Dan Aykroyd pimps vodka in a crystal skull
— looks like Ray has gone bye-bye; related: his UFO “documentary” via buzzfeed.com #Interactive Fiction Competition 2008 entries released!
— like last year, the brilliant IF luminary Emily Short will be reviewing games as she plays them #Cave Story coming to WiiWare with exclusive new content
— if you’ve never played the freeware masterpiece, it’s available for PC, Mac, and Linux #Obama campaign releases official iPhone app
— flawlessly designed, focused heavily on participation; grouping your address book by state is surprisingly useful via Daring Fireball #Nintendo announces new DSi with camera, web browser, downloadable games
— here’s video of it in action #Webmonkey on the clickjacking IFRAME exploit
— potentially devastating hack and relatively easy to pull off, affecting every browser #The Money Meltdown, excellent primer to the current mess
— some very good links I haven’t seen before via MetaFilter #Google Blog Search launches new Techmeme-like homepage
— funny, I thought they’d abandoned the site entirely; here’s the announcement #Dexter ad campaign spoofs Wired, Esquire, New Yorker magazine covers
— clever campaign, though the typefaces are slightly off throughout; the New Yorker cover was drawn by regular Edward Sorel #Visual History of Recessions since 1949
— in other words: everything is going to be okay via buzzfeed.com #Dan Rather interviews FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver
— applying knowledge learned from baseball analytics to electoral projections #Netflix launches public Javascript, Atom, REST APIs
— as Kellan points out, it comes with OAuth, a developer blog, and an API explorer via laughingmeme.org #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 Google Blogoscoped #Rososo, the peaceful newsreader
— clean and minimalist approach to feedreading for newbies via topherchris.com #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.
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 #Cisco accidentally removes all letter "T"s from official homepage
— regex gone awry via Justin Mason #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 Kottke #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 leapfrog.nl #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 Kottke #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 beingfamous.com #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 Digg #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!