So, naturally, I've been doing a lot of digging about the story on *.gov websites. In the process, I realized that the U.S. government loves the "PRISM" acronym. There are literally dozens of projects and applications named PRISM at the state and federal level, many with delightfully goofy logos. Here are some of my favorites.

Panelist and Reviewer Information System
Database of prospective reviewers for The National Endowment for the Humanities

Parallel Research on Invariant Subspace Methods
Argonne National Laboratory project to develop infrastructure and algorithms for the parallel solution of eigenvalue problems

Pliocene Research, Interpretation and Synoptic Mapping
USGS project to understand global climate change

PRoject Information SysteM
Apply for grants from the Washington State's Recreation and Conservation Office

Parameter-elevation Regressions on Independent Slopes Model
Climate analysis tool from the National Water and Climate Center

Pesticide Registration Information SysteM
The Environmental Protection Agency's database on all registered pesticide products.

Portable Remote Imaging Spectrometer
NASA JPL's airborne instrument for monitoring the ocean from UAVs

Performance and Registration Information Systems Management
U.S. Dept. of Transportation program to register commercial vehicles

Performance Reporting Information System
The State of Oregon's workforce reporting system

Partnerships for Regional Invasive Species Management
The State of New York's environmental effort to manage invasive species

Patient Reporting Investigation Surveillance Manager
Communicable disease data system for the State of Wyoming's STD program

Performance Related Information for Staff and Managers
Dept. of Mental Health's reports on hospital trends

Proactive Recruitment in Introductory Science and Mathematics
National Science Foundation's effort to fund STEM programs for undergrad students

Proteomics Research Information System and Management
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory's system for managing large-scale protein data

Procurement Information System for Management
Procurement software used across the federal government

@maxtemkin Still waiting for a Dance project I care about. Someone needs to do an interpretive dance based on Spelunky or something.

— Andy Baio (@waxpancake) May 1, 2013

Not long afterwards, this appeared.

$1 goal with a 24 hour limit, and a single $1 reward limited to one backer: me. So great. I can't wait to see the finished dance.

It even got the attention of Spelunky creator Derek Yu:

Time to break some Kickstarter records, guys. RT @aeiowu Help save the world. Every little bit counts: kickstarter.com/projects/maxte...

— Derek Yu (@mossmouth) May 1, 2013

With absolutely no prompting, and with no real incentive to back the project, it's up to 71 backers and $132. (Like me, it looks like more than a few people are using this project as an opportunity to fill their Kickstarter pie... The Dance category is almost always the last slice filled.)

Beyond our circle of friends, the reaction from the Internet to Max's project was ridiculous. One indie comics artist called it "Kickstarter Abuse," and people on /r/games said the project was "mocking current industry trends" and "a waste of time, and a shallow effort to hold a mirror up to society."

The early days of Kickstarter were filled with crazy, tiny experimental projects like these. After all, Kickstarter CEO Perry Chen's only successful project was six backers giving him $19 to videochat with him on a flight and buy drinks for random passengers. These are the roots of Kickstarter's international success.

Playful experimentation is never abuse. It's the best thing for a healthy, creative community.

May 6: The performance was released exclusively to me last night, and I was deep in the middle of plans to sell DVDs, when some jerks named tUNNELcREW leaked it online. First, as a camcorder leak and then the screener copy.

Since I clearly won't be making a dime off this project, I decided to release the high-quality performance on YouTube. Enjoy.

For those unfamiliar, Archive Team is a band of rogue archivists and programmers working to rescue dead and dying websites from destruction. To put it mildly, they are very good at what they do.

Led by computer historian/documentary filmmaker Jason Scott, they've saved massive sites like GeoCities, Friendster, MobileMe, Fortune City and many others from deletion, and collaborate with the Internet Archive to inject their backups into the Wayback Machine for permanent preservation.

The importance of their work can't be overstated. While companies like Yahoo work to destroy as much Internet history as possible, Archive Team is the only group actively trying to save it.

To assist their efforts, they've developed ArchiveTeam Warrior, a virtual appliance that makes it easy for anyone to help archive dying websites and upload the backups to their server.

Want to help? Install Warrior right now.

It's dead simple to get up and running, and works on Windows, Mac, and Linux. And because it all runs in a virtual machine, it can't possibly hurt your system. It will only use your bandwidth and disk space.

After it's installed, you can choose the "Upcoming" project to start backing up Upcoming.org specifically, or pick "ArchiveTeam's Choice" to let the team decide. Posterous and Formspring are also dying soon, and that will allow the team to prioritize your work.

I made a little video showing how easy it is to start saving Internet history.

You can track the status of the Upcoming archiving effort in real-time, currently at around 6% of the complete site.

And again, thanks to all the dedicated volunteers of Archive Team for their effort.

Update (April 23): Three days later, the Upcoming archive is complete. Every event, venue, group, and user page is currently being compressed and uploaded in batches to the Internet Archive. Truly amazing.

My next step: to parse the HTML and extract structured data, distributed that database, and build something off it to make the community-contributed material accessible after Yahoo shuts it down.

I knew its closure was inevitable after the infamous sunset slide, but never knew when it would happen. Like a newspaper prepping for a sick celebrity, this obituary's been sitting in my drafts folder for months, waiting for its sad publication day.

The last five years were hard on Upcoming. After Gordon Luk, Leonard Lin, and I left at the end of 2007, the site quickly started to fall apart. The social features that made Upcoming unique were minimized, or removed entirely, by a series of redesigns. Spam, like creeping kudzu, was left unchecked and spread across the site. Fortunately, the final catastrophic redesign never made its way out of beta.

By 2009, the only people using Upcoming were event promoters and spammers. (Especially depressing considering self-promotion was banned entirely for its first two years.)

Frustratingly, nothing's come to take its place. Potential competitors like Plancast and Going closed their doors, while others never grew an organic community. Some sites carved off a piece of Upcoming: Facebook's private events, Songkick's concerts, and Lanyrd's fantastic conference coverage.

But, for me, finding events I care about feels like 2002 again. I'm missing geeky events I'd love, and when I travel to a new city, I'm back to digging through the calendar listings of my local weekly newspapers. It blows my mind that the problem Upcoming solved — surfacing interesting events in a city, driven by public social activity — is an unsolved problem again.

And now, Yahoo will quietly take Upcoming off life support, an opportunity squandered.

Bleeding Purple

It's hard to believe now, but there was a time when Yahoo was actually pretty cool, in its own dorky Silicon Valley way.

By 2005, when we started talking to Yahoo, they'd made a series of thoughtful hires, including PHP creator Rasmus Lerdorf, Jeremy Zawodny, Tom Coates, Simon Willison, and future Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson. Cameron Marlow, Jeffery Bennett, and Mor Namaan were doing pioneering work at Yahoo Research. They acquired Flickr, bringing some of the most talented and creative people in technology to help change the company from the inside, including Cal Henderson, Heather Champ, and founders Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield. A month after we came in, they acquired Del.icio.us.

Clueful people were making their way up to the executive level, too. Future Bandcamp founder Ethan Diamond led the redesign of Yahoo Mail, future Topspin CEO Ian Rogers was managing Yahoo Music, and and Bradley Horowitz, now VP of Product at Google, was taking over big pieces of the company. Yahoo was an exciting place to be.

Upcoming was a side project, created during my day job at a financial company. After my son was born, I had no time to work on Upcoming at all, even as the community grew. Spammers started to discover the site, as bug reports and support requests piled up unanswered. The opportunity to work on my own project full-time was a dream come true.

And Yahoo seemed like a perfect home for Upcoming — they'd promised resources to grow the community, we'd get to work at a promising tech giant with some of our favorite people, and the acquisition price was small but seemed fair. Coming into Yahoo, we were hopeful.

It wasn't clear how dysfunctional the rest of Yahoo was until we'd settled in, and there was no indication how horrible they'd soon become in the years to follow. This was long before they gave up dissidents to the Chinese government, closed Geocities, weaponized their patents, "sunsetted" Delicious, and a number of other awful decisions.

In hindsight, selling Upcoming to Yahoo was a horrible mistake. Selling your company always means sacrificing control and risking its fate, and as we now know, online communities almost always fail after acquisition. (YouTube is the rare exception, albeit one with billion-dollar momentum.) But Yahoo was a particularly horrible steward for the community.

I built Upcoming because it scratched a personal itch, and I was delighted when so many others found it useful. For the small group of old-schoolers that remember it in its prime, Upcoming made their lives better. I've heard stories of people finding friends and spouses through Upcoming, people lonely in a new city tapping into new communities, impromptu parties gaining momentum.

I'm going to miss it.

Archiving Upcoming

Upcoming stopped being relevant long ago, and part of me is happy that Yahoo's putting this bastardized version of the site out of its misery. (In case your memory's foggy, compare how it looked when we left to its current state.)

What really upsets me is that the archived events will soon be taken offline, and with no way to back it up. Ten years of history will be gone in 11 days. Good URLs never die, and I'm frustrated that every link to Upcoming will soon 404.

I've reached out to Yahoo multiple times over the last few months about re-acquiring the Upcoming.org domain and event database, but they were less than receptive.

I would love to create a permanent archive of Upcoming, with a clean responsive layout and some month-by-month analysis and visualization of the site's history, but getting the metadata's proving much more difficult than I thought.

All of Upcoming's events and venues use autoincremented ids, making it dead simple to generate a list of URLs to scrape. But Yahoo's security makes scraping a challenge. Every time I've tried to back up pages, I can only grab a few files with curl or httrack before Yahoo starts serving blank responses.

Note that scraping the HTML alone won't provide the full list of attendees for popular events, which are displayed via Javascript. For example, to get all the metadata for this event, you'd need to scrape both the event page for the event details and this XML for the attendees.

If you have any idea how to scrape Upcoming's events, or can get me a dump in any form, please get in touch ASAP. Anonymity guaranteed.

Update: Archive Team is working to save Upcoming, and they need your help in the rescue efforts.

Watch it full-screen HD on Vimeo.

Meet Nyan Cat's Creator at Mashable House

Tweets Will Power Doritos' 62-Foot SXSW Vending Machine Concert Stage

Top the Kred SXSW 2013 Leaderboard and Become a Kred Star

Klout Offers 'Cirque du Soleil' VIP Perk at SXSW

Quiznos to Present at OMMA Mobile at SXSW on Mobile Advertising Campaign Success Powered by Sense Networks!

...and more.

I signed up the day it went live in the App Store, on February 7, and finally made it to the front of the line this morning after two weeks of patient line-waiting.

While I was waiting, I'd occasionally open the app to see my place in the queue, and think — what if the line was real?

Imagine an ever-growing line of weary people fiddling with their phones, sprawling off into the distance. How long would the line be?

If you signed up right now, you'd find yourself at the end of a line with 807,896 people ahead of you.

They're letting people in at a near-constant rate of 800 per hour, or just over 13 people per minute.

Let's assume that people standing in line take up an average of two feet of space, from back to back with room for personal space.

The line stretches over 300 miles into the distance. To put it in perspective, that's further than London to the outskirts of Paris. It's 30 miles longer than Hollywood to Las Vegas. It spans from the Bronx to Portland, Maine.

But it's moving! Slowly. At about 0.3 miles per hour. You're shuffling along at just over five inches per second.

At the current rate, you'll make it to the front of the line in about 42 days.

I hope you brought a charger.

As I wrote last month, Macklemore is only the second unsigned artist in Billboard history to reach the #1 slot, the first in two decades.

And now, with a new #1, another record's broken: Baauer's "Harlem Shake" is the first song from a largely unknown artist to debut at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Since 1958, only 21 songs have ever debuted at #1. Of those 21 songs, only four were from artists appearing on the Hot 100 for the first time, all from artists with extensive mainstream media exposure — three American Idol contestants (Clay Aiken, Fantasia and Carrie Underwood) and a popular artist going solo (Lauryn Hill). Source: Billboard.

I'd wager this is another first: "Harlem Shake" is the only song to ever debut at #1 on the Hot 100 without significant radio or TV airplay. This is solely an Internet phenomenon, gone deeply mainstream.

This is in no small part because of major changes incorporating YouTube views into the Billboard Hot 100 formula, introduced this week in response to the viral success of "Gangnam Style."

This week, a report surfaced that Nielsen will start tracking YouTube and other digital plays too.

Billboard and Nielsen are just acknowledging a long-overdue reality. Radio and cable aren't the future, and if you're focused on tracking them, you're looking at an ever-shrinking window of behavior.

But seriously, who cares what Billboard and Nielsen think anyway? Aren't the charts irrelevant? For most purposes, probably.

But like winning an award, chart success is a symbol of reputation. Recognition from a reputable source tracking sales or viewership opens doors for artists, especially important if you're independent.

It's one thing for Amanda Palmer to raise a million dollars from Kickstarter, but having her album debut in the Billboard top ten shows that there's demand beyond her most hardcore early supporters. This gives her team the power to negotiate everything from distributors to concert venue contracts.

And when other artists see that indie artists can find legitimate mainstream success on their own, others will follow. This is already happening on a small scale, but it's only going to get accelerate.

A couple weeks ago, I went to see Ben Folds Five's reunion tour here in Portland:

Just saw an unsigned indie trio from North Carolina that crowdfunded their new album. These boys are going places! twitter.com/waxpancake/sta...

— Andy Baio (@waxpancake) February 6, 2013

I joked about it on Twitter, but I'm not sure many knew I was serious. The reformed Ben Folds Five is unsigned.

After releasing their first three albums on Sony, Ben Folds Five decided to fund their album on Pledge Music and release it independently.

They easily could've released it through a label — Ben Folds is still signed to Sony/Epic for his solo work and Darren Jesse through Bar/None. Why do it all on their own?

Because they could.

But I was starting to feel guilty about ignoring it, so I added some new tools for exploring the archive of 650+ games, sketches, and silly experiments.

You can now see the most popular games, all the games I've featured, the most recently published games, and my personal favorite, the games with the longest source code.

This surfaced a whole bunch of interesting games I hadn't seen, so I freshened up the featured section with some new picks.

Playfic was always intended to be an experiment, yet another tool of creative expression and a quick way for people to experiment with Inform 7. I really wasn't expecting much out of it, but I've been happy to see people slowly discover the community and find new uses for it.

Update: Releasing any platform for creative expression often comes with unintended consequences. For Playfic, one of the biggest surprises was seeing it used by educators, something I never intended.

Most recently, I just discovered this high school teacher using Playfic to teach interactive fiction in the classroom. I was a little stunned to see a room full of high school students playing interactive fiction for the first time on iPads, starting with Cooper's first game:

Games being created by high-school students and played by high-school students. How awesome is that?

It's an old story, and a common theme that pops up in rock songs, often from well-established bands. (Though it seems especially common the '70s.)

After writing about Macklemore's "Jimmy Iovine" for my Indiepocalypse post yesterday, I stumbled on several more great angry songs about record labels. They didn't fit into the post, but I still wanted to share them.

Graham Parker and the Rumour - Mercury Poisoning (1979)

I got a dinosaur for a representative,
It's got a small brain and refuses to learn
Their promotion's so lame,
They could never ever take me to the real ball game
Listen, I ain't a pet, I ain't a token hipster in your Monopoly set.
I've got Mercury poisoning.
It's fatal and it don't get better!

The Clash - Complete Control (1977)

They said we'd be artistically free when we signed that bit of paper
They meant let's make a lotsa money and worry about it later
I'll never understand
Complete control, lemme see your other hand
I don't trust you, so why should you trust me?

Nick Lowe - I Love My Label (1977)

Deeply sarcastic, Lowe tossed off this track to get out of his major label deal with United Artists.

Oh I'm so proud of them up here, we're one big happy family
I guess you could say I'm the poor relation of the parent company
They always ask for lots of songs,
but no more than 2:50 long so I write 'em some
They never talk behind my back,
and they're always playing my new tracks when I come along

Lynyrd Skynyrd - Workin' For MCA (1974)

MCA signed the young band for a seven year deal for $9,000.

Oh, nine thousand dollars just to sow to the wind.
Come to smile at the yankee slicker with a big old southern grin.
They're gonna take me out to California, gonna make me a superstar.
Just pay me all my money, maybe you won't get a scar.

Want you to sign the contract,
want you to sign the date.
Gonna give you lots of money
Workin' for MCA.

Sex Pistols - E.M.I. (1977)

In October 1978, EMI signed the Sex Pistols to a two-year contract, but dropped them only three months later. They were quickly picked up by A&M, and dropped less than a week later. Virgin finally released their debut in May 1977, their third label in six months.

Don't judge a book just by the cover
Unless you cover just another
And blind acceptance is a sign
Of stupid fools who stand in line
Like E.M.I.

The Smiths - Paint A Vulgar Picture (1987)

World tour, media whore,
please the press in Belgium.
This was your life.
And when it fails to recoup?
Well, maybe you just haven't earned it yet, baby.

In one sense, this is the ultimate first-world problem — successful musicians complaining about bad business deals. Then again, for decades, signing with a major label was the only game in town if you wanted to find success in the music industry, and the labels exploited that monopoly.

But overall, I tend to agree with Trent Reznor, who said, "I don't set out to write songs about record labels. Nothing could be more boring—with the possible exception of writing about tour buses."

The only other unsigned artist to ever hit #1 was Lisa Loeb's "Stay (I Missed You)" in 1994, when her friend Ethan Hawke gave the track to Ben Stiller to include on the Reality Bites soundtrack. She quickly signed to a major label, releasing her debut album the following year with Geffen Records.

Lisa Loeb switched to a label as soon as she could because, in 1994, it was the only way to finance a full album, nationwide tour, market an album, get radio/TV airplay, and get distribution to record stores.

That prized record deal didn't work out the way she'd hoped. Four years before Lisa Loeb joined Geffen, the label was acquired by MCA, later renamed to Universal Music Group. She ended up on Interscope/A&M, one of Universal's many subsidiaries, where she received less-than-stellar treatment.

"They became a really big label and I felt they weren't focusing a lot on music," Loeb said in 2003. "They had executives telling you one thing one day and then telling you something different the next. They couldn't deliver on their promises." A planned music video was rejected by the label because they disagreed with the concept.

In the end, she had to negotiate to buy the rights to her own master recordings from Interscope.

Lisa Loeb wanted her work to be heard and she wanted to make a living doing what she loved, so she sacrificed her creative and financial control to get there.

For hundreds of years, publishers across every industry — book publishers, record labels, film studios, videogame publishers — solved problems for artists in four major ways:

1. Funding. The cost of creating a new work, paying the artist's expenses during the creation process, often with an advance.
2. Production. Design, manufacturing, and printing of the finished product.
3. Marketing. Going on tour, making a video, promotion in various media outlets.
4. Distribution. Getting the product into people's hands.

And how does this play out now?

Digital distribution subverted the monopolies held by physical distribution, bypassing distribution deals with record stores entirely, allowing artists to sell directly to fans. Social media and online music services changed the way people discover music, making the payola systems of MTV and radio airplay feel quaint. Production costs dropped dramatically as computers became more powerful and audio editing software got dirt cheap, along with new services for printing on demand. And, finally, Kickstarter and other crowdfunding platforms offset the financial risk to artists.

Most importantly, each new platform let artists find, communicate, and sell directly to their fans.

Music is hardly alone here. Videogames, film, comics, books, product design, hardware, software, board games, whatever. Hackers and makers across every form of art are finding their fan bases, interacting with them, and selling to them.

We're at the beginning of an indiepocalypse — a global shift in how culture is made, from a traditional publisher model to independently produced and distributed works.

Artists that were royally screwed over in the past now have an alternative.

As high-profile artists keep popping up across every industry, other artists will inevitably follow. For every Louis CK or Amanda Palmer, there are 10,000 other artists ready to wake up and try something new. It will be the default state for new artists, and a rising trend among artists with existing fanbases.

Publishers will have to evolve just to stay alive. Labels, studios, and other publishers can provide huge value — they can take care of the bullshit that artists don't want to do. And they can apply knowledge and existing relationships to help artists, rather than asking artists to learn everything from scratch.

Artists of all kinds want to focus on making art, but not if it means giving up a large financial stake in their work, exclusive rights to their work, or a loss of creative control.

It would take much more work, but Macklemore and Ryan Lewis could do it all themselves. Why sign with a label, if it meant giving up so much?

If you have any doubt over whether Macklemore and Ryan Lewis will sign to a major label any time soon, check out the lyrics to "Jimmy Iovine," a track off their debut album, named after the head of Interscope, Lisa Loeb's former label. In the song, he sneaks into Jimmy Iovine's office to try to get a record deal.

Finally see an office with a mounted sign, heaven sent
Big block silver letters, read it out loud: President (nice!)
This was my chance to grab that contract and turn and jet
Right then felt a cold hand grab on the back of my neck
He said, "We've been watching you, so glad you could make it
Your music gets so impressive in this whole brand you created
You're one hell of a band, we here think you're destined for greatness
And with that right song we all know that you're next to be famous
Now I'm sorry, I've had a long day remind me, now what your name is?
That's right, Macklemore, of course, today has been crazy
Anyway, you ready? We'll give you a hundred thousand dollars
After your album comes out we'll need back that money that you borrowed."
"So it's really like a loan?"
"A loan? Come on, no, we're a team, 360 degrees, we will reach your goals!
We'll get a third of the merch that you sell out on the road
Along with a third of the money you make when you're out doing your shows
Manager gets 20%, booking agent gets 10%
So shit, after taxes you and Ryan have 7% to split
That's not bad, I've seen a lot worse, No one will give you a better offer than us."
I replied, "I appreciate the offer, thought that this is what I wanted
Rather be a starving artist than succeed at getting fucked."

It took two decades for a second unsigned artist to top the Billboard charts. I'm guessing it won't be long before we see another.

Fred noticed him first, sitting in the middle of a long table nearby, five people deep on either side. The place was packed and it was hard to reach him, but I waved from across the room, trying to catch his eye. No luck. He was deep in conversation, smiling and chatting. I thought he looked happy. I was wrong.

It was the first time I'd seen him in years, but I decided not to bug him, figuring I could catch up with him some other time. I made a mental note to drop him a line next time I was in NYC.

The next day, he was gone.

Watching him grow up online, he felt like the Internet's little brother. His young age betrayed a deep drive and talent, leading him to accomplish so much in so little time. It was intimidating to people twice his age.

By the time I met him at Foo Camp in 2005, I knew way too much about him. I knew about his work with RSS and Creative Commons, I'd followed his crushes and frustrations on his personal blog through his awkward college years, and I was an avid reader of his Google blog.

He was one of the first people to sign up for Upcoming.org, on the second day it was live, and occasionally sent me valuable feedback. After Upcoming was acquired, he was the first person to visit us, on our second day in the office, on November 2, 2005. The photos he took of us and the gaudy Yahoo campus were the first he ever posted to Flickr.

We sat down for dinner at the end of a long day in URL's, the Yahoo cafeteria, and talked about supertasters and the web. He struck me as someone who was curious, brave, idealistic, and occasionally immature — the kind of person who gets shit done.

We'd talked online occasionally, but it'd been years since I'd seen him last as he went on to change the world — merging Infogami with Reddit, liberating the PACER and Library of Congress datasets, starting Open Library and Demand Progress, and helping to crush SOPA. And, yes, busting into an MIT closet to download millions of academic papers.

Yep, he got shit done.

I never got a chance to say goodbye, but my last glimpse is how I'll remember him. The center of a modern-day Last Supper, holding court over grilled cheese sandwiches in a Lower East Side bar, surrounded by people who loved him.

Goodnight, Aaron.

I was curious to see if the video was matched up to the local TV news broadcast, so I synchronized the two videos side-by-side to see. The results are below (view full screen):

There are two versions in the video. First, synchronized to the TV broadcast on screen, and second, to real-life events.

Note that the TV broadcast is exactly ten seconds behind real-life, with the news station operating on a ten-second delay. Live news commonly uses a five- to ten-second delays for unpredictable live coverage, like the recent car chase that ended in suicide accidentally broadcast by FOX News.

As much as I was hoping to debunk this, it appears to be real (or a particularly convincing fake).

I haven't talked about the site much, and have barely touched it since we launched, but I've been delighted to see people slowly discover it and use it in interesting ways. Unfortunately, I'm the only one privy to these delights, since I never got around to building a good way to browse or search them.

So far, there have been over 600 games created on Playfic. While many of them have been simple sketches or tests, over 20% have more than 1,000 words in the source code. What kind of things have people made on Playfic? Some of my favorites so far:

• An absurd dream world full of Jungian symbolism
• A jetpack simulator.
• Doctor Who fanfic and The TARDIS.
• A port of Homestar Runner's Thy Dungeonman
• Sherlock fanfic
• A geography game winding through the continental U.S. states
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic meets dark, existential dread

But two of my favorite examples happened in the last two weeks.

First, Wired's Chris Kohler published an interview with Infocom's Dave Lebling and Steve Meretzky as an interactive fiction game. The game was written on Playfic and embedded in the article.

As if that wasn't awesome enough, today came the first release of Text Glitch, a very early attempt to port the wonderfully creative Glitch multiplayer game to a text adventure.

In short, the brilliant Rev. Dan Catt took the locations and items from the last snapshot of the Glitch Encyclopedia, parsed it, and spit out Inform 7 source suitable for Playfic.

It's very alpha, only covering the Alakol region, and doesn't have any interactive elements beyond simple exploration yet, but for fans of Glitch, it's a trip.

I was a big admirer of Glitch, and very sad when it closed its doors last month. I love the idea of preserving its collective memory in a text world you can explore.

This is exactly the kind of surprising thing I was hoping to see on Playfic. Give people a new outlet for creative expression, and they'll find it and use it. Simply by making it easier for anyone to screw around with Inform 7 and share interactive fiction from their browser, crazy awesome things emerge. I hope to do some work on it this weekend to help shine a light on some more of the wonderful things the community's created.

The writeups on The Verge, Boing Boing, and Wired summed it nicely, and I did a big roundup of reactions from attendees and the press over on Kickstarter.

In case you couldn't make it, we released the videos for every talk last week, over seven hours of video from 24 amazing speakers. There are too many great talks to mention, but personal highlights include Dan Harmon, Chris Poole, R. Stevens, Julia Nunes, and Adam Savage.

Here's my opening talk from the conference portion of the festival, a quick ten minutes talking about what XOXO means and how it happened:

Last month, I was the opening talk at Farmhouse Conf in Los Angeles, attended Andy McMillan's Build in Belfast, participated in the Open Internet Preservation Society at Mozilla Festival in London, and gave the closing talk at Beyond Tellerand in Düsseldorf.

At each event, I've started looking at them from a new perspective, hoping to learn what works and what to avoid, if we ever do XOXO again. A big event, like any startup, is a series of small decisions that roll up into a joyful or miserable user experience.

I've talked a bit about the philosophy behind XOXO and what we were hoping to accomplish — celebrating independent artists and hackers using tech to make a living doing what they love. But I haven't talked at all about the logistics of running the festival, and all the decisions we made that made it unique.

After organizing Build for three years, XOXO was Andy McMillan's fourth major event, but my first time organizing anything bigger than 50 people. From Build, Andy came equipped with concrete ideas about what makes a great conference. I didn't have any experience running an event, but I've been to enough conferences to know what I like. Fortunately, we have very, very similar tastes.

Put simply, I designed the festival that I wanted to see in the world, with the hope that enough attendees shared my interests — if you care about the things I do, you probably had a great time at XOXO.

Speaking only for myself, here's why I think XOXO worked and what we were trying to do.

Tone

XOXO was a snark-free zone, a reaction to the cynicism and knee-jerk contrarianism that's so prevalent online. Playful, sincere, supportive, and meaningful. I wanted them to feel comfortable enough to approach strangers and make new friends. I never wanted them to feel like they were being marketed to. I wanted people to experience everything I love about Portland, have great food and drink, and never feel bored or confused. More than anything, we tried to optimize XOXO for fun.

During our opening comments, I took a moment to encourage everyone to approach people standing alone, or join groups of people they don't know, knowing that everyone was supportive and nobody would be turned away. At the closing party, I heard self-described introverts tell me this guidance fundamentally changed their experience of a conference. They weren't stumbling around alone anymore.

Curation

Curation is the most important factor of a great event. A clear editorial voice, a coherent theme, and who you invite to participate changes everything that comes after it — good curation brings great attendees, generates word-of-mouth, great press, and opens all kinds of doors.

Curation isn't limited to just picking the speakers. In our case, it included the videogames and their designers in XOXO Arcade, the films and their directors at XOXO Film, the musicians in XOXO Music, every project featured in the Market and Hack Cafe, and all the local food carts on the street.

To get great speakers, you have to actively recruit them. For several speakers, XOXO was their first talk. Fortunately, designing the XOXO lineup got easier with each successive speaker, opening the doors to higher and higher profile people. By the time I approached Adam Savage, the lineup was already impressive. After we got Adam, signing on Dan Harmon was that much easier. But it was always a hustle, crafting and customizing the pitch for every single speaker — convincing them it was worth their time and effort for a first-time festival.

Location

The city, the venue, the neighborhood's walkability, and the proximity to great restaurants and bars make the difference between an amazing event and a total slog. In many ways, the event is the location. Good events can succeed despite a bad location, but an amazing location can salvage even the most poorly-run event, giving attendees a memorable experience from the surrounding area alone.

It's amazing to me how many conferences get this wrong, usually for convenience, cost, and capacity. Most commercial event spaces have no character at all, and are in less than ideal areas. Convention centers and hotel ballrooms are well-equipped for large events, but are universally awful places for a creative event.

We held XOXO in a historic two-story brick building in southeast Portland, formerly an industrial laundry converted into an arts space. It didn't have a stage, lighting, sound, wifi, or bathrooms. But it had character, and it was in a perfect part of the city, with two great breweries within a half block and an awesome nightclub across the street, ideal for our opening party and music event.

So we built out all that infrastructure because it was worth it. And on top of that, we customized the venue for our needs, cracking open a long-defunct loading dock as our main entrance, constructing new stairs out to the street, and building a huge wooden deck for outdoor café seating in the parking lot.

It would've been way easier to just give up and use the Oregon Convention Center, with all of its creature comforts, but it has no soul. And every out-of-town attendee would leave thinking that Portland was like the area around the convention center.

We spent tons of money on all that stuff, but there's no question it made a huge difference.

Talk Format

Panels are the best way to make four interesting people boring. They're hard to prepare for, too much pressure to be interesting on the spot, and usually end up a meandering and unfocused conversation touching on a handful of topics. I hate them. Even with a strong moderator, I'd universally rather hear four short solo talks from each person than a four-person conversation. Why? Because preparing a solo talk forces the speaker to think carefully about what they want to say, conveying their message and meaning in a concise way.

As a result, the conference portion of XOXO was entirely solo talks, save for two interviews. I don't love the interview format either, but logistical issues made an interview the best option for both. We made the best of it by getting amazing interviewers, each one an expert and accomplished speaker in their own right.

Another thing missing from XOXO: audience Q&A after talks. Opening up for audience questions is always a huge gamble, giving the captive attention of the entire room to a single audience member. That kind of free attention always seems to inspire the one douchebag in the audience to promote their website or try to impress the crowd with their rambling commentary on the subject. "This is more of an observation than a question..." Sit down, jackass.

One benefit of avoiding professional speakers is that they're much more likely to actually attend the festival, instead of parachuting in and out for just another paying gig. All but one of XOXO's speakers stayed for the entire festival. So, instead of Q&A, we encouraged attendees to go talk to speakers at the evening events and buy them beers. This worked really well. (Maybe too well, in the case of one speaker who showed up before his talk with an epic hangover.)

Single Track

Multiple tracks allow for more talks, more attendees, and more money. The drawback is that you're dividing the attention of attendees and forcing speakers to compete against their peers.

By its nature, multiple-track conferences are forced to pit the most popular sessions at the same time as one another, so that attendees split fairly evenly and don't flood any single room. The result is that attendees are forced to choose between multiple things they want to see, and you end up missing half of what you were hoping to see.

It also changes the shared experience, exposing attendees to ideas and people they may have not sought out on their own. At XOXO, every attendee heard the same speakers and could reflect on them together. I think this is a much better experience for everyone.

Commercialization

Conferences make money in two ways: ticket sales and sponsorship. Unlike journalism, many event organizers don't have any qualms with mixing editorial and advertising.

It's not uncommon for conferences to sell keynote talks, on-stage mentions, video interviews, blog posts, tweets, email blasts, and brochures distributed to every attendee. This is in addition to all the standard on-stage advertising, swag bag inserts, outdoor tents, vendor booths, and branded conference merchandise. Everything at a conference is for sale, including you.

XOXO took a different approach. Instead of sponsors, we had patrons that contributed to the event. What's the difference? Our three patrons weren't bidding for your attention — they wanted to make the event better, and they wanted to participate in it. We gave them passes to the event for their team, mentions in the guide and homepage, and that's it. Wieden+Kennedy invited attendees to a party on their roof. Mailchimp quietly picked up the bar tab at XOXO Music, without any prompting.

As a side effect, this self-selected for interesting, creative companies. The kind of company that's excited to buy a keynote slot and shove their brand down everybody's throats with email blasts isn't the kind of company that's open to this kind of low-visibility patronage.

The result was better for everyone: attendees never suffered a deluge of unwanted advertising and sponsored keynotes, and these three companies helped make something great, while meeting some of the most interesting people in art and tech. From a cost-benefit basis, I'd argue that each patron walked away with something more important than other sponsorship — meaningful connections and a whole lot of goodwill. I'd love to find more creative ways to incorporate patronage in future events.

Big conferences can keep their payola. I'm happy to leave that dirty money on the table.

The Attendees

All the decisions that you make shape the attendees that decide to show up, and ultimately, the attendees decide the fate of a conference. Our attendee list was a ridiculously great roster of creative people.

The biggest challenge for XOXO, if we decide to do it again, will be the attendees. XOXO is a festival for artists and makers, not for people focused on business, PR, and marketing. If enough of those people leak into your event, it shifts the focus and creates a downward spiral that's hard to recover from. The trick is that the biz/marketing/PR crowd often has more resources, and it may take some creative measures to keep them out.

There's also a larger tension between inclusiveness and intimacy. Attendees want an intimate event where they can talk to every person in the room over the course of three days. But, at the same time, I don't want to run an event for the same 400 people every year. I want more diversity and more new voices, with a better balance between artists and technologists, and a better age, gender, and racial breakdown. And, if I'm devoting a chunk of my life to this, I want something with a larger cultural footprint that can make a difference in more lives.

But to do that without excluding the core group of XOXO that made it great, we'd need to grow the attendance, at the potential cost of intimacy. My hunch: an event double or triple XOXO's size with the most creative people in art and tech will still be amazing. Big conferences don't suffer because of their size, they suffer because of a bad crowd.

Looking Forward

XOXO was one of the most rewarding things I've ever done. There's something so magical about connecting interesting people together, and you never know where it will lead — new projects, startups, friendships, marriages... it's hard to imagine never doing that again.

I know it's a cliché, but it's true — you had to be there. Words only go so far, so we made a little montage that tried to convey the feeling of XOXO a little better. I hope you like it.

(All photos from our CC-licensed photo set on Flickr.)

How obsessed? Yesterday, at brunch at Slappy Cakes, he asked me to make this:

Tasty!

The new Spelunky is a reboot of the brilliant 8-bit freeware game that Derek Yu released in 2009, still available for Windows, with an unofficial Mac port.

Spelunky borrows two elements I hated back in the 8-bit era — randomized levels and no way to save progress — and makes them eminently enjoyable. Like NetHack meets La-Mulana, Spelunky is brutally hard. Like other Roguelikes, when you die in Spelunky, you're dead. There's no way to continue.

In an interview with Anthony Carboni, Derek Yu said, "When you die and have to start from the beginning, it makes death meaningful, just like in real life." I'd recommend watching the interview, and Derek trying to play his own game, on New Challenger.

Unlike other hard games, Spelunky feels fair to me. Every time I die, I know that it was my fault. I never felt cheated because of awkward controls or unpredictable behavior, because the processes running the environment are so consistent and learnable. You can palpably feel yourself mastering the game, learning the mechanics and traps and creature movement and every other detail, until the next time you stupidly fumble.

To feel what it's like to play Spelunky, and how deep it goes, I'd recommend reading Tom Francis' quest to find the lost city of gold.

P.S. Eliot just came downstairs to tell me he finished the Worm level, grabbed the Crysknife, and unlocked the Super Meat Boy character. If you've played the game, you know how hard that is. My boy!

If you're a diehard Apple fan that desperately wants to run a buggy beta version of iOS 6 right now, your only legal option is to shell out the $99 to join the iOS Developer Program. Affordable for a developer, the barrier to entry is high enough to keep out casual fans from accidentally bricking their phones and cluttering up the Genius Bar.

But over the last couple years, a cottage industry's popped up around illicit UDID activations — startups exploiting Apple's Developer Program to sell access to prerelease iOS software, usually for less than $10 per device. The craziest thing? Apple doesn't seem to care.

Do a search for "UDID Activation" and you'll find a dozen web sites, including some advertising on Google, with SEO-friendly names like ActivateMyiOS, Activate My UDID, UDID Registration, and Instant UDID Activation. Unlike casual registration trading of the past, these new startups offer secure payment options, solid customer support, Twitter and live chat, and quick turnarounds. One service even offers an AppleCare-like guarantee called "SafetyNet" that protects you if you lose your device or buy a new one.

Behind the scenes, each service uses the same simple backdoor: Registered iOS developers can activate up to 100 unique device IDs (or UDIDs) for their account, an essential tool for testing apps on multiple devices. Once registered with Apple, the activated device is also able to run prerelease versions of iOS, though developers are forbidden from sharing prerelease software outside their own team.

Ignoring these warnings, activation services charge a small fee to add a customer's device to their developer accounts. When they hit the 100-device limit, they just register a new account with Apple.

I spoke to the founder of UDID Activation, an activation service based in Galesburg, Illinois, who asked not to be named. "I set up a new Apple developer account every time I need another list," he said. "I have 30 developer accounts, all with the same name and address, and Apple's never said anything."

There have been isolated reports of Apple disabling developer accounts, but some of these services have been running uninterrupted for years without any apparent consequences.

"It's obvious it's there, and there are tons of people doing it," said UDID Activation's founder. "If they wanted to look into it, it wouldn't be very hard for them to find out what was going on. I've been doing this for about three years and I've never been contacted by Apple, and they've never shut down my accounts or anything. It really does seem like they don't care that much."

I chatted over instant message with a support representative from a competing service that claimed to have ten iOS developer accounts and a bot to reactivate expired UDIDs. I asked how often Apple kills their accounts. "Never in five years," he said.

Apple clearly states in its Developer Program License Agreement, and on its Developer Portal, that membership can be terminated if a developer provides pre-release Apple Software to anyone other than registered employees, contractors, or others with a demonstrable need to know or use the software to build and test applications. Apple adds that unauthorized distribution is prohibited, and may be subject to both civil and criminal liability.

Despite Apple's threat of "civil and criminal liability," the service operators I spoke to didn't seem concerned. "In the developer section, there's a notification that says selling spots to your developer account can get it shut down," said UDID Activation's founder. "But I've never heard of anyone getting their account shut down for selling spots."

It might not be that simple. Detecting fraudulent activity isn't as straightforward as it seems, unless Apple actually purchased activations from each service to identity the account holder. Purchased accounts don't look any different than normal beta testers, though the rate of registrations could be an indication of service violations.

For a small developer, unauthorized activations are a lucrative business that's likely worth the risks. UDID Activation publishes their order queue on their official site, which shows over 2,300 devices activated in the last week alone. At $8.99 for each activation, that's over $20,600 in revenue, with $2,277 paid to Apple for the 23 developer accounts. Their homepage claims that over 19,000 devices were activated so far, and that's only one of several services.

Outside of commercial services, some fans are forgoing commercial services and self-organizing, using discussion forums to crowdfund shared developer accounts, as these Reddit members did last year. On Twitter, authorized developers trade UDID activations for followers and retweets, or just offer them for fun.

Apple may not like it, but all of these back-alley transactions are clearly meeting a market demand. The software may be buggy, incomplete, and not ready for mainstream consumption, but a sizable class of power users doesn't care and is willing to pay to use it.

For these cheap and impatient users, activation services offer an easy, affordable, and low-risk way to experiment with the cutting edge before the rest of the world. And until Apple starts cracking down, there's little reason not to use them.

Using information provided to me by an anonymous Apple developer, I've pieced together the facts. Keep in mind that iOS 6 is still prerelease beta, and Apple may change anything at any point. Everything below is based entirely on the existing beta software and documentation that Apple's provided to developers.

Were walking directions removed in iOS 6? Some press reports have stated that walking directions are removed from iOS 6. This is completely false, and walking directions are still in iOS 6. Here's a screenshot of walking directions in iOS 6, courtesy of Philip Bump.

Were biking directions removed? Bike directions have never been available on the iPhone, and still won't be in iOS 6.

Were public transit directions removed? As of this beta, inline public transit directions are gone from the Maps application in iOS 6. Clicking the public transit button will display a list of third-party apps that support routing in the defined map area, and will launch the app when clicked. Here's the current screen in the beta, with no apps registered.

By release, this blank screen will be populated with a default list of appropriate apps from the App Store. The documentation states, "If the user's device does not currently contain any routing apps, Maps refers the user to apps on the App Store that do."

What about the new Transit APIs? The new Transit APIs, referred to by Scott Forstall at 108:58 in Monday's keynote, allow developers to register their app as a directions provider for routing directions for a particular set of coordinates. It will then be displayed in the list of available third-party apps for transit. Clicking a transit app launches that app, passing the start and end values to the app. Contrary to other analysis, transit routes can't be displayed inline from the Maps app.

How do the Transit APIs work? Apps can enable directions support by setting the type of directions they support, a geoJSON file specifying the map regions they support, and uploading it to iTunes Connect. Developers can specify a category (Car, Bus, Train, Subway, Streetcar, Plane, Bike, Ferry, Taxi, Pedestrian, Other).

Directions requests from Maps are handled by a special URL. From the documentation: "When the user asks the Maps app for directions and chooses your app, Maps creates a URL with the start and end points and asks your app to open it." From there, the app can "compute and display the route using your custom routing technology."

Of course, any of this may change before release. But, for the moment, the APIs simply don't support inline transit routes from within the Maps app.

Are Street View photos removed? Yes, these were also provided by Google.

Why is Apple doing this? Do they hate public transit?! Of course not. Transit directions aren't in iOS 6 because Apple replaced Google's maps with their own solution, which didn't include access to transit data. Maintaining transit feeds and keeping it up-to-date for hundreds of cities was presumably too difficult to attempt for this first release, so they decided to outsource it to third-party apps.

Is Google going to release a Maps app for iOS? We don't know. Google hasn't announced any plans for a native Google Maps for iPhone. And there's a big unknown: if they developed it, would Apple approve it?

Hope that helps. Hit me up with any more questions, or if you have internal information, I'll happily honor your anonymity.

Amanda Palmer blows up the music business.

Two weeks after Kickstarter launched in April 2009, I was fishing around for an idea to test the platform and launched a project for Kind of Bloop, an 8-bit tribute to Miles Davis' Kind of Blue.

Like many to follow, my Kickstarter project hit the initial goal in the first few hours and eventually quadrupled it, with $8,600 raised from over 400 backers. Modest by today's multimillion dollar blockbusters, it's still considered one of the site's early successes. The album was released shortly after, adored by the only 400 people in the world who find the idea of "chiptune jazz" thrilling.

But unlike nearly every other album project on Kickstarter, I'm not a musician. I've never written a song, with or without vintage videogame consoles, and wouldn't know where to start.

Instead, I hired musicians I love to make the music. My job was organizing the project — giving the musicians feedback, setting the budget and timeline, and handling all the mundane chores of licensing, production, promotion and fulfillment.

Without intending to, I'd added a new title to my résumé: I was a record producer!

As Kickstarter's exploded in popularity, I've started to see signs that there are others like me -- a movement of fans as producers, commissioning work from their favorite artists instead of waiting for the artists to come to them.

To me, it feels like the next logical step in the evolution of fan funding. Already, fans are expecting to witness the creative process with behind-the-scenes progress updates and feedback forums. Now, they may actually help decide what gets made. If I'm right, the implications for working artists is potentially huge, providing an unexpected source of revenue, as well as potential creative headaches.

Here are some potential applications, and some who are leading the way.

The New Event Organizers

The idea for Kickstarter began seven years before its launch with a concert in New Orleans that never happened. Perry Chen, founder and CEO, wanted to organize a late night event during the 2002 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival that would cost $20,000, but didn't want to deal with the upfront risk. His thought: pre-sell the tickets to the nonexistent event on a conditional basis. If there wasn't enough interest, he wouldn't lose his shirt.

He gave up the project, but not the underlying idea. Ever since it launched, I've thought events were the most underrated use for the platform. The very first project to crash the Kickstarter servers, in fact, was the flood of people trying to buy a ticket to see Neutral Milk Hotel's Jeff Mangum at a benefit concert in NYC.

Last week, I launched a Kickstarter project to fund XOXO, a new conference and festival in Portland, Oregon. I worked with Andy McMillan, the creator of The Manual and Build, to budget the costs, invite speakers, book venues, and effectively design an event without spending a dime. Within 50 hours, the event was completely sold out with over $160,000 raised, making it the largest event ever funded on Kickstarter.

We'd designed an event we would want to attend, and tested the waters to see if anyone else agreed. If they hadn't, the only loss would have been our time.

Again, like Kind of Bloop, I found myself in the position of a producer; this time for a festival organizer instead of an album. I'm getting more and more comfortable in these shifting roles.

From the beginning, musicians have experimented with Kickstarter for funding their tours, from Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman's five-city tour to Kim Boekbinder's Impossible Tour, a set of ten separate projects testing local audiences.

As far as I can tell, nobody's flipped it around and tried to commission a musician to play for fans. Most bands already play corporate events and private parties. If fans collectively raise the same amount of money, why not play a house show for them instead? For fans, it'd be a once-in-a-lifetime experience to see an artist they love in an intimate setting. For musicians, it'd pay well without the malaise that comes from playing the Intel holiday party.

Though there's no reason commissioned works need to be limited to music.

Commissioned works are perfect for collaborations. Why not team up your favorite indie comic book artist with your favorite videogame creator, like Pixeljam and James Kochalka? Or musicians with authors, like Ben Folds' collaboration with Nick Hornby? Or hire an illustrator you love to make art based on that cult indie film you and your friends keep watching? Sure, go ask Olly Moss to make prints based on Ghosts With Shit Jobs.

Projects like these have three big requirements.

1. Strong, achievable concept. Commissioned works should be scoped down to something realistic, because you're paying for their time, but high-concept enough to capture the excitement of other fans.
2. Organizer. The funding may come from the crowd, but there needs to be a single person managing the project and handling all the logistics and small details.
3. Due diligence. The organizer will need a firm agreement from the artist, committing to a timeline, payment, and any other demands. Also, if the project results in a tangible work, determine who owns the rights to it before you start raising money.

Fans Liberating Art

The rights issue is an interesting one. With Kind of Bloop, it was effectively work-for-hire. I paid the artists the complete proceeds of the Kickstarter fundraiser and I owned the finished album, with the ability to sell it in the future without hassle.

But a new class of commissioned projects are taking the rights issue a step further, liberating works into the public domain. This week, two classical music projects that funded on Kickstarter released their work into the world, free of all copyright limitations.

Of course, symphonies from the Baroque period are already in the public domain, but the modern recordings of those compositions are almost all copyrighted.

The Musopen project, funded in September 2010, raised over $68,000 to hire the Czech Filmharmonic to perform original recordings of classical symphonies from Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and others. The result was announced last week: 27 symphonies, uploaded to Archive.org in raw ProTools format with individual recordings for each instrument.

A second German project, funded in June 2011, sought to create a new score and recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations. The Open Goldberg Variations completed recording in January and released the new score and recording into the public domain last week. A free iPad app followed, released only yesterday.

Both projects were organized and funded by fans of classical music. Fans did the research, raised the money, and paid musicians to do what they do best. Together, everyone worked together to enrich our shared culture, to the chagrin of classical record labels.

Every day, it seems like Kickstarter is evolving into a kind of dream factory — manifesting the dreams and wishes of an individual that shares a vision with their community.

If this is the future of fan funding, I'm in.

You probably saw Isaac's adorable lip-dub proposal, choregraphed by a bunch of drama geeks in Portland.

In the Vimeo description, they also posted the video to YouTube, which is now "blocked on copyright grounds." There's only one possible infringement claim, and that's the soundtrack, which used Bruno Mars' "Marry You."

Despite the fact that Bruno Mars himself loved the song:

Congrats to Isaac Lamb and the future Mrs..I don't think I could've made a better music video for this song. Thank you vimeo.com/42828824

— Bruno Mars (@BrunoMars) May 26, 2012

Before blocking copies of the YouTube video, Warner Music Group filed a DMCA notice with Google to remove 27 links to the song from their search results.

There's a strong argument that their non-commercial use of the song should be fair use, and that hyperlinks from Google should never be censored, but let's just grant WMG the benefit of the doubt. It's their song, and they're clearly the copyright holder.

Instead, I want to draw attention to the other claimants for the YouTube copyright takedown — Keshet, La Red, and Scripps Local News.

I wasn't able to find any information about Keshet and La Red, but why would Scripps be listed in the copyright claim?

A number of Scripps-owned local ABC TV affiliates aired the story, like this report from ABC 2 Baltimore. Content ID is smart enough to detect partial use of a video, and now even detects the melodies in cover songs. But it's not smart enough to figure out that the original video predated the newer upload, as in this recent example with a comedian's video broadcast on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.

So the Scripps TV broadcasts are indexed by YouTube, and the Content ID robots do the rest. And because Content ID disputes are judged by the copyright holder, complaints are routinely ignored or denied.

As a final stupid footnote, there are still multiple copies of Isaac's proposal on YouTube. The most popular? This one — uploaded by a TV news network.

Try searching for something popular using the Google+ API, ordered by recent. Here's a test for 'iphone'. For me, the most recent result was 25 minutes ago. (Your results may vary, depending on time.)

Now, do the same search on Google+ itself, and click the "Most recent" link to only show recent posts.

At first, Google+ shows the same sparse results of relatively outdated posts... Then, slowly, it populates with newer posts from the last couple minutes.

Unfortunately, I can't figure out a way for the Google+ API to show those newer posts. Any help? Any Googlers out there able to help out?

If you haven't already seen it, take a look at the video we made, which pretty much explains everything:

We'd confirmed most of the entire lineup by Monday, including the founders and CEOs of Etsy, Kickstarter, Metafilter, 4chan, Canvas, Simple, VHX.tv and The Atavist, and the creators of World of Goo, MakerBot, Indie Game: The Movie, Star Wars Uncut, Diesel Sweeties and Black Apple. And Julia Nunes! (This is as close to WaxyCon as you're ever going to get.)

Andy and I debated back and forth about whether the project was ready to announce, and both of us were nervous. It's a unique project for Kickstarter, and we didn't know if we'd provided enough detail to convince people that we're working on something really exciting. We'd run all the numbers, and to do everything we wanted without cutting corners or selling out, the tickets would cost around $400. Was that price too high? What if only business and marketing types sign up? Is the festival too long, too short, too far to travel?

So many doubts, so many fears. We were betting it all — pre-selling every single ticket with a $125,000 goal. And we were serious: if it came up short, we'd walk away. Months of planning would be wasted, but at least we wouldn't have lost our shirts.

Until the last minute, we were debating whether to push it yet another week out to polish things up. Finally, we bit the bullet, cleaned up some final issues, and launched at 11:20am on Tuesday.

Hugely excited to announce @xoxo, a new conference & festival this September in Portland! Get your tix quick: kickstarter.com/projects/waxpa...

— Andy Baio (@waxpancake) May 22, 2012

The reaction was explosive and immediate. In fact, I'd fully intended to write about the launch on Tuesday morning, but within 30 seconds of posting the Kickstarter project, my inbox exploded. I knew that Kickstarter's new social features were powerful, but this was intense. Before I'd even tweeted it myself, 20 people backed the project.

Less than two days later, it's passed $110k raised with over 60% of the tickets sold. (Update: It sold out completely in 50 hours!)

This is the most money I've allocated to a Kickstarter project--because it's going to be amazing. See you at XOXO kck.st/JDMcWl

— apocryphal mat honan (@mat) May 23, 2012

Its high time for a new tech conference for people who build things, not overrun w/ brands & marketers. I am all for kck.st/JDMcWl

— bigrocket.net (@bigrocketdaily) May 23, 2012

The list of speakers we've put together is great, but the list of attendees is amazing. We could easily do five more conferences just from the current attendee list. Some of the smartest and most creative people in the world are coming to XOXO, and almost every time I search a name I don't recognize, I'm impressed. Putting all these people in one room is going to be something special.

As far as I know, XOXO is also the biggest event ever funded on Kickstarter. When I first started working with Kickstarter in 2008, the idea of funding events came up regularly. Kickstarter was originally inspired by a concert that Perry wanted to throw in New Orleans back in 2001, but didn't want to deal with the up-front risk. I've always thought it was a perfect use for the site, but up until this point, barely anybody's tried to fund their entire ticket sales on it. I think this really validates Kickstarter as a tool for funding events.

There are a million things to do and we're just getting started. But, for now, I'm just grateful that everyone got it. We're at the very start of a Cambrian explosion of creativity, made possible by technology. Everything is awesome.

Kickstarter. Steam. App Store. Food carts. Netflix. Square. I like this trend. DISRUPT ALL THE THINGS.

— Cabel Maxfield Sasser (@Cabel) February 9, 2012

Tonight, I watched Neil Gaiman's commencement speech to this year's graduating class of the University of the Arts. All of it's worth watching, but this part of the speech (at the 17:20 mark) resonated with me.

We're in a transitional world right now, if you're in any kind of artistic field, because the nature of distribution is changing, the models by which creators got their work out into the world, and got to keep a roof over their heads and buy sandwiches while they did that, are all changing. I've talked to people at the top of the food chain in publishing, in bookselling, in all those areas, and nobody knows what the landscape will look like two years from now, let alone a decade away. The distribution channels that people had built over the last century or so are in flux for print, for visual artists, for musicians, for creative people of all kinds.

Which is, on the one hand, intimidating, and on the other, immensely liberating. The rules, the assumptions, the now-we're supposed to's of how you get your work seen, and what you do then, are breaking down. The gatekeepers are leaving their gates. You can be as creative as you need to be to get your work seen. YouTube and the web (and whatever comes after YouTube and the web) can give you more people watching than television ever did. The old rules are crumbling and nobody knows what the new rules are.

So make up your own rules.

I couldn't have said it better.

So, go check out the project, watch the video, and check out the speaker lineup. If you want to, back it. And I hope to see you in September!

Every talk I saw was amazing. All the sessions are making their way onto YouTube, and are all worth checking out. I posted some of my personal highlights on Twitter, but if you missed them, here are my favorites:

Jonathan Zittrain's introductory keynote was thoughtful and inspiring. Jason Scott's solo talk on the Mysterious Mr. Hokum is a crazy story of a pre-Internet scammer. Flourish Klink's panel on fangirl culture was eye-opening, a glimpse into a massive subculture of the web I know far too little about.

The most entertaining, hands down, was Craig Allen's behind-the-scenes story of the Old Spice campaign, with a surprise Skype cameo by Isiaiah Mustafa.

The most underseen and misunderstood session was Wonder-Tonic's pitch for Localoffrly.biz, a douchebag startup turned into comedy performance art. (Bonus points for actually launching a site.) Hard to believe, but some people in the audience weren't sure whether it was a joke, and started to get frustrated when they stopped the gamified talk between each "level." Brave.

And, of course, Chris Poole's solo talk, which ended up inspiring my Wired column that was published last Wednesday. I reprinted it below, hope you enjoy it.

Early this month, the Internet invaded the MIT campus for ROFLCon III, the biennial two-day conference that brings together the subjects of net memes with those who study and adore them.

Among the meme celebrities -- Tron Guy, Paul "Double Rainbow" Vasquez, Antoine Dodson, Scumbag Steve and Chuck Testa all attended -- were those who are deeply invested in the future of Internet culture, both emotionally and financially. Founders of community sites like Reddit and 4chan, academics studying memes, and the cottage industry that's capitalized on them, most notably the Cheezburger Network's Ben Huh. And, of course, the whole audience participated in their propogation.

From the moment I boarded the plane to Boston there was an undercurrent of change running through the conference. I sat next to Whitney Phillips, a University of Oregon doctoral student speaking on a panel about her research on troll culture. She'd attended every ROFLCon since 2008, and realized that she'd have to revise her thesis in the next month -- the meme landscape is in a transitional period, but it's not clear what it's transitioning into. She echoed something I heard repeatedly over the weekend: "It just feels different."

It felt apropos that this was the last ROFLCon, with the organizers "putting this trilogy to bed and riding out into the sunset." Or, at least, until "we can figure out how to continue doing it great justice."

The Internet is still spawning memes at an accelerated rate -- and they'll never go away. But there are some major shifts under way that may fundamentally change the way they're created.

Every meme, like folklore, shares two common characteristics: It must show reproduction (the ability to be copied) and variation (the ability to mutate).

These days, memes spread faster and wider than ever, with social networks acting as the fuel for mass distribution. But it's possible we may see less mutation and remixing in the near future. As Internet usage shifts from desktops and laptops to mobile devices and tablets, the ability to mutate memes in a meaningful way becomes harder.

From the Interest Web to the Social Web

Over the last few years, we've seen a fundamental shift away from discussion forums and other niche communities to social networks and aggregators. In a 20-minute talk at ROFLCon, 4chan and Canvas founder Chris Poole characterized this as a shift from the interest-based web to the friend-based web.

Poole is concerned that the web is losing its emotional depth, a richness that comes from lurking, failing and learning before finding your place in a community. The difficulty gave it more meaning, and the resulting communities added far more value to the web than they extracted.

Now, aggregators like 9GAG and Cheezburger are ridiculously popular, but memes rarely originate there. Unsourced images are posted and watermarked by their new hosts, muddling their origins and diluting the context of the original image. As Poole said, "It's hard to feel emotionally invested in 9GAG."

To me, this is part of the natural expansion of online community. Reddit users hate 9GAG for stealing their memes, but 9GAG is popular because it's easier to use, making it more inclusive to Facebook users than Reddit's sprawling subgenres and somewhat esoteric community norms. It's the same reason that, for years, 4chan users hated Reddit for stealing their memes and bringing them to a community that was much easier to understand.

Unlike social networks, each successive community doesn't seem to cannibalize its predecessor, but instead simply finds a larger, newer audience. The original community stays largely the same, which feels like stagnation relative to the "next big thing." With each new site, the mainstream base and shared knowledge we call "Internet culture" converges into a mixed cultural heritage.

But there's one potential risk that affects the cultural production of memes.

Meme Mutation

Ever tried using 4chan on a iPhone? It's completely impossible to upload images from an iPhone or iPad, immediately limiting your contribution to the community to commenting alone. Sites like Reddit let you post a URL, but modifying and uploading images to a public URL from a mobile device is, for the moment, not easy.

Also for the moment, it's extremely rare for mobile apps to allow community remix and sharing. In fact, I could only find two iOS apps that supported posting your own remixes to a public community space: Mixel and Make Pixel Art. (If you know more, leave them in the comments.) All others only support sharing to your contacts or your own social network, but not the public, unmediated space that memes thrive in.

It's not surprising, then, that the only memes that seem to originate on smartphones are text-based -- autocorrect fail, iPhone whale, and texts from last night.

It feels like we're on the verge of a breakthrough to unleash the creative potential of these devices, but mobile developers are limiting our options to mild tweaking, at best. Instagram's filters made the simplest cosmetic changes, and you weren't able to modify anybody else's work. Draw Something let you draw, but only with a single person and no shared history. Where's the Canvas, Polyvore, deviantArt, and YTMND of the app world?

In the absence of good remix apps, image macro generators like Meme Generator and Quick Meme have filled the gap, making it possible to instantly generate a new meme from a mobile browser in seconds. No tools, or time investment, required.

This is incredibly empowering, but also limiting. Your imagination, and the scope of the meme's breadth, is limited to the capabilities of the meme generator.

It's reasonable to think the shift from desktops and laptops to mobile and tablets will continue, especially for the new generations of young Internet users that typically generate memes. If the app ecosystem doesn't grow to accommodate it, we may see remix participation drop, largely substituted by the lightweight interaction of likes, favs and comments and lightweight prebuilt memes from generators.

In his talk on Saturday, Poole said, "Memes are the instruments with which we play music. The way things are going, we're going to lose our song."

Memes may not go away, but I'm worried we may lose the concert venues where the music is performed -- the quirky, difficult communities that foster creative expression and make it meaningful.

There are millions of cover songs on YouTube, with around 12,000 new covers uploaded in the last 24 hours. Nearly 40,000 people covered "Rolling in the Deep," 11,000 took on "Pumped Up Kicks," 6,000 were inspired by "Somebody That I Used to Know."

Until recently, all but a sliver were illegal, considered infringement under current copyright law. Nearly all were non-commercial, created out of love by fans of the source material, with no negative impact on the market value of the original.

This is creativity criminalized, quite possibly the most popular creative act that's against the law.

I don't think it's an act of civil disobedience; nobody's making a statement. Most people don't know that cover songs need a synchronization license, and even if they did, trying to get one is a confusing and expensive proposition. Unlike the mechanical licenses used to release a cover song on an album, video sync licenses don't have an affordable flat rate and require the publisher's explicit permission.

Even as YouTube forges agreements with publishers to handle the synchronization rights for cover songs, it's nearly impossible for musicians to tell whether their songs are covered or not.

This week, I set out to answer a seemingly simple question: when are YouTube cover songs legal, and how can we do this better?

Conflicting Information

Even trying to determine if a cover song is legal can be confusing for most musicians. There's no shortage of answers online, but most of them are conflicting. Publishers, musicians, and lawyers all give different answers, none of which are totally accurate. Even YouTube's own FAQs are incomplete, made inaccurate by recent settlement agreements.

Like any area of copyright law, there's no shortage of armchair lawyering on blogs and discussion forums about cover songs. A common belief is that cover songs fall under the "fair use" provisions of the Copyright Act, but the question of whether a non-parody cover song could fall under fair use is untested in the courts. Despite this, over 60,000 cover songs on YouTube cite "fair use" in their title or description. (Whether uploaders actually believe that or are preemptively using it as a defense is anyone's guess.)

Content ID detects one of Adrian Holovaty's cover song

While they happily encourage fans to upload covers, YouTube makes it clear that users must have the rights to all content they upload. "We tell users they must own the copyright or have the necessary rights for any content they upload," said a YouTube representative. "It's ultimately their responsibility to know whether they possess the rights for a particular piece of content."

Their only specific guidance for cover songs is in their Copyright FAQ, which says, "Recording a cover version of your favorite song does not necessarily give you the right to upload that recording without permission from the owner of the underlying music."

But this answer isn't fully accurate. YouTube's negotiated blanket synchronization licenses for its users from thousands of publishers, most notably the settlement with the National Music Publishers Association last August. This agreement allowed publishers to opt-in to a program that let them take a cut from a $4 million advance pool and up to 50 percent of the advertising revenue from any cover song they own the rights to.

Frustratingly, we have no idea which publishers have signed on. The NMPA doesn't publish the list, making it impossible to figure out whether your song is covered by the agreement or not. (I contacted the NMPA, but a spokesperson confirmed that information appeared to be unavailable, but was looking into it.)

Begging for Forgiveness

In reality, the only way to tell whether a song is legal is to risk breaking the law and losing your YouTube account -- by uploading the video and waiting for copyright notices.

In the last few months, YouTube has quietly expanded Content ID beyond original recordings to detect cover versions and live performances using the underlying melodies. A YouTube representative confirmed with me, "Content ID's technology allows us to identify works in an original sound recording, or in a cover version (by identifying the underlying melody of a song), using information provided to us by the publishers."

YouTube hasn't talked much about its melody matching technology, but it was in the news recently after a drunk Edmonton man belted "Bohemian Rhapsody" in the back of a police car. After the Content ID identified the song, EMI initially decided to take the video down, but soon changed its mind and authorized it with advertising.

Adrian shared a screenshot of his copyright disputes page.

Everyblock founder Adrian Holovaty is well known on YouTube for his acoustic guitar covers, which have amassed millions of views. I asked him if Content ID identified the melodies in any of his videos. So far, seven of his videos were identified, with all but one rights holder choosing to leave the video online and collect the revenue. Only one video his cover of the Village People's "YMCA," was taken down by the songwriter, leaving Adrian with a "copyright strike" on his account. YouTube's policy allows three strikes before the account is terminated and all videos removed.

The Flaws in the System

The system's not perfect, though. Unscrupulous individuals are routinely using Content ID to claim content they don't own to harvest ad dollars from unsuspecting users. For example, two of Adrian Holovaty's disputed tracks are Django Reinhardt songs from the 1930s, claimed by an obscure company named "Social Media Holdings."

Other copyright claims may be accidental, as material they don't actually own finds its way into the Content ID database, like this poor guy who's received eight consecutive claims from companies claiming to own George Romero's public domain Night of the Living Dead.

And Content ID isn't immune to false positives, like the bird calls misidentified as music. Worse, for all these case, disputed Content ID claims bypass the DMCA process for counter-claims entirely, as I wrote about in February.

How can a musician decide what's legitimate or worth fighting?

Still, YouTube's Content ID is pushing publishers and rights holders into the modern age. It's an ingenious approach for an otherwise dysfunctional copyright system that's too hard for amateurs to navigate, making money for everyone involved while still allowing free creative expression.

The Need for Change

But there's something strange about this begging-for-forgiveness approach to copyright. It's like driving without traffic signs, only finding out you broke the law when you're pulled over.

The real question: Why is it illegal in the first place?

Cover songs on YouTube are, almost universally, non-commercial in nature. They're created by fans, mostly amateur musicians, with no negative impact on the market value of the original work. (If anything, it increases demand by acting as a free promotional vehicle for the track.)

The best solution is the hardest one: To reform copyright law to legalize the distribution of free, non-commercial cover songs.

Copyright law was intended to foster creativity by making it safe for creators to exclusively capitalize on their work for a limited period of time. Cover songs on YouTube don't threaten that ability, and may actually prevent new works by chilling talent that could go on to do great things.

As we've seen with countless breakout artists from YouTube, budding musicians have built their careers from cover songs that evolved into original material. Karmin, Pomplamoose, Julia Nunes, Greyson Chance.... Even Justin Bieber started with covers of Chris Brown and Nee-Yo before getting discovered.

Now, the next generation of budding pop stars are covering Justin Bieber, with about 216,000 of them so far. It's all part of the virtuous cycle of culture: We take from it, build on it, and then give back in return. The law should help that along, not hinder it.

Update: I originally published this column over at Wired on May 2. The woman I spoke to at the NMPA confirmed the list of publishers appeared to be unavailable, but promised to look into it. I haven't heard back, so I followed up again. I'll update here if I hear anything.)

Just so nobody else ever has to do this, here's the data, culled from Google News reports and YHOO stock quotes. Download as a CSV.

Context: Super Mario Summary reworks every level of Super Mario Bros. on a single screen, turning a side-scrolling platformer into a devious, addictive puzzle. Amazingly, it was built in only 48 hours by Swedish developer Johan Peitz as part of the Ludum Dare game competition. Read his postmortem of making the game.

As I said, "I thought I was giving them a shield, but turns out I gave them a missile with my name permanently engraved on it."

This week, Twitter announced their Innovator's Patent Agreement, an open source contract intended to guarantee patents will only be used defensively, even when sold. The IPA seems to directly address the issues raised in my article.

Adam Messinger, Twitter VP of Engineering, wrote that, "With the IPA, employees can be assured that their patents will be used only as a shield rather than as a weapon."

Every one of Twitter's existing patent filings, including Loren Brichter's famous pull-to-refresh patent, will fall under this agreement later this year.

Still, the IPA isn't perfect, and it needs work to protect the intentions of designers and engineers. Instapaper founder Marco Arment pointed out that the contract's definition of "defensive" is overly broad, allowing an unethical company to initiate a lawsuit for a range of reasons without requiring the inventor's permission.

Hypothetically, if Yahoo had adopted the IPA, would it have prevented them from later suing Facebook for patent infringement? Maybe not. Facebook's threatened several startups over trademark name issues in the past, including Lamebook, Placebook, and Teachbook. If any of them were also users, customers or affiliates of Yahoo, then Yahoo could bypass the Patent Agreement and file a patent lawsuit. (Though, if they did, the inventors could choose to sublicense their patents directly to Facebook.)

These problems are correctable though, and Twitter should be commended for taking this important first step. In a deeply broken patent system, it's heartening to see an established company proactively try to work around its flaws. I hope agreements like these find wide industry adoption.

But this isn't a real fix. Union Square's Fred Wilson dubbed it Twitter's "Patent Hack," and that's exactly what it is -- it's duct tape to patch a broken system, but it doesn't solve any of the underlying problems.

The ideal would be patent reform, or if the system's beyond reform, the abolition of business method patents entirely.

Marco Arment wrote, "A truly innovative stance would be for a large technology company to avoid filing patents, and to lobby aggressively for progressive patent reform to make that a practical choice for every technology company."

Like I did last month, Marco vowed not to file any patents. "I fundamentally disagree that software patents (and many other types of patents) are a net gain for society, and I can't participate in that system in good conscience."

After all, if you only use them defensively, why do you need patents at all? Publish your work and establish prior art.

Sadly, prior art only works in an ideal world. As we've seen, the U.S. patent office routinely grants patents even when prior art exists. The recently passed reforms to the patent system, switching from a first-to-invent to a first-to-file system, make this more likely than ever.

For the moment, avoiding patents entirely isn't a realistic legal strategy for large companies. Maintaining a patent arsenal won't ward off shell company-style patent trolls, but it can protect you from competitors by allowing cross-licensing settlements. But all of that feeds into the "cold war" mentality of stockpiling patents you never hope to use.

Until we have real reform or abolition, ethical tech companies are forced to play the patent game, but at least engineers and designers now have a way to rewrite the rules in their favor.

In 2008, I was hooked on one drug for my daily fix: Memeorandum, a completely automated aggregator that surfaces popular stories from political news sites, often within minutes.

As you'd expect, the universe of political blogs is largely split in two, with conservative and liberal blogs rarely covering the same stories or linking to the same sites. But it can be very challenging to tell their political leanings at a glance, especially with names like "Balloon Juice," "Weasel Zippers," or "The Volokh Conspiracy."

So, four years ago, I launched a project with Delicious/Tasty Labs founder Joshua Schachter to visualize the linking biases of various political blogs on Memeorandum by looking at their past behavior.

Using singular value decomposition, the linear algebra at the heart of your Netflix recommendations, we reduced the entire matrix of blogger-to-article relationships to a single dimension. Imagine a single line grouping like-minded blogs together based on the diversity of the stories they cover, with hardcore left- and right-leaning blogs on opposite sides of the spectrum.

Using those precalculated values, we load the data from Google Spreadsheets and color the links on Memeorandum, based on where they fall on the spectrum. The brighter the color, the more frequently they only cover stories by their counterparts.

This simple visualization leads to some interesting insights. Compare these two articles, which were trending on Memeorandum at this writing:

Seeing each site's potential bias provides the context for understanding how news is spread. Right-leaning blogs are eager to point out new evidence that George Zimmerman was hurt the day he shot Trayvon Martin, but left-leaning blogs aren't covering that story. Likewise, only left-leaning news sites appear to be covering the news of Ted Nugent's threatening remarks to the president, but conservative blogs aren't. This visualization also makes it easy to spot outliers, the sources that are breaking away from their past behavior to link to something beyond their usual circle.

This browser add-on is free and open source on Github. We've updated the data sources for the first time since 2008, and Memeorandum Colors now works natively in Chrome, in addition to Firefox.

You can try the browser add-on by following these simple directions.

Google Chrome

1. Click the memeorandum_colors.user.js link.


2. In the warning dialog at the bottom of Chrome window, select "Continue."


3. Visit Memeorandum and wait a moment for the links to color.

Firefox

1. Install Greasemonkey.


2. Restart Firefox.


3. Click the memeorandum_colors.user.js link, wait three seconds, and Install.


4. Visit Memeorandum and wait a moment for the links to color.

Four Years of Data

Along with this release, we now have four years of historical activity to work with. The collected scores are on Google Fusion Tables, and I've included a dump of the activity in Github.

Looking at historical activity can reveal some interesting trends, especially in how attitudes have shifted since the last election.

For example, Little Green Footballs is a long-running political weblog started by Charles Johnson, a web developer who aligned himself with the conservative right wing after the World Trade Center attacks. In late 2009, he publicly parted ways with the right.

That shift away from conservatism was reflected in his linking behavior at least a year before his public statement. If you look at the timeline below, you can see that Johnson started linking to a wider variety of stories outside the conservative conversation, until his activity was mostly neutral in early 2010. Now, his activity tends neutral but slightly favors articles popular in the liberal blogosphere.

Bias In Linking, Not Beliefs

Memeorandum was created by San Francisco developer Gabe Rivera, who followed its introduction with aggregators for media, celebrity gossip, and baseball news. The most popular of these is Techmeme, a daily destination for tech industry watchers.

A month after Obama's election, Rivera announced he'd hired a human editor for Techmeme to help prevent inaccurate results from the algorithm. This editorial oversight would affect any link-based analysis on Techmeme, but he confirmed that Memeorandum is still completely machine-driven.

This automated analysis is not a commentary on the personal opinions and beliefs of any blogger -- no amount of linear algebra can prove that. What this shows is the biases in their linking behavior: the stories that each site chooses to cover, or not cover, and their similarity to others like them.

If you'd like to learn more about the math behind how this works, there's more detail and links to tutorials on my original blog entry.

Let me know if you have any questions and I'll try to answer them in the comments.

In those ten years, I've posted 415 entries, including this one, and over 13,000 links.

The decision to start writing here regularly changed my entire life. It's given me exposure, a place to share my projects and crazy experimentation with technology. It's created new opportunities for me, directly or indirectly responsible for every major project I've gotten involved in. It's a place to play and experiment with ideas, some of which led to big breakthroughs and passions. And it connected me to people who cared about the things I did, many of whom became lifelong friends.

Personal homepages and weblogs have long since faded from the popular trends. They're no longer hip and nobody's launching the hot new startup to reinvent them or make them better.

Most of the interest in writing online's shifted to microblogging, but not everything belongs in 140 characters and it's all so impermanent. Twitter's great, but it's not a replacement for a permanent home that belongs to you.

And since there are fewer and fewer individuals doing long-form writing these days, relative to the growing potential audience, it's getting easier to get attention than ever if you actually have something original to say.

Carving out a space for yourself online, somewhere where you can express yourself and share your work, is still one of the best possible investments you can make with your time. It's why, after ten years, my first response to anyone just getting started online is to start, and maintain, a blog.

And now, just for the hell of it, some of my favorite posts from the last ten years. :)

2002

Tracking the All Your Base Meme with Usenet. The first chart appears only two weeks in, setting a precedent for the next ten years.

Dar Kabatoff's In Town. My first deep-dive into Internet kookiness, an amazing example of Usenet lunacy that eventually led to my first stalker. To this day, people still link to this on various forums that Kabatoff appears in.

Spamming Weblog Comments. Where I casually predicted the rise of blog spam and Bayesian filters designed to stop it.

Steve Martin Fans. Another exploration into a sad, weird corner of the Internet, a prolific stalker turned suicidal in a Steve Martin fan forum.

October 2002 Dictionary Domains. I used to periodically run a script, check for the available of dictionary word .com, .org and .net domains, and post the results. Note the last one in the list, which I later snatched up for myself.

2003

Eldred, Shared Culture Loses. My first mashup landed me in the New York Times and Boston Globe, my first real press coverage ever. Soon after, a Disney exec bought a print of the comic from me, with the sale facilitated by Larry Lessig himself!

NYT and Lost Friends. Two weeks later, I was in the NYT again for my Lost Friends page. This was very new to me.

Google Buys Blogger. I was sitting front and center at the Blogosphere panel in Los Angeles when Ev announced Google bought Blogger, and was one of the first to report the news.

Bias Affects Story Updates on Political Weblogs. My first controversial tech exposé, manually analyzing sites to understand linking behavior. Most of these sites found my article from their referers, leading to some very upset bloggers. People don't like to be accused of bias.

Typo Popularity Tracking with Google. I feel like I started to hit a stride with posts like these, doing some simple analysis to find entertaining results.

Star Wars Kid. The post that launched a meme, melting my server and the servers of most of my friends. I later tracked him down, interviewing him with Jish's help and doing a fundraiser to buy him a newly-introduced iPod. Later, I reported on the lawsuits. Years later, I wrote a final summary of the whole thing, along with the logs for that period.

Santa Monica Farmer's Market Tragedy. My personal reporting from a freak car accident that killed nine people outside my office led to coverage in the BBC. Horrifying.

Upcoming.org Launch! The side project that changed my life.

2004

Researching the 2004 Oscar Screeners. Inspired by a delusional film industry, I sat down and tried to figure out exactly how often Oscar screeners leak online. Eight years later, I'm still doing it every year.

Waxy v2.0. Announcing our pregnancy and, a few months later, the birth of our son.

Danger Mouse's The Grey Album. I was the first person to put the Grey Album on the web, leading to the first takedown request from EMI, which spawned the Grey Tuesday protests.

InfocomBot for AOL Instant Messenger. One of my favorite hacks ever, it let you play classic and modern text adventures over AIM.

Nanniebots: Hoax, Fraud, or Delusion? I helped Ben Goldacre and Cameron Marlow debunk a ridiculous hoax, someone who claimed he developed chatbots to lure pedophiles in chatrooms.

Waxy's Bandwidth Blowout #1: Heat Vision and Jack. In the years before YouTube, serving video was a massive pain in the ass. If you were lucky enough to have a dedicated server, excess bandwidth was a handy commodity. I always loved hosting commercially-unavailable materials.

Amazon Knee-Jerk Contrarian Game. This post, tracking horrible Amazon reviews of critically-loved media, still makes me laugh.

Kleptones, "Night at the Hip-Hopera". Still my favorite mashup album ever, I originally hosted a copy and crowdsourced the sample list for the Kleptones. It netted me my second cease-and-desist, this time from Disney/Hollywood Records.

Afro-Ninja Found! I managed to track down the identity of a stuntman having a very bad day.

Amateur Tsunami Video Footage. Another pre-YouTube phenomenon, the demand for this tragic disaster footage was so high, it melted my server and even took down Archive.org for a time. The videos I uploaded to Archive.org dominated their most downloaded lists for years.

2005

Boing Boing Statistics. I built a simple visualization tool for Boing Boing's five-year archive, following my own Waxy.org Stats and Metafilter growth charts.

Wordpress Website's Search Engine Spam. The biggest story I'd ever broken, at that point, covering search engine spam hidden on Wordpress.com. For me, this was a switch from casual blogging to serious journalism, including quotes from Matt Mullenweg before publishing. More in the followup.

Automating Wikipedia History. I started a contest to make a Greasemonkey script to visually browse Wikipedia history, and got some amazing entries, including one by future-jQuery creator John Resig.

Yahoo and Upcoming, Sitting In A Tree. One of the craziest things that ever happened to me, the optimism in this post is almost blinding.

House of Cosbys, Mirrored. After the brilliant Cosby-inspired animated series was shut down, I mirrored all of the videos and got a takedown order from Bill Cosby's lawyer. I publicly defied it, compiled a list of Cosby parodies in the media, and did an interview about it with the New York Times. I never heard from team Cosby again.

2006

Metafilter Sources 2006. Tracking how the top 50 link sources on Metafilter changed between 2004 and 2006.

Sex Baiting Prank on Craigslist Affects Hundreds. I broke the story of Jason Fortuny's "Craigslist Experiment" after seeing a link to it in a private discussion forum. This ended up being a huge story, involving Craigslist, lawsuits, and ruined lives.

2007

Outgoing. Waxy.org went into cryogenic sleep while I was working at Yahoo and raising my baby boy, so I decided to take some time off to write again and explore new ideas.

2008

Colin's Bear Animation. Four years later, this video still makes me laugh. I tracked down Colin and interviewed him about it.

Personal Ads of the Digerati. I dug up vintage personal ads from Dave Winer and Richard Stallman, and I interviewed RMS about his unusual methods of accessing the web.

The Times (UK) Spamming Social Media Sites. I exposed some nefarious SEO practices from a mainstream newspaper, and interviewed founders of online communities to see what they thought.

Highlights from the British MovieTone Darkweb. Some wonderful vintage videos from a service that doesn't want you to find them. I'm amazed these videos still work.

ForumWarz Postmortem: Interviewing the Game's Creators. This innovative game never got popular, but I was very proud of this interview.

WIRED and The WELL. I have a complete archive of The WELL, and occasionally dig into it for research. For anyone who cares about Wired history, it's a treasure trove.

Internet Power, Volume 1: Flashback to the VHS-Era Web. I set up a VCR and started ripping vintage VHS tapes about the Internet. This was the first of a series of VHS rips, including Internet Power Vol. 2, Olympia School District, and Computability.

Fanboy Supercuts, Obsessive Video Montages. The blog post that named the "supercut" genre, I continued adding to it for years before starting Supercut.org.

Milliways: Infocom's Unreleased Sequel to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. This post caused me more pain and heartache than anything I've ever written. On its release, I was extremely proud of it, reconstructing the never-before-told history of an unreleased Infocom game using digital archives. But I didn't ask permission before quoting private emails, causing major fallout on the source that provided me with the archives, ending our friendship forever. You have no idea how often I wish I could unpublish this post.

The Whitburn Project: 120 Years of Music Chart History. I've always loved this story about a group of record collectors on Usenet, illegally swapping Billboard chart spreadsheets. In my followup post, I used the data to analyze music history.

The Machine That Changed the World: Great Brains. An awesome, out-of-print documentary series on computer history that I ripped from VHS, and created annotated show notes for each of the five episodes.

Girl Turk: Mechanical Turk Meets Girl Talk's "Feed the Animals". The first of my Mechanical Turk experiments, crowdsourcing metadata about the album to make neat charts.

Cheap, Easy Audio Transcription with Mechanical Turk. People still cite this post regularly as the guide for DIY crowdsourced transcription.

Kickstarter. The first of many posts about Kickstarter, when I first met the team and joined the board. "Ultimately, everybody should be able to support themselves doing what they love using the web."

Memeorandum Colors: Visualizing Political Bias with Greasemonkey. I worked with Joshua Schachter on this Greasemonkey script analyzing linking behavior on Memeorandum. I still use this every day.

The Faces of Mechanical Turk. I wanted to know what they looked like, and was willing to pay them to find out. This image seems to show up in every conference presentation about Mechanical Turk.

2009

Robin Hood's "Oo De Lally," Translated Into 16 Languages. This makes me happy.

Translating "The Economist" Behind China's Great Firewall. One of the strangest online communities I've ever discovered, a group of Chinese fans of The Economist translating the entire thing cover-to-cover as a learning tool. I ended up writing a shorter version of this piece for the New York Times.

Attribution and Affiliation on All Things Digital. This investigation into AllThingsD's linking practices led to concrete change. They never use long quotes anymore, clearly attribute, and drive traffic to the blogs they link to. Everyone wins.

Category Inflation at the Webbys. In the three years since, the number of categories continues to explode. Planning on writing a followup soon.

Kind of Bloop: An 8-Bit Tribute to Miles Davis. My first Kickstarter project was a big success, hitting its goal in four hours, and went on sale later that year.

Meme Scenery. One of my all-time favorite posts, I removed the subjects of famous memes from their backgrounds. There's something weirdly serene about these background locations without context.

Code Rush in the Creative Commons. In 2008, I'd posted an annotated copy of the classic Mozilla documentary and interviewed the director after he requested I take it offline. A year later, he decided to release it under a Creative Commons license, allowing me to put my annotated version back online.

2010

Interviewing Ted Rall on Comics Journalism in Afghanistan. I interviewed several project creators for the Kickstarter podcast, including this one with author and cartoonist Ted Rall, Pixeljam and James Kochalka, and R.U. Sirius.

Wikileaks Cablegate Reactions Roundup. Sometimes, there's value in just curating the best set of links around a topic. Every time I've ever done this, people seem to like it. I need to remember that more often.

Joining Expert Labs At the end of 2010, I took a leap and joined Expert Labs to work on tools to help government agencies better listen to citizens using social media.

2011

Metagames: Games About Games. Quite possibly the most entertaining research I've ever done. It took me forever, largely because I ended up playing so many clever games.

The Daily: Indexed. I got a lot of press for creating a public index of The Daily's iPad app, against their will. After my trial was up, I wrote about how I did it.

Making Supercut.org. The product of one very, very long night, I worked with artist Michael Bell-Smith to make a script that generated randomized video clips composed entirely of spliced-together supercuts.

Playable Archaeology: An Interview with Telehack's Anonymous Creator. I was so floored by this tour de force of computing history, I interviewed the brilliant, but anonymous, genius behind it.

Kind of Screwed. The long, frustrating tale of the contested Kind of Bloop artwork, which cost me a large out-of-court settlement and a bunch of legal bills. Makes a good story, though!

Apple's 1987 Knowledge Navigator, Only One Month Late. As I was watching the Knowledge Navigator video, I started piecing together dates to figure out when it was supposed to take place. I was blown away by the coincidence.

Google Kills Its Other Plus, and How to Bring It Back. My first column for Wired ended up being a big one. Lots of other power users were justifiably upset, and it directly led to the "Verbatim" feature being added to Google Search.

Supercut: Anatomy of a Meme. I dug into the supercut meme using Mechanical Turk and my database of clips. This doubled as the launch announcement for Supercut.org, a community-contributed index of videos.

Google Analytics A Threat to Potential Bloggers. Exposing one of my techniques for researching anonymous sites, I was surprised how many people didn't know about this.

Viewing the UC Davis Pepper Spraying from Multiple Angles. Sometimes, the simplest ideas are the most powerful. The video's been viewed on YouTube over 150k times.

No Copyright Intended. Remix culture is the new Prohibition.

I'll wrap it up there. With luck, I'll see you in ten more years. Thanks for reading.

I crunched the numbers, pulling together data from a selection of 30 notable internet acquisitions over the last ten years, from Broadcast.com to OMGPop, to see if the Facebook/Instagram acquisition was as crazy as everyone thinks. (I left out companies without public purchase prices or user stats.)

The spreadsheet below captures the acquisition date, dollar amounts, and ballpark counts of the users and employees at the time of acquisition. Be warned: any of these numbers are very rough, cobbled together from Internet Archive searches, old news articles, Quora answers, and tech blogs. If you have more accurate information, please leave a comment and I'll fix it.

Download the spreadsheet or view it on Google Docs.

Cost Per User

When a startup's acquired, they're purchased for any combination of the technology, talent, or the user base.

If we look strictly at the acquisition cost per user, Facebook got a relative deal with the Instagram purchase, paying roughly $37 for each of Instagram's 27 million users. (The median cost across all the acquisitions is about $92 per user.)

Compare that to acquisitions like Aardvark ($555/user) or Jaiku ($240/user), and you can systematically see which were likely technology or talent hires. The glaring exception is Yahoo's famous purchase of Mark Cuban's Broadcast.com in 1999, which paid nearly $10,000 for each of their 520,000 monthly active users, ten times any other startup. (Broadcast.com skewed the chart so much, I had to leave it off.)

Cost Per Employee

But if you look at the payout per employee, Instagram is completely off the charts. If split equally, each of Instagram's 13 employees would make nearly $77 million. The nearest runner-up is YouTube, with a paltry $24M for its 2006-era staff of 67. Skype, Broadcast.com, and Myspace all top the charts. The median? About $3 million.

Some would point to this as a sign of a bubble, but I think it's more likely it just reflects the incredible scalability of modern app architectures. Using cloud services, failover, and solid monitoring, Instagram can quickly scale up to support a million new users overnight with very little additional engineering effort.

The User-to-Employee Ratio

Instagram's numbers are exactly what you'd want to see in a social network -- high user counts with the lowest number of employees. This ratio is a measure of your efficiency, and it's no surprise that Instagram comes out on top here, with a ratio of one employee for every 2.07 million users.

The second highest user-to-employee ratio is OMGPOP, famous for developing Draw Something, the fastest-growing mobile app in history. With only one employee for every 875,000 users, they were able to scale to 50 million users within 50 days.

On the other end of the scale are the short-lived Q&A service Aardvark, with one employee for every 1,800 users, and customer-service giant Zappos with one employee for every 3,400 users.

More than anything, the app ecosystem rewards efficiency; your ability to massively scale with very little engineering effort. I'm guessing these ridiculously lean startups with huge exits aren't a freak occurrence. We'll see more of them as the rest of the world catches up, and learns how to do more with less.

Methodology

All figures are at the time of acquisition, and I favored active user counts over total registered users for calculating acquisition cost per year.

Thanks to Tristan Louis for providing some of the rumored numbers.

Update

I originally published this yesterday on Wired, under a different headline and revised lede from my editor. To be clear, I don't know if we're in a bubble or not. My only point is that, relative to other acquisitions, the per-user cost for Instagram isn't insane. Union Square Ventures' Albert Wenger added some additional thoughts, noting that the per-user costs should be discounted as the userbase grows.

Many Wired commenters complained I was wrong because Instagram has no revenue. In 2006, YouTube had 34M users, zero revenue, and were bleeding $1M/month for bandwidth alone. Was Google crazy to buy them, too?

Anyway, it was a good excuse to collect all of this data in a spreadsheet for the first time. I went looking, and couldn't find the numbers available in one place anywhere. Hope you liked it.

I guess Caine should've worked out a harder-to-crack checksum.

Short version: Expert Labs — the non-profit I've worked on for the last 18 months — is over. Gina and Anil are rebooting ThinkUp into a commercial entity, but I've decided to move on. I'll continue to act as a ThinkUp advisor, and have already started work on two brand new, soon-to-be-announced projects.

A Quick Review

I worked on a whole bunch of stuff while at Expert Labs, but it took on two themes: bringing ThinkUp to a new audience, and analysis of the data we collected. Since most of this work wasn't high-visibility outside of the existing ThinkUp community, here's a quick roundup.

Outreach. It's the first time in my career I've ever worked with self-hosted software, and I spent quite a bit of energy trying to help people understand why they'd want to use ThinkUp and make it as easy as possible to get it installed. It's hard enough to get people to sign up with a new web service, but one that requires you to install it on your own web server? Damn hard.

Part of this was marketing: I produced two promo videos, showing off the capabilities of the app at different stages. The first video was overly long, too detailed, and a bit cheezy. With the second, I cut out all the crap and asked Clay to narrate a tight, 74-second elevator pitch for why ThinkUp is an essential utility. If you've never seen it, take a minute to watch.

Unfortunately, offering a hosted version ourselves was never an option. As a nonprofit, it would have been irresponsible for us to archive people's social media activity and then disappear when funding dried up. Instead, we tried to make installation as simple as possible.

My first attempt was just getting it up and running on EC2, and making that process as easy as possible with a step-by-step tutorial. Later, I replaced that with the ThinkUp Launcher, a one-click installer that booted a custom EC2 instance with ThinkUp preinstalled. I released the code on Github, so any open-source project could easily make their own launcher.

Finally, in December, a commercial service appeared that offered drop-dead simple ThinkUp hosting. We worked with PHP Fog, a Portland-based cloud hosting company, to support a one-click ThinkUp jumpstart. Here's the screencast I made, showing off how to get up-and-running in seconds.

To help expand the reach of the app, I worked with Mule Design to figure out what ThinkUp does well, what it could do better, and incorporate those learnings to redesign the next version of ThinkUp. Elements of the redesign have already made their way into ThinkUp 1.0, and will guide later versions of the app.

Analysis. Whether it was making charts, building mashups, or crunching data, I spent quite a bit of effort trying to make sense out of the incredible amount of data being collected by ThinkUp.

I showed off the ThinkUp API with ThinkBack, an open-source mashup that extracted entities from your historical Twitter history to make a time machine of the people, places, and things in your past.

I analyzed Twitter reactions to 2011 and 2012 State of the Union speeches, as well as the White House's Twitter Town Hall, releasing datasets for each. I even made my first, and only, linkbait infographic summing up the White House's Year in Review on Twitter.

One of the biggest projects I created was the Federal Social Media Index, which used ThinkUp to gather activity from 125 federal agencies on Twitter, and try to measure their engagement for the questions they ask using some simple metrics. The response was great, showing how much interest there is for additional tools in that world.

Over the last few weeks, I've adapted it to use the ThinkUp API and will be open-sourcing the results soon to use on your own projects.

Overall, working with Expert Labs was fascinating for me. I'd never worked with government before, and was able to work with motivated and passionate teams from the White House down to local city government. It was an eye-opening experience, and I learned a ton about cultivating an open-source community, the challenges facing state and federal government agencies, and distributing hosted software. Best of all, I was able to do it all while working with three friends I deeply respect: Gina Trapani, Anil Dash, and Clay Johnson.

The Future

Expert Labs may be ending, but ThinkUp is just getting started. It'll continue to be free and open-source, and Gina and Anil are spinning ThinkUp off into a commercial entity, using the open-source base to create a new media property. You can read more about their plans on their Knight News Challenge application on Tumblr, which you should totally like and reblog. (The number of votes factors into the Knight Challenge judging!)

And me? I'll be doing new stuff, like always. I'm still writing my weekly Wired column, working on Playfic, and thinking about big future projects.

I've started working on two unannounced projects simultaneously that I'm crazy excited about. Both have to do with this problem: how do you use technology to connect people together in new ways, and help people make a living doing what they love? It's a running theme through everything I've ever worked on, and I'll be writing much more about them soon.

For the first time in a very long time, I'm also open to hearing about new opportunities. If you're working on anything along these lines and want help, get in touch!

If you're running a botnet, the goal is to avoid detection for as long as possible. Flashback took an interesting approach to hiding itself — if one of several popular antivirus or monitoring tools is detected, it immediately deletes itself. Merely installing a utility like Avast, Clam Antivirus, Little Snitch or HTTP Scoop was enough to protect you, even if you didn't keep them running.

Funny enough, major commercial antivirus utilities like Norton Antivirus, McAfee VirusScan, and F-Secure weren't included in the blacklist. It seems the Flashback authors aren't afraid of the effectiveness of those utilities or, maybe, the technical expertise of their customers.

From the threat description:

On execution, the malware checks if the following path exists in the system:

/Library/Little Snitch
/Developer/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/MacOS/Xcode
/Applications/VirusBarrier X6.app
/Applications/iAntiVirus/iAntiVirus.app
/Applications/avast!.app
/Applications/ClamXav.app
/Applications/HTTPScoop.app
/Applications/Packet Peeper.app

If any of these are found, the malware will skip the rest of its routine and proceed to delete itself.

Note the presence of Xcode, Apple's IDE for Mac and iOS development. To a virus author, the presence of development tools like Xcode is a perfect indicator of a tech-savvy user... the kind of person most likely to detect your work.

If you want to stay safe, or see if you were infected, Macworld has the best roundup.

It's the opening titles for 48 Hours of Hallucinatory Sex (originally "48 Horas de Sexo Alucinante"), a 1987 trash/sexploitation film from Brazil. (Don't worry, the clip's safe for work.)

Everything about this video is amazing, from the face-melting porno synth to the Amstrad-like scrolling fonts. (You can see the blinking cursor!) With the VHS warble, it sounds like an unreleased track straight off of DJ Shadow's Endtroducing... I couldn't find any information about the soundtrack online, but would love to hear more.

The sequel to a 1985 movie called 24 Hours of Explicit Sex, the plot of 48 Hours is totally meta: a sex psychologist sees the original film and hires the original cast and crew to make her own. It's like the '80s porno version of The Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence, where a psychopath is inspired to recreate the events of The Human Centipede using the real-life actors from the film.

The last time I stumbled on anything this funky, it was this scene from low-budget indie comedy Apple Pie from 1976, that ends with this insane 15-minute-long choreographed dance sequence set on the streets of 1970s NYC. And the music? An improvised funk jam by Hall & Oates.

This happens to me every time I go to NYC.

(Click for larger size.)

This article received a bigger response, hands-down, than anything I've written for Wired so far, resting at the top of Techmeme for a full day, with widespread coverage from The Telegraph, The Verge, Fox News, and Business Insider. (That's a good signal you've written something notable: when competing tech magazines start linking to your work.)

Almost two weeks later, I'm still angry but happy that the column ignited such a powerful discussion about the patent issue. I'm especially pleased that "weaponizing patents" is entering the lexicon; articles like these use the phrase without mentioning me at all. Awesome.

For two other perspectives on this issue, I enjoyed Mark Cuban's linkbait take and Fred Wilson's short, furious rant.

Anyway, if you hadn't seen it, I hope you enjoy it.

While most of the tech world was partying at South by Southwest in Austin yesterday, Yahoo announced it was filing a lawsuit against Facebook for allegedly infringing on 10 patents from their 1,000+ patent warehouse.

I'm no fan of Facebook, but this is a deplorable move. It's nothing less than extortion, expertly timed during the SEC-mandated quiet period before Facebook's IPO. It's an attack on invention and the hacker ethic.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have a small supporting role in this story. None of the patents I co-invented are cited in the Yahoo complaint, but a handful of applications I worked on with Yahoo were granted patents, weaponized now to use against people like me.

Here's how the process worked, in my case:

In 2005, Yahoo acquired Upcoming.org, the collaborative events calendar I'd launched two years before.
Back then, the Web 1.0 behemoth seemed on the verge of turning things around. A series of smart moves — high-profile hires, the Oddpost and Flickr acquisitions, the launch of the Yahoo! Developer Network, and their Research Lab — was breathing new life into things. Two months after we were acquired, Del.icio.us and Webjay joined us in the Yahoo fold.

After we moved in, we were asked to file patents for anything and everything we'd invented while working on Upcoming.org. Every Yahoo employee was encouraged to participate in their "Patent Incentive Program," with sizable bonuses issued to everyone who took the time to apply.

Now, I've always hated the idea of software patents. But Yahoo assured us that their patent portfolio was a precautionary measure, to defend against patent trolls and others who might try to attack Yahoo with their own holdings. It was a cold war, stockpiling patents instead of nuclear arms, and every company in the valley had a bunker full of them.

Against my better judgement, I sat in a conference room with my co-founders and a couple of patent attorneys and told them what we'd created. They took notes and created nonsensical documents that I still can't make sense of. In all, I helped Yahoo file eight patent applications.

Years after I left I discovered to my dismay that four of them were granted by the U.S. Patent and Trade Office.

I thought I was giving them a shield, but turns out I gave them a missile with my name permanently engraved on it.

I was naive. Even if the original intention was truly defensive, a patent portfolio can easily change hands, and a company can even more easily change its mind. Since I left in 2007, Yahoo has had three CEOs and a board overhaul.

The scary part is that even the most innocuous patent can be used to crush another's creativity. One of the patents I co-invented is so abstract, it could not only cover Facebook's News Feed, but virtually any activity feed. It puts into very sharp focus the trouble with software patents: Purposefully vague wording invites broad interpretation.

In their complaint, Yahoo alleges that Facebook's News Feed violates "Dynamic page generator," a patent filed in 1997 by their former CTO related to the launch of My Yahoo, one of the first personalized websites. Every web application, from Twitter to Pinterest, could be said to violate this patent. This is chaos.

Software patents should be abolished, plain and simple. Software is already covered by copyright, making patent protection unnecessary.

Ask any programmer — developing software is as creative and unique as writing poetry.

Yahoo's lawsuit against Facebook is an insult to the talented engineers who filed patents with the understanding they wouldn't be used for evil. Betraying that trust won't be forgotten, but I doubt it matters anymore. Nobody I know wants to work for a company like that.

I'm embarrassed by the patents I filed, but I've learned from my mistake. I'll never file a software patent again, and I urge you to do the same.

For years, Yahoo was mostly harmless. Management foibles and executive shuffles only hurt shareholders and employee morale. But in the last few years, the company's incompetence has begun to hurt the rest of us. First, with the wholesale destruction of internet history, and now by attacking younger, smarter companies.

Yahoo tried and failed, over and over again, to build a social network that people would love and use. Unable to innovate, Yahoo is falling back to the last resort of a desperate, dying company: litigation as a business model.

That it's Yahoo makes it even sadder. The complaint isn't really wrong when it asserts that: "For much of the technology upon which Facebook is based, Yahoo! got there first."

But being first with something generic that would have been invented by someone (like the wheel) — as opposed to something few could have imagined (like the Segway) — is a big difference.

Ask any start-up CEO — execution is everything.

As the fictionalized Mark Zuckerberg says in The Social Network, "If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you'd have invented Facebook."

The only problem? There is no music in the video; only bird calls and other sounds of nature.

Naturally, he filed a dispute, explaining that the audio couldn't possibly be copyrighted.

The next day, amazingly, his claim was rejected. Not by YouTube itself — it's unlikely that a Google employee ever saw the claim — but from a representative at Rumblefish, who reviewed the dispute and reported back to YouTube that their impossible copyright for nonexistent music was indeed violated.

Back at YouTube, eeplox found himself at a dead end. YouTube now stated, "All content owners have reviewed your video and confirmed their claims to some or all of its content." No further disputes were possible, the case was closed.

Whether caused by a mistake or malice, Rumblefish was granted full control over eeplox's video. They could choose to run ads on the video, mute the audio, or remove it entirely from the web.

A History of Screw-Ups

On Sunday night, Reddit took notice. Within hours, the thread was on the homepage, commenters were freaking out and, to his credit, Rumblefish CEO Paul Anthony was fielding questions in an IAmA interview until 2:30am.

His argument: One of Rumblefish's Content ID reps made a mistake by denying the dispute, and they released the claim on Sunday night. "We review a substantial amount of claims every day and the number is increasing significantly," said Anthony. "We have millions of videos now using our songs as soundtracks and keeping up is getting harder and harder."

This is the latest in a long series of foibles or outright abuses of YouTube's Content ID system. Content ID was intended to help copyright holders manage the chaos of YouTube. They'd provide copies of their audio and video for analysis, which would then algorithmically match newly-uploaded videos. If a match was found, rightsholders could automatically block the video or, increasingly, claim money from video advertising.

Content ID's monetization was a huge boon for copyright holders. Uploaders could keep their videos online, while copyright holders profited from the creative reuse of their work.

But the last couple years have seen a dramatic rise in Content ID abuse, using it for purposes that it was never intended. Scammers are using Content ID to steal ad revenue from YouTube video creators en masse, with some companies claiming content they don't own, deliberately or not. The inability to understand context and parody regularly leads to "fair use" videos getting blocked, muted or monetized.

Bypassing the DMCA

The problem is that media companies and scammers are using Content ID as an end run around the DMCA.

With the DMCA, the process works like this. A rightsholder could file a claim against a video with YouTube, and YouTube would immediately take the video offline. If there was a mistake, the uploader could file a counter-notice. The video would then be restored by YouTube within 10-14 business days of the counter-notice, unless it went to court.

It wasn't perfect, by any means, but it was fair. Disputes could always be appealed, and both parties were given equal power. And if a claimant lied about owning the copyright to the material in question, they could face perjury charges.

The current system, led by Content ID, tips the balance far in favor of the claimant.

Rumblefish never needed to prove they were the copyright holder, but were still given ultimate control over the video's fate. Uploaders can dispute claims, but the only people reviewing claims are the Content ID partners that filed the claim in the first place, who are free to deny them wholesale.

A Simple Fix

The solution is simple: if a copyright holder wants to pursue a disputed Content ID match, they should file a DMCA claim. That's the only way to guarantee their rights, and make the copyright holder legally responsible for telling the truth.

In fact, this is exactly how YouTube says that Content ID "fair use" claims should work. In practice, this doesn't appear to be true any longer. Content ID partners, of course, can file a DMCA notice at any time, but why bother if they can reject the counter-claims themselves?

(Preferred partners like Universal Music Group can go a step further and block videos directly without filing a claim.)

This problem has been on YouTube's radar for at least two years, but it's only getting worse as unsavory companies discover this nascent business model. Claim copyright on media you may or may not own, and let Content ID do the rest.

By letting Content ID partners have the final word, and not trusting their own users, YouTube is violating its trust with its community and damaging fair use in the process.

Update

I originally published this article over at Wired, where a commenter pointed out that this process may actually violate YouTube's "safe harbor" granted through the DMCA. If they choose to ignore disputes, they're effectively giving content providers an end run around fair use and the DMCA.

Selfish Crab wrote:

It seems like by providing the Content ID system, Youtube was trying to pre-emptively identify copyrighted material, like a first-pass dispute system. Their lawyers probably concluded that so long as the content ID system falls back onto DMCA takedown procedure, they are still in compliance with the DMCA sufficiently to retain their safe harbor.

So if Content ID claim disputes do not fall back onto DMCA takedown, as Andy's article suggests, there's a case to be made that YouTube no longer has liability protection from users. It is a whole another can of worms to analyze what a legal claim against youtube would look like. You'd have to look at the YouTube Terms of Service (i.e., the contract) to see if maybe they contracted around this problem already, you'd have to figure out damages, etc etc. Or I guess you can just raise a shitstorm and that's enough of a moral victory.

In a Google+ comment last December, senior copyright counsel for Google and former EFF staff attorney Fred von Lohmann acknowledged the problem.

Yes, we're aware of that problem in the Content ID dispute process and are looking at what we can do to fix it. It's the result of a complicated collision of how to handle geographically limited Content ID claims, disputes, and global DMCA removals. Turns out to be a hard problem to figure out. But we're thinking on it.

Virginia law student Patrick McKay got in touch with Annie Baxter, a public relations manager at YouTube, about this issue.

This is one of those corner-case outcomes that emerges from several different rules, none of which was intended to yield the result you've encountered (i.e., DMCA takedowns are global, but Content ID ownership claims are territorial). Unfortunately, addressing it YouTube-wide is going to take some time, both for pondering and implementing.

So while we can promise you that we're thinking about this, we can't promise you a fix or time-table. And feel free to tell the OVC we're looking at it and trying to come up with something.

In the meantime, anyone in the Content ID program is offered free reign to claim copyright on your videos and profit directly from them. I'm hoping this gets cleared up soon.

Playfic is a community for writing, sharing, and playing interactive fiction games (aka "text adventures") entirely from your browser, using a "natural language"-inspired language called Inform 7.

Inform 7 is incredibly awesome and weird. For example, this is a fully functional game:

East of the Garden is the Gazebo. Above is the Treehouse. A billiards table is in the Gazebo. On it is a trophy cup. A starting pistol is in the cup. In the Treehouse is a container called a cardboard box.

Type that into Playfic, and you end up with this simple game, ready to send to the world.

The official documentation is extensive, with a great manual and recipe book. I've collected a list of resources to help you get started.

For now, there's very little documentation on Playfic itself, but you can click the "View game source" link on every game to see how it was made, and Cooper's adding sample games from the official Recipe Book.

My hope is that Playfic opens up the world of interactive fiction to a much wider audience — young writers, fanfic authors, and culture remixers of all ages.

While the language can be tricky, building simple games is surprisingly easy. Cooper had never coded anything or made a game before trying Playfic, and within 30 minutes of futzing around, he'd made his first game.

Some stuff is broken and missing, but I'd love to hear what you make of it. Open to any and all feedback. Go make some games!

As I was about to connect my Gmail account, my finger hovered over the "Grant access" button.

Wait a second. Who am I giving access to my Gmail account, anyway? There was no identifying information on their site — no company address, no team page listing the names of its team members, and broken links to their privacy policy or terms of service.

For all I knew, it could be run by unscrupulous spammers or an Anonymous troll looking for lulz. And I was about to give them unfettered access to eight years of my e-mail history and, with password resets, the ability to access any of my online accounts?

I had to dig around online to find out who's behind it, and fortunately, Unroll.me is a totally legit NYC-based startup providing a useful service. I spoke to Perri Blake Gorman, Unroll.me's cofounder and CMO, who assured me they'll add all the company information as they roll out their public beta.

But since Gmail added OAuth support in March 2010, an increasing number of startups are asking for a perpetual, silent window into your inbox.

I'm concerned OAuth, while hugely convenient for both developers and users, may be paving the way for an inevitable privacy meltdown.

The Road to OAuth

For most of the last decade, alpha geeks railed against "the password anti-pattern," the common practice for web apps to prompt for your password to a third-party, usually to scrape your e-mail address book to find friends on a social network. It was insecure and dangerous, effectively training users how to be phished.

The solution was OAuth, an open standard that lets you grant permission for one service to connect to another without ever exposing your username or password. Instead of passwords getting passed around, services are issued a token they can use to connect on your behalf.

If you've ever granted permission for a service to use your Twitter, Facebook, or Google account, you've used OAuth.

This was a radical improvement. It's easier for users, taking a couple of clicks to authorize accounts, and passwords are never sent insecurely or stored by services who shouldn't have them. And developers never have to worry about storing or transmitting private passwords.

But this convenience creates a new risk. It's training people not to care.

It's so simple and pervasive that even savvy users have no issue letting dozens of new services access their various accounts.

I'm as guilty as anyone, with 49 apps connected to my Google account, 80 to Twitter, and over 120 connected to Facebook. Others are more extreme. My friend Sam is a developer at Kickstarter, and he authorized 148 apps to use his Twitter account. Anil counted 88 apps using his Google account, with nine granted access to Gmail.

For Twitter, the consequences are unlikely to be serious since almost all activity is public. For Facebook, a mass leak of private Facebook photos could certainly be embarrassing.

But for Gmail, I'm very concerned that it opens a major security flaw that's begging to be exploited.

The Privacy Danger

A long list of services, large and small, request indefinite access to your Gmail account.

I asked on Twitter and Google+ for people to check their Google app permissions to see who they've granted Gmail access to. The list includes a range of inbox organizers, backup services, email utilities, and productivity apps: TripIt, Greplin, Rapportive, Xobni, Gist, OtherInbox, Unsubscribe, Backupify, Blippy, Threadsy, Nuevasync, How's My Email, ToutApp, ifttt, Email Game, Boomerang, Kwaga, Mozilla F1, 0boxer, Taskforce, and Cloudmagic.

Once granted, all of these services are issued a token that gives unlimited access to your complete Gmail history. And that's where the danger lies.

You may trust Google to keep your email safe, but do you trust a three-month-old Y Combinator-funded startup created by three college kids? Or a side project from an engineer working in his 20 percent time? How about a disgruntled or curious employee of one of these third-party services?

Any of these services becomes the weakest link to access the e-mail for thousands of users. If one's hacked or the list of tokens leaked, everyone who ever used that service risks exposing his complete Gmail archive.

The scariest thing? If the third-party service doesn't discover the hack or chooses not to invalidate its tokens, you may never know you're exposed.

In the past, Gmail's issued security warnings to accounts being accessed from multiple IP addresses. I spoke to OtherInbox founder Joshua Baer, and he said that Google's eased up on the warnings because of the prevalence of third-party services.

It's entirely possible for someone with a stolen token to read, search, and download all your mail to their server for months, and you'd never find out unless they exposed themselves, or you were diligently auditing your "Last account activity" history.

Stay Safe

Clearly, we're not going to stop using awesome new utilities just because there's a privacy risk. But there are best practices you can follow to stay safe.

• Clean up your app permissions. The best thing you could do, right now, is to log into each service you care about and revoke access to the apps you no longer use or care about, especially those that have access to Gmail. Finding the permissions pages can be tricky, but the nice folks at MyPermissions.org made a handy dashboard linking to every one.


• Think before you authorize. Before authorizing an account, find out who you're granting access to. Look for a staff page, contact address, and take a look at the privacy policy to make sure they're not sharing or selling your info with third parties. Bonus points if they outline their security policies and offer a way to disconnect service from within the app. If anything seems off, don't do it.


• When in doubt, change your password. Have a feeling that someone might be reading your mail, but not sure which app is to blame? Changing your password instantly invalidates all your Google and Facebook OAuth tokens, though Twitter tokens persist after password changes.

Google could improve, as well. Their permissions page is too hard to find, even for experienced users, and it's impossible to see which apps have accessed your account recently.

Facebook does an excellent job with this, but Google only shows you the IP address and the protocol it used to connect. Surfacing this information, as a periodic e-mail or on-site notification, would go a long way to averting a potential disaster.

The Greatest Troll of All

So, I originally published everything above over on my Wired column yesterday, but I left off something else I've been thinking about.

While I think a compromised database is the most likely scenario, there's another possibility that disturbs me more.

Imagine that a brand new service pops up, offering a simple, fun service that uses your Gmail account. Maybe a neat visualization like Tout's Year in Review, or maybe something more practical like sending all your attachments to Dropbox.

But it's all just a giant troll, where the app's creators are silently running targeted searches, downloading your mail, and looking for compromising photos and sensitive documents behind-the-scenes. They could collect the documents for months or years, and then release it all online in an anonymous blast. Lulz!

You'd likely never find out where the data came from, and the perpetrators would never be caught. Hell, if you've Gmail-authed a questionable app, this could be happening to you right now and you'd never know. Whee!

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.

Update, February 11: Everybody's singing the YouTube Disclaimer Blues.

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 / Tasty n Alder (NE/SW)
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. A new downtown location brings a slightly different menu throughout the day and evening, both are great but get busy. Brunch daily from 9am.

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

Salt & Straw (NE/NW)
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. Now with a second location on NW 23rd.

Pine State Biscuits (NE)
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 Alberta location stays open until 1am on Fridays and Saturdays. (Their SE Belmont location closed in early 2013, soon to reopen on Division.)

Screen Door (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. Get there before brunch (9am) or dinner (5:30pm), or be prepared to wait.

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.

Boke Bowl (SE)
My favorite ramen in Portland. Not traditional, but excellent, Boke Bowl started as a series of pop-up ramen events around town before establishing their own location. I highly recommend the steamed buns and the pork ramen w/fried chicken. Vegan and gluten-free ramen options are available and delicious.

Tanuki (SE)
The motto of this quirky Japanese/Korean-influenced izakaya is "No kids, no sushi," but I'd also add "no groups larger than three, no vegetarians, no picky eaters, no prudes, no prima donnas." Just get the omakase for $20/person, order some drinks, play some pinball, and enjoy. My favorite restaurant in Portland, and some of the best meals I've ever had. Just be willing to go with the flow, or you'll get your ass banned for life.

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 beer.

Note: Voodoo Doughnuts 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. Want great donuts? Try the new Blue Star Donuts, a 10-minute walk from Voodoo.

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

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 sprawling SW 9th and Alder cart pod, the largest in town spanning two blocks. Closed Sundays. (Too busy? Try the to-go shop in SE.)

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.

Mississippi Marketplace (SE)
Since the closure of SE Division's D Street Noshery, this is probably the best-curated cart pod in the city. Highlights include Minizo (ramen), Miss Kate's Southern Kitchen, The Big Egg (breakfast until 2pm), Koi Fusion (Korean-Mexican fusion), and Prickly Ash (Chinese flatbread sandwiches). On a nice day, grab your food and sit on Prost's deck with some oversized Belgian beers.

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.

APEX (SE)
50 great beers on tap and a massive patio. Grab some excellent Portland-style banh mi from Double Dragon across the street, and settle in. Cash only, but if you use their ATM and show the receipt, they'll give you $1 off.

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, one of the few breweries in the U.S. focused 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 Eastside Distilling to New Deal and Vinn. 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 phenomenal coffee in Portland. (Coava is my personal pick.) 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.

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

Want more?

Looking for late-night options? I did a big roundup of the city's best, as of May 2013.

The recommendations from Eater's Top Restaurants and Heatmaps are consistently solid.

Have a great time!