Nearly two years ago, as part of my ongoing Metafilter Statistics project, I decided to see which websites the Metafilter community was linking to most frequently. With Matt Haughey’s help, I analyzed a complete dump of every post and came up with this list.

Now, two years later, I ran it again. Some of the results are surprising, as you can see below.

In the space of two years, YouTube launched and became the 15th most popular site, Flickr jumped 2,400 places to #14, and Wikipedia went from #66 to #2. Other big winners included Ask Metafilter, Times Online, Archive.org, and MSNBC. Huge losers that fell off the Top 50 entirely were Nandotimes.com (stopped publishing), News.cnet.com (changed domains), Observer.co.uk, and ZDnet.com.

Update: Some people in the Metatalk thread had questions about my methodology. The number next to each link is the jump in rank from the 2002 list. I’m only counting links in the front-page post itself, not the comments. And in the complete list, I’m excluding the 26,123 sources with only one link to conserve space.

Continue reading “Metafilter Sources 2006” →

If you happen to be at the Webvisions conference in Portland this week, you should come by my session Thursday afternoon.

I’ve been to several tech conferences in the last six months, and I can’t count the times I’ve been disappointed to find that a presentation that sounds interesting is either deadly boring or a poorly-disguised product pitch. Even when I was on the advisory board for the last Emerging Technology conference, I was surprised at how often the exciting pitches we approved ended up in lackluster talks.

So, when I was asked to speak, I tried to make a presentation that I would personally want to watch. I picked a topic I cared about and researched it to death — library research, original interviews, and plenty of web dumpster diving. It was a blast, and reminded me of what I missed most about college.

The topic: I’ll be speaking about how and why virtual communities meet in real life, from ham radio to modern online communities. It’s a topic that’s interested me since the BBS era, which I’ll also be touching on. I’m very deliberately not talking about Upcoming.org or anything else Yahoo-related.

Whether it’ll actually be interesting to anyone else but me is up in the air. This is my first solo conference talk and I’m terribly nervous. Hopefully, I’ll be able to hide it well enough so that the material doesn’t suffer. Anyway, I’ll link to responses as they come in after my session, so wish me luck!

July 21: This is my first Webvisions, and it strikes me as both very intimate and very well-run. My talk went very well. So many people have asked to see my slides that I’m going to write up some of my research and do a screencast of my talk.

Some reviews: Brian Oberkirch, Adam Darowski, Paul Bausch, Jeremiah Owyang.

California Extreme, the awkwardly-named yearly arcade/pinball show, comes to San Jose’s Parkside Hall again this weekend. I’ve been going for nearly a decade, and let me say (again) that this is the best thing ever. The world’s biggest 1980s-era arcade, filled with old favorites and many you’ve never heard of, all set on free play. (If the Flickr photos don’t get you drooling, then move along.)

Plus, the speakers they’ve lined up this year are great. Eugene Jarvis (creator of Defender, NARC, and Cruis’n USA) will be talking about the making of Robotron, Kevin Tiell will be showing his pinball’s-eye-view photography, and director Greg Maletic will be screening parts of his Future of Pinball documentary.

If you’re going, feel free to join the Upcoming event or leave a comment to let me know. I’ll be there all day tomorrow, so if you see me, say hi.

Update: The show gets better every year. My highlights, before I forget them:

• Panic Park. One of the funnest arcade games I’ve ever played. The goal of this Japanese two-player import is to shove your opponent around in a number of great minigames. The controls are like two big cushioned levers, which you throw your entire weight against to move your character around onscreen. Tilt your head sideways and watch this video to get the idea.
• Multi-Pac. This 24-in-1 Pac-Man hack created by Clay Cowgill is no longer available because of legal issues. With its crazy boot menu and hacked graphics, you feel naughty playing it. The one I tried appeared to be a different romset, as it had one Pac-Man variation called “Pacman Berzerk,” which used characters and animations from Berzerk Retro arcade mashup!
• Metal Slug X. I completed this remixed and upgraded version of Metal Slug 2, which took around 30 minutes. Exaggerated cartoon violence with a sense of humor and a ridiculous amount of on-screen action, it was very clearly a huge influence on Paul Robertson for Pirate Baby’s Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006.
• Bumper. Released in 1936, Bally’s “Bumper” was the first pinball game to use bumpers on the playfield. Funny enough, early pinball machines wouldn’t get flippers for another 11 years, until Gottlieb’s Humpty Dumpty in 1947. Until then, gameplay was limited to shooting the balls and watching them fall. If you want to see it for yourself, Bumper can be found at the Lucky Ju Ju pinball gallery in Alameda
• Warlords. I forgot how fun Warlords could be with four players at a cocktail (tabletop) cabinet.
• The Irritating Maze. Use a trackball to maneuver through a playing field with electrified walls. Touch the walls and a buzzer sounds, blasting a jet of air in your face. Irritating, but in a good way.
• Prop Cycle. By the time I beat the Story mode, I was sweating from pedaling the stationary bicycle, but the built-in fans kept me cool and added a little immersion. Despite some severe clipping problems and awkward controls, it still felt like I was flying a bike through the air.
• Older, underrated favorites: Quantum, Wacko, Puzz Loop

Two years old already! Not just walking and talking, but singing, conversing, drawing, counting (to two), playing drums, laughing at my jokes, and running to hug me when I walk in the door. I thought having a two-year-old would make me feel old, but it’s like being a kid again. Happy birthday, Eliot!

Continue reading “Eliot Turns Two” →

For the past couple of years, I’ve tried to highlight the best underdog games at E3, but this year was particularly hard. Partly because I spent most of the day waiting in line to see the Nintendo Wii, but also partly because the entire gaming industry is getting so weird. In catering to the casual gamer and trying to differentiate from the competition, every platform and publisher is spending serious money turning former underdogs into big-name titles.

I saw this trend everywhere at E3, but nowhere more prominent than Nintendo, which threw all the rules out the window with the Wii. The new controller forced every developer to invent new forms of interaction without relying on existing standards, so practically everything in Nintendo’s booth felt new and weird. Even the well-worn Tony Hawk series feels new and interesting when you’re waving your hands all over the place, though it doesn’t seem nearly as well-suited for epics like Zelda.

Beyond Nintendo, I was surprised to see games like Loco Roco and Viva Piñata with huge marketing efforts by Sony and Microsoft. (What hath Katamari wrought?) At this point, it’s hard to say that many of this year’s picks are true underdogs, but they’re all odd. If you want real underdogs, the indie gaming scene is thriving and almost completely unrepresented on the exhibit floor. Anyway, here are picks for the E3 Underdogs of 2006.

Continue reading “E3 Underdogs 2006” →