April 22, 2009

Last Year's Model — "saving the planet through sheer laziness" or maybe not #

Maureen Dowd's ridiculous interview with Twitter's founders — they were funny and graceful under idiocy #

YouCube, make an interactive cube from YouTube videos — for example, try Oo De Lally, David After Dentist or Douche Cubed #

April 21, 2009

McSweeney's "Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era" — with slight modifications, I think this class would be a massive hit (via) #

Sarien's web-based multiplayer ports of classic Sierra games — Space Quest, Police Quest, and Leisure Suit Larry so far; here's how it all works (via) #

Jeff Veen's Designing for Big Data — great 20-minute talk covering the history and best practices of data visualization #

BirdFeeder, prototype client for an open decentralized Twitter — don't miss his presentation, explaining why Twitter is like CompuServe mail #

NYT's Saul Hansell researches the costs of broadband Internet providers — they want to add fees to cover increased usage, but their costs are actually going down #

Interface design concepts for Firefox as a URL library — an iTunes-like treatment for URLs, combining bookmarks, feeds, and history (via) #

April 20, 2009

NYT on Wired's J.J. Abrams-edited Mystery Box issue — the puzzle was solved by Steven Bevacqua; the whole issue is great (via) #

The Brain-Twitter Interface — focusing on flashing letters creates measurable brainwaves (via) #

History of Rainn Wilson's Twitter feud with Sockington — unfortunately, it's led to over 100 threats; Rainn's toned it down recently #

Casual Profanity's liquid sculpture made from plastic tubing — see also: the Superfluid Skirt (via) #

Kara Swisher announces changes to AllThingsD's Voices section — in response to my article, they removed the comments/Share links and changed the wording; compare then and now #

April 19, 2009

Adam Berg's Carousel, short film capturing a frozen moment in time — you can scrub through it on the official site #

Inspired Bicycles: Danny MacAskill — breathtaking in parts, it's like watching parkour on a bike #

Braid artist David Hellman releases game's art assets — the wallpapers are lovely (via) #

Bohemian Rhapsody played by vintage computer hardware — Atari 800XL, TI-99/4a, 8" floppy, 3.5" hard drive, and HP ScanJet 3C as Freddie Mercury (via) #

April 18, 2009

MailChimp used Mechanical Turk to rank 25,960 templates — interesting approach, combining algorithmic design with human filtering #

Jason Fortuny ordered to pay $74k for Craigslist sex baiting prank — he never showed up in court; I wonder if any of the hundreds of others affected will bother #

April 17, 2009

Little Big Cremaster 1 — Little Big Planet levels inspired by Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle; also: Little Big Cremaster 4 (via) #

Scene.org Awards 2009 winners announced — the best of the demoscene; you can view or download every entry on Pouet (via) #

Covered, a blog with modern artists covering classic comic books — I love the realistic Donald Duck, Richard Sala's Batman, and Gustavo Deveze's frenetic Action Comics 1 (via) #

The Pac-Man Dossier — an exhaustively researched and well-written guide, with gameplay details I've never seen before (via) #

CMU's ClueWeb09, 1 billion website crawl available for researchers — massive 25 terabyte dataset shipped on four 1.5 terabyte drives; get this up on AWS! (via) #

Swedish court finds The Pirate Bay guilty — a year in jail and $3.6M in damages #

April 16, 2009

Hacklab's laser engraver plays the Super Mario Bros. theme — here's the Ruby code and homegrown ASCII tablature that makes it work (via) #

Super Mario 3 "Rainbow Riding" LUA hack for FCEUX emulator — you only control Mario indirectly, skip to 1:00 to see how fundamentally it changes gameplay (via) #

Dash Shaw's Bodyworld — serialized in 12 chapters, surreal online comic from the creator of Bottomless Belly Button (via) #

Spreadtweet, Twitter disguised as an Excel spreadsheet — I love his other work, including a playable Snake on his homepage #

Amazon's Knee-Jerk Contrarian Game — five years later, these reviews still make me laugh #

Chino Otsuka's digitally adding her modern self to her childhood photos — time travel with Photoshop (via) #

Kottke digs up The Wire's original pitch, draft outline, and three scripts — a must-read for any fan of the show #

Vulture's history of bloggers depicted in film and TV — they forgot Mr. X #

Track 4chan's Twitter race to beat Ashton Kutcher and CNN to 1M followers — their @basementdad account, created yesterday, is gaining 700-900 followers per minute #

April 15, 2009

4chan users discover Twitter, mass-following a new account — the NSFW thread on /b/ (cache) is interesting, they've shared code for fake account creation #

Ken Jennings took H&R Block up on their offer — they did his taxes for free, because of the "unpleasantness" #

Paul Lamere interviews a 4chan hacker about the TIME poll manipulation — custom Windows apps, Perl scripts, and proxies to submit thousands of votes per minute #

Sweet Juniper's photos of an abandoned Detroit block — every entry on his site is magic, including his TIME tour, abandoned zoo, stealing books, and thoughts on scrappers (via) #

Digg drops the DiggBar for all non-Digg users — which, really, they should've done in the first place (via) #

American expat shows Saudi government's hand-censored version of Katy Perry CD cover — though the last photo looks Photoshopped; maybe they're printing new booklets instead? #

Canvas visualizations of sorting algorithms — absolutely beautiful, based on Aldo Cortesi's original visualizations #

Nancy Cartwright is your insufferable crazy aunt — except that my crazy aunt never donated $10 million to Scientology #

Clay Shirky on the failure of #amazonfail — outrage has its own momentum, even when circumstances change #

Category Inflation at the Webbys

Posted April 14, 2009July 13, 2023 by Andy Baio

The nominations for the 13th Annual Webby Awards are in, and browsing the list, I’m a little surprised at how much it’s grown. I remember the novelty of the first ceremony at Bimbo’s back in 1997, with its quirky five-word speeches and humble 15 categories.

I was curious to see the growth trend, so I tallied up the total number of categories on their official site. In the last five years, we’ve seen a 330% increase in new categories to a total of 129 today. In the chart below you can see the gradual rise during the dot-com era and brief reduction after the bust, only to swell along with the Web 2.0 movement. In 2005, with the introduction of the new Mobile, Advertising, and Film award types, the number of categories more than doubled to 63 and continued to expand every year since.

With so many categories, you’d think that their business model hinged on getting as many entries as possible… Which, of course, it does. Submitting an entry for Webby consideration costs $275 for the Website, Mobile, and Advertising categories, while the Film categories costs $195.

All of this reminds me of Cool Site of the Day, a former web mainstay that’s long since drifted into irrelevance. Once they started taking cash for consideration, the award became less meaningful and the picks were less interesting because of it.

At what point does the Webbys meet the same fate as CSOTD, where the only people who care about the awards are the nominees themselves?

April 14, 2009

Rocketboom spins Know Your Meme off into new site, community — their meme database is like a safe for work alternative to Encyclopedia Dramatica (via) #

We Didn't Start the Flamewar — very potent Diggbait (via) #

Amazon employee blames French office for AmazonFail glitch — they say it's strictly internal, debunking Weev's claims #

Erik Kastner's Super Ear Man Bros. playthrough — he makes a suicidal game look easy #

April 13, 2009

4chan manipulates all 21 top results on the TIME 100 Poll — not content to just push Moot to the top, they rearranged the results to spell a message #