The song that delayed LittleBigPlanet

The publisher found out that it contains lyrics from the Quran. Muslims seemed fine about this, but the game was delayed to take the song out regardless. The song is "Tapha Niang" by Toumani Diabaté.

Amazon's second cloud-based storage product

S3 is probably suited for static files, as it is afflicted with latency. The new Elastic Block Store (not in any way related to books), is integrated with EC2 to provide dynamic storage that is better for databases. Notably, the space can be shared between different EC2 instances. You can also back up your data onto S3.

Kudos to the Amazon engineers for what appears to be another home run. I, for one, welcome our new Skynet overlords.

Facebook is dead

As you may know, the new Facebook hides the apps away on a page called "Boxes", which is listed 4th in the user page sub menu. But, the natural order of profiles has not been restored. Your activity stream is merged with the wall to become the default profile view, with your profile info (i.e. your actual profile) pushed to second.

It's pretty smart. Facebook has morphed into a Friendfeed or a Twitter. Your bio or other personal info is mainly static and therefore irrelevant, whereas your activity is fresh and interesting. Even less appealing is a list of personality quizzes you've taken, which is what passes for apps.

The Facebook team has done such a good job hiding the apps that I realized that I hadn't seen any in weeks. I thought a proper goodbye was in order, so I headed over to my friend Chase's profile to reminisce about the platform. He is probably one of its biggest fans, installing everything possible. I found this particularly amusing:

I mean, it's a steal! You'd be a fool to not take a 99.7% discount.


I just worry about the health of Facebook. The miniscule font size is particularly troubling. It's not too bad if you bump it up to double its original size, but come on. Also, the conversation seems to have died down. A lot of people are moving on and it's becoming apparent that Facebook is not much more than a phonebook. The saving grace will be if it can become the internet's single sign-on, which will be tested on Digg soon.

Is AppJet the next big web framework?

I just got a tip from AppJet front-end developer, Aaron Iba, about plans for self-hosted AppJet instances. "We're thinking about releasing this soon." This was also just added to the FAQs page. What this means is that one could download the backend that runs the apps and install it locally, on servers, or even Amazon Web Services. Why would someone want to do this when everything is already hosted by default for free? The answer is that it allows an app to use more resources, namely storage space and processing time. An avenue for intensive apps, such as Agglodex, is desperately needed. Some people also get a kick out of DIY projects. The self hosting option appeals to experienced techies, whereas the recent beginner's programming tutorial was an outreach to fledgling or even non-techies. This suggests either a lack of targetted focus or a quest for ubiquitous dominance for the AppJet team.

The prospect of achieving a serious foothold in the web framework space is intriguing. The prejudice against JavaScript might be just too much, in which case it will never gain traction. Although, AppJet is not the only company toting a JavaScript web framework. Aptana Jaxer has an interesting approach that blurs the line between client and server code even further. With over 2 million downloads, the market is clearly there.

To explore the degree of success the AppJet platform can achieve, we need to consider the business style of the team. We know they are Y Combinator funded, which historically seems to take a less bottom-line focus (although the latest round seemed much more commercial). Note that AppJet has been public for over three quarters with an apparent revenue stream of zero, with only polls about desired premium features. It would almost seem that they aren't interested in money at all! This is a very good sign for driving adoption, as long as they stay in business. (The one thing that worries me is the coddling of beginning programmers. This is good for PR, but wasting valuable time for the 3 employees. The point of a framework is to coddle the application structure. Syntax help and programming theory is a job for the community.)

Let's face it: web platforms have to be free and open. LAMP is the reigning king. Ruby on Rails and Django are the up-and-coming challengers. All three are open source and 100% free. Microsoft's ASP.NET--not so much. So to have any chance at all, AppJet needs to be open too. Luckily, the FAQs indicate that exact plan.

Or maybe not? Maybe AppJet is part of the new-wave sandbox hosting, such as Google's AppEngine, that doesn't directly compete against traditional web frameworks. It's analogous to Reddit vs. Slinkset. Do you want to DIY or get up and running right away? As time rolls on, it is clear that the level of abstraction increases. It is even getting to a point where dealing with virtual instances of computers on Amazon Web Services is too much work, if code can just run on one huge platform. The cowboy era is ending and the mesh is beginning.

And this is where AppJet comes in. If they have the business sense, they will host the runtime on AWS and charge a slight premium over Amazon's rates. All of the server configuration can be handled with zero human interaction. This simplifies hosting for app authors just as now, the difference being that it is now scalable. Also, using AWS plays to the current paradigm of having all data cached in RAM.

So, is AppJet the next web framework? Could it be something bigger?

Fancy File Uploader

This is a reworking of an example file uploader. I've thrown in my typical user accounts, pagination, and tagging to make it really powerful. Feedback is welcome. I will also answer questions about how the code works.

Tagging Library for AppJet

The original and current versions of Vortices, have an only slightly more flexible category system than Reddit. On Reddit, you have to explicitly create a category, whereas Vortices had ad hoc categories with an option to explicitly create one. But this isn't quite what I had in mind. I want tagging, as Flickr and Delicious have, loose groupings that emerge naturally.

So, I built a tagging library that does exactly it. Then I built an example app to test it out. Surprisingly, it worked after I changed a few typos. What took the most time was all of the initial rewrites. I was having a hard time structuring it because I wanted to track who was doing the tagging and how many times an item was tagged with something, but in the end I decided it was too much effort as well as an impact on performance.

fbFund oddity

Facebook is having a contest for new app ideas on their platform, with huge grants awarded to the winners (more information). Oddly, there isn't even anything that says you have to actually make the app. But the strangest part wasn't even that. Reading the terms and conditions for the fbFund, an odd phrase jumped out in the middle of page 3:

(2) Effective Use of the Android Platform (17%)

So let me get this straight. Facebook copied Google's Android developer challenge and didn't even bother to change the branding? This is beyond lame.

Adding audio enclosures to feeds with Yahoo Pipes

I just finished my second "pipe" using Yahoo Pipes. If you haven't looked into Pipes, I strongly recommend it, because it is a testament of capabilities the web just didn't have until recently. It's main use is manipulating RSS feeds to create new feeds. Also, a pipe can make feeds from scraping web pages. Instead of editing source code as text, you insert graphical modules and fill in values to configure them. Then, whatever a module outputs can flow into the next module and the next, until finally the output is produced. Both of the pipes I created solve the same problem, adding audio enclosures to a music feed that was lacking them. I had to identify a pattern between the information in a feed entry and the URL of the MP3 file. The first one, Newgrounds weekly audio winners (original feed, my version, pipe page), was easy. All I had to do was copy the link and change "listen" to "download".



An experienced Pipes developer could make this in 2 minutes. But I have no idea what I'm doing, so it took me a couple hours of trial and error. The second one, remix.kwed.org (original feed, my version, pipe page), was a little more complicated. The link is http://remix.kwed.org/?search={id}. The MP3 is located at http://remix.kwed.org/{id}/{title}.mp3. Still not too bad, though, since all of the information was right in the feed, so no page scraping was necessary.

I still don't think I understand how to really use Pipes, as I am used to textual coding rather than visual. Maybe they will make it even easier to use in successive versions, assuming Yahoo isn't disbanded, with all of its cool apps sent to the scrap heap. But for now, if there's a quick hack you wish for involving feeds, and you don't feel like opening up a new programming project and figuring out how to host it, Pipes is your best bet.

AppJet databases now faster and more powerful.

Good morning, everyone. You might like to know that AppJet, the cloud-based JavaScript framework that nobody knows about, just released an update, making it more efficient for the CPU and easier on the coder, a win-win. There are new methods that make it easy to filter and paginate and data sets. See the AppJet change log for specifics.I have prepared an example to show the new features in action.

Suppose you have a collection, storage.threads and each object has a property, text, that you want to display. But it would be unreasonable to display every single thread at once, so some sort of pagination is in order. SQL has a handy LIMIT command, and now AppJet has an equivalent, skip() and limit().

//Pagination variables
var start = parseInt(request.params.start) || 0
var items = parseInt(request.params.items) || 10

The first step is to figure out where we're starting and how far to go, using request parameters found at the end of the URL. If not specified, we fall back to the front page (0) showing 10 items.

storage.threads
  .sortBy('-timestamp') //sort first so we skip the right ones
  .skip(start)
  .limit(items)
  .forEach(function(thread){
          printp(thread.text)
  })

Then we make the database query and print the output in one shot. In order for this to work, each thread has to have been given a timestamp property when it was created. The obvious thing to use is a Date object, which is really convenient because it easily casts itself to an integer when needed. So sortBy() sorts things from least to greatest, and since time always increases, it would sort in chronological order. All it takes to reverse this is prepending a minus sign to the argument. Now we simply skip anything before we want to start printing and limit the query to a certain number of items. It reads a lot like English. Finally, at the end we loop through the results of the query and print paragraph tags with the text inside.

You can see a more advanced version of this example running live on http://post.appjet.net/, with the source code available. Next time I'll show you how to generate the links for pagination.

Please Solve Comment Fragmentation

Friendfeed is a leap in communication. Using RSS and proprietary activity stream APIs, you can track what people are doing across the web instead of just on one site. Facebook has some inklings of this as well. Whoisi adds wiki functionality which is parallel to imaginary friends on Friendfeed, where you can follow an activity stream of someone who didn't sign up or import a certain stream. XMPP will make the stream real-time and less intensive on networks.

This is all well and good, but there is still a problem. Comments. For one, Friendfeed doesn't thread the comments, which makes it too hard to have a conversation. But even worse is the fragmentation. Other sites, such as Reddit, will maintain a single page of comments for any particular URL. But Friendfeed can create several, and there is no way to find them all. There could be the original import of the item (maybe a blog post or image on Flickr) from the content creator, followed by any number of others' links to that item from Google Reader, Twitter, Digg, and the rest. And when those actions appear on Friendfeed, they all have the potential to create yet another silo of comments. You may see something interesting and be completely oblivious to a huge discussion happening around it. An app built on top of Friendfeed, Noiseriver, is trying to fix this. But Friendfeed is just a microcosm of a data siloing problem that the entire web faces. We're seeing a huge movement for something called "data portability", but this seems to have nothing to do with comments and everything to do with profile information and friends lists.

This is important too, but not the same goal. Sure, it's great to meet up with your friends on a completely different site, but does nothing for helping you connect with complete strangers. The real key to connecting people digitally is unifying the conversation. The argument against this is wanting to talk exclusively with one's friends, but this is unfounded since the program could easily bubble friends' comments to the top and only display other comments upon request. So I'm asking for a solution to comment fragmentation. We need an open API for posting threaded comments across the web. Any site choosing to accept open comments should accept a POST request stating,

"I am commenting on this URL in reply to that comment, and here is the text or URL of my comment".

And then of course you could GET for the current set of comments. Now anyone or any app involved in the discussion around a URL will be on equal footing and have access to all that is being said about it, because the silo now has a series of tubes running through it. Perhaps we can't realistically expect arbitrary sites to handle this kind of load, so some kind of glue, such as Gnip, may need to get involved. But this is the solution, and it will kick ass when it is created and people start using it. There is so much that the internet makes possible, so there is no reason to believe that what we have now is as good as it gets.

Empire Maintenance

I finally got around to refreshing the layouts of my various web properties, namely my web site and this blogger template. Let me tell you, both were in bad shape. The banner now reads "vortices" whereas before it was "Vezquex's Vortices". The branding change doesn't really make sense. The domain is vezquex.com, after all. But it was the best logo I have at the moment. It looks pretty sweet over the fantasy space background; don't you think? I lifted it from a Russian guy, but let's keep that between you and me ;). The menu has some new items and should be easier to navigate.

The image used to make the menu bar is now monochrome and transparent so that it can be an arbitrary color using a background color, plus it looks cool over an image. I took out the Friendfeed widget from my home page and moved to the blog's side bar. I adopted their technique of many favicons linking to profiles. I still want to better integrate this blog into the site, but I haven't decided exactly how to approach that.

I've also been doing a lot over on AppJet. The concept of throway apps is great. I wrote a two libraries, lib-subdomain and lib-style, just for making my other libraries look nicer. I've bundled some pretty useful things into lib-general. But I haven't forgotten about the apps. One I recently made is an anonymous (for now) message board with support for external images and mp3s. I'm actually trying to write a user account library, but there are some bugs in it that I haven't quite solved, so it's not finished. There is of course an existing library that does the same thing, but I don't like its execution. (My main gripe is that it sends you to a separate page to log in.) On the lighter side of things, I have rewritten the PHP Novebruary script in JavaScript on AppJet, with added support for Septogust, so mark your calendars. I'll reimplement the widget too.

Comments weren't working. Turns out they were turned off. But no longer!

I somehow got the idea that to use the Disqus commenting system comments had to be turned off on Blogger. That makes sense, because surely Blogger comments should be disabled so that they are not competing with Disqus. Maybe the way Disqus or Blogger works changed at some point because the commenting feature has been missing for a quite a while. And yet, it was working just fine on my other blog, so I investigated. I went to the comments section of Blogger settings for both blogs and looked for any differences. Oh! Comments were turned off for new posts on the Vezquex Blog. I toggled this setting and then went back through the old posts to make sure each one allowed comments. It would have been easier if Blogger had a toggle box for comments on the Manage Posts page so that you could handle it all at once. But I don't post that much, so it didn't take too long.

U.S. Politics: Will things really be different when the Democrats control Congress and the Presidency?

We've seen how corrupt Republican control can be--spending out of control, perpetual wars, holding prisoners without fair trial and condoning torture. Even life long Republican voters are losing faith in their party. They are tired of war and scared of recession.

The probability of an electoral Republican win is low, and gaining net seats in either house of Congress is also highly improbable. Whatever the reasons, the support just isn't there this year, and it could take over a decade for the Republican Party to rebuild.

So let's assume a triple crown for the Democratic Party in the 2008 election: control of the Presidency, House, and Senate. I wonder how good Democratic control will be. Many of the Democrats in Congress vote for bills unpopular with Democratic voters, such as FISA, including Obama in this case [ www.senate.gov]. One problem is that there is simply too much to do. There is the of fixing and possibly nullifying poor legislation from years past (the Patriot Act comes to mind) and also new projects such as universal health care, which I don't even think they'll get to. Congress trails public opinion, therefore health care will come well after most people are clamoring for it, which they aren't yet.

One thing is certain: stuff will get done. Fast. There will still be enough Republicans around to filibuster, but that's only in the Senate. Now, more legislation typically means more unnecessary spending, but in this case that is not true. It is tempting for Congress to pass bills that sound good but are out of budget, and it is tempting for the President to sign them into law. Hell, the bill may be terrible in principle and cost. It's going to take some impassioned legislators to convince the others that the money simply isn't there, but it is not impossible. This is a tough issue because money seemingly grows on trees, but there is a reasonable limit to debt that the U.S. Treasury has surpassed. You can ignore it, but it's still there, devaluing the currency and siphoning tax dollars to pay interest. The flip side of this problem is that if Congress and the President were to cut spending and raise taxes and just pay off debt for years, they would look like they weren't even trying to do anything.

The prospect of Democratic control this term is quite appealing. America's economy, world image, and constitutional rights will all benefit from it. But the hole has been dug pretty deep, so don't be surprised if you get less change than you hoped for.

Minority Report input on the cheap

Nintendo's Wii controller is pretty swell. You wave it around and the movement is translated into actions for whatever metaphor there is in the current game. Now take the controller away. Replace it with any random object or just a piece of tape on your finger. Take the Wii console away. Replace it with your normal computer and a cheap web cam. Viola. Nintendo is screwed.

And it's all thanks to a tiny startup in Israel. This works on any game. All it takes is someone to invent and bind a control scheme.

Friendfeed Awesomeness

Friendfeed is getting a lot of attention. I find the site quite interesting, but actually using it bores me to tears. Maybe I'm using it wrong, not using the "hide" feature enough or simply having the wrong friends. Although the site is innovative, there is a lot of work to be done to bring parts of it up to par with other sites, namely the commenting system and categorization. It is not too much to ask for threaded discussion that allows line breaks. Grouping the discussions in some way would reduce repetition. But few are too worried about these minor annoyances which will be amended soon enough. Bare bones functionality is fine for now, with fine-tuning on the way.

The Staff
They're freaking ex-Googlers. What could possibly stop these rockstar developers? The designer of Friendfeed was behind Gmail and Google Reader. The simplicity of the interface just puts me at ease. Plus, there's knowledge of scaling and search. Friendfeed is the envy of Google, the social network they pine after with the Friend Connect initiative. I wouldn't be surprised if an acquisition happens. Wouldn't it be strange to get bought buy your former employer?

Competition
Some see it as the Twitter-killer, or at least want it to be. Sure, why not? Twitter was important historically because it opened our eyes to an on-demand worldwide conversation but it did not invent status updates nor could it expect to have a lock on them. Friendfeed is sneaky, because its gaining popularity from indirect posts makes it an increasingly attractive place to post on directly.

Digg-killer?
Digg is one of those silly sites that requires the extra step of submitting a link, completely ignoring the marvel of feeds in a hope to get better quality content. It doesn't work, because people race to manually submit every story from the major sources. Friendfeed is much more passive, even throwing out the CAPTCHA. Minding their own business around the web, Friendfeed users are streaming all of their links and posts effortlessly. Laziness is king.

Clones
With the web turning to soup, clones and parasites are sure to emerge. I don't know if Friendfeed can fend them off long enough to reach a state of dominance. Foreign-language clones are always a stickler. But if Friendfeed is open enough, with their API, feeds and widgets, potential competitors would be more inclined to work with it rather than actually compete.

Summary
Friendfeed is awesome. The development team has done most everything right, yielding a clean, efficient experience. Friendfeed takes up where Twitter left off in aggregating a global conversation. It is looking more and more like the end-all social network, at least for this week.

the web is turning to soup

I am finally starting to see the mesh of innovative web sites that are allowing data to slosh around freely and expose people to more conversation. I must admit that I'm a little late getting onto the RSS bandwagon, but this is still a vital part of the equation not only for humans but for machines. There are a number of efforts to allow you to use the same profile on different sites, allowing you to connect with friends you may not have even known used these other sites. APIs allow third-party applications and other sites to send and receive messages and multimedia from not just computers, but also mobile devices. And these services will begin to truly become efficient as add the ability to push data (XMPP) in addition to pulling data (HTTP, RSS).

As many have pointed out, the noise level becomes a problem with so much text sloshing around. Duplicates are pretty easy to filter. The solution here is the same as personalized news. You rate items based on their relevance to you, and some algorithm figures out similarities between items you rated highly. There are several factors that could potentially be important to this kind of algorithm: keywords, length, author or originating source, ratings by users with similar tastes. That last one is enormously powerful. In fact, Netflix is running a contest to see who can do it the best.

I don't know if it will ever be possible to have completely synchronized discussions. But there are various hacks for now, such as tracking keywords on Twitter.

custom domain possibilities for Vortices

AppJet just added the option to use custom domains. I am cheap, so I will just use sub-domains
of vezquex.com. I want to have two for Vortices. The full one, vortices.vezquex.com, and the short one, v.vezquex.com.

I went into my domain registrar's control panel and pointed vortices.vezquex.com to 589766781.hosted.engine.appjet.net with a CNAME record, as per AppJet's instructions from the publishing tab of the IDE. So that domain should be working within a day or two.

Now the interesting part is the second sub-domain. One approach is to do the same for v.vezquex.com. Another may be to alias or redirect v.vezquex.com to vortices.vezquex.com. Theoretically, these seem equally valid, but I don't know for sure.

I'm trying the former approach to start.

China will be more powerful ($$$) than the United States in 7 years

This is the kind of thing you know in the back of your mind, but when you read it you are nonetheless shocked. The Beijing Olympics are a metaphor for China's regained dominance. Well, it was a fun ride for the U.S. while it lasted.

FTA:

Angus Maddison's forecast (which uses purchasing power parity) isn't built on outlandish assumptions. He assumes China's growth will slow way down year by year, and America's will average about 2.6% annually, which seems reasonable. But because China has grown so stupendously during the past decade, it should still be able to take the crown in just seven more years.

If that happens, America will close out a 125-year run as the No. 1 economy. We assumed the title in 1890 from - guess who. Britain? France? No. The world's largest economy until 1890 was China's. That's why Maddison says he expects China to "resume its natural role as the world's largest economy by 2015." That scenario makes sense.

Browser Extensions

In this small patch alone, I see evidence of three Firefox extensions or user styles:


The "k" on the upper-left corner of that gray box is from Adblock. It actually reads "Block" when it is not cut off. This is for blocking flash elements if you desire. I don't recall ever using this feature.

The little icon just southeast of that I thought was from the user style (using the Stylish extension) that inserts icons on links to different types of files. Upon further inspection it turned out to be part the Adblock thing.

All of those "Buy" links look messed up because of a user style I became aware of on news.ycombinator.com, which itself uses nofollow links extensively. You can make the style do anything you want; the selector is the important part. I just happened to settle on inserting a tilda in front of it by adding the :before pseudo selector.

/*highlight nofollow links*/
a[rel~="nofollow"] {
background: red;
}

/*denote nofollow links*/
a[rel~="nofollow"]:before {
content: '~'
}

Motives to be For or Against Adobe's Open Screen Project

The promise of the Open Screen Project to developers is the age-old dream of being able to write an application once and deploy it anywhere across any device. [...] Notably absent from Adobe’s list of partners is Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Each has its own ideas on how this cross-device compatibility will work.

I'll admit that Adobe Flash is a very useful implement for a broad range of applications. But I don't think it will have much relevance a few years from now because all of Adobe's openness will catch up to them. You see, the upcoming JavaScript 2 is based largely off of the language used in Flash called ActionScript 3. Adobe has also open sourced the virtual machine that currently allows Flash to run so much faster than normal JavaScript manipulating the DOM or a canvas element. The folks at Mozilla are busy integrating this into Firefox 4, though I think it may find its way into other browsers soon afterward. (Mozilla is already known to be making an IE plugin.)

Anyway, about those notably absent companies--what are their motives? This is assuming they have some other idea of what paradigm applications will take on next. Microsoft is easy; they are directly competing against Flash with Silverlight. Apple is almost as simple; IIRC they invented the canvas tag for their web browser, Safari, and it was later implemented in Firefox and Opera. So supporting canvas and web standards in general may be a factor. But Apple is most focused on its mobile hardware business. For some reason, Apple doesn't want Flash on the iPhone. Why oh why, Steve? (Maybe FSJ can tell me...) My guess is that they want anything not running inside Safari to be a good ol' Objective-C--or what have you--app. Google's absence is perhaps the most mysterious of all. A long time ago, google.com was a kickass search engine and nothing else. Their second runaway hit was Gmail. Its awesomeness was only made possible by the invention of Ajax, reloading only the part of the page you need! There is dispute over who created Ajax, but I think it is safe to say that Google created Ajax as we know it today. Now, it is possible to use Ajax and Flash together, but Google isn't terribly interested in that. If they were, then the majority of their apps--Gmail, Reader, News, Docs, et al.--would be based on Flash instead of pure HTML and JavaScript.

But Adobe may not need the support of the #1 and #3 browser vendors and the #1 and #3 search engines to retain dominance. Superior graphics are huge asset for Flash. Although the potential is there, I still have yet to see a solution to making games and animations using SVG or canvas that truly rivals the ease with which (I assume) you can in Flash Studio. These are mostly uncharted waters. Sure, I've seen lots of demos, but nothing seriously popular uses them. Internet Explorer's only having VML has a large part in hampering anything like that.

But the Open Screen initiative may be the ace in the hole for Adobe. Flash's continued success stems from its ubiquity, nearly 100% browser penetration already. And now it's coming soon to any previously untapped platform. So Adobe can probably hold off most challenges to Flash as the new software platform for everything. Because that's what it is or what Adobe wants it to be. There is another option, but I don't see much chance of it happening. Adobe could essentially throw out Flash and fully adopt some kind of JavaScript and SVG alternative. This actually has a fairly good chance of occuring gradually over time, as crossover increases. Consider Google Gears, which compiles Java into JavaScript; it is not hard to imagine compilers that go back and forth between Flash and alternatives.

So if you are a freetard, as I am, don't get discouraged if you are working on something that might be better done in Flash. And if you are a flashboy or adoboy--yes, I just made those up--don't necessarily come over to the light side if it would terribly inconvenience you. Both sides have bright futures and we'll all be on to something entirely different in 10 years anyway.

Poll: Jeremiah Wright's effect on Obama

You've no doubt heard about the controversy surrounding Obama over the leader at his church. I was curious whether or not this is an important issue to voters.

one more poster

innovating merchandise

A simple way to increase profits on any popular brand is to sell merchandise. It may in fact be your main revenue source if your brand is not directly sold, such as art or writing. A recognizable mascot can occupy the surface area of T-shirts, toys, lunch boxes, almost anything. The likes of Hello Kitty and Krusty the Clown have gone to town with this concept. But I believe this method has gone stale and needs spicing up.

My favorite is a more subtle form which has been gaining traction. Bring a fictional product into the real world. It is easiest to piggyback on an existing product. Last summer, 7-11 turned some of their stores temporarily into Kwik-E-Marts and rebranded their Slurpees as "Squishees" after the Simpsons spoof. The 8-bit tie also comes to mind, originally an April fool's joke and now up for sale.

It is often easier to stick with T-shirts since there are so many sites that do all the work for you. If you cater to more of a sophisticated crowd, consider stressing an idea rather than a character. The web comic XKCD offers an anti-velociraptor shirt. ThinkGeek offers a red shirt with the word "Expendable", a throwback to doomed crew members on the original Star Trek.

OK, what if absolutely have to merchandise a character? Try one with a smaller role, such as weighted companion cube plushies from Portal. One of the most beloved minor characters on Futurama, the Robot Devil, would make for a great refridgerator magnet.

There is a reason that trying different techniques with merchandise can be more profitable. It can be such a delightful surprise that it will make headlines and spread by word of mouth, becoming a meme.

attention-based real estate values for ads in a virtual world

Advertisers want their ad to be seen by the most people with the most likelihood to spend money on their products. The brute force approach is to make sure as many as possible see the ad, hoping the actual buyers will be among them. So, barring demographics, the value of any ad space is proportional to the number of people who see it.

So, picture a 2-dimensional ad space, such as the million dollar home page, except that it is not constrained in size, so that scrolling is needed to see all of the ads. Make it a video game (think old Zelda in the top-down view), so that the scrolling speed is very slow. Reason would lead us to believe that the ads closest to the point of origin would be seen the most often and thus be worth the most to advertisers. The value would theoretically decrease in an inverse relationship to the distance from the point of origin, as the number of players thinned out. Of course, this could be eliminated by spreading players out equally.

What really strikes me is the implications of moving the ad-space into the 3rd dimension. For one, the ads start blocking each other. If the player began with a view outside of the known ad-verse, then the most valuable ad-space would be on the outside! Say the ads are solid objects that cannot be passed through; they might be designed to try to trap the player so that he stays longer.

These ads do not necessarily have to be for real products. In an MMORPG, other players may be advertising their virtual items or services, and propaganda may be an important tool used to maintain alliances.

God, I love Futurama.

New Song: Suxorz

Succinct, straightforward, feel-good dance song.

Vezquex relaunched on MySpace

I ran up the stairway to Heaven to enjoy the silence
I don't know why I'm losing my religion on a stormy monday

Do you feel like we do?
Insomnia at last, in the purple haze of a sandstorm

Whether you're Billie Jean walkin' on the sun
Or a secret agent man runnin' with the devil
Or even an American idiot wanting money for nothing,
You're still alive, so shine on you crazy diamond.
Don't worry; be happy. You won't get fooled again.
I'm never gonna give you up.

Now get busy, child.
Get back, back in black.
Play that funky music,
And let the good times roll.

the device has been modified

ad in the wild

logo, 1st (public) try

I wish Russian had better support.