May 27, 2006
Cory Doctorow on O'Reilly's "Web 2.0" trademark
— by encouraging ubiquity of the "Web 2.0" meme, O'Reilly diluted the proprietary meaning of the mark #
Video: Gnarls Barkley on Conan O'Brien
— electric performance; could they have been honoring Towel Day a day early? #
Indiana Jones and the Fountain of Youth
— fan-made Scumm game in the style of the old Lucasarts games; start the countdown to C&D (via) #
the broken laptop i sold on ebay
— disgruntled buyer gets elaborate revenge by posting photos from seller's laptop hard drive (via) #
Nine-minute Waxy widget
— Mat uses Dashcode to built a complete Dashboard widget pulling my remote feed in nine minutes #
Watercooler Games on the good, bad, and awful media coverage of the Super Columbine Massacre RPG
— don't miss Kotaku's coverage, including interviews with a Columbine survivor and the game's creator #
Video: Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers
— found audio goodness via Robot Wisdom, who I've really enjoyed lately (via) #
ExtremeTech's roundup of 8 free music recommendation services
— Last.fm destroys the competition, with Pandora next in line (via) #
Roomba hacked into MIDI instrument
— I won't be satisfied until all my appliances can play the Super Mario theme songs #
O'Reilly responds to Web 2.0 trademark debacle
— they were called out by Arrington and others for cease and desisting an Irish Web 2.0-branded conference #
WWW 2006 – Retroactive Answering of Search Queries
— Google's paper suggests ways to recommend interesting new pages based on a user's search history #
Flash: TagLines, visualization of interesting Flickr tags over time
— the WWW 2006 paper is interesting stuff, though a bit over my head (via) #
WWW 2006 – Random Sampling from a Search Engine's Index
— new method to benchmark relative sizes of search engines; only about 45% of Yahoo's index is in Google, and vice-versa #
"Dead in Iraq" virtual protest in America's Army game
— instead of playing the Army-sponsored shooter, he's typing the name of every American killed in the war #
Game-based errors in "The Wizard"
— you can almost feel the disgust emanating from the page; the DVD will finally be released in August #
The Morning News' 2006 Editors' Awards for Online Excellence
— long name for a good list of links (via) #
Torrentspy lawsuit accuses MPAA of hiring hacker
— they claim he was asked to steal internal Torrentspy documents by any means necessary #
Half Life 2: Episode 1 goes gold
— the first in the episodic gaming series will be released on June 1 (via) #
Del.icio.us Hotlist
— redesigned homepage highlighs fresh popular links, and a minimum threshold for the recent page #
Nicholas Carr on Wikipedia's gradual shift toward moderation
— Nick and Jimbo Wales wage battle in the comments (via) #
Teens using high-frequency ringtone out of adult hearing range
— here's an MP3 of the Mosquito sound and a clip of just the tone (via) #
Google pushing borderless AdSense by default
— since launch, they've resisted blending ads with content; an interesting switch #
Crushing Competition
— tax preparers lobby to make California taxes more difficult to prepare (via) #
I Liked It Better Live
— MP3 bloggers collect songs with better live performances than the recorded original #
Ultrastar, open-source port of karaoke game SingStar
— the original judged your vocal performance by analyzing pitch and duration #
Video: Mr. Rogers addresses the U.S. Senate in 1969
— essential watching, this guy was a hero; plus, he could breakdance (via) #
Berkeley's "Naked Guy" commits suicide at 33
— I always heard about him, but never saw him in my four years on campus (via) #
Super Happy Dev House 10 tries a new idea
— a weekend-long contest to build a "money making machine," with Paypal revenue determining the winners #
3D milling service to be offered for Second Life avatars
— at E3, I saw that the Spore team was 3D printing their character creations from corn starch (via) #
San Francisco scar tissue
— "a piece of San Francisco healing around now-gone railroad tracks" (via) #
Flickr's hiring
— you couldn't pick a cooler group of people to work with, aside from maybe Upcoming #
Eric Kleptone speaking at next Web 2.0 conference
— I've been obsessed with the Kleptones' 24 Hours album lately; try Sixteen Sisters for a taste #
37signals e-book earns $175k in first 75 days
— incredible argument for self-publishing online (via) #