Apple Keynote Index Fund
— Matt Haughey finds out the returns for day trading AAPL during the last ten keynotes #
Steal This Film II released
— free documentary about history of piracy interviews Pirate Bay, Mininova, EFF, MPAA, and others (via) #
Protagonize, community-driven hypertext fiction
— reminds me of Gav and Peloso's interactive story from 1995; Wikipedia has more on the genre (via) #
Danah Boyd on Pew's report on teen use of social media
— some interesting trends, including the bits about low-income blogging #
Matt Webb wraps up 2007
— massive brain dump that extends beyond tech into sociology, ecology, marketing, drugs, and genetics #
Tristan's tech support hell with Palm customer support
— the support tech insisted she was Palm's CEO; contrast with Apple's personal touch #
Snarkout's history of "White Christmas"
— after a full year since his last post, Steve returns with a whirlwind history from Holiday Inn to Black Christmas; merry xmas, everybody! #
IM IN UR MANGER KILLING UR SAVIOR
— memeorific and sacrilicious "tale of three nerds turning a nativity scene into a LARP battle"; don't miss the video responses (via) #
The Last Man on Earth, full-length film on Archive.org
— 1964 adaptation of Richard Matheson's "I Am Legend" starring Vincent Price as Dr. Will Smith #
Snowclone.pl, Perl script to query snowclone variations from Google
— used often here, it also supports searching Yahoo, Live.com, Google Groups, Google Blog Search, and Gigablast #
Fake Steve Jobs pranks bloggers with Apple shutdown drama
— update: the references to Tony Clifton and Kaufman are a sly confession #
Hacking an NYC taxi's backseat kiosk
— these things are so irritating, it's nice to see someone find a good use for them #
The Jingler
— turns any MP3 into Christmas music with beat-matched sleigh and jingle bells (and Santa!) (via) #
Meta 419 Scam
— pretends to reach out to victims of Nigerian scams, with a convenient $1M payment (via) #
I Am Legend DVD screener leaked to BitTorrent
— there should be a special name for this time of year, when Oscar screeners flood the net #
xkcd's Randall Munroe speaks at Google
— including an appearance by Donald Knuth and an impromptu stick figure Google logo #
Newspaper accidentally identifies thief on the front page
— photos from two different stories showed the same man painting a storefront and stealing a wallet #
Deciding the Long Bet winner for weblogs vs. the New York Times in Google
— Rogers Cadenhead finds that while blogs beat the NYT, Wikipedia crushed them both (via) #
Exclusive: Yahoo! Brickhouse launches BravoNation
Today, Yahoo! Brickhouse launched BravoNation, the newest release from their San Francisco-based incubator program. Gordon Luk, the leader of the project and my fellow Upcoming founder, graciously offered to give me an exclusive preview of the launch.
BravoNation is an experimental platform for people to send virtual awards and achievements to their friends and family, and a robust set of APIs for developers to build achievements into their own software. It reminds me of a web-native equivalent of XBox Live’s achievement system, abstracted to work with any online community.
From its genesis as a Hack Day project to my departure from Yahoo! last month, I was a close observer of this project and I’m thrilled to be the first to write about it publicly. Gordon gave me access to the “Rough Draft” release of the site this morning, and I’ve included my screenshot-heavy tour below.
Continue reading “Exclusive: Yahoo! Brickhouse launches BravoNation”
Best Blogs of 2007 that You Maybe Aren't Reading
— Rex's brilliantly-curated list of new, underrated blogs #
Flash: How is babby formed?
— apparently pretty old, but made me laugh; the original thread on Yahoo! Answers #
NYC's area/code reveals they created Chain Factor
— a wonderfully addictive Flash game, it also acted as a trailhead for a month-long ARG for CBS's Numb3rs (via) #
Long list of 2008's anticipated films
— I'm most excited about Benjamin Buttons, The Box, Be Kind Rewind, Where the Wild Things Are, and Wall-E (via) #
GOOG-411 created to train speech-to-text software
— running the free service to build up a corpus of voices? neat idea, but seems inefficient #
Pitchfork's Top 50 Music Videos
— they include some fan-made videos and this charming cover from a high school trio #
Ryan Barrett's thoughts on SimpleDB
— still catching up from my NYC trip, this was the best writeup I've seen so far #
Anil Dash on Google and the Theory of Mind
— I had dinner with Anil on my first night in NYC last week, and he made me eat pig tails and cow glands; yum! #
Isometric pixel map of Hong Kong
— insanely detailed with some odd photo collage bits; try the highest zoom level (via) #
Raiding the abandoned Sun Microsystems building
— linked from a thread in this wonderful UK urban exploration forum (via) #
Ev's guide to evaluating new product ideas
— for me, "personally compelling" is the only one that matters, since I can't build something I won't use myself #
Dopplr launches publicly at Le Web
— even if you don't travel, it's worth signing up just to experience all the brilliant UI touches #
Pirate Bay launches Last.fm-powered Music section
— mostly genre browsing, but suggesting torrents based on your listening habits is now feasible #
OptiMap, travelling salesman problem solver using Google Maps
— neat, it supports passing addresses in the querystring; the methodology, for the curious #
Aquaria finally released!
— gorgeous underwater side-scroller won the grand prize at IGF; watch the movies (via) #
End of an era as New York Times closes recording room
— NYT reporters tell their own stories in the comments #
Richard Beymer's Twin Peaks photos
— taken on the set of the final episode by the actor who played Benjamin Horne (via) #
Rails 2.0 released
— multiviews, moving towards REST over SOAP, and better native security and performance #