Steal This Film II released
— free documentary about history of piracy interviews Pirate Bay, Mininova, EFF, MPAA, and others via thepiratebay.org #Protagonize, community-driven hypertext fiction
— reminds me of Gav and Peloso’s interactive story from 1995; Wikipedia has more on the genre via Fimoculous #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 @areasofmyexpertise #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 #Happy <Holiday Name Here>
— Christmas card from Aperture Science and the Portal team via Delicious #I Waterboard!
— Straight Dope member waterboards himself and writes about the experience via Delicious #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 MetaFilter #Meta 419 Scam
— pretends to reach out to victims of Nigerian scams, with a convenient $1M payment via Delicious #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 #On the overuse of the Trajan typeface in movie posters
— the accompanying Flickr pool via typographica.org #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 techmeme.com #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.