Google search volume dropped while Obama spoke — a similar dip happened on Flickr and Last.fm, but Twitter exploded during his oath #

Mat Honan geocodes his life for Wired — funny, I was with Mat when he twittered from Greens and the mentioned awkwardness ensued #

YouTube Street Fighter — short side-scroller built with YouTube annotations #

The Electronic Playground, a massive archive of pinball and arcade game cameos in film and TV — highlights include Charles Bronson with Marble Madness, Michael J. Fox with Death Race, David Hasselhoff playing Atari 2600, and Starsky and Hutch playing Pong #

Visiting the Obama inauguration site in Fallout 3 — instead of Secret Service, the Mall is patrolled by enemy super-mutants #

2D Boy's Ron Carmel and Kyle Gabler talk about developing World of Goo — some insight into the creative process of my favorite game of 2008; the free soundtrack was just released #

The Onion: Bush Dies Peacefully In His Sleep — a fitting finale for their series of news briefs #

Why I'm Happy, Why I'm Not Satisfied — Ill Doctrine on the work ahead #

Twitter's traffic on inauguration day — five times the normal traffic with only slight delays (via) #

Whitehouse.gov's Old and New Robots.txt Files — all third-party content's licensed under Creative Commons and there's a Twitter account, too (via) #

Tom Taylor's Microprinter, a web-connected receipt printer for daily notifications — it pulls data from Google Calendar, iCal, BBC Weather, and Dopplr daily #

Seattle Times on The Game, a large-scale treasure hunt in 2002 that went wrong — the original version of the game inspired the movie 1980s screwball comedy Midnight Madness (via) #

Marble Madness speedrun in 2:35 — related: the original Marble Madness design documents (via) #

The Story of Boxxy — well-written story of how one girl inadvertently launched a 4chan civil war; yesterday, her channel was hacked and videos deleted (via) #

Belkin employee paid Mechanical Turkers to write positive product reviews — Belkin's CEO responded, saying it was a rogue employee #

danah boyd's dissertation on social networks and the American teen — an essential read, she interviewed and observed hundreds of teens across 16 states, tracking the rise of Myspace and Facebook in the process #

Kottke.org's roundup of new footage of the Hudson River plane landing — this also gives me a chance to point to Kottke's new redesign; older designs here #

Paul's SXSW Artist Catalog, annotated with the YouTube and Last.fm APIs — brilliant, SXSW should replace their official list with this immediately #

Jorma Dances to Fleet Foxes during SNL rehearsal — see also: Jorm Dances to My Chemical Romance, Death Cab, and Arcade Fire #

How to use Amazon EC2 for BitTorrent — update: turns out this is actually pretty expensive #

Google releases open-source Blog Converters project — hold up, Google has a Data Liberation team!? #

YouTube offering download links on selected videos — high-quality MP4 files, starting with all Change.gov videos; for everything else, there's KeepVid #

New law threatens handmade children's toy and clothing crafters — used toys are now exempted, but Etsy sellers are rightfully panicking; some endangered toys (via) #

Google search results for "KH(Ax)N" for x=1 to 100 — see also: hmmm, Oh Shiit, and Daaaamn, and X Girls Y Cups (via) #

Seattle Post Intelligencer writes its own obituary — naturally, the staff reporters covered the announcement of the paper's sale in detail #

Hotel for Dogs undisclosed ad on I Can Haz Cheezburger — the community saw right through it, in their own unique way; does editorial integrity apply to LOLCats? (via) #

Thought bubbles in Brooklyn — found on Urban Prankster, edited by Improv Anywhere's Charlie Todd (via) #

Measuring gravity in the Super Mario Bros. universe — as game hardware increases from the NES to Wii, Mario's gravity is getting closer to reality (via) #

Melt-in-the-Mouth Cookies, a brief history — Justin obsessively researches a family recipe back to the 1940s (via) #

Microsoft Songsmith takes on The Police's "Roxanne" — more classics here, including Wonderwall and What's Going On (via) #

Dopplr's visualization of Barack Obama's travels in 2008 — they're also generating these annual reports for every Dopplr user (via) #

Dennis Crowley on the death of Dodgeball — the site's original cofounder vows to build a replacement after it's closed for good (via) #

Superuseless Superpowers — though nothing really beats the powers of Section 8 #

Google closes Dodgeball, Google Video uploads, Google Notebook, Google Catalogs — and they're ending development on Jaiku and open-sourcing the code #

Melodie, the one-year-old videogame expert — hell, I didn't even know five of them (via) #

Legends of Zork — the Zork franchise is being revived as a browser-based MMO from the creator of Trukz #

DeWitt Clinton takes a Twitter sample — he estimates about 23% of the userbase is active and connected, about 1.2M people (via) #

Giant Bomb releases game database API — they're doing some interesting community stuff, mixing wikis with traditional game journalism (via) #

Ben Terrett on "Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet" — they printed 1,000 copies of a newspaper filled with tweets, blog posts, and miscellaneous writing from last year #

Weezer's Pork and Beans, alternate video — much more chaotic with nearly twice the memes, including Badger Badger and Leeroy Jenkins cameos #

Dan Bruno on the rhythm battle system in Mother 3 — one of the harder songs has a 29/16 time signature #

Interview with a former adware programmer — the lengths they went to avoid detection were pretty incredible #

The Hype Machine's Zeigeist 2008 — now that the whole thing's up, well worth checking out; all 50 top albums are streamable #

Pretty Loaded, an archive of Flash preloaders — "strange, this site never finishes loading" (via) #

New York Mag on the new programmer-journalist movement at the New York Times — the NYT seems like the only paper that's innovating like a high-tech startup #

The Evolution of Dance 2 — like the New Numa and Hamsterdance 2, you can't recapture the magic #

Commercials appear on YouTube's most viewed list — since the strangeness last year, they've started moving to a broader Most Popular algorithm #

Japanese live-action recreation of Super Mario Bros. — from the same show that brought us Matrix Ping Pong (via) #

Google responds to the "boiling water" energy usage report — they claim 1,000 Google searches produces as much CO2 as an average car driving 0.6 miles #

Globulous goes free — one of my favorite multiplayer distractions drops the restrictions for free players #