Dom Sagolla's story of the birth of Twitter — a former employee, he recalls how Jack first discussed the idea on the slide in South Park #

Crummy.com's series on the naming of videogames — every new console followed similar trends, except for pinball; here's the second part of the series #

Conspiracy Rock, 1991 Schoolhouse Rock parody of the Kennedy assassination conspiracy — 4,320 frames painstakingly animated by Jason Scott, online for the first time (via) #

Ben Fry on turning charts into music with Microsoft Songsmith — don't miss the sonification of the Dow Jones compared to the growth of the porn industry #

Coca Cola's Avatar ad for the Superbowl — love the augmented reality HUDs #

Censored Bill Hicks performance airing tonight on Letterman — Hicks's retelling of the appearance; his mom's appearing on the show marking the 15th anniversary of his death #

Huffduffer, podcasting found audio around the web — I've been loving it lately; it's like Give Me Something to Read for audio #

Spreadsheet of artists, bands, and record labels on Twitter — Lazyweb: turn this into a Twitter aggregator with music and popularity info from Last.fm; update: Google Spreadsheets is having issues #

Ma.gnolia suffers severe data loss, no timeline for recovery — bookmarks may be permanently lost, updates here #

Big Fat Whale's list of Internet Anti-Memes and Non-Sensations — that STD-tracking Facebook app sounds like Lia's Sickr concept from Worst Website Ever #

Detroit News story of a frozen body found in an abandoned elevator shaft — nobody but the reporter called the police, and it took three 911 calls and 24 hours for them to arrive #

World of Goo's Kyle Gabler gives the Global Game Jam keynote — starting today, 2,000 people worldwide will be building free games in only 48 hours #

Cash4Gold tries to bribe Cockeyed.com not to talk about them — a former employee explains how the scam works in detail #

Pseudo-3D videoconferencing with a generic webcam — tying together head tracking with background subtraction #

Mattias Geniar on Academic Earth, online classes from top colleges — like iTunes U, but with complete transcripts, course materials, and web-based video (via) #

Henry Hey's musical accompaniment to Bush's last press conference — from the creator of Palin Song #

Velato, an esoteric programming language that uses music as source code — I think its Hello World program is more listenable than the one for Fugue (via) #

Telescopic Text — like Blueful, another playful experiment with storytelling on the web (via) #

iPhone app uses photo recognition to solve Rubik's Cube — quite possibly the only iPhone app that mentions Laplace transforms and blob detection (via) #

LÖVE, a lovely 2D game engine in Lua — as Why points out, the documentation and tutorials are fun #

Perfect Balance — note that you can rotate the blocks (via) #

Very Small Array's visual breakdown of Billboard's Hot 100 for 2008 — compare this to her chart of Pitchfork's Top 100 #

Last.fm starts auto-correcting typos in artist and song names — their audio fingerprinting project finally surfaces with elegantly-designed tools #

A Life Well Wasted, a new podcast about videogames inspired by This American Life — first episode explores the recent death of EGM; RSS feed is here (via) #

Metafilter's history of the Resolute Desk, the President's desk in the Oval Office — did you know the Dept. of Homeland Security meets in the old barber shop? #

Dogster's Ted Rheingold on the quiet death of Yahoo! Pets — it's sad, even a maligned site like Pets had a tremendous amount of potential if done right #

Bay Area TV news report about "electronic newspapers" in 1981 — it took two hours to download the whole paper at $5/hour for Compuserve service (via) #

NYT launches Best Sellers API — if you're near NYC, their hack day next month should be great #

The White House on Vimeo — nice alternative to the YouTube channel (via) #

Muxtape relaunches as artist-friendly MP3 site — Justin also recently released I Hardly Knew Her, a minimalist Flickr browser (via) #

Softwear by Microsoft, their new clothing line — collaboration with Common and Urban Outfitters; this isn't very Microsoft-like (via) #

Blueful, a short story scattered across the web — trust me and just follow the links (via) #

Radio Aporee, field recordings with Google Maps — contribute your own audio to the geographical soundscape #

Ze Frank's Flash toy lets you draw with your voice — it's like Visual Acoustics, inverted #

Unofficial iTunes Store proxy running on AppSpot — this won't last long (via) #

Champion of Guitars, Guitar Hero as text adventure — with z-code, even (via) #

MAD Magazine goes quarterly with issue #500 — I have a strange feeling Cracked will get the last laugh #

Pac-Man Dungeons, Pac-Man as a text adventure dungeon crawl — more elaborate than Pac-TXT, with a map and better writing #

Listable, create and share lists with JSON, SQL, and plaintext output — Andre Torrez scratches an itch with App Engine #

John Resig explains how the Greasemonkey CAPTCHA solver works — step by step #

Greasemonkey: Neural network in Javascript solves Megaupload's CAPTCHAs in the browser — weak captchas, but still impressive; the author explains why cracking reCAPTCHA is much harder, with more discussion on Reddit (via) #

Mr. Tweet, user recommender for Twitter — shockingly well done, doesn't require a Twitter password #

How to use emoji icons in SMS on the iPhone without hacking your phone — a $1 app unlocks the Japanese keyboard, along with 461 picture characters to confuse your friends (via) #

The Boxxy Story, Part 2: The Fall of Boxxy — along with the first part, some of the best research on Internet culture I've ever seen #

Kevin Kelly on access vs. ownership for digital goods and services — for the flipside, see Jason Scott's argument against the cloud #

Google's Ajax APIs Playground — over 170 code samples for eight APIs #

Judging a stranger by their tweets — Dolores Labs asks Mechanical Turkers to rank the top 200 users, and plotted the results #

Waferbaby's The Setup — Daniel Bogan's interviewing writers, coders, and musicians about their computer setup (via) #

St. Petersburg Times' Obameter, tracking Obama's campaign promises — brilliant example of database-backed journalism #

Wired on the outdated IT infrastructure in the White House — the Mac-savvy team found PCs "outfitted with six-year-old versions of Microsoft software" #