Danah Boyd on ephemeral profiles — it always amazed me that my little sister created a new IM screenname every couple months #

Top 12 Appearances by Bands in Films — also: '60s garage band cameos in TV & film #

The Edge annual question, "What are you optimistic about?" — funny, everyone from Boing Boing was a contributor except Mark (via) #

Kongregate — nicely designed community for sharing Flash games (via) #

Sci-Fi Channel's "The Lost Room" as adventure game — sounds intriguing; the Wikipedia entry has more spoilers (via) #

The Flying Saucer, early mashup from 1956 — the artists ended up in court for sampling popular songs in their novelty break-in record #

Steve Wozniak interviewed by Compuserve members in 1983 — shortly before the introduction of Macintosh, lovingly scanned by Jason Scott #

What's Noka worth? — incredible 10-part expose of an insanely overpriced chocolate seller (via) #

This year's best selling album sold less than 4 million copies — tastes are splintering as music discovery and distribution gets easier #

Henry Jenkins interviews Gamelab's Eric Zimmerman — Gamelab is among the best of the small independent studios; every game is great (via) #

Noah K's everyday/celebrity project for VH-1 — the full series, including this real-life meme mashup with Lonelygirl15 (via) #

Gerald Ford, dies at 93 — Dana Carvey covered his death in 1996 #

Jay's Best of Casual Gameplay 2006 — incredible collection of the year's best web games and toys, many which I'd never seen before #

Nintendo Wii Controlled Smarthome — from the interesting Wii Hacks blog (via) #

Why Viva Pinata Is The Most Underrated Game Of 2006 — one of my E3 2006 underdogs, it's still the only intriguing game on the 360 #

Line Rider Urban Run — pseudo-3D isometric style, from the creator of Jagged Peak Adventure (via) #

The Decemberists Vs. Stephen Colbert: Countdown To Guitarmageddon — with appearances by Henry Kissinger, Eliot Spitzer, Rick Neilsen, Robert Schneider, and Peter Frampton! #

PopMatters Best Indie-Pop of 2006 — a very personal list and my current favorite of this year's batch; I'll be using his definition of the genre from now on #

Sam Wintermute's Universal Text Imitator — my favorite of the examples: Beastie Boys structure using words from a linguistics textbook #

Bristolz' Half Bakery Illustrations — I just read that she passed away in August; very sad #

Digitized Doodle Dome — rigging an obscure spherical Etch-a-Sketch toy to drafting software (via) #

Pitchfork's Guest List Best of 2006 — top album lists from 30+ musicians, from Beck to Mastodon #

Paper Thin Walls' incredible 2006 Mixtape — 31 writers pick their favorite songs of the year, then interview each artist about them (via) #

Six Apart's Holiday Video — "no, owls can't type" #

Mates of State record a session with Daytrotter — including their 2-year-old daughter's recording debut #

Rogers Cadenhead battling MGM over Wargames.com — he's owned the domain since 1998 #

GameSetWatch reviews "Heaven and Earth" from 1992 — I bought this wonderful puzzle game when it was new; you can download Mac and PC versions here #

Michael Crichton writes critic in as a child molestor in new novel — not a book critic, but someone who questioned his global warming denial #

Mozilla launches Operator microformats parser — using the microformats support we pushed in Upcoming and Y! Local as examples, too #

Archie comics getting a realistic redesign — ghastly! (via) #

FCC drops morse code testing for all ham radio licenses — end of an era #

How big of an Internet star was the Star Wars Kid? — Viral Factory explains how they arrived at 900 million views #

Threadless Deals With Plagiarism — they handled it very well #

Ask Mefi on cooling a warm Coke in two minutes — with thebest answer by Adam Savage from Mythbusters! (via) #

Turning a full-size Fender into a Guitar Hero controller — awesome mod #

Antville Music Video Awards 2006 — can you imagine if the MTV VMAs were like this? #

Google Patent Search — beats the crap out of the official patent search (via) #

xkcd's hand-drawn Map of the Internet — plot yourself on the map! #

Craigslist Meets the Capitalists — refreshing (via) #

ABC News launches Amanda Congdon's new show — here's a mildly positive review from the NYT (via) #

Flickr's Ho Ho Ho easter egg — try adding a "ho ho ho hat/beard" note to any of your photos (via) #

Honan fact-checks the supposed iTunes collapse — then again, the original article cited was by Orlowski #

i'm going to live forever — Leslie founded Smug and Hoopla, among other, writings; Zeldman interviewed her in 2001, which only hints at the depth of her contributions online #

Thank you, Leslie. — Leslie Harpold, one of the web's most influential and interesting writers and designers, is gone; memories from Merlin, Kevin, Brad, Emily, Robert, Lia, Chris, Lance, Dan and more #

How many taps in a URL? — the results are non-intuitive #

Video: Pre-Taped Call-In Show — Mr. Show goodness #

Redubbed Christmas classics — worth it just for the Charlie Brown Christmas alternate ending #

Money circulation science using Where's George data — here's the Nature article with some interesting info vis #

NYT's Year in Ideas — my favs: work rumors are usually true, social-cue reader, ambient walkman, fighting homophily, and publishing negative results #

VerizonMath — customer service reps try to learn the difference between dollars and cents #