Amazon's Turk-powered app for the iPhone to identify product photos — a truly harebrained idea, since SnapTell does the same thing instantly using image similarity for all CDs, DVDs, books, and games #

Sony deleting user-created LittleBigPlanet levels without warning — the gaming world is about to revisit all the lessons Web 2.0 already learned, from Friendster to Facebook #

YouTube's new video thumbnails to be determined algorithmically — they'll be representative of video content instead of cleavage shots designed to drive click traffic #

David Recordon on building OpenID in the browser — the best way to drive mass adoption, since it's such a difficult concept to understand otherwise #

Image and video manipulation in Mathematica 7 — also, it supports built-in parallel processing on EC2 #

Pirates of the Amazon, Firefox extension adds Pirate Bay links to Amazon listings — similar Greasemonkey scripts exist for Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB (via) #

Songbird hits 1.0 — very exciting release, though iPod touch/iPhone aren't supported just yet #

Whole Foods subpoenas New Seasons' financial and marketing records — the local Portland chain isn't even involved in the dispute #

Wired on how Dan Kaminsky and a set of DNS all-stars fixed a serious exploit — a dramatic retelling of "the largest multivendor patch in the history of the Internet" #

The Guardian publishes six unreleased 999 emergency calls — insanely dramatic life-and-death scenarios, including a solo childbirth and near-death choking (via) #

Jason Nelson's "I Made This. You Play This. We Are Enemies." — an exploratory Flash game/poem with levels based on sites like Metafilter and Fark #

Design lessons from World of Goo — "show, don't tell" #

Magic/Replace — spreadsheet manipulation built on the underrated DabbleDB; don't miss the demo (via) #

How Jeremy Keith's Flickr photo ended up in Iron Man — it was CC-licensed, but attribution in the credits costs money, so he signed a release instead #

Six Apart acquires Pownce, which will shut down in two weeks — unlike most acquirees, they thoughtfully built an exporter tool #

Lolcats postcard from 1905 — here's a completed auction for the same postcard #

Kottke on the "broken windows theory" applied to online communities — if graffiti can cause more crime, can the ugliness of a message board create more trolling? #

The Simpsons takes on Apple — a narwhal reference, too; full episode's on Hulu #

Give Me Something to Read — meatier articles bookmarked by Instapaper users; related: the toread tag on delicious #

Change.gov switches from copyright to Creative Commons — small decisions like these, made quickly in a time of transition, are inspiring #

Bio-Bak, the portfolio site of Dutch Flash artist Coen Grift — I've never seen anything remotely like it #

Emily the Strange character inspired by Nate the Great's Rosamond? — noticed before, but the phrasing on the sticker and book are virtually identical #

NYT on Mark Allen and Machine Project at LACMA — one of the most interesting people I know gets a writeup of his most recent project #

MIDI Hero, Guitar Hero hack with a drum kit — the author later wired up his Roland V-Drums kit (via) #

Danah Boyd on Lori Drew's conviction in the Megan Meier suicide case — the lawsuit centered on technology, when the fact it happened online was incidental (via) #

Rogue ported to iPhone — get your 1980s dungeon crawling on #

New York Times' visualization of one year of NYC parking tickets — they had to file a FOIA request to get the data for the 9.9 million tickets #

Helvetireader, minimal Google Reader redesign with Greasemonkey — very sexy, though maybe a bit too minimal #

The L.A. Times data desk — all their research projects collected in one place, though some raw data dumps would be nice too (via) #

Rick Astley rickrolls the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade — quite possibly the widest instant exposure of an Internet meme ever #

Barack Obama's weekly address on YouTube — stylistic notes: his team's using the new widescreen format and comments are enabled #

Ed Piskor's Wizzywig #2 released — the perfect blend of autobiographical comics and geek subject matter; I bought both books, highly recommended #

The Time Machine, an interactive YouTube adventure — see also: Tube Adventures and its sequel, Samsung's Follow Your Instinct, and A Car's Life (via) #

Zoetrope, search and visualize the historical web — in-development tool creates a window into past versions of a page (via) #

Vinylscrobbler — packet sniffing Shazam to update Last.fm from analog sources (via) #

William Shatner responds to the new Star Trek film — funny, I thought it'd be more like this #

Fimoculous' List of Lists 2008 — as always, check back often; last year's had over 600 lists #

StateStats, find correlations between search queries and U.S. state characteristics — Myspace users are violent illiterates in warm climates, Gmail users are skinny and rich #

Fleet Foxes on La Blogotheque's Take-Away Shows — directed by Vincent Moon in an abandoned wing of the Grand Palais #

Processing hits 1.0 — seven years in the making, the artsy programming language leaves beta (via) #

Bad Hacks, a repository of vulgar ROM hacks — including Super Nazi Bros., Naked Metroid, and Zelda as erotic fanfic (via) #

Kottke on Shaq's first week on Twitter — I like that Shaq is following Not Shaq #

John Gruber on the iPhone's deprecation of "http://" — I'm a little surprised they didn't merge the search and location bar into a single field #

Twitter acquires Rael Dornfest — along with Values of n, which will be shutting down Sandy and Stikkit next month #

Autographed Zork first edition manual sells for $2,300 on eBay — from Brian Moriarty's personal collection, less than 100 copies were sold for the PDP-11 (via) #

Disney World's Haunted Mansion map in Counter-Strike Source — from the creator of the Van Gogh Starry Night map #

Doom ported to Flash 10 — built with Alchemy, which could bring a flood of PC emulators and ports (via) #

Feedback Army, cheap and quick usability testing built on Mechanical Turk — get 10 random people's feedback for $7 #

Esquire profile of Passage creator Jason Rohrer — touches on games-as-art and the lack of popular auteurs in gaming #

YouTube Live's archived highlights — some online were overthinking this, but I thought it was good fun; personal highlights: Julia Nunes, Bo Burnham, Mythbusters, Charlie the Unicorn, and DJ Mike Relm remixing memes #