Happy Birthday Emoticon

Twenty six years ago today, Scott Fahlman posted the following electronic message to a computer-science department bulletin board at Carnegie Mellon University:

19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman :-) From: Scott E Fahlman

I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:

:-)

Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use:

:-(

As any teacher who has received a paper from a student in the past 5 - 10 years will tell you, the world has never been the same since.

To honor the occasion, Wired has an article about the founder of the emoticon movement and a slide show as well.

Smile - it's Friday!

An Advertisement About Nothing

To my amusement and delight, one of my favorite comedians Mr. Jerry Seinfeld has filmed a number of Microsoft ads with Mr. Microsoft himself Bill Gates which are perfectly Seinfeldian. The first takes place at the mall where Jerry spots Bill buying shoes. The second takes place at a residential home where Bill and Jerry have moved in with a random "normal" family.

As PC World writes, the ads are "all just stuff to make you react. Whether you chuckle, guffaw, scoff or spew, you're doing something -- and that's ultimately the point of the ads about nothing."

They are funny to watch and almost like a traffic accident - though I may not want to look, I simply cannot not look. Plus, seeing Bill do "the robot" is quite enjoyable, though English striker Peter Crouch does the robot much, much better.

Over time, the ads are supposed to get more and more "specific" about Microsoft products and service. When that happens, who knows if I will feel the same way about Jerry shilling for MSFT. For now, I will just simply enjoy Jerry swapping George Costanza's companionship with yet another major icon's as he goes through the banal moments of life.

First he hung with Superman. Now he's hanging with the richest man in the world. Sounds pretty fun to me.

Shoe Circus:

New Family:

WoWoW

Now you can play a character playing a character in World of Warcraft. Ridiculous! My favorite quote is, "I mean, when you are staring at the computer screen, you believe you are in a dimly lit basement staring at a computer screen."

The Onion, how I love you so....

Browsing PicLens Style

What a fantastic little FireFox plug-in this Pic Lens is! In their own words, it "transforms your browser into a full-screen, 3D experience for enjoying photos and videos across the web." In my words, it's pretty sick - I love it. So do a lot of other people too. My advice: find 20 spare seconds and install it. Simple as that.

Lord of the E-Mail?

I have no clue how Yahoo! got the Tolkien estate to give them rights to use Bilbo and Gandalf to advertise how you can text and chat inside Yahoo!'s email offering. Half of me thinks it is oddly interesting to "watch" Mr. Wizard and the Halfling converse as if they were 15 year old girls. The other half thinks it is sacrilegious. You decide which half you fall on.

Low Tech Trumps High Tech

Wally Wallington has demonstrated that he can lift a Stonehenge-sized pillar weighing 22,000 lbs and moved a barn over 300 ft. What makes this so special is that he does it using only himself, gravity, and his incredible ingenuity. It will make you think thrice about how the ancients were able to build what they built.

Via J-Walk

Skynet Isn't That Far Away

PC Magazine has a short article about how hackers have been able to take control of certain power grids. It seems that several cities outside the U.S. have sustained attacks on utility systems and extortion demands and the CIA is taking careful note of what happened to try and prevent it from happening within our borders.

Considering the Internet really does not have any borders, this is troubling news as the world becomes more and more computerized. Let's hope that the sys admins who manage our vital infrastructure locations have changed their default passwords from "password" to something harder to crack than "p@ssw0rd."

New Designs, Devices and User Experiences for 20008

The new year always brings new resolutions. Mine this year is twofold: to try and post more frequently and to change my eating habits. For the first one, in the words of Michael Pollan, the author of In Defense of Food, I plan to "eat food, not too much, mostly plants."

For the second, as my first post of the year, I thought I would share some spiffy new designs, devices and user experiences that are in store for us in 2008 and beyond. These are really, really cool. I'm not easily "wowed" these days but over and over again I found myself scratching my head and thinking "how do they come up with this stuff?"

Check out the Innovative Designs and Devices and User Experiences of the Future courtesy of Smashing Magazine.

I love the Bluetooth Laser Virtual Keyboard, the Hi-Tech Office: Eclipse Partitioning System and the Reactable. Most of these are spec only and not for sale which is good for me - it limits the temptation to run out and buy them today.

A Gift You Might Have Wanted This Holiday Season

Who wouldn't want their very own decorative Flux Capacitor? Maybe someone wants an actual working one, that's who. How much does 1.21 gigawatt's worth of power equal anyway?

Via Neu

From the "You Can Run But You Can't Hide" Dept

It was only a matter of time: Digital wanted signs have arrived and are already proving to be quite effective. One guy in Alabama was on the run for 10 days - the police had no leads except for his photo. So, the police posted his photo to a digital billboard which acted as a giant digi "Wanted!" poster and low and behold, the fugitive turned himself in a day later. It seems he felt that with so many people driving by his face all day long, someone was bound to recognize him and better he turn himself in than have the police break down his door.

This is just the first step - the next is when we all have RFID chips under our skin. I say convicts will start to get "chipped" in the next 5 - 10 years, ACLU be damned.

Free Wi-Fi in Manahatta?

If you love to connect to the net for free and you spent time in NYC, then CBS's announcement that it will be developing a CBS Mobile Zone, a free Wi-Fi network for laptops and other wireless devices, in the heart of the Big Apple should make you very happy.

This zone will cover the area from Times Square to Central Park South, between 6th and 8th Avenues. It is an experiment between CBS and the MTA and I am very curious to see it if works, especially since Philadelphia has had such trouble proving free Wi-Fi.

Via See-Ming

All Your Base Are Belong To Google

Is Google outsmarting everyone?. It is quite possible.

Financially, the $2k that I didn't invest in Apple in 2003 and the $2k I didn't invest in Google when it debuted are worth around $25k total right now. Apple has gone up about 10x since when I thought about buying it and Google has gone up about 7x. Knowing that I would have only made "small" bets on these companies, and knowing that I would have 99% sold my stakes in them when they simply doubled or tripled, are the only things keeping me from kicking myself on a daily basis.

Some investment decisions should be made by your gut and invest in Apple when the first generation iPod came out and investing in Google when they pulled their dutch auction IPO were no-brainers. I think that is why they are called "no-brainers" - because if you use your brain, you'll probably think yourself out of making the right decision.

Via Alex (who also crafted the nifty title on another blog post)

DRM is Going Down!

DRM stands for digital rights management, aka the utter bullshit that companies use to "protect" their content from the very people who gave them money for said content in the first place. DRM sucks and not just because the song/show/movie you bought will only play on certain "approved" device(s) - there are about 10 other good reasons why it sucks which I'm not going get into in this post. Not only do most music consumers hate the very idea of DRM, now music industry professionals are going on the record against this failed idea as well.

For instance, Ian Rodgers, the Head of Yahoo! Music, the #1 music destination on the web, stated two weeks ago that he won't spend a single dollar more on DRM. As he so eloquently put it,

"In the end you get what you pay for. I won’t spend another dime paying engineers to build false control, making listening to music harder for music-lovers. I will put all of my energy into making it easier and making the experience better. I suggest you do the same."

Now for a little history about this whole nonsense: DRM became "hot" due to the Napster and P2P phenomenon which caught publishers by complete surprise. Their only strategy for the last 8 years has been to circle the wagons and go into lock down mode while they try to figure out how to take advantage of this new digital landscape. I do not use "take advantage" lightly; what the music publishers have done over this almost decades worth of time is take advantage of their customers, by first rolling out poorly thought out and poorly executed DRM strategies and then by trying to get everyone to use subscription based models - you don't own any music, you just "lease" it - to make as much money as they can.

eMusic has always known what users want and has allowed them to buy DRM free MP3s since they first launched their site years ago. However, the eMusic song catalog has always been limited to the lesser (though still good) known acts of the world which has been one of its main drawbacks. The other main drawback is that you can only buy a package, like 30 tracks in a month for $9.99, and not individual songs from eMusic. So, I like the site but I don't love it.

Apple then got on the bandwagon a few months back by starting to sell DRM free songs in its iTunes store at a premium, which was a step in the right direction but still annoying and not just because Apple basically hid (from a information architecture / usability point of view) this whole DRM free section of the site. As an aside, I have been buying tracks off of iTunes for a while now - mostly because my wife keeps getting gift certificates to the iTunes store so hey, why not right? I love the store but hate the rights managed AAC format. This means that some of my great music can only be played on an iPod. While I do have an iPod now, who knows what the future brings? Being locked into a certain device in order to listen to music I bought and paid for is aggravating and upsetting. Trying to find the new DRM free iTunes tracks is almost as aggravating. Almost.

Then, just about a month ago things got very interesting. Amazon, praise Jesus, rolled out their DRM free MP3 store and hallelujah, there is a real player out there who can honestly compete with iTunes (i.e. the store has over 2 million songs) . Say it with me the way that Marv Albert says it: "Yesss!"

Finally, a major store exists that sells you a product that you, not they, control. You give them money. They give you control. I'm so in love with this new store and the idea of being able to buy individual DRM free MP3s from major artists that I even posted a small banner on my site to the new Amazon MP3 store to try and help our their business. Go check out their store and buy a track while you are at it - it will only cost you a buck (or less).

The even better news is that Amazon is being taken quite seriously. Apple has cut the costs for their DRM free music and I bet that these types of track will become easier to find / more heavily promoted as well.

Y!'s Mr. Rodgers said, "Convenience wins, hubris loses" and I hope he is right.

Window CE + ME + NT = VISTA

For those who have a few minutes for a geeky laugh, check out the video below. My favorite part of "Vista Sucks" is when the announcer says, "From the company that taught you to turn off the computer by clicking the start button." Enjoy.

Social Network Built For Two

If you have not heard of Ze Frank, well, you haven't been paying attention to the blogosphere because he is one of the most "famous" bloggers out there. Frank won a 2002 Webby Award for Best Personal Websit, in 2005, he was featured in Time Magazine's "50 Coolest Websites" and Frank spoke at the TED Conference in 2004 and 2005.

While I know of him, I never check out his site. That being said, someone today sent me a little ditty he wrote and produced titled Social Network for Two which is just catchy, techie and nerdy enough for me to post. Happy Friday!

Current Web Usage Stats

I use the Internet every day. I even managed to do so while on vacation in Hawaii using my T-Mobile data driven Blackberry Pearl so I'm curious if more people are like me or if I'm the minority when it comes to web usage. Therefore, I was happy to hear that Avenue A | Razorfish surveyed 475 consumers across "all demographics" in July and that they made available their findings. I think they show the usual divide between what the loud techno-elite minority cares about, as compared to the quiet mass-consumer majority is still in effect. It also shows which parts of the web are catching on faster than others. Take a look:

Overall Stats

• Only 60% personalize home pages
• 47% never share bookmarks
• 44% never use RSS feeds
• 65% never use tag clouds
• Almost all read the "most popular" or "most emailed" items on sites

That being said, here are specific stats about a number of different categories and whether they are "big" or not.

Video: Big

• 67% regularly watch videos on YouTube, etc.
• 95% have watched online videos in the last 3 months.
• 49% have uploaded online videos in the last 3 months [shockingly high--almost makes us discount all findings, or at least conclude that this is a highly web-literate and young consumer sub-set].
• 85% have watched online movie previews in last 3 months.
• 71% have watched a TV show online in the last 3 months [more than we would have thought].

Online Music, Photos, Blogs: Pretty Big

• 42% regularly purchase music online
• 41% use photo-sharing sites
• 70% read blogs regularly

Online research when making product selection decisions: HUGE

• 92%+ use the web when making product buying decisions (research, reviews, retailer location, price comparison, etc.)
• 54% start their product research at a search engine
• 14% start it at a comparison shopping engine
• 30% start it at an e-commerce or retailer site
• 55% rely on USER REVIEWS most when choosing products
• 21% rely on EXPERT REVIEWS most.
• After product selected, most important criteria when choosing where to buy are PRICE (38%) and SITE REPUTATION (38%)

Mobile data services: Small

• 68% never use mobile phone to listen to music
• 76% never use mobile phone to watch video.
• 64% never use mobile phone to check headlines.

Via Silicon Valley Insider

Holodeck v1.0

This omni-directional treadmill represents a massive step forward in designing and developing virtual worlds. So far its just the floor of the holodeck, but still it’s something…

Via Neu

Wii Love the Simpsons

Coming soon to a video console near you: The Simpsons Game! It is being created in partnership with Gracie Films and Twentieth Century Fox and is not based on the upcoming Simpsons movie. Rather, it is an original story from writers who create the TV program and it will feature the entire voice cast from the TV show. Basically, you just need to be prepared to never leave your couch as it seems that its going to be just plain awesome.

Techtree news said:

"Players must use exciting, all new powers to save the world from rising chaos, with Homer, Marge, Bart, Maggie, and Lisa being playable characters. Players will have to make a journey through all of Springfield, battle an array of villains, and fight their way through various parodies of multiple popular video games."

The game has over 15 levels and each will take the form of an episode of the series, with a unique title animation, setting, and story. Within each episode, players will take control of two family members, or play one of them with a friend in a split-screen two-player mode.

It is scheduled for release at the end of this year for basically everything: PS3, PS2, PSP, Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii, and Nintendo DS.

After the jump, read the preview from Yahoo! News. I have just one thing to say: Aye Carumba!

Via Phyl

The Simpsons Game Preview: May 10, 2007 from Yahoo! News

Like Bart and Milhouse plotting in the Simpsons family tree house, EA was cooking up a little something-something on May 7, 2007. Outside, hundreds were celebrating a milestone 400th episode of The Simpsons. But inside the Fox Studios cafeteria, guarded by famed bartender Moe Szyslak, The Simpsons Game was being unveiled to a select group of press representatives.

Executive Producer Scot Amos set the scene: "We wanted to stay true to the fans, first and foremost. We wanted to make the ultimate video game for the Simpsons characters." The first step was crafting a script worthy of the license. To do that, EA enlisted a trio of the show's writers and producers, Matt Selman, Tim Long, and Matt Warburton.

The three spoke to us about the game's focus, and earned massive gamer cred. "EA has been great to us," said Selman. "They're much better than the other monolithic video game companies." The plot promises a plethora of surprises, poking fun at not only standard pop-culture, but also game-centric segments and parodies to appease even the most hardcore gamers. Unfortunately, the camp was keeping all of these secrets, well, top-secret.

They would tell us the game featured over an hour of new, TV-worthy material in cutscene form. All the actors reprise their roles for voiceovers, so it will be as authentic as possible. Tim Long quipped, "We're not going for a hard ESRB rating here, but I will tell you some of the lines are so dirty, they made the cast cry." Also, very early in the game, the Simpsons figure out that they're actually inside a video game, which means all Springfield breaks loose.

Amos and Creative Director Jonathan Knight took us through one chunk of the game, however. It was an eating contest at the Duff Brewery, and the player controlled Homer. The perspective was free-roaming 3D, as Homer battled Barney, Krusty and other familiar characters to reach food. Surprisingly, after ingesting enough grub, Homer could turn into Homerball -- ransacking the place as a gigantic sphere.

Being in a video game (and being aware of it), the family Simpson is not tied to the limitations of the show as much. Each one has a superpower to exploit: Homer has his ball form; Bart turns into Bartman; Marge can command hordes of characters; and Lisa can change the environment. Each of these has their own advantages, and the level design allows you to use them both to complete prime objectives and do a little exploring to find secrets and gather pick-ups.

Back to the eating contest: The stage is almost like Epcot Center, with various geographical locations. Homer trashes Germany, Mexico, and others -- partially with the help of a spicy pepper (referencing the chili cook-off episode) to turn into a ball of lava. When it comes time to go through Scotland, Groundskeeper Willie closes the gate.

Now it's time to switch to Bart, and use Bartman's glide ability to scale the wall and take out Willie with some well-placed slingshot fire. This is a good time to mention the co-op gameplay. Each stage features two Simpsons family members, and you can switch between them during play. Much like LEGO Star Wars, a second player can jump in at any time. This turns everything split-screen, and the difficulty scales dynamically.

Online play will not be supported, but EA's reasoning is sound. Knight says, "Our focus has been high-quality couch play. People are going to want to own the game because their friend will come over for a Homerball vs. Homerball match, or to play through the story with them. It's going to bring the whole family together." The prospect of multiplayer-centric minigames is definitely exciting.

Being a 3D game about a 2D family brings up some complications. You need to be faithful to the show, but expand the world to be more exciting. You need to have the Simpsons themselves be 3D, but still look hand-drawn. The team worked many months in research and development to solve this. Knight says, "We have a patent pending on this tech to real-time deform the mesh of faces as you move the camera around. It's important that they stay looking like Bart or Homer from any angle."

This addresses problems with past 3D Simpsons games, where something just didn't look right -- be it Lisa's hair or Homer's marshmallow-man physique. Knight says, "You want Lisa's hair to look like a flat 2D billboard from any angle. There's a lot of technology behind it, but it looks effortless in the game. But once you see it, you can never go back to another Simpsons game. It's the first time we're capturing the look and feel of the TV show."

As we got to see the game in action (on Xbox 360), we can attest to the beautiful and faithful art style. It's like you could pause it at any time, and it looks like an animation cel from the show. The Simpsons has simplistic visuals to be sure, but the game doesn't skimp on details. Physics react realistically (for a cartoon, of course), and the animation is very solid. Also, things like flesh bunched up on the Homerball are nice -- albeit disturbing -- touches.

We've gotten relatively technical talking about graphics, but Simpsons creator Matt Groening popped in to put things into perspective: "This is the most ambitious Simpsons game ever. It rewards people that love games, while making fun of other games." This isn't just a video game starring The Simpsons; this is exactly how The Simpsons themselves would do video games. Due to release in late fall, we still have a long time to wait, but with reruns, the upcoming movie, and no shortage of DVDs, there are plenty of outlets to get your Simpsons fix in the meantime.

Mob Rule at Digg Nation

Digg, which is a user driven social content website, faced a user revolt that it couldn't contain or control over the past two days. Long story short, some users started posting some quasi-legal / illegal information about how to get around HD-DVD encryption. Digg management, fearing a lawsuit, deleted the posts. More posts came with the same info. More posts were deleted. Their CEO posted to the Digg blog and said,

"We’ve been notified by the owners of this intellectual property that they believe the posting of the encryption key infringes their intellectual property rights. In order to respect these rights and to comply with the law, we have removed postings of the key that have been brought to our attention."

That only go the users even more fired up and they rose up to make sure that EVERY single post was about this topic. As this is how the site works (users post information that they find interesting - like how delicious does bookmarks - and other users then link to it, comment, etc), management couldn't do anything except either suspend EVERY active account or take the site down, neither of which were viable options in their opinion.

So, today co-founder Kevin Rose posted on the Digg blog, effectively capitulating to the mob’s demands: He wrote,

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be. If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

Read more after the jump.

To say what happened today on Digg was a “user revolt” is an understatement. The Digg team deleted a story that linked to the decryption key for HD DVDs after receiving a take down demand and all hell broke loose. More stories appeared and were deleted, and users posting the stories were suspended.

That just got the Digg community fired up, and soon the entire Digg home page was filled with stories containing the decryption key. The users had taken control of the site, and unless Digg went into wholesale deletion mode and suspended a large portion of their users, there was absolutely nothing they could do to stop it.

Digg CEO Jay Adelson responded on the Digg blog earlier this afternoon but it was clear he did not yet understand the chaos that was coming. The post only added fuel to the fire. Just now, co-founder Kevin Rose posted yet again on the Digg blog, effectively capitulating to the mob’s demands: He says

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be. If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

Until today, it seems, even Digg didn’t fully understand the power of its community to determine what is “news.” I think the community made their point crystal clear.

Vive La Revolution.

Lying Robot Scum

I regret to inform you that tricky robots have been built as the Technology Review, which is published by MIT, has reported this very unfortunate bit of news. Here is one sort of scary though at the same time pretty cool quote:

Keller (lead scientist guy) and his team did not expect this level of sophistication in the bots' communication. They concluded that kinship and the imperative of the group to survive spurred a group dynamic that included helping one another and deceiving outsiders.

Via Chris G.

Beer Launching Fridge

This is what smart kids do at a good school - use their knowledge to better themselves and the rest of humanity in the process. Those of use who went to a state school would have loaded it with the Beast, not a primo brew like Miller Light. Enjoy.

The Hole - video powered by Metacafe

SMS Security

I found today a new blog to read. It's titled Red Tape, it can be found on MSNBC's site and its purpose is to unmask government bureaucracy, corporate sneakiness and outright scam artists. A lofty goal from a site owned by General Electric but anyway...

A post today talks about whether or not the SMS messages that you send can be "captured" and then read by others. In one word: yes. Its a fascinating read. One part that liked was:

Cell phones and pagers also can be “cloned,” meaning the clone will receive a copy of every text message sent to the original device. In the most famous case of pager cloning, alleged Israeli organized crime figure Assaf Waknine obtained a clone of the pager carried by a Los Angeles police detective who was investigating him.

Read all about it for yourself. You will make sure that you never text a bank account or credit card number again.

Wee!

Six years ago, I became obsessed during the holiday season about getting a PS2. This obsession was due to a number of reasons. The first was a very practical one: I needed a DVD player and among other things, the PS2 was a DVD player. The second was that I had been laid off from my dot com job and not only had plenty of time to try and get one, but tons of time to actually play it once I got it. The third and most important reason was that other than my Atari 2600, I had never owned a video game system and I had become convinced that the time was finally right.

For years, I religiously went over my friend's houses to play Baseball Stars, Super Tecmo Bowl or Bonk's Adventure but never owned those games or the system they were played on (Full disclosure: my father during a misguided Atari loving phase bought a Jaguar but that sucked and I try to forget about it). I was at that time when I started to develop a love hate relationship with video games, something which would only get stronger over time, moving away from loving and towards hating as I started to see my friends getting totally sucked into games like "Bond" where they would sit inside all day, playing endless tournaments, never getting up off of their asses except to maybe get a drink of something. I took a perverse joy out of being the "other guy" - who hoped on his bike and went for a ride or who went for a walk instead of playing all day - and let everyone know it too.

This love/hate relationship came to a head when I lived my senior year of college with Bryan who not only had a Playstation but spent an enormous amount of time "lost" to it. I would berate him on a daily basis to put the controller down and get outside to the point where I felt like his mom. Then, towards the end of the year when senioritis was truly setting in, I picked up "Metal Gear Solid" and sure enough was absolutely hooked, to the point where I was soon coming home from my internship during lunch to squeeze in a few minutes of gameplay.

Hate had become love - the siren song of the pixels was too much! About a year and a half later post-graduation, I heard tons of hype about PS2 and decided that I must have one and sure enough, using much gile and cunning (and setting my web brower to automatically refresh every 5 seconds on a day that I had been told Amazon would be getting them in stock) I was able to procure one and have never looked back since.

That is, until a few weeks ago when I heard that the new PS3 would cost over $500. I started to look back on how much I've used the PS2 the past few years and sure enough, its pure gaming usage has fallen dramatically since I moved out of my 2 br converted to 3 bachelor pad and moved in with my then girlfriend/now wife. Gone are the Fins/Jets Madden battles that would rage into the early morning. Gone forever is the kind of life where for one magical day I could sit and play "Metal Gear Solid 2" for 15 hours straight. During that day, my roommate got up, found me sitting Indian style in front of the TV playing, went to the gym, came back, went out to get breakfast, came back, went out to get lunch and run errands, came back, went out on a date, came back and I NEVER MOVED! Over the past few years, aside from bursts of Grand Theft Auto action, the game system really didn't get played. In fact, MGS 3 (Snake Eater) stayed in its box for a solid year because I knew it needed about 40 hours of my time to beat it and these days, I don't even have 3.5 hours to get to the movie theatre, sit through the Bond flick and get home, let alone 40 hours for a silly video game.

With this mindset of "not having enough time" - a reason I never joined the WoW (Worlds of Warcraft) universe - I started to read about the Wii and its strategy of going after the "casual" gamer. After a lot of thought, I realized why I wasn't playing anymore: I just didn't have time and had become a "casual" gamer myself. My wife is getting ready to go out for the evening? 20 minutes of game play coming up! Everything that I read and/or saw about the Wii made me want to get one even more - hell, one of my favorite video game accessories of all time was the Nintendo light gun that was needed to play "Duck Hunt."

Now, having stood outside the Times Square Toys R Us for over 3 hours on a Saturday morning in December, having had a Wii for about a month, having not only brought it to my sister-in-law and brother-in-laws house but brought it into work to demo it for co-workers but having so everyone I know can see it, I have to say that it was one of the best moves I've made in the past decade. That is maybe a bit of hyperbole but you get the idea.

The reason why I love it so much is because the Wii is a machine that is just plain fun - you really want to yell "wee!" when playing it. The games, while very simple, are lots of fun and you really work up a sweat while playing Tennis or Baseball, so much so that Nintendo has already issued a recall for the wrist straps to make them stronger as people have been losing control of their remotes and destroying their TVs and windows. There is a feature called "Wii Fitness" where each day, you are run through 3 out of 15 different training exercises and at the end, you get your "Wii Age" which is supposed to show you how in shape you are. I started at 60 (oy!) and now I'm down to my actual age (29). I'm hoping to get under 25 sooner or later - I got to 26 before going away and like real life, if you don't train everyday, you lose a step and sure enough, my first day back pushed me into the 30's.

There are also other fun features besides the games. One is the ability to show pics on your TV if you use an SD flash card as your camera memory (which I do). When my mom, sister and in-laws came over my apartment recently, I was able to show off my trip photos right on my TV instead of having everyone crowd around the computer screen. Another is the Wii Message board, where others who have Wii's can write you notes (my friend Jay used it to talk trash when we faced each other in fantasy football playoffs - yeah, phone calls, SMS messages and emails were not enough...) and as the Wii has built in Wi-Fi, there are channels like the Forecast Channel where you can always get an up-to-date weather report.

As time goes on, I'll post more about it. Right now, I'm ready to leave and head home to see if my age today is going to go up or go down. Maybe I'll also play my wife in golf or hit a few balls either at the golf range or in the batting cage. Each should take only a few minutes - the kind of game play my life wants and needs right now!

You Are Not There Yet You Are There

Linda Stone, the technologist who once labeled the disease of the Internet age “continuous partial attention” — two people doing six things, devoting only partial attention to each one — remarked:

“We’re so accessible, we’re inaccessible. We can’t find the off switch on our devices or on ourselves. ... We want to wear an iPod as much to listen to our own playlists as to block out the rest of the world and protect ourselves from all that noise. We are everywhere — except where we actually are physically.”

November 1, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
The Taxi Driver
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Paris

I arrived at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport the other night and was met by a driver sent by a French friend. The driver was carrying a sign with my name on it, but as I approached him I noticed that he was talking to himself, very animatedly. As I got closer, I realized he had one of those Bluetooth wireless phones clipped to his ear and was deep in conversation. I pointed at myself as the person he was supposed to meet. He nodded and went on talking to whomever was on the other end of his phone.

When my luggage arrived, I grabbed it off the belt; he pointed toward the exit and I followed, as he kept talking on his phone. When we got into the car, I said, “Do you know my hotel?” He said, “No.” I showed him the address, and he went back to talking on the phone.

After the car started to roll, I saw he had a movie playing on the screen in the dashboard — on the flat panel that usually displays the G.P.S. road map. I noticed this because between his talking on the phone and the movie, I could barely concentrate. I, alas, was in the back seat trying to finish a column on my laptop. When I wrote all that I could, I got out my iPod and listened to a Stevie Nicks album, while he went on talking, driving and watching the movie.

After I arrived at my hotel, I reflected on our trip: The driver and I had been together for an hour, and between the two of us we had been doing six different things. He was driving, talking on his phone and watching a video. I was riding, working on my laptop and listening to my iPod.

There was only one thing we never did: Talk to each other.

It’s a pity. He was a young, French-speaking African, who probably had a lot to tell me. When I related all this to my friend Alain Frachon, an editor at Le Monde, he quipped: “I guess the era of foreign correspondents quoting taxi drivers is over. The taxi driver is now too busy to give you a quote!”

Alain is right. You know the old story, “As my Parisian taxi driver said to me about the French elections ... ” Well, you can forget about reading columns starting that way anymore. My driver was too busy to say hello, let alone opine on politics.

I relate all this because it illustrates something I’ve been feeling more and more lately — that technology is dividing us as much as uniting us. Yes, technology can make the far feel near. But it can also make the near feel very far. For all I know, my driver was talking to his parents in Africa. How wonderful! But that meant the two of us wouldn’t talk at all. And we were sitting two feet from each other.

When I shared this story with Linda Stone, the technologist who once labeled the disease of the Internet age “continuous partial attention” — two people doing six things, devoting only partial attention to each one — she remarked: “We’re so accessible, we’re inaccessible. We can’t find the off switch on our devices or on ourselves. ... We want to wear an iPod as much to listen to our own playlists as to block out the rest of the world and protect ourselves from all that noise. We are everywhere — except where we actually are physically.”

A month ago I was in San Francisco and went for a walk. I was standing at an intersection waiting to cross the street when a man jogging and wearing his iPod came up next to me. As soon as the light turned green he sprinted into the crosswalk. But a woman driving a car — running a yellow light — almost hit him before she hit the brakes. The woman was holding a cellphone in her right ear and driving with her left hand. I thought to myself, I’ve just witnessed the first postmodern local news story, and I crafted the lead in my head: “A woman driving her car while speaking on her cellphone ran over a man jogging across the street while listening to his iPod. See page 6.”

Hey, I love having lots of contacts and easy connectivity, but in an age when so many people you know — and even more you don’t know — can contact you by e-mail or cellphone, I’m finding this age of interruption overwhelming. I was much smarter when I could do only one thing at a time. I know I’m not alone.

A few weeks ago I was trying to find my friend Yaron Ezrahi in Jerusalem. I kept calling his cellphone and getting no answer. I eventually found him at home. “Yaron, what’s wrong with your cellphone?” I asked.

“It was stolen a few months ago,” he answered, adding that he decided not to replace it because its ringing was constantly breaking his concentration. “Since then, the first thing I do every morning is thank the thief and wish him a long life.”

Convos: A Life Organization Tool

My life is pretty organized but not nearly as organized as it could be. To try and help solve the problem that I and millions like me face, my good friend Eric is one of the people who founded a new company called Convos. Convos is an internet-enabled service designed for individuals and groups to easily communicate, collaborate and organize. Yes, that sounds sufficiently vague, maybe because "the Convos application is currently being developed and will launch in early 2007" so they are light on details. Here is the scoop on why they are developing this app:

Often, an organization or individual is saddled with multiple email accounts, instant messenger accounts, passwords and usernames. A person may be using one application for managing his contacts, another for organizing events, and yet another application for file sharing. These disparate platforms exemplify a lack of data standardization resulting in organizations and individuals wasting valuable time, spending more money, losing contacts, and compromising security.

Consequently, there is an intrinsic need to integrate these services into a simplified, organized, and standardized platform. Convos is that platform.

Sounds cool - but the proof will be in the pudding as they say. In the mean time, I plan on checking back every now and then to read the blog and to see if they have updated anything. Bon chance mon ami!

W.O.W.

To the fans of Opus and Anthony, let me start by saying I am not talking about "Whip'em Out Wednesdays" in this post. W.O.W. in this case stands for World of Warcraft, a game that has redefined the massively-multiplayer online role playing game category, aka MMORPG or MMO for short. As the article states, "There were massively-multiplayer games before World of Warcraft, just as there were MP3 players before Apple’s iPod. Like the iPod, World of Warcraft has essentially taken over and redefined an entire product category." I don't think I've written about MMO's before and the time is long overdue. Essentially, its an online computer role-playing game (RPG) in which a large (or massive) number of players interact with one another in a virtual world.

I think its important to talk about because W.O.W. is first global video game sensation since Pac-Man as over 7 million players world wide are actively participating. Pac-Man came out over 20 years ago folks so that is really saying something. The interesting thing about this stat is that the Asian piracy problem was circumvented - in fact there are 3 million players in China - by the fact that the software is given away for free. The real cost is the monthly subscription fee which is impossible to get around. You want to play, you have to pay. It's that simple.

There are whole industries that have sprung up around MMO's. There are bots that troll all day, auto-playing characters to build them up and farmers (real people) who collect experience points, weapons and/or gold for those that don't have the time to earn them for themselves. Virtual items or even characters are sold on eBay for real-world dollars - in some cases for hundreds if not thousands of bucks. It's actually astounding what people will do in and for the game. I for one haven't played one because I fear I will lose my life to it. My friend Chris has written alot about his World of Warcraft addiction and I know myself so I have a good reason to be scared.

After the jump, read about it courtesey of the Times.

Online Game, Made in U.S., Seizes the Globe by Seth Schiesel, 9/5/06

SEOUL, South Korea — At 10:43 p.m. one recent Saturday, in a smoky basement gaming parlor under a bank in this sprawling city’s expensive Daechi neighborhood, Yoon Chang Joon, a 25-year-old orc hunter known online as Prodigy, led his troops into battle. “Move, move!” he barked into a microphone around his neck as a strike team of some 40 people seated at computer terminals tapped at keyboards and stormed the refuge of the evil plague lord Heigan, fingers flying.

As Mr. Yoon’s orders echoed from speakers around the room, Heigan reeled under an onslaught of spells and swords. In six minutes he lay dead. The online gaming guild called the Chosen had taken another step in World of Warcraft, the online fantasy game whose virtual, three-dimensional environment has become a global entertainment phenomenon among the cybersavvy and one of the most successful video games ever made.

Less than two years after its introduction, World of Warcraft, made by Blizzard Entertainment, based in Irvine, Calif., is on pace to generate more than $1 billion in revenue this year with almost seven million paying subscribers, who can log into the game and interact with other players. That makes it one of the most lucrative entertainment media properties of any kind. Almost every other subscription online game, including EverQuest II and Star Wars: Galaxies, measures its customers in hundreds of thousands or even just tens of thousands.

And while games stamped “Made in the U.S.A.” have often struggled abroad, especially in Asia, World of Warcraft has become the first truly global video-game hit since Pac-Man in the early 1980’s.

The game has more players in China, where it has engaged in co-promotions with major brands like Coca-Cola, than in the United States. (There are more than three million players in China, and slightly fewer than two million in the United States. And as with most video games, a clear majority of players worldwide are male.)

There is a rabid legion of fans here in South Korea, which has the world’s most fervent gaming culture, and more than a million people play in Europe. Most World of Warcraft players pay around $14 a month for access.

“World of Warcraft is an incredibly polished entertainment experience that appeals to more sorts of different players than any game I’ve seen,” said Rich Wickham, who heads Microsoft’s Windows games unit. “It’s fun for both casual players and for the hard-core players for whom the game is more just than a game: it’s a lifestyle. Just as important, Blizzard has made a game that has a broader global appeal than what we’ve seen before.”

Perhaps more than pop music or Hollywood blockbusters, even the top video games traditionally have been limited in their appeal to the specific regional culture that produced them. For example the well-known series Grand Theft Auto, with its scenes of glamorized urban American violence, has been tremendously popular in the United States but has largely failed to resonate in Asia and in many parts of Europe. Meanwhile many Japanese games, with their distinctively cutesy anime visual style, often fall flat in North America.

One of the main reasons Western software companies of all kinds have had difficulty in Asia is that piracy is still rampant across the region. Games like World of Warcraft circumvent that problem by giving the software away free and then charging for the game service, either hourly or monthly.

Since the game’s introduction in November 2004 the company has expanded to more than 1,800 employees from around 400. Almost all of the additions have been customer-service representatives to handle World of Warcraft players, helping them with both technical advice and billing concerns.

“Ultimately, what I’d like is for the user to feel like they are having a very polished entertainment experience,” said Mike Morhaime, 38, Blizzard’s president (and a gamer since he first encountered Pong in 1976). “We’d like players to associate our name with quality, so if they see a box on the shelf and it says Blizzard Entertainment, they don’t need to know anything more than that.”

The basic genre that World of Warcraft belongs to is called the massively-multiplayer online game, or M.M.O. The “massive” refers to the fact that in an M.M.O., thousands of players simultaneously occupy one vast virtual 3-D world. (In a more traditional online game like Quake or Counter-Strike, there are generally fewer than a dozen people in each arena.)

Blizzard runs hundreds of copies of the Worlds of Warcraft universe, known as servers, and there might be a few thousand players on any server at any given time. There are servers customized for six written languages: English, both simplified and traditional Chinese, Korean, German and French. Spanish is in development.

To begin, a player creates an avatar, or character, customizing its physical appearance as well as race and profession, each of which has different skills and abilities. An elf druid might specialize in healing, for example, while an orc rogue could be an expert in stealth and backstabbing. The player is then set loose in a huge colorful fantasy world with cities, plains, oceans, mountains, forests, rivers, jungles, deserts and of course dungeons.

The players can explore on their own or team up with others to conquer more imposing challenges. As a character completes quests and defeats monsters, it gains new abilities and collects more powerful magical equipment that in turn allow it to progress to the next set of challenges. Players can fight other players if they choose, but much of the focus is on teaming up with other users in guilds like the Chosen to battle automated foes.

There were massively-multiplayer games before World of Warcraft, just as there were MP3 players before Apple’s iPod. Like the iPod, World of Warcraft has essentially taken over and redefined an entire product category.

“I think the real key to WOW’s success has been the sheer variety and amount of things to do, and how easy it is to get into them,” said Kim Daejoong, 29, a doctor of traditional herbal medicine in Iksan, Korea, who had traveled to Seoul for one of the Chosen’s regular in-person sessions.

“Hard-core gamers will play anything, no matter how difficult it is,” Mr. Kim said. “But in order to be a mainstream game for the general public, it has to be easily accessible, and there have to be lots of things for you to do, even alone. What WOW has done better than other games is be able to appeal to both audiences — hard-core players and more casual players — all within one game and bring them together. That’s why you’ve seen people all over the world get into the game.”

Hours after the Chosen finished their raid in Seoul, a United States guild called Violent stormed Blackwing Lair, home of the black dragon Nefarian and his minions.

One of the players was Jason Pinsky, 33, the chief technology officer for an apparel company in Manhattan. Mr. Pinsky is not unusual among serious players in that he has logged more than 125 days (3,000 hours) on his main character, a hunter.

“I play this game six nights a week from 8 p.m. to midnight,” he said in a telephone interview. “When I say that to people, sometimes they look at me a little funny. But then I point out that most people watch TV at least that much, and television is a totally mindless experience.

“Instead of watching ‘The Lord of the Rings’ as a three-hour experience, I am now participating in the epic adventure.”

It is rare for guilds in North America and Europe to get together in real life, partly because of geographic distance and partly because of the social stigma often associated with gaming in the West.

In Asia, however, online players like those in the Chosen often want to meet in the flesh to put a real face on the digital characters they have been having fun with. Even in the United States, more and more players are coming to see online games as a way to preserve and build human connections, even if it is mostly through a keyboard or microphone.

“Think about it: I’m a 33-year-old guy with a 9-to-5 job, a wife and a baby on the way,” Mr. Pinsky said. “I can’t be going out all the time. So what opportunities do I have to not only meet people and make new friends but actually spend time with them on a nightly basis? In WOW I’ve made, like, 50 new friends, some of whom I’ve hung out with in person, and they are of all ages and from all over the place. You don’t get that sitting on the couch watching TV every night like most people.”

Stop Motion Space Invaders

A large cast of nerdy French individuals with some time on their hands decided to devout those precious minutes to recreate the classic co-op Space Invaders using stop-motion animation of people sitting in auditorium seats. It's super geeky and oh so cool!

Via Ro (via Amos)

Dot Net Nuke

My friend Sam told me about DotNetNuke, a fully customizable and scalable open source web platform that I deem cool enough to share. It is exactly what I was looking for as I have been trying to figure out how to help my friend Steven take his Democratic Lawyer Council org to the proverbial next level. For my goals, its much better than doing something simple in Ruby.

At first, the idea of building 51 commonly themed web sites - one for each state plus one for the national chapter - each with their own special characteristics was a daunting proposition. After watching the 20 min video on what DotNetNuke can do, I'm really ready to fully geek out and try and change our country for the better. Sam and I are planning to use this platform to tackle a completely separate business idea. Man, it just keeps getting easier to do all the cool tech stuff I want and as I don't love to code that much anymore, this platform makes me really excited. Check it out for yourself.

Amazon's Very Own "Turk"

It is really hard to keep up with Web 2.0. Amazon for instance has been rolling out tons of web services and lots of smart people are figuring out ways to use them. I would love to think of something super cool that will allow me to create a company that Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft or AOL is forced to buy due to its amazing coolness. I am definitely trying though so far, no eureka moments.

One service that I found especially cool is called Amazon Mechanical Turk. It provides a web services API for computers to integrate "artificial, artificial intelligence" directly into their processing by making requests of humans." Basically, people complete simple tasks that people do better than computers and get paid for their effort. For instance, to help the rollout of the A9 local search engine, you might identify stores in photos, something humans are great at but computers kind of suck at. The name was taken after Wolfgang von Kempelen's mechanical chess-playing automaton. Too bad the pay is literally pennies right now. I'll be keeping tabs on it to see how it evolves...

Check Out Squidoo

Squidoo is a new company I heard about from Seth Godin in his lecture to Google about the future of marketing. Mr. Godin's views about marketing dovetail with mine and if you have the time, I suggest you watch the video or read one of his books. At the end, he mentioned this new company he's involved with so I went, signed up, claimed a page (they call them "lens") and after reading the FAQ section, which said "a lens is one person's (lensmaster's) view on a topic he cares about. More specifically, a lens is a single web page filled with information and links that point to other web pages, to continually updated RSS feeds, or to relevant advertising. It's a place to start, not finish," I still didn't totally get what the heck they were doing and what they were after. I did however sign up to receive daily emails and now I get it. I also love it.

A Squidoo Lens allows you to pull together information from tons of different places about a single topic you are interested in. For instance, this lens on Space Elevators is absolutely fanscinating. This lens on how to build huge cardboard castles is pretty cool too - too bad I don't have the space in my apartment! I named my lens "Sevensquared" because I didn't get it at first and now that I do, other than putting in info about the "Seventh Son of a Seventh Son" legend, I don't know what to do with it. This might be a blessing in disguise though as I really do need to jump start this graphic novel project.

Yahoo! Mail Beta & Why I'm a Huge Geek

When I got home from grad school last night, I logged into my Yahoo! account to read my email and saw an offer to demo the new version of Yahoo! mail that is in beta testing right now. I have been waiting for Yahoo! to catch up to Google in the mail department for a long time. Google Mail is so much better than Yahoo Mail but who wants to change their address? Google Maps & Yahoo! Maps were rolled out around the same time and they both use XML & SOAP really well to deliver a super slick interface to the user. I happily said yes and when I saw that Yahoo! has turned (and continues to improve) its clunky mail offering into a dynamic MS Outlook-like version (not sure if its AJAX or simply a great use of Flash), I started punching the air and saying "Yes! Yes! This is what I've been waiting for! DHTML baby! Yes!!" I then once again realized I am a tremendously large geek.

Seriously though, the new Yahoo! Mail rocks and not only that, by moving the ad that free users see from a horizontal "leaderboard" one running across the top to a vertical "skyscrapper" running along the side, they have craftily made me more likely to spend the $20 a year for Mail Plus because now I lose pixel width which makes it more difficult to read my ads. So sneaky. So smart. I love it!

Free "Sunday" Silenced

After the jump, read about how NBC has frozen the viral "Lazy Sunday" wildfire. Man are they missing the boat.

via Jessie

PS - to my loyal readers: sorry for the absense of posts lately. I actually have been quite busy as I resigned from my job to take a new one (my last day is this Friday and have been busy transfering my brain to others), started a new semester of b-school, am working on a big freelance opportunity AND just got back from 5 days in sunny St. Maarten. Be patient - more good posts are on the way...

NBC freezes wildfire spread of 'Lazy Sunday'

Reported by Media Life

It looked like the perfect example of a viral marketing success story. Unfortunately, the source did not agree. When fans put a skit from "Saturday Night Live" called "Lazy Sunday" onto video-sharing sites, it was watched up to 5 million times on YouTube alone, according to reports. The video, which featured Chris Parnell and Any Samberg, may have provided "SNL" with a lot of free publicity, but NBC Universal has asked for it to be withdrawn from YouTube, along with 500 other clips featuring NBC programming, in order to protect its copyrights, says the New York Times. It is not uncommon for postings on video-sharing sites to contain copyright protected material. However, to date the sites have not faced many problems over this issue. NBC's action over the "SNL" video, which is now available free on the NBC site or for $1.99 from iTunes, shows the problems that could confront video-sharing sites like YouTube and Google Video now that the networks themselves are getting into on-demand

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Geeky Poll of the Day

If you know what the number one result is to this Most Used Key Combo poll, I'm sure you, and possibly another player, are smiling right now.

Comments are Shut Down Until Further Notice

The spam barrage continues. I hope that by taking down the comments feature for a few days, the spambots will leave my little blog alone and I'll be able to add comments back to my site. In the mean time, I am experimenting with a couple of different comment verification systems. I know that I've received less than 200 comments since my blog has been up but its not the amount, its the idea that someone can publically respond to what I wrote. Now, I've had to change this because of fucking spammers. I hope every last comment spammer dies a gruesome death.

Under Spam Attack

My site is currently under a crazy comment spam attack. I have received over 1000 spam comments in the last 24 hours and if this continues, I am going to have to disable the comment feature which would fucking blow. All comment spammers should die a horrible death. As a short haired blond crazy woman named Susan Powter once said, "Stop the insanity!"

My NXT Robot

Lego is currently developing an updated robot kit for their Mindstorms division called NXT and I am so pscyhed to get one. I have never built a robot before, though when I was a child I dreamt of doing so and even figured out all the pieces I needed to ad-hoc acquire. While I got some of the parts, I never got the tank tread that was needed for mobility and that in a sense stopped the development in its tracks. Now, many many years later, after reading the recent Wired aritcle about this project and seeing the demo on the Lego site, I for some reason have a burning desire to build my own robot. It comes out in the fall and I for one cannot wait until the leaves start a'fallin.

The really cool thing about the development process is how Lego has tapped the hardcore Mindstorms programming community for advice, testing and feedback which in turn is actually being incorporated into the product design. The orginal robot kit from 2000 was not that great but a lot of talented and smart people took those limited bits to amazing heights - sort of how we put a man on the moon with less computing power than what is in a regular cell phone. Now those same people are now working with Lego to ensure that the NXT kit is friggin fantastic. This is not an open source product and project though - Lego is keeping all proprietary data and knowledge and Lego is the one making the money here but that to me, and to the developers helping, is okay. Its better to have someone to turn to do, to own the factories, to handle packaging and shipping, etc. Sort of how RedHat sells Linux in a way. Everyone is just happy that the end product will be the best that it can be because the global knowledgebase has been tapped in order to make it so. I have signed up to be a Lego Mindstorms NXT Pioneer and will find out some time in February whether or not I'm picked to write article, post entries and build robots as a beta tester. I am sure I have no chance, there are only 100 Pioneers, but as NY Lotto used to say, "Hey, you never know."

The GeigerPod

This GeigerPod, an iPod inside of a Geiger counter, is simply fantastic. I love when people hack one device and make another one out of it, like when people turned their XBox's into Linux machines or when Chris made a rechargable iPod battery out of an Altoids tin. Check out the entire Flikr set of the retrofitted counter. I say well done JavaMoose!

Via Slashdot

Texting "GOOGL"

Topping my "I should have bought this stock at the IPO" list for the past few weeks has been Google. One of the reasons is because it continues to release cool apps. Take Google SMS for instance, which enables you to send queries as text messages over your mobile phone or device and easily get precise answers to your questions. No links. No web pages. Just text � and the information you're looking for. Try the demo and see how you can:

• Get local business listings when you're on the road.
• Obtain driving directions to get from point A to point B.
• Find movie showtimes and theater locations.
• Check weather conditions and 4-day forecasts.
• Study the latest stock quotes.
• Get quick answers to straightforward questions.
• Compare online product prices with ones you find in retail stores.
• Look up dictionary definitions.

Its pretty cool. If you are stuck in traffic during the holidays, play around. Tangentially related, I wonder if "texting" an approved way of referring to sending someone a text message, as in "I'm texting it to you now." What do you think? I vote "yes."

Coq Roq

Now this is getting just plain silly: First the Subservient Chicken, then the Sith Sense and now Coq Roq - damn I wish I worked on the Burger King interactive account! Coq Roq is the web site for a made-up band called "Fowl Mouth" - its a great flash site that advertises BK's new Chicken Fries (I can feel my arteries clogging just having typed that). Check out the gallery area; I think it's neat how it switches from picture to picture.

Thanks Todd for sending this to me - and to think I thought Coq Roq was a gay band...

UPDATE: �What kind of messages does this site send out, especially when it�s backed by a huge corporation? Ultimately, what it�s doing is sexualizing fast food" is just one opinion out of many about this campaign. After the jump, read about all the controversy Coq Roq has kicked up

From AdAge:

BURGER KING'S COQROQ.COM TRIGGERS CONTROVERSY
Some Sexual Double Entendres Removed From Site Overnight
July 26, 2005 by Kate MacArthur

CHICAGO (AdAge.com) -- Even though it has suddenly removed sexual double entendres from its new Web site, CoqRoq.com, Burger King today denied it had received any complaints from consumers or other outside groups.
This screen grab was taken in the 'Gallery' section of Burger King's CoqRoq.com site yesterday. Today, the 'Groupies Love the Coq' caption was removed. The company denies it made the changes because of outside complaints. The CoqRoq.com site is linked to Burger King's main Web site and is promoted in a new Burger King TV commercial.

Crispin Porter
CoqRoq.com, created by Crispin Porter & Bogusky, Miami, the agency that created Burger King's Subservient Chicken site, is designed to look like the kind of crudely outrageous Web site created by a rock band.

The Web site's double entendre name, along with the lyrics, demeanor and the sophomoric presentation of the fictitious heavy metal group, projects the illusion of something designed to offend the sensibilities of mainstream adult America.

Among other things, CoqRoq.com, which is linked directly to the main Burger King Web site, includes photo galleries with Polaroid-style shots of young girls with the handwritten captions "Groupies love the Coq" and �groupies love Coq." Since the site went live yesterday, those captions and others have been erased from the online materials. AdAge.com took screen shots of those removed materials yesterday afternoon.

�Nothing on the site has changed because of any reaction to the site,� said Edna Johnson, senior vice president for global communications for Burger King Corp., which is owned by private equity firm Texas Pacific Group. Mrs. Johnson said photo cutlines were written and then assigned randomly by computer software that as since been disabled. She said malfunctions in the Flash and XML programming were responsible for putting the "Groupies love the Coq" on the photos of the young women.

No complaints
Ms. Johnson said neither the marketer nor its agency, Crispin Porter, had been contacted by any groups. �We haven�t had any complaints. The site launched slightly more than 24 hours ago and the changes are typical of a new Web site that is being tweaked.� She added that a misspelling of Burger King had also been fixed.

But even industry insiders were surprised by the gaffe of the CoqRoq site, with some noting that the bar, first raised first by Burger King�s subservient chicken and later upped by the Paris Hilton erotic carwashing spot for CKE Restaurants� Hardee�s and Carl�s Jr., has pushed the limits of what fast-food marketers will do for attention.

�There�s a fine line between getting the attention of the core target and risking offending the masses,� said Chris Carroll, senior vice president and director of marketing for Subway�s Franchisee Advertising Fund Trust.
The lead singer of Burger King's ficticious rock band CoqRoq is named Fowl Mouth.

Ralph Norman Haber, partner, Human Factors Consultants, an expert on subliminal perception and subliminal advertising, said there�s nothing subliminal in the site or its advertising and that both males and females appear to be targeted equally.

"As far as I could see both sides of each one of these comes in for being the target,� he said. �Everybody is picked on and it�s kind of fair game. I think it�s probably an effective ad. From my point of view I thought it was very creative.�

However, outsiders are asking how a corporation of Burger King's stature could have approved the use of such a concept.

'Offensive in general to families'
�Just the name Coq Roq in general is offensive to families,� said Aliza Pilar Sherman, an authority and author on women and the Internet and founder of cybergrrl. �I can�t imagine if parents of a smaller child saw this. They�d say they don�t want their child exposed to this. Where do we as responsible individuals draw the line? Of course there�s freedom of speech but does that mean Burger King should be perpetuating stereotypes, negative attitudes and demeaning behavior to the market.�

�Burger King is perpetuating a crude type of stereotype,� agreed Dr. Martha Allen, director of the Women�s Institute for Freedom of the Press. �They�re serving junk stereotypes degrading and harmful to women.�

The fact they adjusted the site indicates "they�re crossing the line and they know it in some sense,� said Pat McGann, director of outreach for Men Can Stop Rape, a group that works with young men to foster healthy relationships with women. He called the entire site an example of material that confuses men about what it means to be a man.

Sexualizing fast food
�What kind of messages does this site send out, especially when it�s backed by a huge corporation?� he asked. �Ultimately, what it�s doing is sexualizing fast food."

Fun with FireFox

I use FireFox as my web browser as much as I can help it - there are still some sites that are better viewed using IE but that number keeps falling - because its so wonderful. I love the tab based browsing and the bazillion of other neat features that FireFox offers. Today, I was checking out the various extensions offered after reading about a social networking plugin on Slashdot and found the following fun (to me) plugins:

• The Litany Against Fear: adds the text of "The Litany Against Fear" from Frank Herbert's Dune series to your brower. You go to the "tools" dropdown, select "I must not fear" and an alert box pops up with the full text. I memorized this quote in high school and it means a lot to me. I recite it before each and every athletic game I play. It is sort of responsible for a burn on my left hand. Now its in my browser. Sweet.
  
• TorrentBar: BitTorrent File Search Toolbar for Firefox. Allows to search numerous sites in a matter of minutes for needed torrent files. Nuff said.
  
• ForecastFox: adds Accuweather forecasts, which are so much better and more accurate than Weather.com forecasts, into your browser. Weather nuts will love this one.
  

Search Engines In The News: Part II

A little over a year ago, I posted about a number of interesting search engines that haven't gotten combined the amount of press that Google alone has garnered. Today, the NY Times had an article about search engines which provided two more interesting engines that I felt compelled to list. Here they are:

• MrSapo, a bizarrely named but extremely useful engine because it allows quick, easy comparisons of the results of the same search on 45 different search engines. Using a DHTML interface, you toggle between the various engines. Using MrSapo, I found a picture Stephanie took of what she thinks an older me will look like.
• The Aquaint project, whose work is unclassified but has gone virtually unnoticed in the news media. The name stands for "advanced question answering for intelligence," and it refers to a joint effort by the National Security Agency, the C.I.A. and other federal intelligence organizations. To computer scientists, "question answering," or Q.A., means a form of search that does not just match keywords but also scans, parses and "understands" vast quantities of information to respond to queries. In the real Aquaint program, the questions are more likely to be, "Did any potential terrorist just buy an airplane ticket?" or "How strong is the new evidence of nuclear programs in Country X?" Apart from whatever the project does for national security, its innovations could eventually improve civilian search systems, much as the Pentagon's Arpanet eventually became the civilian Internet. Of course, the dark potential in ever more effective search-and-surveillance systems is also obvious. I'll be keeping my eye out for more news on this project.

PlusDeck2, aka The Gadget I Must Have

The $150 PlusDeck2 is a cassette deck the size of an internal CD-ROM drive that pops into any desktop PC's 5.25-inch drive bay. It turns tapes into MP3's - or, for true retro music fans, record MP3's onto blank cassettes. Yes, you read that correctly. Check out the picture below:

It's best feature? Why, validation for saving all my tapes all these years of course! As the NY Times put it, "pack rats who saved hundreds of tapes, to the annoyance of their significant others, will suddenly seem to be masters of foresight."

So very true. I just moved apartments a few months back and lugged all my tapes uptown, not even really knowing why, expect for the fact that I just couldn't throw them away. I must have over 125 great albums on tape that I'm just dying to convert to digital. I have tons mix tapes that I made through the years, like some off of Z-100 full off funny songs like "New Kids Got Run Over By A Reindeer" along with various "High 5 at 9" countdowns from the early 90's. I have a tape of me, age 4, reading a book and me, age 3, setting up blocks and them knocking them down (I wanted to hear how loud the crash sounded). I have an audio journal from a ski trip that I took with my aunt, uncle and cousins in the early 90's which to is me is hysterical. Basically, there is a virtual treasure trove of music and audio now sitting at my finger tips and I cannot wait to get this device and convert these babies into mp3s. I need to order this ASAP.

The Sith Sense

Challenge Darth Vader to a game of 20 questions he likes to call The Sith Sense. My object was an radish which he guessed on the 17th question. Once again, the agency handling the Burger King account has developed a seriously cool viral concept. I especially likes the effect when Vader shakes your screen. Cool stuff.

Thanks Scott

A New M.A.A.P. of NYC

M.A.A.P. is short for Massively Authored Artistic Project and is a succinct way of describing what Yellow Arrow is all about. Maybe you have seen one of the dictinctive yellow arrow stickers around the city and didn't know what it was. Here is a quick rundown from the site itself:

"Participants place arrows to draw attention to different locations and objects -- a favorite view of the city, an odd fire hydrant, the local bar.

By sending a text-message (SMS) from your mobile phone to 1.646.270.5537 beginning with your arrow's unique code you associate it with a short text -- messages can range from literary quotations to personal commentaries to game-like prompts to action.

When another person encounters the arrow, he or she sends the code to 1.646.270.5537 and immediately receives your message on their mobile phone.

Through this location-based exchange of text-messages, the Yellow Arrow becomes a symbol for the unique characteristics, personal histories, and hidden secrets that live within our everyday spaces."

Michael Shanks posted about this "global public art project, urban game, and tool for collaborative experimental travel" in August, 2004 and Wired picked up the story around that time as well. Since then, it has only gained momentum and today when I got an email from Yellow Arrow, I thought I would share this project with those that read this little blog. So, sign up, get some arrows and tag the city your way!

Sneaky Yahoo Might Be Tracking You Around The 'Net

Yahoo is now using something called "Web Beacons" to track Yahoo users around the net to see what you're doing and where you are going - similar to cookies. Yahoo might be recording every website and every group you visit. They say that, "Yahoo! uses web beacons to access Yahoo! cookies inside and outside our network of web sites and in connection with Yahoo! products and services." I'm not happy about that and have opted out. You can too. Here's how:

1) Log into your Yahoo account and take a look at their updated privacy statement

2) About half-way down the page, in the section that refers to cookies, you will see a link that says web beacons. Click on the phrase web beacons.

3) That will bring you to a paragraph entitled "Outside the Yahoo Network." In this section you'll see a little "click here to opt out" link that will let you "opt-out" of their new method of snooping. Once you have clicked that link, you are exempted. Notice the "Success" message on the top of the next page. Be careful because on that page there is a "Cancel Opt-out" button that, if clicked, will *undo* the opt-out.

Thanks Chris for calling this to my attention

New Star Wars Videogame

There is new Star Wars video game being advertised on TV a lot these days. It's called Stars Wars Battlefront and it looks pretty good. I went to the product site to check out some screenshots, watch a demo vid and generally review it. Although I rarely play my PS2 these days, I have to admit that I will probably rent this game and/or buy it because it seems pretty damn cool. The flash site is decently robust and its neat how its got a music player which streams classic star wars tunes. Check out the requisite AIM icons - the characters are very nicely rendered as pixel art. Some LucasArts games have crappy game play so I'm hoping that this one is good. If I actually do rent/buy/play it, I'll post an update and a review.

Video Game commercials

If you've been pining away to see a replay of a video game commercial from the last few years, this fan site has them. I mean it, they have over 1600 video game commercials from across the globe. As the site says, "almost 90% of these commercials come from Japan and look very very very ODD." I 100% agree. I love it! So far, my favorite is the Sega Worldcup 98 clip (found in chapter 1) but then again, I need to go to bed and I've only watched a few.

I found a link to these commercials on the f.u.b.a.r. forums. When you find a funny video game clip, post a comment and let me. Happy viewing!

Search Engines In The News

It seems that everyone these days is talking about Google, about how it's impending IPO will give it a market cap greater than every the market cap of every other company in the world combined (okay, that is not really true), about how its one of the few companies to have its name turned into a verb (you are going out with her on a blind date and you haven't googled her?!) and how search is the true killer app of the web (how many true killer apps are there anyway?). What isn't talked about are the other search engines out there - no, not Ask Jeeves or MSN but the small guys, the ones that want to be the next Google. Appropriated from the 3/29/04 edition of Newsweek is this handy list of four cool search engines:

1. Vivisimo - clusters search results into meaningful categories. eBay uses it to sort auction outcomes.
2. Topix.net - Credit ex-Netscapers for the ability to automatically build pages around 4,000 online news sources.
3. Coneteq - A Lebanese project (to be launched later this year) will let you search products by brand, price and location. NOTE: This may get my mother to finally start really using the 'Net
4. Feedster - Allows searchs of the thousands of personal web logs (this this one) and ranks results by dates
5. Grokker - Plugs queries into the major search engins and uses home-cooked algorithms to analyze the pages and organize them into cagegories.

CGI: is there anything you can't do?

My friend Chris sent me this link to me today at work. Its the trailer for a new Playstation 2 game that is due to come out in the States sooner or later. Overall, it is just a fantastic little movie and definitely worth a view. The end to me is the best because I could have sworn that the characters shown were actually real actors who were filmed. That is not the case - they are CGI representations of those actors.