Oulipo
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The CBC kid's site (cbc4kids — oy, what a project: don't ask) I worked on last year with Eric, Peter ♡ Hong and Jason Krogh (among others) got shortlisted for a Flash Film Festival at flashforward2003. You could vote for it in the people's choice thingy, but if you're smart you'll do what I did: vote for Grant Skinner's absolutely freaking amazing gModeler (UML modelling in Flash! Export XML documentation! Export AS code stubs!) or the sublime Fly Guy (also programmed by Jason Krogh).
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Further:

Games allow for an imposition of artificial utility on groups of people that keep relationships going. Since utility-based relationships are always more durable, more constant, and less stressful than emotionally-based relationships, providing this utility in so many new and more enveloping forms is the most remarkable thing these games offer. Who wants to play intramural volleyball when you can start up an economy or take over a third of the land? The sheer amount of shared accomplishment is something that most people won't get from their work.

—A., Waggish

p.s. Har har.
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threedegrees beta is now live. However, “The 3° beta requires a beta version of the Windows XP Peer-to-Peer Update.” I don't know what that is, but it sounds bad. I'll hold off until some reports come in ...
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Intramarriage linking: Caterina's last two posts were great: If you were (prokaryote) bacteria and O wonderful! O wonderful! O wonderful! / I am food! I am food! I am food!

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In2Gr8 Corporation. Hee. “With In2Gr8’s vast consulting experience and value-added, proprietary products and tool sets, our clients will have powerful, competitive solutions to drive their business past their competition.”
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Says Andre, “Let's Fucking Roll Already.” And via Andre, myHuman.org: “PFC Adrian Stokes of Riverside, 1st Brigade US Army, was killed during the Gulf War on June 19, 1991 ...”
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The people who don't understand why Google bought Pyra strike me as rather like people who, aftering watching a car pull into a gas station and seeing it fill up, stand around trying to puzzle out the driver's motivation.
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Hubs and spokes: “Through Game ∞ Neverending I found MetaFilter ...” & “I was unaware of the existence of blogs before i started playing GNE”.
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Perhaps my all time most favorite thing I've read about GNE on someone's site:

I have avoided MMOGs for a long time, since they had 'never finish your dissertation' written all over them. But finally I gave in. I chose a relatively safe one - the Game Neverending. To make a long story short - and to not tell a lot of other stories that I could - I got to be third level, at which point the easiest way for me to make money (and hence buy a house, become famous and happy etc. etc.) in the game was to bake pies. I'd go to the grocery store, buy some flour and butter and apples, and make an apple pie. Then I'd sell it to the local cafe, and make a profit from the sale.

I played the game pretty intensely (and I promise you, I am All About Intense when it comes to geeking out about this kind of stuff) for a week and then stopped. I've never been back. Jesus fucking christ - pies?! I've got a roundtable to organize, grant apps to get in, an RPG to write, a dissertation chapter to finish, a concert coming up, the Levinas reading group, reading Talmud with the Rabbi, reading Levinas with von Aschenbach, fucking putting up with Ali in rehearsal.... aggh! My own life is busy enough! Now I've got to make pies?! Click the 'buy ingredients' button fifty times and hour and then the 'make pies' button fifty times? Just to raise money to buy a house? No way, man - I've got rent and a dissertation in this world to worry about.

From a long post called Mars and Mansions (via Paperlane).
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Plus ça change: Steve Jobs in 1984 (short mpeg clip) — quelle ’airdo!
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Klaus alerts me that Vacherin Mont D’Or (AOC) is in at Les Amis du Fromage (he reserved two boxes to pick up this evening).

According to the Geneva Notebook, the cheese “can now [late autumn/winter] be found in almost every shop and supermarket in this area [Geneva].”

Oh, North America ...
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The Waldzell Glass Bead Game

The Glass Bead Game at Waldzell is a concretized version of the game described, in general terms, in Hermann Hesse's 1943 novel, Das Glasperlenspiel (English: Magister Ludi or The Glass Bead Game). Although Waldzell provides guidance in the form of rules of play, the central product is the Glass Bead Game Archive. The purpose of the Game Archive (which has a precedent in the novel) is to provide a single, easily accessible repository of completed games. For Waldzell, this repository serves both the Game directly as a source of structures upon which to build, as well as the Canon as a source of incremental growth and concensus.

See also CoreWave's Glass Bead Game and, of course, dmoz.

The Waldzell Zeroth-Order Game: “While the first assertion of the first move of a zeroth-order game is made simply by invoking two terms and stating the relation between them, all other assertions must be connected directly or indirectly to the first assertion -- and hence to each other. Two assertions are directly connected if they have a term in common. Two assertions are indirectly connected if there is a chain of directly connected assertions between them.”

Finally, Considerations for those who would build variants on Hermann Hesse's Glass Bead Game.

* * * * *

Hey Dirk, er, Matt, isn't it the mesh, the interconnectedness, and not the trails that we are building? (A trail is a view on the mesh, like a memex (“Consider a future device for individual use ... A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications ...”) is an individual's view on the world.)

Perhaps it's more like we/Google are playing a glass bead game (just not, generally, very well yet).

(p.s. Oh, imagine Everything₂ with just the right constraints and all the blather cut out.)
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GNE fan art, from Mina and Jaen, via that wacky reverisble thing. Goddamn web, huh? Whuf.
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Since if I don't take care of my googleputation, googreputation, gooputation Google reputation, who will?.Stewart Butterfield
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Congratations (was “wow”).
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I'm one of the judges for the Webby Award's Best Practices category this year.

(Update: “Best Practices” is defined as: “Sites demonstrating unparalleled excellence across The Academy's six criteria: content, structure & navigation, visual design, interactivity, functionality, and overall experience. Best Practices sites serve as an industry benchmark for the most current, innovative, and advanced practices in Web development.”)

I am suppposed to be getting a zeitgeist from my people, so, people, post away:



Done. The submittal form has been removed. Thanks to everyone who submitted a suggestion!
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Last year on this day: post > card.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.
— W.S.

Happy Valentine's Day. Love.
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(testing: ILikeGne)
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I got a review copy of Andy King's new book Speed Up Your Site: Web Site Optimization (book site) a few weeks ago and enjoyed poking around in it. Dealing with lots of optimization problems right now and it is nice to have resources like this available. And it is hardcore: optimizing to fit packet size, fer crying out loud. That's the spirit!

(Also, for a guy who doesn't generally review books, I have been getting lots of review copies: I neglected to mention Christina's Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web from a few months back — another book I really wish I had back in 1999).
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[Keywords used on AltaVista: homomerous, uranoplastic, starosty, sponginblastic, caudodorsal.]
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'Sims Online' Gives Creators a Painful Reality Check
“Even with broad media exposure, "The Sims Online" sold 105,000 copies, or only about a quarter of the initial shipment in December. Since then, 82,000 users have registered to play the game for the 30-day trial; of those, about 40,000 have run out of free time and are paying the monthly fee, Riccitiello said.”

Ouch. The article contains the third or fourth comparison to screensavers I have heard.
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Absolutely Absinthe (recipe)
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What do Karl Popper, Milton Friedman, the Myers-Brigg topology and Camille Paglia have in common? Look no farther than this handy diagram of The Sources and Influence of the Kant-Friesian School.
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Baghdad 2028 —“Yet something similar has happened before. Just this past year, four decades after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the remaining members of the Kennedy, Kruschev and Castro governments at last met at an historic conference in Havana. ” — a brilliant idea from Andrew Zolli and probably, for all its brevity, the most insightful thing I have seen or read about this conflict (via his bOingbOing guest blogger spot).
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AMF (Actionscript Message Format) is the protocol used by the Flash Remoting MX server to communicate with a Flash client. The protocol sounds great — it is binary so it saves bandwith, it is native to the Flash player so it doesn't require parsing (as would XML) and it allows you to share objects or pass other complex data structures between client and server without having to serialize on the server and reconstruct on the client (and vice versa).

Here's the thing: AMF is a closed protocol and no spec has been published. Macromedia wants about US$1,000 per CPU for the remoting server. A clever Flash/PHP developer has come up with a way of getting PHP to talk AMF, apparently by viewing a publicly available demo application on Macromedia's site.

So far no word from Macromedia about how they feel about this (developers are wondering) and in the meantime, an
AMF-PHP project has been set up on Sourceforge. If you can do it in PHP, then you can do it in Java or .NET (and then nearly the whole point of buying the Remoting server disappears).

The question: is it illegal to reverse engineer a communication protocol? (In this case, I can't find anything about reverse engineering in the Flash Player EULA except in the context of the player software itself, and nothing at all about protocols.) Anybody know? (Positive indications, but no answer yet from my Googling.)

(Update: Anil says reverse engineering a protocol clean-room is totally legal, citing the IM back and forths.)
('Nother update: Cory concurs, citing a large number of precedents, and Jason Krogh (who, by the way, did the swell programming behind Trevor Van Meter's ultra-cool Fly Guy) also agrees. General consensus is that it is all fine, but Macromedia can still change the protocol at any time. I'm not worried about this at all, since there is no way they could do that without breaking stuff that is made with their products. In the case of, e.g., IM networks, when the proprietary protocol maker controls the clients and the servers, they can make whatever changes they want, but Flash Remoting will be running on all different servers and clients around the world.)

Should we all feel free to start building applications around AMF? This would be a big leap forward for complex real-time in-browser applications. (Answer appears to be: yes.)
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(Remember to post notes on causation and events.)
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BlogNomic: A game of Nomic, involving weblogs. Kevan is clever. (via the newold WriteTheWeb)
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WIRED News appears to have lost the “Elsewhere Today” section that they've had at the bottom of the front page as long as I can remember. It was always my cannonical example for clients (back in the day, when I dealt with clients) of the principle that you need not be afraid of losing (ugh) “eyeballs” — give people good links and they will come back for more.

It was a great example and one of the very few news sites that actually pointed to other news sites for stories. I guess Terra Lycos suddenly got afraid of losing eyeballs? Weak. Very weak. (Update: Elsewhere Today is back now. It was temporarily replaced with a section called “In Case You Missed It” with links to older Wired News stories. Experiment that didn't pan out?)
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How could I miss Judith's birthday!? Happy Birthday! I am sorry!

(Two years and a few days ago, I went down to San Francisco, partly to attend a very special 30/30 birthday party for Judith. I came back with a date, went on a trip, and now I am married. Surely JZ is a Great Connector.)
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Since there are no anchors on Plurp for me to link to, I will quote the entry that I would have linked to: a good take on the AOL loss:

Blab. This reader sees humor in vast corporate tragedy. This is our kind of reader.

The AOL loss is pretty funny, really. According to the article you linked to, they took a $54 billion dollar "writedown" in the first quarter of last year ("we noticed the dotcom bubble burst"), and then another ($45 billion dollar) "goodwill" writedown at the end ("people think we're idiots"). The nicely symmetrical numbers add up to $99 billion. In actual money, not counting these little writedowns, I think they're claiming to have made like 5 billion after taxes during the year (although the article is amazingly muddy about when they're talking about the year and when they're talking about the quarter). Them intangible assets are so troublesome...

They should have auctioned off their good will on e-Bay. It just seems certain that they could have gotten more than negative $45B for it, doesn't it? Some wacky guy in Oklahoma, up late at night, figures he'll snatch up all of AOL's good will for, oh, twenty-five bucks?

Hey Martha! Wake up! I just bought all of AOL's good will for twenty-five bucks. Wait'll the Peterson's hear!

That's the kind of thinking that makes for a great executive. Hey, Steve: missed your calling.
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“The Internet is the greatest group-forming environment since the invention of land.” I love this line (from David Weinberger's ETCon talk description).
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We closed the prototype down just after midnight. That was a pretty amazing thing. People were crying on four continents. Last words.
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How many times did this BBC new story get sent to me today? Lots. (“Keen gamers can rejoice as US scientists are working on ways to make computer games that never end.”) Indeed!
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