Interesting times
Jeff Kaplan, a lead game designer for world of warcraft, talks about the challenges in designing endgame content for casual gamers and an upcoming raid dungeon, naxxramas – in the new york times sports section, of all places. (via /.)
Bonus link: wow maps, google style. Neat.
Wankr
You should check out the wankr beta, it truly captures the essence of web 2.0.
Related (kinda): web 3.0 by Jeffrey Zeldman. Good stuff.
Bleh
No time for happy fun things like blogging or world of warcraft. So just as an excuse to break radio silence i’d suggest you head over to youtube and watch this presentation of the tenori on by Toshio Iwai @artfutura. Followed by this talk by Kevin Smith if you have a few extra minutes. Now if you’ll excuse me, i’ll try to fend off the brainslugs by watching silly video clips of morning musume being humiliated on japanese tv – i’ll leave it to you as an exercise to google these yourself.
Google Earth for Mac
Google earth is now (officially) available for mac os x. I know you’ve been waiting for this.
Retrievr
If you haven’t checked out retrievr yet, do so now. You can sketch an image and retrievr will match your sketch against similar images on flickr. Impressive.
Virtually anthropologized
A friend brought to my attention that a photo of my desk, posted on flickr and tagged “whatsonmydesk“, somehow ended up in trendwatching’s december newsletter on virtual anthropology. I feel both a bit like a lab rat and slightly flattered for no particular reason about this. Funny how stuff you put online shows up in completely unexpected places…
The article itself, by the way, isn’t bad, so you might wanna read it.
Don’t listen
Check out the drm restrictions on coldplay’s new cd. According to an insert which comes with the cd you can’t burn it, you can’t rip it, you can’t play it on many portable players, car stereos or dvd players, it won’t work on some pcs, it doesn’t support macs and there’s not even a word about linux (your guess if it’ll work or not…). Makes me wonder how exactly you’re supposed to play this damn cd if it’s incompatible with pretty much anything capable of playing audio cds? Best of all they won’t accept returns except for manufacturing defects, so if you buy this disc and find out that you can’t play it you’re out of luck. So why would anyone do something stupid like this? Thankfully the insert explains that it’s all “[i]n order for you to enjoy high quality music”.
This would be hilarious if it wasn’t so sad. The music industry? It’s fucked i tell you, totally fucked. (via boingboing)
Happy new year
A happy new year to you all, thanks for sticking around. 2005 was a good year for me, let’s see how 2006 turns out.