Years ago, I’d heard about a mythical unreleased videogame developed by Penn & Teller for the Sega CD and 3DO. The game was supposed to be an oddball adventure game, with some cruel magic tricks and minigames thrown in for good measure. This Absolute Entertainment press release from March 1995 sums it up nicely.
Waxy Hits the Deck
In the past, I’ve never been a big fan of advertising. It’s very often irrelevant, obnoxious, and almost always diminishes user experience. While there are clever TV commercials, print ads, and outdoor campaigns that win worldwide acclaim, I’m not sure any user would shed a tear if every ad banner disappeared overnight. (It’s no wonder that the Firefox Adblock extension is downloaded 100,000 times weekly.)
The rapid rise of contextual advertising takes a step in the right direction by attempting to recommend ads related to the page you’re currently reading. I’ve been minimally running Google Ads on the Waxy.org archives since May 2004, and I’ve generally been happy with the results. The ads themselves were still a bit ugly and only occasionally relevant, but it was an acceptable sacrifice since they covered my hosting bill every month. (About $150/month, if you’re curious.)
Now, a little bit of news. Late last year, Jim Coudal started a boutique advertising network called The Deck. A few things make The Deck’s approach unique among other online ad networks I’ve seen.
First, every advertiser must offer a product or service that the Deck members have used or paid for, and we’re very picky people. Second, the ad slots themselves are very limited (currently only six slots), forcing us to choose best candidates. And the ads are cleanly designed and unobtrusive, without animation and limited to one per page.
I’d like to see a world where online ads are meaningful, representing the ideals of the writer and the interests of the reader. Careful moderation and unobtrusive presentation will hopefully lead to a better experience for everyone, which in turn means better results for advertisers. It’s an interesting experiment, and I’m proud to be in the company of net legends like Jeffrey Zeldman, Jason Fried, and John Gruber. Neat guys with very good taste.
Anyway, I’ll report back in a few months with the results. For more information, read John’s explanation of why he switched, and Mister Snitch’s analysis some trends in blogger ad networks. And if you have something to advertise you think we’d like, get in touch.
Nick and Amelia's Lazy Sunday
My 9-year-old nephew and 7-year old niece perform “Lazy Sunday.” (Watch the original.) Need I say more?
Download: Nick and Amelia’s Lazy Sunday.mp3
January 21 Update: I just received an e-mail from NY Daily News reporter Julian Kesner, who wrote a profile on Andy Samberg and “Lazy Sunday” last month. Julian heard about Nick and Amelia’s MP3 and sent it to Andy Samberg. Andy wrote back and said, “That might be my favorite thing of all time ever.”
January 22: ADM of the excellent Amy’s Robot blog remixed the original video with Nick and Amelia’s audio. The results are surreal, and iPod-compatible!
January 24: Two 11-year-old boys recreated the video, with the help of their dad. Apparently, there’s a market for SNL Kids.
Suck.com, Gone for Good?
Suck.com, one of the most important and influential webzines, appears to be offline permanently, replaced by a porn search portal.
The strangest part is that the domain continues to belong to Lycos, with Hotwired acting as the nameservers. If you query ns1.hotwired.com for the suck.com domain, it returns 198.65.105.202, an IP address of a Verio server currently hosting over 36,000 domains. The server is owned by a company called ParkingDNS.net, which seems to be hosting nothing but Parkingdots.com affiliate search portals.
It also appears that there’s no complete archive of Suck.com remaining anywhere online. Because the new owners have blocked web crawlers, Archive.org has purged blocked access to the archived version of the site. (Last year, Suckarchives.com expired and was snatched up by a squatter.)
If permanent, this is a tragedy for anyone who cares about the web’s history. Does anyone at Lycos know what’s going on? Also, if anyone out there has a complete copy of the Suck archives, please get in touch. (If you need to submit it anonymously, that’s fine.)
Update: Interesting stuff in the comments below. Greg Knauss, himself a Suck.com contributor, is proxying requests to the old Suck.com server through his own server at suck.eod.com. Also, Mike at Injoke.com posted a 200MB torrent of the entire Suck.com archive. Update: Boy genius Aaron Swartz is mirroring the Suck.com snapshot from Mike’s torrent. Nice work!
This doesn’t change the fact that every link to a Suck.com article is still broken, but at least the articles aren’t lost.
January 2, 2006: Suck.com is back! Someone out there must have the inside story of what went on over the past few days.
Dogwelder's "My Humps"
When Luke Gattuso isn’t putting bananas on his head, he’s busy making wonderful things that make me smile.
His latest is a cover of Black Eyed Peas’ “My Humps,” a song that represents a low point not only for popular music, but for humankind.
The only thing that could possibly be better than his MP3 version is syncing it with the original video. Download this now.
Quicktime: dog_eyed_welders_-_my_humps.mov (11MB)
XviD: dog_eyed_welders_-_my_humps.avi (10MB)
(Thanks, Chrominance!)
House of Cosbys, Mirrored
So, I moved to Palo Alto and finally started at Yahoo last week. (Summary: Fascinating place to work, brilliant people, kooky corporate culture, boatloads of potential.) Things are finally starting to settle down, which means the dry spell on Waxy will be ending very soon.
In the meantime, I’ve been meaning to post this for the last couple weeks… The House of Cosbys, which I wrote about recently, was finally taken offline by Bill Cosby’s lawyers. In its place, the videos have been replaced with this message. The original videos are now very difficult (if impossible) to find online.
I’ve decided to archive them on Waxy for as long as I possibly can. They deserve to be seen, so watch them, mirror them, torrent them, and don’t let them disappear again. March 14, 2006: See below for news!
House of Cosbys: Episode 01 HD from Justin Roiland on Vimeo.
House of Cosbys #1 – High Quality Quicktime
House of Cosbys #5 (warning: offensive content; unofficial, fan-made response to cease-and-desist)
Listen Up, Theo (House of Cosbys music video, not safe for work)
If you have any other House of Cosbys-related videos, please e-mail me. Feel free to post links to mirrors in the comments.
November 13: CommonFlix is hosting BitTorrent downloads of each video. Also, thanks to Alex for the music video!
November 16: Thanks again to Alex, I think I have the complete collection online for posterity.
January 22, 2006: Temporarily redirecting to the Google Video mirrors to alleviate some bandwidth limitations.
March 14, 2006: I got cease-and-desisted for mirroring these videos. Please use a mirror below to watch or download them and stay tuned to the main posting for news and updates.
* YouTube
* CommonFlix (BitTorrent, formatted for iPod)
* EOD.com (thanks, Greg!)
* Watching Paint Dry (thanks, Alek!)
* Stroeck.com (thanks, Michael!)
* Nonstuff.com (thanks, Robert!)
* I’m Just Sayin’ (thanks, Krup!)
* 1hug.com (thanks, David!)
Yahoo and Upcoming, Sitting In A Tree
Two years ago, I launched Upcoming.org and announced it to the world. Today, along with my partners Gordon Luk and Leonard Lin, I’m unbelievably proud to announce that Upcoming.org is now a member of the Yahoo! family.
I’ve always had a warm and fuzzy feeling about Yahoo. It’s been my browser homepage since forever, and I still have akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo/ stuck in muscle memory. Recently, the nostalgia has been replaced by admiration as I’ve watched them making smart decisions, acquiring great companies (Flickr, anyone?), and hiring all of my friends. The end result is that they’re doing some of the most interesting work online, and I found myself linking to them more and more over the last year.
So when Stewart asked if we’d be interested in coming to Yahoo, we were surprised and flattered. It’s immensely satisfying for a company as interesting and high-profile as Yahoo to validate the hard work we’ve done, and to see the future potential for growth.
After all, Upcoming was always a side project, fueled by passion and caffeine in the spare hours when we weren’t at our respective day jobs. When I think about how much we were able to pull off with so little, and what we’ll now be able to do with the staggering resources Yahoo has to offer… Well, it blows my mind a little. Sunnyvale, here we come!
I’ve posted more details on Upcoming.org, and both Gordon and Leonard have written about it on their own sites. For Yahoo’s take on it, Paul Levine from the Yahoo! Local team wrote about the news on the company blog.
Oh, and a profound thanks to everyone who’s supported the site since the beginning. I kiss you!
October 10, 2005: Thanks so much to Leonard for answering questions and covering e-mails while I was at Web 2.0 last week. We’re all getting ready for the big move later this month, but I’ll be around by e-mail and IM if you want to say hi.
ETech 2006 Call for Participation
The last chance to submit proposals for the Emerging Technology 2006 conference is this Monday, September 19. The overall theme of the conference is the progressive trend toward making technology useful, helping us rediscover what’s meaningful instead of overwhelming us with information. But it’s just a theme, so don’t let it hold you back if you have a great idea.
This year, I’m honored to be sitting on the program committee with such geek luminaries as Clay Shirky, Tom Coates, Cory Doctorow, and Rael Dornfest. (I’m not sure how that happened, but I suspect a bug in Rael’s committee nomination code.)
Anyway, get those proposals in! I promise to selfishly try to design a conference that I’d want to go to.
Upcoming.org Badges
Feist and the State of Music Videos Online
My favorite new artist is Feist, the genre-defying Canadian singer-songwriter formerly with Broken Social Scene. Her album was released in France in mid-2004 but only found a U.S. release in April, and I’m in love with it. Like I usually do when I get obsessed with a musician, I went looking for any related media I could find about her.
It’s a bit disheartening that the only place I could find high-quality music videos of her were in Usenet, and even those were ripped from MTV2 UK’s “120 Minutes” show. After doing a little research, the state of music videos online is just generally poor. Music videos are promotional material to spur album sales, right? Then why do we need to suffer through postage-stamp video and buffering Realvideo streams to watch a well-produced advertisement? I’m not asking for DVD-quality here; just something on par with Apple’s movie trailers.
One reason could be the bandwidth concerns, but that’s getting cheaper every day (and there’s always BitTorrent). Or maybe the labels are worried they’d be giving something away they could potentially profit off of? I don’t know, but that seems desperate. There are exceptions, like the Decemberists distributing a music video over BitTorrent, but they’re very rare.
Anyway, I’m hosting high-res MPEG videos for “Mushaboom” and “One Evening” below. If there are record labels or legal websites distributing video downloads of this quality, let me know.
Download: Mushaboom (MPEG, 27MB)
Download: One Evening (MPEG, 25 MB)
Oh, and if you’re a fan, don’t miss the video of her live KCRW performance.