If you’ve been following my Links page lately, you’ll know that I’ve been somewhat obsessed with the new Block View search for A9 and Amazon Yellow Pages. Amazon photographed virtually every street-level business in Los Angeles, among other cities, and it’s a very fun toy to play around with.

More recently, A9.com was mentioned in a small bit of awkward dialogue on Thursday night’s episode of The O.C. Waxy reader Eric Vaughan went to the trouble of finding and editing the clip. Watch it below, and judge for yourself:

theoc_a9com.avi (3.7MB, Windows Media)

Even though this appeared to be a clear example of paid product placement, A9.com’s CEO denies that it was paid for or that they knew anything about it.

This seems very unlikely, especially considering A9’s somewhat-obscure status in the non-geek world, the timing of the episode with recent publicity, and The O.C.’s use of the full domain name instead of simply “A9.” (Has anybody ever used/heard the term “A9.com’d” before?) I don’t even particularly care about the product placement, but I don’t like attempts at covering it up.

One way to settle the issue would be to contact Allan Heinberg, the writer of that episode, or any of the producers. I’ll try to do some research on Monday, but please e-mail me if you know anyone that might be able to help.

February 21, 2005: I have two reliable sources that confirm that A9 was not even aware of the O.C reference before its broadcast.

Today is the fifth anniversary of Boing Boing’s relaunch, the day they switched from a traditional webzine to uber-blog.

To commemorate the birthday, the gang released a complete dump of every Boing Boing entry for free download. I’m hosting the torrent on my tracker, and I pulled together some statistics. (Is anyone surprised?)

Try my new Boing Boing Statistics. Most notably, use the keyword tracker to search the popularity of keywords over time, broken down by author. This is outstanding for looking at trends, or the uniquely quirky obsessions of each author.

Let me know if you have any suggestions, or have found other uses for the data dump.

January 22, 2005: By request, here’s a direct download of the 5-year archive.

Occasionally, I get people asking me how I find good Waxy Links… Well, since MovableType stores everything in MySQL, it was simple to write a few queries to crunch my statistics.

So, here are some Waxy Links statistics, with a breakdown of my top 100 sources since I started including “via” source attribution in March 2004. Note that I’m grouping my top-level domain, which explains why Del.icio.us is firmly on top. (The Del.icio.us homepage, individual Inboxes, and Most Popular page all get lumped together into one record.)

Not surprisingly, this is a representative list of many of my favorite weblogs. Lots of great underdog bloggers in here, like Simon Carless (listed as “mono211.com”), Jason Cosper, Nelson Minar, Brett O’Connor’s Negatendo, Phillip Lennsen, and many more.

I’ve also included a breakdown of link activity over time, the busiest link days of all-time, and my link history by weekday. It looks like I peaked last summer, with a record total of 37 links in a single day! My posting activity slowed a bit during the fall and winter as deadlines at work started picking up. Not surprisingly, Mondays are the busiest days, but I was surprised to see links slow down throughout the rest of the week.

There are some main Waxy.org stats, as well. The most-commented entries, my complete posting history by month, and spam comment denials from MT-Blacklist.

In addition to the extensive first-person coverage of the tsunami disaster on blogs, there have been several amateur recordings of the tsunami from camcorders. Unfortunately, the network websites aren’t making them easy to find and view. The videos are usually only available as poor-quality, streaming video like RealPlayer, and buried in popup windows and poor navigation.

Ben pointed me to downloadable versions of three clips. I’m hosting them here. (Unfortunately, I don’t have much information about the source of these videos.)

• phuket.wmv (11MB) – shot from inside a restaurant, waves engulf older couple clinging to railing before flooding entire room
• patong_beach.wmv (10MB) – rooftop view of two huge waves battering buildings along shore, then flooding of city streets
• sri_lanka.wmv (7MB) – upper balcony view of hotel swimming pool area getting flooded as observers run away; woman asks “how high will it go?” before retreating
• koh_lanta_thailand.avi (11MB) – shot on beach level; watch as first wave grows and crashes, before cameraman’s frantic retreat away from shore
• penang_beach.wmv (1MB) – shot from wall above beach, three men are caught in battering waves
• sri_lanka_resort.wmv (6MB) – upper level hotel balcony; restaurant, pools, and deck flooded as people cling to trees; two men narrate what they see

If you have any more first-hand video footage, or higher-quality versions of any of these videos, please let me know and I’ll add them. Most of these videos are also available as direct downloads from Cheese and Crackers, Asian Tsunami Videos, and Wave of Destruction.

December 29, 2004: Added two more videos. There is also some new footage I haven’t converted yet: BBC footage from a second-story balcony in Aceh, Indonesia.

December 30, 2004: Wow, you people used over 400GB of bandwidth in a single day! I’m now redirecting all video requests to several mirrors, courtesy of Gordon Luk, Leonard Lin, Nathan Perkins, and Ask Bjorn Hansen. Thanks for the help, guys! (Sorry about the temporary downtime while I was sorting out the details.) If you can contribute a mirror and have loads of bandwidth, please e-mail me ASAP.

December 30, 2004: Archive.org is now hosting all the videos. All download links will now redirect to the Archive.org mirror. Thanks to everyone who mirrored the files overnight.

Also, a final note… If these videos touched you in any way, consider donating to the relief efforts.

December 31, 2004: Basically, we broke Archive.org! The largest repository of public-domain audio, video, and text in the world couldn’t handle the demand for these videos.

I’m now hosting all these videos on my BitTorrent tracker instead. Because of the small size of these videos, I was hoping to avoid requiring a BitTorrent client for downloading, but the demand is just too high.

January 4, 2004: Back to Archive.org, at Brewster Kahle’s request. He thinks they can handle the traffic now.

January 12, 2004: If you’re looking for newer videos, the definitive source is the questionably-named Wave of Destruction. The site is updated constantly, with videos available by BitTorrent or direct download from multiple mirrors.

I know this comes dangerously close to breaking my First Rule, but what’s the point of a personal website if you can’t post baby photos?

With that said, here’s Eliot’s First Christmas!

And for everyone who can’t stomach adorable baby photos, Jason Scott has the complete soundtrack to The Last Starfighter, The Musical.