Two weeks ago, I summoned the Lazyweb for a way to automatically generate a slideshow of Wikipedia revision history. I wanted it so badly, I offered $50. Other people felt the same and kicked in an additional $200 (among other nice prizes)!

Four outstanding entries were entered: Dan Phiffer’s Wikipedia Animate, Corey’s WikiDiff, John Resig’s AniWiki and Colin Hill’s BetterHistory.

The winner? Dan Phiffer’s Wikipedia Animate. (If you haven’t used it, watch Jon Udell’s brief screencast to see it in action.)

Although John Resig’s AniWiki entry had several innovations, Dan wins because of the elegant Wikipedia integration and the ease of use. Dan’s entry was the first to use a slider for navigation, allowing you to scrub across revisions with changes reflected in real-time, and I like the ability to switch between selected arbitrary ranges using the existing Wikipedia buttons or the entire revision history. It looks like a seamless part of Wikipedia. He’ll receive $200, one Flickr Pro account, a $20 Threadless gift certificate, and the Socialtext Starter package.

Second place goes to John Resig’s innovative AniWiki. Although I didn’t like the slideshow navigation as much, I was blown away by his graphical chart of activity over time and the visual diffs written entirely in Javascript. (Dan Phiffer later incorporated John’s Javascript diff algorithm into his own code.) For his excellent work, John will receive $50 and a Flickr Pro account.

These scripts raise an interesting question about the ethics and etiquette of user scripts, since they all generate multiple page requests to Wikipedia. There was some debate about this on the Greasemonkey discussion list.

I think Dan’s entry was an excellent compromise, as the only one that doesn’t automatically load any extra pages without explicit user action (i.e. clicking a button). Not to pick on Corey’s otherwise excellent entry, but the Greasemonkey script loaded (at least) 30 revisions in the background when viewing every Wikipedia entry, whether you wanted the history or not. No matter what the solution, anyone animating the history of a wiki entry with hundreds (or thousands) of revisions could seriously impact the server’s performance. What’s great for users isn’t always great for the website creator.

Anyway, thanks to everyone for participating. Go, Lazyweb!

On Tuesday, I posted a link to my local copy of the Tom Cruise Kills Oprah Quicktime video that I found on an unnamed file-sharing site. Since then, the clip’s exploded in popularity. It’s been linked from MSNBC, USA Today, b3ta, and every Livejournal and message board on the planet. Right now, I’m serving about 200 gigabytes of the 4.1MB video every day. Yesterday, it was downloaded over 52,000 times and 60,000 times the day before. (Watch my bandwidth implode in real-time.)

Does anyone know the origins of the video? (Update: Found! Read the update below for details.) I know that it was later used to create the YTMND page, but nobody seems to know the source of the original video.

Between his crazy Scientology ranting, his war on psychiatry and anti-depressants, creeping out Hollywood starlets, frenetic couch jumping, and the conspiracy theories surrounding the brainwashing of Katie Holmes, it seems like Tom Cruise is the new Michael Jackson. Sounds good to me.

Update: Leonard’s hosting the video for a while until traffic dies down a bit. Thanks, Leonard!

June 27, 2005: An anonymous commenter admitted to creating the movie using audio from a downloaded version of Star Wars Episode III. He adds, “The video was created using Adobe Premiere for the shot and sound editing and Adobe After Effects 6.5 for the lightning using the ‘advanced lightning’ feature.”

I can confirm that my source originally found it on Shacknews, so this makes sense.

I consider myself fairly knowledgable in the world of comment spam, but this one leaves me completely baffled… Two comments were posted right after each other to two different entries, with two different e-mail addresses but identical text. Here it is:

IP Address: 85.65.41.131

Name: yellow antelope

Email Address: [email protected]

Comments:

Think of every yellow antelope you know – they do not match! Enchanted experience of betting and gambling with yellow antelope http://spaces.msn.com/members/rear-animels/ yellow antelope is what I was looking for.

The MSN Spaces blog linked in the comment has only two entries, and they’re complete nonsense. The text files they link to on 50webs.com make even less sense, since they have no hidden links and no apparent purpose.

Theoretically, they could be driving up the pagerank of these seemingly benign pages, and then replace them en masse with advertising pages… But why inflate the search engine ranking of the pages for terms like “purple clown” and “yellow antelope”?

June 22, 2005: More bizarre animal spam today, apparently from the same people as the antelope spam. This one uses Blogspot instead of MSN Spaces:

IP Address: 85.64.46.113

Name: protected animals

Email Address: [email protected]

Comments:

The best protected animals in the world. protected animals tournaments are now available.

This recent Jon Udell entry about Wikipedia wars mentioned a great idea, but I don’t have the time to code it.

I’d love to see a tool for animating Wikipedia history for a given entry or block of text (see Udell’s screencast for an example). Bonus points for highlighting what changed in each version, and extra special bonus points for a way to scrub backwards and forwards through time. I don’t care if it’s a Greasemonkey extension, Flash or Ajax, as long as it does the job.

Lazyweb, hear my plea! $50 $250 (and a free Flickr Pro account) to the best implementation, ruthlessly decided by me in about a week. If anyone else wants to kick in money for the bounty, feel free to post a comment. (If your application meets Jason Scott’s criteria in the comments below, you’ll earn an additional $50.)

Update: Two amazing entries were submitted so far, both using the Greasemonkey extension for Firefox. Dan Phiffer’s Wikipedia Animate and Corey’s WikiDiff. Others are still in development, and a winner will be announced on Tuesday.

June 21, 2005: Two more entries! John Resig’s AniWiki and Colin Hill’s BetterHistory. Also, note that the first two submissions have had big changes… Give them all a try, and stay tuned for the winner later today.

June 27, 2005: The winners!

My baby boy turns one year old today. Wow, what a difference a year makes:

Happy birthday, Eliot!