July 31, 2008

Get Your War On, the first animated episode — via Rex, who's been tearing it up lately (via) #

NYT Magazine on Internet trolls and lulz culture — journalist spends a few days getting to know Jason Fortuny, weev, ED, and the /b/tards; and yes, I'm part of the problem #

Michael Wesch's Anthropological Introduction to YouTube — highly recommended viewing from the creator of The Machine Is Us/ing Us (via) #

Del.icio.us 2.0 goes live as Delicious.com — tag combos still work perfectly, so I'm happy #

YouTube introduces text search for political videos — their speech-to-text transcription gets a public trial in limited fashion on their You Choose section (via) #

Librarian responds to complaint about "Uncle Bobby's Wedding" — incredibly thoughtful and well-reasoned defense of a mildly controversial children's book (via) #

Deerhoof releases new single as sheet music, asks people to record their versions — Matthew Walker's cover is fantastic; Lucas Gonze contributed a MIDI score and guitar tab to work with (via) #

July 30, 2008

Caterina Fake joins Hunch.com as CPO — stealthy startup I'd keep a close eye on #

Speed Racer Video Mosaic — every frame of the video is composed of hundreds of individual thumbnails #

Judge Judy taping interrupted by L.A. earthquake — also: the set of Big Brother, KNBC News, KABC, L.A. City Hall, and Judge Jenny #

Diesel Sweeties leaves unprofitable print syndication, back to web-only — Lore Sjoberg interviews R. Stevens about the switch (via) #

12 Glowing Men — also: the 1957 version of 12 Angry Men is on YouTube in its entirety (via) #

Don Hodges explains how to control the barrels in Donkey Kong — I've linked to his kill screen work before; someone get this guy an RSS feed! (via) #

Bowser's Minions — those College Humor guys are on a roll #

Candid Camera-style show sends "Ugly Americans" to Parisian cafes, records results — the locals were extremely tolerant and were only chastised by other Americans (via) #

Amazon redesigns Mechanical Turk with web-based creation tools — creating HITs now requires no programming; just pick a template and upload a CSV with the values #

July 29, 2008

OSCON in 37 minutes — 45 presenters summarize their talks in 30 seconds; I'd love to see this before every conference #

fl0wer gameplay from E3 2008 — my other E3 picks: Ibb and Obb, Mirror's Edge, Rhythm Heaven, Fat Princess, and LittleBigPlanet (via) #

Waiter Rant reveals his identity on eve of book tour — NY Mag identified the restaurant, saying he worked there for six years (via) #

So Open It Hurts — SF Mag's long profile piece on Tara Hunt and Chris Messina's public breakup; Tara's take #

July 28, 2008

Derek Powazek's 10 Ways Newspapers Can Improve Comments — solid suggestions that would lead to a massive short-term decrease in comments, for the better #

Metafilter on the end of Wired Magazine's Found column — almost uniformly goofy, I'll still miss it #

Phillip Toledano's Days with My Father — a 98-year-old widower with no short-term memory, but a great sense of humor (via) #

LA Times on Sean Tevis' XKCD-inspired fundraising comic — he hit his goal in 24 hours and raised a staggering $95k in two weeks, 8 times his old-guard opponent #

Innocent People Should Never Talk to the Police — funny, even the cop agrees with this one #

Waverly Flams and the Magic Pants — "I'm a God! I have breathed life into my pants!" #

GOOD Magazine on "vampire energy," power consumed in standby mode — not surprisingly, plasma TVs, computers, and game consoles are the worst (via) #

Internal Apple video from 1987 predicts the year 1997, with tongue in cheek — cameos from Woz and Scully; don't miss the "Vista Mac" at 2:20 and the stock chart at 6:02 (via) #

July 27, 2008

Recursive Motivational Poster — update: bandwidth exceeded, so I'm mirroring it (via) #

Vimeo decides to ban and delete gaming videos — reminds me of Flickr's screenshot battle, but they never deleted photos #

July 26, 2008

NYT's roundup of home electricity monitoring tech — isn't it against the utilities' best interest to provide tools to monitor and reduce usage? #

StupidFilter goes beta, releases code — the classifier for identifying stupid comments; try the demo on random Digg comments (via) #

College Humor's montage of top 10 eye-gouging scenes — from King Lear to Blade Runner (via) #

It's 1975 And This Man Is About To Show You The Future — selections from a vintage IBM sales presentation; I want a t-shirt of several of these slides (via) #

Charles & Ray Eames' "A Computer Glossary" from 1968 — charming animated primer on computers for IBM, music by Elmer Bernstein (via) #

Mondo 2000's RU Sirius banned from Facebook for using a pseudonym — shouldn't they make an exception for people known primarily by their aliases, like Frank Black or Jello Biafra? #

Journey's new album released on a pre-loaded, branded MP3 player — with 11 songs re-recorded with their new singer discovered on YouTube (via) #

July 25, 2008

Embracing the backchannel at the Start conference — they've hired Flickr's George Oates to act as an ombudsman #

Google hits one trillion URLs indexed — bigger than a breadbox #

Flowing Data redesigns a bar chart — I like Nathan and Tyler's the best #

Randy Pausch, R.I.P. — now would be a good time to watch the Last Lecture again #

New Yorker digs into California's medical marijuana industry — from growers to brokers to dispensaries to clients (via) #

Tarantino's Mind — short film explores a unified theory of Tarantino films (via) #

Rush plays "Tom Sawyer" on Rock Band — they failed the Expert level one-third through the song (via) #

July 24, 2008

The Onion interviews Mike Patton on videogames — he discusses Rock Band, Portal, Bionic Commando, and voicing the monsters in I Am Legend #

Amir's Super Mega Burn — anonymity can turn anyone, even superfans, into superjerks in no time flat (via) #

The Balcony Is Closed — Roger Ebert on Gene Siskel and the end of "At the Movies" #

The Onion's Random Roles with Teri Garr — like Random Rules, this format teases out insights and anecdotes from interview subjects #

Friendfeed and Flickr

Posted July 23, 2008 by Andy Baio

How often is Friendfeed hitting Flickr, and how many Friendfeed users are on Flickr?

We now have a glimpse into Monday’s traffic, thanks to a snapshot provided by Kellan and Rabble’s in their talk, Beyond Rest: Building Data Services with XMPP PubSub, presented earlier today at OSCON in Portland:

On July 21, 2008, Friendfeed hit Flickr 2.9 million times to get the latest photos of 45,754 users, of which 6,721 visited Flickr in that 24-hour period, and could have potentially uploaded a photo.

Three million requests for 6,000 updates. Clearly, polling isn’t ideal. Don’t miss the rest of the slides.

(Also, at its peak, Flickr is currently receiving 60 uploaded photos a second, “roughly 10 times the number of people born on Earth per second.”)

July 23, 2008

Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over' — remarkably prescient article from January 2001 #