Linked all over the place because it’s a good read: 13-year-old Scott Campbell swapped his iPod for a Walkman for a week. Most people designing music players these days probably grew up with a Walkman (and might thus be influenced by its design), while there are certainly many people using iPods who have never used a Walkman in their life.
Fever feed reader
Fever, a new feedreader by Shaun Inman, looks rather brilliant: you provide a selection of essential feeds (your must reads) and supplemental feeds (the high volume, high noise, low signal feeds). Fever then uses the supplemental feeds to identify stories and links which create a lot of buzz across all subscribed feeds and ranks news items accordingly. I’m already distinguishing between must reads and a river of noise (y’know, for those really slow news days), so this approach seems reasonable to me. In contrast to other feed readers, with Fever your feed reading experience (supposedly) improves as the number of your subscriptions grows. In practice it’ll all depend on the quality of the ranking algorithms obviously.
Fever’s distribution model is interesting as well: it’s a web application, but instead of a subscription based hosted service, you buy a license to host and run it on your own server, like traditional desktop software. Unfortunately there’s no trial version available and i’m not quite convinced to buy software just because of an interesting concept, with no way to assess the quality of implementation.
Stweet is a mashup of Twitter and Google Maps, using streetview where possible for best effect. (via Warren Ellis)
What is a browser?
Less than 8 % of people who were interviewed that day knew what a browser was.
Bring Back Free Clicking!
Okay, nytimes.com, we need to have a talk. The “contextual dictionary,” if that’s what you’re calling it, isn’t cute or clever. It’s not helpful. It’s just a pain. The New York Times may be the paper of record, but I’m not putting up with a pop-up record for every word I double click.
Very true.
Slightly related: free interactions pt. 1 & pt. 2
Faking online death
It’s quite easy to fake one’s death online (well, at least considerably easier than in the physical world) and apparently a surprisingly large number of people are doing so, as Wired UK reports:
In two investigations between 2007 and 2009, I encountered countless examples of fake deaths in all corners of the online world. [...]
A LiveJournal community, known as fake_lj_deaths, has more than 6,000 members committed to investigating suspicious “deaths” reported on the social networking site. The sleuths are motivated by a desire to spare credulous readers the all-too-real grief and bereavement over the imaginary passing of a sometimes-imaginary friend. “I would venture only one in ten deaths that we are asked about turns out not to be fake,” said Anne Soffee, the moderator of fake_lj_deaths, the community that has investigated, and exposed, hundreds of such frauds.
The most likely motivation for faking your own death online? Drama whoring of course.
World Builder
A strange man builds a world using holographic tools for the woman he loves:
World Builder from Bruce Branit on Vimeo.
The Auteurs is an online streaming service for independent, foreign and classic film.
WowWee Robot To Delve Into Augmented Reality Gaming:
WowWee hoped to introduce a robot that used augmented reality to turn everyday spaces into a video game like world [...] The idea was that you would place markers in a room in your house and then drive the robot around, controlling and watching it through a web browser [...]. When the robot saw and recognized those markers the software would replace the markers with gaming icons.
The Konami Code is a cheat code which is present in many Konami games. Konami code sites lists a number of websites that support the Konami code. It’s a lot more widespread as one might think.