Grand Theft Auto IV mocks Flickr and tagging
— there’s a parallel-world Internet in the game with hundreds of pages, including parodies like Craplist #Tresling, Tetris controlled by arm wrestling
— the battling dynamic reminds me of the rare Panic Park gameplay #Paulville, gated communities for Ron Paul supporters
— no, really, the first one’s in West Texas via LiveJournal #Rocketboom's coverage of Before the LOL at ROFLCon
— the history of online memes, back to the late 1800s; and yes, I’m a huge Jason Scott fanboy via Fimoculous #Jason Scott runs the stats on his Goatse hotlinking prank
— he goatse’d 704,000 people last year, which must be some kind of record #Things I Learned About My Dad (in therapy)
— edited by Dooce, a book of essays with several good friends (and excellent writers) contributing #Clustarack's impressive Rube Goldberg contraption
— behind the scenes, 180 hours to build the contraption, 98 takes, 30 minutes to restore to initial state via Delicious #Antique children's book uses bellows and cones to make sounds
— beats a tinny speaker playing the Dora the Explorer theme for 30 seconds via Adam Kempa #Google Maps adds Street View for driving directions
— some clever tips in the video, like checking for toll roads and parking signs #Robot reassembles itself after being broken apart
— it uses a camera to seek out its missing parts via blog.pmarca.com #WSJ on Miller Brewing's Brew Blog
— a former reporter is scooping other brewers and the trade publications, and both are angry #Analysis of malware that creates Blogger spam blogs
— using remote CAPTCHA solvers run by the spammers via Slashdot #Mister Bookseller
— scanlation of a wistful Croation comic about a bookstore with every book in the world, except one via Delicious #Gin, Television, and Social Surplus
— transcript of Clay Shirky’s excellent keynote from the Web 2.0 Expo; watch it instead via Leonard Lin #John Resig on Orto, running Java apps in Javascript
— also, John wrote about another project porting the Ruby virtual machine to JS #Marc Andreessen's guide to the Microsoft-Yahoo hostile takeover
— the best explanation I’ve seen via Battelle Media #Howard Rheingold's footage of a WELL meetup from 1989
— everyone’s identified in the Boing Boing comments #Don Hodges fixed the kill screen bug in Pac-Man
— he did the same for Ms. Pac-Man, Dig-Dug, and Donkey Kong, too #ROFLCon Live Stream
— hear the stories behind popular memes from their creators; see the Tweetscan for more #Interview with the brains behind 419 Eater
— I had no idea Shiver Metimbers unmasked himself last year #TypeRacer, multiplayer typing game
— I average about 90 wpm, even with my crazy nontraditional typing style via twitter.com #The history of NYC in video games
— coming in October, Sierra’s Prototype will also attempt to model NYC in exacting detail via Delicious #Mixwit, mixtape maker from Y Combinator
— like Muxtape, totally illegal fun; the embeddable players are great #How Dave Cassel made $900 writing 300 reviews for Helium's Reward-a-Thon
— he churned out at least 120,000 words in 100 days, most likely their biggest earner #Pirate Bay hits 12 million simultaneous peers
— the percentage of seeders is rising, despite Comcast’s efforts #Kyle Bean's The Future of Books
— lovely art piece fashions a laptop out of an old book via tumbl.us #Superfan blogger visits the set of The Office
— with detailed photos of every character’s desk, among other details via incidentalthinking.com #Color Wars Street View Scavenger Hunt
— I’m so impressed with the games they’ve invented using existing web services #BBC Two's Horizon on "The Electronic Frontier" in 1993
Continuing the series of portrayals of technology from the VHS era, here’s another contribution from Martin Brewer, who brought us the first episode of The Net. This is another BBC Two show, an episode of Horizon from 1993 on “The Electronic Frontier.”
The broad theme of the episode is the information economy, and it’s a whirlwind tour of influential people and tech in the pre-Web 1990s. They focus heavily on Microsoft, Apple, and General Magic, with interviews from key players from each. (Plus, great footage of their headquarters and workspaces.) There’s plenty of footage of vintage ’90s tech in here, including giant cell phones, Windows NT 3.1, the Newton, General Magic’s Magic Cap, Corbis, Encarta on CD-ROM, interactive TV and software agents. Some of the highlights, with screenshots, after the video below.
Note: Like all the other materials I post here, this video is completely out-of-print and unavailable commercially, digitized from an old VHS tape. If it ever comes back into print, or the copyright holders contact me, I’ll take it down immediately. (Update: YouTube is blocking my upload in some countries, so I replaced the video embed below with this copy from the Internet Archive.)