Interim Apple Chief Under Fire After Unveiling Grotesque New MacBook
— “you need to shave the USB ports every couple days” #Remnants of a Disappearing UI
— the fingerprints left on an iPad display after each app via Brandon Boyer #Phantom of the Floppera
— Toccata and Fugue in D minor performed on four floppy drives via twitter.com #Byrne Reese on why MovableType lost to WordPress
— trivia: he says the Huffington Post never paid for MT, which they still use today #Threatened BBC websites crawled and shared as 1.88GB torrent
— the torrent holds 172 websites set for closure #Clement Valla's Seed Drawings
— Mechanical Turk workers copying each other’s drawings in a visual game of Telephone #Johnny Chung Lee's low-cost video chat robot
— a lower-tech version of the scone-buying robot, for $500 instead of $15,000 #2D Boy on World of Goo's iPad launch and sales figures
— sold 125k copies in the first month, by far the fastest selling by both units and revenue #Washington Post's visualization of global weight gain since 1980
— more analysis in the article via FlowingData #Google releases Translate for iPhone
— the Babelfish is near, just need a version that translates constantly #OkCupid crunches the data on best first-date questions
— as always, some incredibly entertaining correlations #Feltron 2010 Annual Report
— this time, a report on his father’s life reconstructed from artifacts via Kottke #NBC's Community takes on Advanced Dungeons & Dragons
— trivia: Community creator Dan Harmon also co-created Channel 101 and Heat Vision and Jack #Gawker Network launches major redesign
— it caters to superfans at the cost of pageviews, quite possibly a good thing; my money’s on Rex #New Yorker's long Scientology expose
— incredible reporting, centered on screenwriter Paul Haggis’ departure from the “Church” #Darryl Cunningham's comic on climate change
— previously: Homeopathy, Moon Hoax, and MMR vaccinations #Ze Frank's Star.me launches private beta
— Techcrunch has an interview with Ze and more screenshots #The Making of "The Social Network"
— 93-minute behind-the-scenes film, available free on IMDB via twitter.com #The Daily: Indexed
Anybody else think it’s weird that The Daily, News Corp’s new iPad-only magazine, posts almost every article to their official website… but with no index of the articles to be found? They spent $30M on it, but apparently forgot a homepage. (That’s a joke, people.)
So I went ahead and made one for them! Introducing, The Daily: Indexed…
Why did I do this? The Daily’s publishing free, web-based versions to every article, but without an index, it’s (deliberately) hard to find or link to the individual articles from the web. And since the iPad app only carries today’s edition, it makes finding any historical articles you’ve paid for nearly impossible.
I love that this kind of experimentation is happening in journalism. I love journalism dearly and want to see new models emerge, and charging for content is a great way to align a media organization’s interests with those of its readership. That said, if you do charge for access, you can’t publish free versions to the web and hope that people don’t find them.
I’m also very curious about their reaction. This isn’t illegal or a copyright violation — all I’m doing is linking to the versions they’re publishing on their site. The ability to link to any webpage without permission is part of what makes the web great, and it should never be discouraged. It’s also worth noting that Google’s slowly indexing all the articles too, and search engines aren’t blocked in their robots.txt file.
But I’m still recovering from a legal nightmare last year (more on that soon), so if asked to stop publishing and delete the Tumblr, I will. (Lawyers: My email address is at the top of this page.)
In the meantime, enjoy!
(Special thanks to Rex Sorgatz for the inspiration.)
Update: At The Daily’s press conference, editor-in-chief Jesse Angelo addressed the question of public sharing on the web.
“For the pages in the application that we can do it, we create mirror HTML pages. Those pages are out there on the web — they can be shared, they can be searched, you can find them out there… We know there are billions of other people sharing content on the web, and we want to be part of that.”
Thanks to Ryan Tate for the video.
February 4: Some people seem to have been a bit confused by my original post, so I edited it a bit, explaining a bit more clearly why I made this. I never thought that The Daily actually forgot to make a homepage/index; that was tongue-in-cheek. I also added a comment answering some of the frequently asked questions about the project.
Nick Montfort releases Curveship, new interactive fiction framework
— Python framework for world modeling with the ability to interactively change narrative style #Match.com acquires OkCupid
— seriously hoping Christian Rudder continues updating OkTrends; they deleted a critical post from last April #Robert Sheckley's "The Prize of Peril"
— 1958 short story that predated The Running Man and predicted reality TV via tvtropes.org #Everything is a Remix, Part 2
— worth it just for the wall of sequel title frames; I want that as a screensaver #New York Observer on the "end of blogging"
— more like evolution than an end; Clive Thompson nailed it, it’s the rise of the long take #Wired on a Toronto statistician who cracked a lottery ticket system
— finding flaws in pseudo-random interactive games designed for print via givemesomethingtoread.com #NYMag feature on the changing landscape of online porn
— “we’re living in a grand age of micro-smut, a burgeoning empire of lemonade-stand porn” #Metagames: Games About Games
Over the last few years, I’ve been collecting examples of metagames — not the strategy of metagaming, but playable games about videogames. Most of these, like Desert Bus or Quest for the Crown, are one-joke games for a quick laugh. Others, like Cow Clicker and Upgrade Complete, are playable critiques of game mechanics. Some are even (gasp!) fun.
Since I couldn’t find an exhaustive list (this TV Tropes guide to “Deconstruction Games” is the closest), I thought I’d try to pull one together along with some gameplay videos.
This is just a starting point, please post your additions in the comments or email me and I’ll add them in. Note: I’ve tried to stay away from specific game parodies (like Pong Kombat or Pyst), and stick to games that comment on game design, mechanics, or culture.