that the script was broken by a guy named Pat, a political blogger in Detroit. He asked politely if I'd fix the script, and I promised to take a look at it. I fixed it last night and was cleaning it up for release this morning, when I saw this on Twitter:

I never looked at his site, so was totally unaware of his political leanings. I was just busy.

Enjoy the code, Pat! Sorry I took so long to fix the code you use and love, for free, every day.

Update: Pat deleted his three tweets (archived above for posterity) and, in an epic 17-tweet rant, offered me and five others "an ass kicking that you will never, ever forget." He follows up with a threat to sue me for publishing his "likeness and words" — screenshots of the three deleted tweets above, posted in public, addressed to me, and reproduced for non-commercial commentary and criticism under the Copyright Act's "fair use" provisions.

Update 2: And now his Twitter account's gone. I saved an archive of his threatening tweets for posterity. If you want to get in touch, his new account is @RightBloggerPat.

August 6: Pat wrote a followup on his blog, with his perspective of the whole ordeal. He admits he jumped the gun and apologizes for the mistake. Case closed.

Aside from the Kickstarter project, we also talked about the history of Mondo and its long-term impact, their rivalry with Wired, and the long-lost unpublished issue. He also reveals that Joi Ito bought the $750 reward to fictionally write yourself into Mondo's history, which is funny because Joi was actually on the masthead.

The full transcript is on the Kickstarter blog, or you can download it or listen below.

Back in 1999, my first job out of college was at Gettingit.com, a San Francisco-based webzine edited by R.U. Sirius. I was a total Mondo/Wired/bOING bOING fanboy in the early '90s, so the opportunity to go work with R.U. was incredibly exciting to me. In a disappointing turn, he was an incredibly nice and normal guy, instead of the hyperactive cyberhippy on mescaline that I was expecting.

I recommend reading Patrick Farley's The Guy I Almost Was, a classic webcomic that nicely characterizes my impressions of the early '90s cyberculture scene. (Patrick Farley just ran a successful Kickstarter project to revive Electric Sheep, and R.U. backed it.)

Random trivia: In July 1999, we tried to sell R.U.'s soul on eBay. Here's the image I made for the auction:

• Kickstarter Podcast #5 - Glorkian Warrior

James Kochalka is undeniably prolific, though he balks at the word. He's kept a daily comic diary of his life on American Elf for the last 12 years, released 40+ books, recorded 10 albums, and just appeared in a scifi film. But he's never made a videogame, something he'd been aching to do since he was a kid.

Thanks to a chance meeting at a chiptune concert, Kochalka's collaborating with Pixeljam Games to make it happen. Pixeljam's responsible for some of my all-time favorite Flash games, such as Dino Run, Gamma Bros., Ratmaze, and Mountain Maniac. It's a match made in geek heaven.

Their Kickstarter project ends tonight, so get the Glorkian Warrior game, mini-comic, and other exclusive rewards while you can.

Bonus track, for hardcore Kochalka fans:

• James Kochalka sings the Glorkian Warrior theme song

On Saturday night, Kickstarter, Tumblr, and SoundCloud welcome you to F*CK YEAH! SXSW, a party with music/visuals by Eclectic Method sponsored by the nice folks at ThePlanet. It's at Emo's on Saturday night, from 6:30pm until late.

On Sunday 11am, I'm doing a solo talk about a mish-mash of my interests, focused around metagames — both games about games, and games built on games. Quite possibly the only talk at SXSW to mention Mechanical Turk, Desert Bus, Barack Obama, VVVVVV, and Metafilter.

Also in amazing panels, Kickstarter's own Perry Chen (Monday w/Robin Sloan), Yancey Strickler (Wednesday w/Allison Weiss), and Fred Benenson. You should go to every one. More details here.

See you in Austin!

He graciously agreed to an interview over Skype, which we posted late last week as the second episode of the Kickstarter Podcast. I thought it came out well, though I clearly still need to work on my audio mixing skillz (sounds better on headphones!) and perfecting my NPR voice.

Listen/subscribe on iTunes or you can stream and download the MP3.

• Kickstarter Podcast #2 - Interview with Ted Rall

Rall's a controversial figure, especially reviled among political conservatives, even though he's leveled some of his toughest criticisms at the Obama administration. While most attention's focused on his syndicated cartoons, he's also written six non-fiction books, half of those focused on his travels across the 'Stans -- Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. In 2002, he published To Afghanistan and Back, a mix of written dispatches, cartoons, and a graphic novella documenting his experiences on the ground during the U.S. invasion after 9/11.

All of Ted Rall's previous trips were funded by news organizations, but with budgets for foreign correspondents slashed, he's turned to his fans to fund his return trip. We talk about the changing media landscape, his previous books, and what it's like being a NYC cartoonist in one of the most dangerous places on Earth.

"... Anyone who wants to can see a list of all the events you are planning on attending? It's like a stalker's delight."

— Comment about Upcoming.org from September 23, 2003, six days after launch

"It's bad enough we're using real names and telling people where we've been. Now it's like prepping someone for the best times to try robbing your apartment."

— Comment from June 2005

Further back, from the Montreal Gazette, September 1983...

From 1977, don't list your weddings or funerals in the paper, unless you want to get robbed...

The packet's a nice little time capsule of their dot-com excess, with promo materials, a breathless press release about their relaunch ("Youth Culture Network Creates Groundbreaking Content That Revolutionizes The Interactive Entertainment Experience"), and copies of articles from the New York Times, USA Today and the Wall Street Journal.

They took the site down for three full days to launch their redesign, something you don't see often these days. "DEN is here and we're changing the face of entertainment for Gen Y audiences, bringing this age group an interactive experience unlike anything they've known," said then-CEO, Jim Ritts. (He was ousted three months later after their IPO was shelved.)

For me, the highlight is an included copy of "The 4th Annual P.O.V. 100 Best Web Sites," where they appeared at #4. Published by the short-lived P.O.V. magazine, which itself shuttered a month before DEN declared bankruptcy, it's a nice artifact of the era.

All the usual suspects are there — Broadcast.com, hot off their $5.7B acquisition by Yahoo!, Third Voice, and Six Degrees, alongside webzines like Feed, Word, and Brunching Shuttlecocks and proto-blogs like Cardhouse, Obscure Store, and Jeffrey Zeldman Presents. Debuting on the list at #93, a new search engine named Google that "really works, scouring billions of links for junk-free matches — and it does so quickly." #100 is Joshua Schachter's Memepool, "an ever-expanding set of links from smart folks who exist only in cyberspace."

I was going to scan it in, but managed to find a PDF created by the author himself. With his permission, I've mirrored it locally:

Surprisingly, DEN.net is still online, an archive of some old videos and documents, with the intriguing tagline "We're back..." But since it's stayed exactly the same since August 2007, I wouldn't hold my breath for a relaunch.

I've updated my spreadsheet with all the current available data, eight years of data tracking the online distribution of every Oscar-nominated film since 2003. I've added this year's 34 nominated films to the list, a total of 245 films. (Read about my methodology at the end of the entry.)

View or download all the data below, including a second sheet with some interesting aggregate statistics. As always, I'll keep it updated until the Oscar broadcast. (And let me know if you find any mistakes.)

View full-size on Google Spreadsheets.

Download: Excel (with formulas) or CSV

Findings

Since 2003, I've tracked the online distribution of Oscar screeners, and every year, the piracy scene manages to release nearly every film by nomination day. Last year, all but three films were leaked in DVD quality by nomination day.

The tide may be turning. There's still a month out before the Academy Awards, but so far, fewer Oscar screeners leaked online this year — only 14 out of 34 nominated films, the lowest percentage ever. And they're taking twice as long to leak — a median 21 days after theatrical release, up from 11 days the previous year.

It's not limited to screeners, either. Camcorder and telesync releases dropped this year. Even the percentage of retail DVD rips has dropped, though this will likely shift before the broadcast. In the chart below, you can see the percentage of films that were released in each format. (For example, 21% of this year's films had a cam release and 44% had a retail DVD leak.)

And the R5 DVD releases that dominated previous year's Oscars is now mostly dead. I'm guessing the studios are moving away from the early distribution of R5 DVDs entirely.

But why the shift this year? Are studios doing a better job protecting screeners and intimidating Academy members? Or was this year's crop of films too boring for pirates to bother with? I can't tell if this is a scene-wide trend or localized to the Oscars only. If you have access to historical data tracking scene releases, get in touch.

And if you have any theories or inside information, leave a comment.

Other fun facts:

• Academy members received screeners for 30 of the 34 nominated films.
• The Avatar screener was the last to be received by Academy members (Ken Rudolph received his on January 15). Amazingly, it hasn't leaked online yet. February 4: It leaked today.
• The Hurt Locker and The Young Victoria were both leaked online in DVD format over six months before their theatrical release.
• As far as I can tell, The Secret of Kells is the first film since I started tracking to be nominated without a U.S. theatrical release. It's currently slated to come out in March.

Methodology

As usual, I included the feature films in every category except documentary and foreign films (even makeup and costume design). I used Yahoo! Movies for US release dates, always using the first available date, even if it was a limited release. Cam, telesync, R5, and screener leak dates were taken from VCD Quality. I used the first leak date, with the exception of unviewable or incomplete nuked releases. Finally, the official screener dates came from Academy member Ken Rudolph, who lists the date he receives every screener on his personal homepage. Thanks again, Ken!

For previous years, see 2004, 2005, 2007, 2008 (part 1 and part 2), and 2009.

Update: Removed the downloads, see update below.

• Multitrack Analysis of She's Leaving Home
• Multitrack Analysis of A Day In the Life
• Multitrack Analysis of Come Together

Unfortunately, I don't have any information about the source. In the "Come Together" one, they mention one of the narrators is named "Steve." Beyond that, I haven't had any luck finding where they came from. Can anyone identify them? I'd love, love, love to hear more.

Update: It's from a BBC Radio 6 program called The Record Producers, hosted by Richard Allinson and Steve Levine, that aired last month. Unfortunately, the original BBC broadcast is no longer available on their site.

January 16, 2012: I was politely contacted by Steve Levine, creator of The Record Producers, who politely asked me to remove the sound clips. The BBC was granted permission to broadcast the sensitive Beatles master recordings with strict limitations: they could license it for only seven days after broadcast, and with the condition that they actively prevent non-authorized sources from making them available.

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any legal way to purchase or listen to these recordings, and likely won't for some time.

Working with these guys was an absolute dream. Their creativity and dedication transcends the original concept, creating something that pays tribute to Miles' seminal work while pushing the boundaries of the genre.

I know there are jazz purists out there that hate the idea of anyone interpreting a jazz masterpiece in this way, but to them, I'd only ask that you listen to it first before making a judgment. Virt responded to one naysayer in the comments on my original post:

Way I see it, chiptunes can either be a punishingly difficult artistic medium we happened to grow up with, or a tired retro fashion statement. Our goal was to stick to the former, pushing the limitations hard, building on our capacity for expression using the most basic sounds. There could be no better challenge, Andy thought, than one of the most expressive jazz albums of all time, one that has inspired us all.

So, you see, I'm not the least bit embarrassed by our work. In fact, I think you might be short-changing "the masters of jazz," who I believe would be grinning ear to ear right now. They were ALL ABOUT mastering unusual techniques and expressing within a framework. That's the whole point of Kind of Blue. The parallels to our own medium were dead obvious, and I got the same rush of perverse glee that the original ensemble must have felt 50 years ago, locking myself in a cell and playing between the metal bars.

I hope, if you still can't enjoy the sound of the album itself, you might at least be less quick to dismiss it, given this perspective. It's not a parade, it's a love letter in our own weird handwriting.

So, thanks for listening. (Oh, and bonus points to anyone who can identify all the quotes and references in the album.)

I'm happy to say that Code Rush is now released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. Winton and his colleague John Koten set up a dedicated homepage for the film, with links to stream or download the film in various formats.

They're encouraging everyone to use the documentary in new ways, remixing or reusing the footage for any non-commercial use. In particular, I'd imagine the Mozilla Foundation should be very happy that they can finally use this historic footage of their origins.

Thanks to the new license, I'm able to put my annotated version of the film back up on Viddler. I've embedded it below.

Best of all, David Winton's announced that they're planning on digitizing the original interview footage and making them available. "We are still working to get our hands on a digital Beta deck to digitize the original dailies, but hope to get up and running in a couple months." If you can help them out, get in touch.

Update (August 6): I just discovered that unreleased footage from the documentary is being added to Archive.org.

I've been on the board for the last 10 months, helping find the development team and providing some guidance on tech, design, and community issues. And in the last year, watching the site evolve was an amazing experience, from an idea to a website with the potential to change the way things are made.

Since our launch ten weeks ago, over $250,000 has been pledged to make everything from books, magazines, albums (and album reissues), plays, films, art projects, zombie iPhone apps, and more. (Not to mention, my own Kind of Bloop album.) And keep in mind, the site's still invite-only!

Getting people to give you money is tricky, but I think we've hit on a formula for success:

• All-or-nothing. Projects are only successful if they reach the fundraising goal by the deadline, otherwise nobody pays. This limits risk for both backers and project creators, who don't have to worry about committing money and time to a failed project.
• Rewards. We strongly emphasize the importance of crafting good rewards, which makes Kickstarter more like commerce than altruism. We support multiple tiers of rewards from $1 to $10,000, limits for each, and tools for creators to contact each tier group independently.
• Publishing. A simple and powerful reward is access to exclusive updates during a project's funding and development, creating a powerful connection between the audience and project. As a result, we offer publishing tools for public or private updates, including hosted media and update notifications.

These mechanisms and constraints allow Kickstarter to not just fund projects, but test ideas, engage with an audience, and pre-sell your work without risk.

Earlier this month, I spoke at the Guardian Activate Summit in London about the power of play and applying game mechanics to non-games — difficult problems like environmental change, political activism, and fundraising. Kickstarter turns fundraising into a social game, where people have to work together within a time limit to reach a common goal. Already, we're seeing that projects develop their own viral momentum... Once a project hits 25% of its goal, success is almost guaranteed. (94% of projects that hit that mark eventually hit their goal.)

I look forward to pushing Kickstarter further in that direction, and build a platform flexible enough to do more than help artists raise money for themselves. I'd love to see more people use Kickstarter for commissioned works like Kind of Bloop, collecting the money to pay someone to make or do something you want to exist. Or anywhere you need to gauge market demand, like throwing parties without the risk of losing your shirt in ticket sales.

Soon, we'll be opening the site up to anyone who wants to make a project — and that's when things get really interesting. In the meantime, you can get an invite from an existing member, or sign up to get notified when Kickstarter opens to the public.

Like Jon Haddock's porn sans people, these photos are banal out of context. Only someone familiar with the original memes would sense something's amiss, like the set of a play waiting for the actors to stumble into history.

Can you name all 22 23? (Click any image for the answer.)

Ever since Kickstarter launched, I've been trying to come up with a great project for it that plays to its strengths... I like to describe it as a site that lets other people pre-order your dreams — an easy way to get the people you know to fund your ideas into reality.

With that in mind, I just launched a project I've been dreaming about for years. The idea is Kind of Bloop, an 8-bit tribute to Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, one of my favorite albums of all-time. I've always wondered what chiptune jazz covers would sound like. What would the jazz masters sound like on a Nintendo Entertainment System? Coltrane on a C-64? Mingus on Amiga?

I've researched the topic quite a bit, and was only able to find four jazz covers ever released — ast0r's version of Coltrane's Giant Steps and Charlie Parker's Confirmation, Sergeeo's own Giant Steps cover, and Bun's version of Coltrane's My Favorite Things. (If you know more, please let me know!)

So I asked ast0r and sergeeo, along with three incredible chiptune artists (Virt, Shnabubula, and Disasterpeace), to collaborate on a track-by-track remake of the album. I'm raising the money to legally release the album, pay the royalties¹, print a very limited run of CDs for Kickstarter backers only, and pay the artists for their hard work on these very challenging songs.

Read more about the project, and back it if you want to make it real.²

Update: We hit our $2,000 goal in four hours, so this project's definitely on! That doesn't mean it's over, though... Anyone can still give money for the download or limited-edition CD. But I'm not planning on selling the album after the August 1 deadline, so pledge now if you want a copy.

Footnotes

1. This is my first time licensing music, and I'm frustrated that there's no free, legal way to release this album for free download when it's done. By law, you're legally required to pay royalties for every download, whether or not you charge for it. Wouldn't a percentage of revenue make more sense?

2. Some people seem to misunderstand what Kickstarter's for, expecting it to work like Kiva, where there's a pool of investors waiting for neat projects to throw their money into. In reality, I'd expect very, very few projects to be backed by random people stumbling on it from the Kickstarter website. It hinges on your own social network, your ability to promote your project, and the demand for what you're offering. So if your project fails, it's most likely because there wasn't enough interest from the people you know.

From: jenifergoodluck (Your Big Fool) <cynthiawilliam5@yahoo.com>
Reply-to: jenifer.dagba@yahoo.com
Date: Mon, May 4, 2009 at 6:11 AM
Subject: Hello My Dear one

Hello My Dear one

How are you and how is your work? i hope that all is well with you, My name is miss Jenifer , i know that you may be suprise how i get your email, i got your email today when i was browsing looking for honest partner,then i feel to drop this few line to you , and i will like you to contact me through my email so that we can know each other and exchange our pictures, and we maybecome partner.

Remember the distance does not matter what matters is the love we share with each other. i am waiting to hear from you soon.

kiss regards Miss Jenifer

About an hour later, I received a very unusual followup.

From: jenifergoodluck (Your Big Fool) <cynthiawilliam5@yahoo.com>
Reply-to: jenifer.dagba@yahoo.com
Date: Mon, May 4, 2009 at 6:11 AM
Subject: You Owe Me

Since you haven't fallen for my stupid scam letter let me go ahead and be up front with you.

Because I am a Nigerian, you owe me something. The fact that my decadent forefathers sold their neighbors and relatives into slavery means that you owe me a lot of money, especially if you are white. I will accept $1000 USD from you per month for the next 12 months. That will settle your debt towards me that was created by our forefathers.

Moreover, it is imperative that you begin to acknowledge my inherited right to steal and be corrupt without oppression from anybody's legal system. I am entitled to instant riches at the expense of everyone outside West Africa.

This starts with you, my friend, so start paying up now by Western Union.

As much as I'd like to think Jenifer had a nervous breakdown within the hour, it's clear that it's a different author. The writing style is completely different and the scammer's from Senegal, not Nigeria.

I'm guessing an angry recipient hacked her Yahoo! Mail account and sent out the second message to discredit her. Any other theories? I replied to the email to get more details, but I don't expect a response.

Kickstarter aims to let creative people of all kinds -- journalists, artists, musicians, game developers, entrepreneurs, bloggers -- raise money for their projects by connecting directly with fans, who receive exclusive access and rewards in exchange for their patronage. Like Josh Freese and Jill Sobule, the site allows creators to have multiple tiers of rewards (e.g. $20 for the book, $50 for signed copy) with optional limits for each.

The model is simple: a project creator sets a fundraising goal, deadline, and an optional set of rewards for backers. If the goal's reached by the deadline, then everyone's charged via Amazon Payments and the backers get their goodies. If the goal's not reached, nobody's charged. It's all or nothing.

If you want to raise money to build an iPhone app, make a run of t-shirts, or print a book, you can do it with absolutely no risk or up-front costs. If there's enough demand for your idea, you'll be able to sell every copy before you've spent a dime.

Kickstarter also offers publishing tools, where creators can post project updates with audio and video, either publicly or for backers only. For projects without a physical reward, exclusive updates could be a great incentive for people to get involved. Check out this project for a good example.

Anyway, I'm thrilled to see what people come up with! For now, anyone can back projects, but you'll need a Kickstarter invite to be able to create your own project. (You can get an invite from an existing member, or sign up to get notified when Kickstarter opens to the public.)

The nominations for the 13th Annual Webby Awards are in, and browsing the list, I'm a little surprised at how much it's grown. I remember the novelty of the first ceremony at Bimbo's back in 1997, with its quirky five-word speeches and humble 15 categories.

I was curious to see the growth trend, so I tallied up the total number of categories on their official site. In the last five years, we've seen a 330% increase in new categories to a total of 129 today. In the chart below you can see the gradual rise during the dot-com era and brief reduction after the bust, only to swell along with the Web 2.0 movement. In 2005, with the introduction of the new Mobile, Advertising, and Film award types, the number of categories more than doubled to 63 and continued to expand every year since.

With so many categories, you'd think that their business model hinged on getting as many entries as possible... Which, of course, it does. Submitting an entry for Webby consideration costs $275 for the Website, Mobile, and Advertising categories, while the Film categories costs $195.

All of this reminds me of Cool Site of the Day, a former web mainstay that's long since drifted into irrelevance. Once they started taking cash for consideration, the award became less meaningful and the picks were less interesting because of it.

At what point does the Webbys meet the same fate as CSOTD, where the only people who care about the awards are the nominees themselves?

Background

After Del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter's article about URL shorteners was posted on AllThingsD, he asked on Twitter, "What the hell is this?" Danny Sullivan replied, "It's a compliment. AllThingsD liked your shortener article enough to feature you on their home page." Joshua responded, "It's just very unclear to me where that came from, who wrote it, why they are showing ads on it, etc."

Sunday, 3:30pm
What Do I Do With Myself, Now that the Economy Has Collapsed?

Lane Becker moderates a lineup of web geeks who started projects during the last bust, with some advice and lessons learned from our past success and failures. I'm very lucky to be on the lineup, along with the wonderful Ben Brown, Michael Sippey, and Jane Mount.

Monday, 7:30pm
The Heather Gold Show
Palmer Events Center, 900 Barton Springs Road

Every year, writer/comedian Heather Gold brings her live, interactive talk show to Austin to interview artists, musicians, coders, and writers around a theme. This year's subject is "Something From Nothing," a loose conversation about inspiration and the creative drive, with CD Baby founder Derek Sivers, Huffduffer creator Jeremy Keith, Adaptive Path founder/Emmett Labs CEO Janice Fraser, singer/songwriter Amber Rubarth, and me! The Heather Gold Show is a small part of the huge Plutopia EFF-Austin party, a three-stage art and music extravaganza featuring Bruce Sterling and Ian McLagan from The Faces, so should be fun. Free admission for SXSW badge holders, $10 for everyone else.

Naturally, I'll be on Twitter and my picks for the show are on Upcoming and Sched.org. If you see me, say hi!

While researching Oscar screeners last month, I stumbled on a remarkable example of online collaboration in China that's completely undiscovered here. In short, a group of dedicated fans of The Economist newsmagazine are translating each weekly issue cover-to-cover, splitting up the work among a team of volunteers, and redistributing the finished translations as complete PDFs for a Chinese audience.

It reminds me of the scanlation movement, in which groups of fans scan, translate, and redistribute manga into another language. But I've never seen it applied to a newspaper or magazine, especially one as high-minded as The Economist.

It's an impressive example of online collaboration with simple tools, a completely non-commercial effort by volunteers interested in spreading knowledge while improving their English skills. In the process, they're taking a political risk in translating controversial articles about their homeland behind the Great Firewall.

hodgman: Did I ever tell you people how much I hate the word "meh"? Nothing announces "I have missed the point" more than that word.

hodgman: It is the essence of blinkered Internet malcontentism. And a rejection of joy. Also: 12 hive mehs in the replies SO FAR

hodgman: By definition, it may mean disinterest (although simple silence would be a more damning and sincere response, in that case)

hodgman: But in use, it almost universally seems to signal: I am just interested enough to make one last joyless, nitpicky swipe and then disappear

wordwill: @hodgman Isn't rejecting joy how one traditionally demonstrates one's superior cool? Though, at the same time, to hell with that.

hodgman: @wordwill yes. It's part of the toxic Internet art of constant callous one upsmanship. And it is a sort of art, but not for me.

Original in English

Portuguese, "O-La-Ri-Lo-Le"

Italian, "Urca Tirulero"

I've been tracking the distribution of Oscar-nominated films every year, culminating with the release of six years of piracy data last year. I've updated those spreadsheets with this year's 26 nominees, for a total of 211 films from the last seven years.

You can view or download all the data below, including a second sheet with some interesting aggregate stats. As always, I'll keep it updated until the Oscar broadcast.

View full-size on Google Spreadsheets.

Download: Excel (with formulas) or CSV

Findings

So, how did they do? Out of 26 nominated films, an incredible 23 films are already available in DVD quality on nomination day, ripped either from the screeners or the retail DVDs. (All 26 were available by February 7.) This is the highest percentage since I started tracking.

Only three films are unavailable — Rachel Getting Married wasn't leaked online in any form, while Changeling is only available as a low-quality telecine transfer and Australia as a terrible quality camcorder recording. (Update: A DVD screener of Australia was leaked on January 23, a retail DVD rip of Changeling on January 31, and finally, the retail DVD of Rachel Getting Married on February 7.)

Other findings:

• Academy members received screeners for at least 20 of the 26 films.


• 25 out of 26 films leaked in some form online, if you include camcorder recordings.


• The average time from the time screeners are received by Academy members to its leak online is 6 days.

Surprisingly, it seems like this year's Oscar movies took longer to leak online than in previous years. If I had to guess, it's because far fewer camcorder copies were released for this year's nominees. This could be because of the theaters cracking down on camcorder recordings, but I suspect it's because fewer nominees were desirable targets this year for cams. (Aside from the obvious blockbusters, like Dark Knight, Kung Fu Panda, and Tropic Thunder.) The chart below shows the median number of days from a movie's US release date to its first leak online.

Last year, one of the interesting findings was how the release of Region 5 DVDs were reducing the prestige of official screener leaks. This year, only four of the nominated films were released as R5s, compared to eight from last year. The numbers are still too small to tell if this is a trend, but it seems like the popularity of the R5 may have peaked in 2007. (Are the studios releasing fewer R5s in general?)

What other trends in the data am I missing? Feel free to chime in with your conclusions or visualizations in the comments.

Methodology

As usual, I included the feature films in every category except documentary and foreign films. I used Yahoo! Movies for US release dates, always using the first available date, even if it was a limited release. Cam, telesync, R5, and screener leak dates were almost universally taken from VCD Quality. I used the first leak date, with the exception of unviewable or incomplete nuked releases. Finally, the official screener dates came from Academy member Ken Rudolph, who lists the date he receives every screener on his personal homepage. Thanks again, Ken!

For previous years, see 2004, 2005, 2007, 2008 (part 1 and part 2).

Update: The screener for Australia was released today, so I added that date to the spreadsheet, along with some missing retail DVD dates from last year's Oscars.

February 3, 2009: Some related links of interest... I was interviewed for Future Tense on American Public Media, talking about this entry. Bruce Lidl looked at leaks in the Foreign and Documentary categories, as well as how quickly HD-quality leaks are happening. Finally, Flowing Data is sponsoring a contest to generate information visualizations from this data.