September 30, 2008
Try Google Search as it looked in January 2001
— extremely surreal flashback only available for one month; predates 9/11, YouTube, Sarah Palin, or this blog (via) #
Twitter's Biz Stone charts popular terms tweeted during the presidential debate
— you can reconstruct the entire debate this way #
I Wish I Were the Moon
— experimental gameplay with four endings, part of Daniel Benmergui's Moon Stories mini-trilogy #
SF Gate's profile on Flickr community manager Heather Champ
— virtually nobody can understand the job's difficulty or the impact her work has on Flickr's culture #
Very Small Array visualizes #1 hit singles by genre, geographic origin, and song length
— great stuff; see also: the Whitburn Project, part one and two #
Metafilter user tracks down the lead singer of Sonseed, the Christian ska band
— sometimes, journalism is just picking up the phone #
xkcd draws the universe from top to bottom, on a logarithmic scale
— in-jokes galore, inspired by this logarithmic map of the universe #
Found Footage: Sarah Palin's 1984 Miss Alaska Pageant Video, Swimsuit Competition
Somehow, a 22-year-old University of Alaska student named Richard Millay got his hands on a videotape that’s eluded the media since John McCain asked Sarah Palin to be his running-mate — original footage of her 1984 Miss Alaska Pageant.
Of course, this is all very frivolous and has nothing to do with the current campaign. But like Barack Obama’s high school basketball footage, it’s a little glimpse into the early life of a highly-visible national figure.
In the first part added to YouTube, he posted the portion from the swimsuit competition, prefaced by a brief introduction mentioning the demand for the “88 minutes of Alaska Gold.”
Update: The original video was removed, but I managed to save a copy of the relevant footage without Richard’s original intro. YouTube’s removing every copy of this video, so I’m streaming the clip below from my own server. It won’t be removed.
Continue reading “Found Footage: Sarah Palin's 1984 Miss Alaska Pageant Video, Swimsuit Competition”
Footage from Sarah Palin's 1984 Miss Alaska swimsuit competition
— video was deleted, here's my local copy on Waxy #
Twitter Elections
— based on candidate-related tweets, looks like only 2% of the Twitterverse is conservative #
Shrub, proxy for Amazon S3 with RSS, JSON, and Muxtape-style output
— for sharing S3 buckets with the world; more from the creator #
Justin Ouellette on the meteoric rise and fall of Muxtape
— I'm surprised there aren't invite-only Muxtape clones, flying under the RIAA's radar (via) #
Current TV partners with Twitter to broadcast tweets on live presidential debate broadcast
— the first real-time backchannel on live TV? #
Vimeo Toys, real-time interactive visualizations of Vimeo social activity
— I'd love to see new comments appear as word balloons in Vimeo Land (via) #
A Car's Life, interactive game built on YouTube annotations
— they claim it's the first, but this Spanish adventure game came out in July (via) #
David Letterman on John McCain's cancelled appearance tonight
— leaked video, expect this one to disappear shortly; the live feed of him talking to Katie Couric is pretty damning #
Hardcore "Claymates" respond to Clay Aiken coming out of the closet
— a strange mix of heartbreak, support, and disgust (via) #
Suzanne Vega talks about Tom's Diner, remix culture, and being the "mother of the MP3"
— Karlheinz Brandenburg used the 1984 song to help debug the MP3 codec #
Larry Lessig's analysis of Sarah Palin's experience
— in this very important presentation, he examines every single VP in history to see how she stacks up #
Parsons students design Little Big Planet levels
— the scale of the Shadow of the Colossus-inspired creature is insane #
Bernanke/Paulson FAIL
— is it just me, or am I seeing more of current net culture leaking into mainstream media? (via) #
Kickstarter
I wanted to take a moment to announce that I’ve joined the board of directors for Kickstarter, a brand-new startup based out of Brooklyn and Chicago.
April 28, 2009: Kickstarter is live! I wrote more about the launch here.
Kickstarter aims to let creative people of all kinds — journalists, artists, musicians, game developers, entrepreneurs, bloggers — raise money for their projects by connecting directly with fans, who receive exclusive access and rewards in exchange for their patronage. More than just a fundraising app, Kickstarter’s a publishing platform where project creators can communicate with the people that are supporting them. (Think Jill Sobule, A Swarm of Angels, or Sean Tevis.)
I was introduced to founders Charles Adler, Perry Chen, and Yancey Strickler by Caterina Fake back in June, and sealed the deal after a trip to NYC to meet the team. They’re a great group of guys with a strong vision, and I feel lucky to be involved.
Ultimately, everybody should be able to support themselves doing what they love using the web, and I think Kickstarter will be a great way to get there. Expect to hear more on Waxy.org as launch day gets closer.
To help them on their way, they’re currently looking for a CTO to join the founding team. I’ve been helping guide some of the technology decisions and building the development team, but we’re looking for a passionate and talented person to devote themselves to the project full-time.
If you’re interested, drop me an email or IM and I’ll introduce you!
Nintendo's Wario Land meta-ad destroys YouTube UI
— inspired by the HEMA ad? try dragging the UI elements around at the end #
Google Maps adds NYC public transit directions
— finally! not perfect yet, but HopStop must be panicking a bit #
Cheap, Easy Audio Transcription with Mechanical Turk
After recording last week’s interview, I was left with a 36-minute MP3 and a profound feeling of dread. You see, I hate transcribing audio. I used to transcribe interviews in high school, and it’s always tedious, taking upwards of eight times the length of the clip itself.

Bracing for a good four or five hours of rewinding and writing and rewinding, I remembered that this is The Future! So, instead, I tossed the job over to the global anonymous workforce at Amazon Mechanical Turk instead.
The result: my 36-minute recording was transcribed while I slept, in less than three hours, for a grand total of $15.40.
This is a fraction of the cost/time of any other transcription service online, including the Turk-driven Casting Words, though you potentially sacrifice some quality. In my experience, though, there were virtually no errors.
Here’s how to do it yourself, with no programming knowledge required. The instructions below are verbose, but using my template, it shouldn’t take you more than five minutes of setup per job.
Continue reading “Cheap, Easy Audio Transcription with Mechanical Turk”
Dragon's Lair walkthrough using YouTube annotations
— impressive! now, will someone make it playable with clickable annotations? #
Technorati's State of the Blogosphere 2008
— detailed demographic study and analysis from Technorati's index, five parts posted over the next five days #
Zen Bound, serene rope-twisting game, coming to the iPhone
— based on Moppi's Zen Bondage for the PC, released in 2005 #
Versionista, track changes to any website
— the author's writing a political column for Slate; sadly, his background is in nasty SEO software #
The NO!SPEC campaign vs. crowdSPRING
— the same group of design pros that attacked the very promising Pixish #
Clay Shirky on information overload filter failure
— speculative Web 2.0 keynote says fixing overload requires a shift in social norms #
Bill O'Reilly on Sarah Palin's hacked email and the First Amendment
— related: someone hacked into the O'Reilly Factor's admin interface two days ago #
Daft Punk's "Something About Us" on Nintendo DS, vocoder, and theremin
— the LED display was added in post-production #
Wine Library's Gary Vaynerchuk at Web 2.0
— I could care less about wine, but I absolutely adore this guy #