Slightly less negative on Facebook
What with the insane euphoria of the web 2.0 crowd having found something slightly less web 1.0ish than MySpace in the social networking space and the insane euphoria of the VC crowd having found a new poster child for massively inflated valuations, I’ve been trying to maintain sort of a cool distance from Facebook.
(While, naturally, having a profile that I hardly touch.)
But this morning an old buddy from school sent me a message. By old buddy from school, I don’t mean university or even high school. I’m talking elementary school.
Wow. I hadn’t even remembered his last name, but I had remembered Jaimie.
Reconnecting with someone you haven’t seen in maybe 20 years is pretty cool.
Serious games wiki
In my master’s course on educational technology venture companies we’ve been talking about serious games. I and a couple others from the class have posted our thoughts on a wiki: the serious games wiki.
Feel free to add to it!
Feedyes? Feedno! Finding a working YouTube RSS Generator
I’m trying to create a feed for a page that has no feeds:http://youtube.com/results?search_query=serious+games&search=SearchFeedYes is supposed to be able to do that … but annoyingly, the site continually has technical errors that prevent me from making a feed. First of all, it doesn’t show steps 3 and 4 … after showing steps 1 and 2. And secondly, after following the instructions in step 2, it tells me that the URL is invalid … after just using it to create a perfectly good list of recent videos.Arggh …Dapper has issues as well. In fact, in total, I probably spent about 45 minutes fooling around with FeedYes and Dapper before finding a service that actually worked …The best I found for YouTube RSS is actually YouTube RSS Generator, which looks decided low-tech but gave me a perfectly functioning feed in about 25 seconds.
Trying Google Reader
OK, I’ve moved my OPML to Google Reader from Bloglines and I’m going to give it a shot.Based on the last 15 minutes use, it’s probably going to stick.We’ll see …
This is the best simple explanation of a wiki I’ve ever seen
I want this …
But it needs Canadian financial institutions. Mint, please come to Canada!
iPhone in Canada, Please
Firefox rocks
Wow wow wow.It’s been about a year - an eternity in web terms - since I’ve seriously tried Firefox. I’ve been using Safari: it just has better aesthetics, and up till now has been significantly faster.However, I’ve just updated, and wow … Firefox launch time is a quarter what it used to be on Mac OS X.Dunno yet if it’ll be the one, but it’s going to get another long look from me.[ update ]Holy mother, the typography has improved on Firefox. Unbelievable. Poor typography - letters that looked like marching ants - was one of the reasons I could not live with Firefox (or Flock) a year or so ago.
MacSurfer update: grand old dame gets a facelift
Count me shocked.MacSurfer, the grand-daddy and still king of Mac news sites, has unveiled a new look, now in beta.Times have changed, mullets have gone out of fashion, Michael is no longer the king of pop, and tie-dye is out … but MacSurfer, the essense of web 1.0, has stubbornly remained completely and utterly static.So any update is a bonus.Major changes:
- 1-column to 3-column
- Font size for article titles is smaller
- Tabbed navigation (as opposed to no navigation at all)
- More add space (in the afore-mentioned 2 extra columns)
- Integrated search (not just a link)
- Archives
- Archives!
- Let’s say it one more time: finally, finally, archives! Now that great article you saw on MacSurfer but forgot where it was is findable.
- Translations (don’t get too excited, they’re via Google … “El Maco updating system blue muy excellent sofa” is a likely translation)
- Times when articles added
That’s a lot of change for a grand old dame … but there could be more.Social features like commenting, submissions, and voting might make MacSurfer less of a jumping-off site and more of a social hub … which I think would translate into significant value for its owners.At any rate: wow - great to see the change.
Virtual worlds, real economy
The world’s first economist studying a virtual world (more accurately: virtual universe) has delivered his first report:
This is the first Econ Dev blog on the economics of EVE. We are heading into unknown territory since there exists no standardized measures on how to describe and analyze an online universe, or if indeed there is a need to have new tools to describe virtual reality. Trade and industrial activities are an important part of EVE and therefore descriptive analysis of trend in quantity traded, price fluctuations and regional differences are always of interest to those participating in that business. In order to fulfill the expectations of pilots we need your comments on this dev blog and which parts are most interesting. Selected sections of this dev blog could be updated on a regular basis if the demand is there.Minerals are the basis of everything in EVE. Most things built in EVE require one or more minerals; some easy to get, others not so much. Minerals provide income for professional miners and newbies alike and no war can be won without having a good supply with which to build and equip an armada. The constant demand for minerals makes the market one of the most effective in the EVE Universe with huge volumes and thousands of trades on a daily basis. That is why examining the mineral market in some depth has been chosen as the topic for the first Econ Dev Blog (EDB).
Good news? Bad news? I don’t know … but it sure is interesting news.
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About
Sparkplug 9 is John Koetsier's blog on life, the universe, and everything,
but mostly the stuff you see big in the tags to the left.
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