Archive for the 'Web' Category
Legion of Rock Stars
YouTube is a treasure trove of cover artists, remixers, parodies, mash-ups and everything else. On occasion you might hit the jack-pot and find a hidden gem amidst all the usual quality content. Something that transcends bad. Legion of rock stars, as can be found in fibbocs video channel, is one such stand-out. It’s a “cover band” that does such lousy job with the source material that it becomes oddly hilarious. And it’s a mother lode: there’s 178 of these videos.
Highly recommended: Mother, Total Eclipse of The Heart, You Sexy Thing, Ghostbusters, Sweet Dreams, and Evenflow.
Legion of Rock Stars‘ site describes their style as:
Legion of Rock Stars (LRS) pioneered Pure Pleasure, in which the band listens to original recordings of classic rock and pop songs on 30db noise-blocking headsets, and then plays along.
Freed from the shackles of practicing, LRS focuses instead on bringing the excitement of a large stadium rock show to the intimate arenas in which it performs.
I’m excited, but mostly for this cover of the The Good, The Bad and The Ugly theme:
Facebook, Game Platform
Marek Bronstring’s post Why the next big web game could be on FaceBook or MySpace covers a lot of what I’ve been meaning to write (he saves me the hassle of doing it myself!) ever since the announcement of Google’s OpenSocial API.
Though I have an account I’m not a big fan of Facebook. That “social software” kind of networking has little appeal to me and feels superficial (why send a message through a third party site when you can just send me an email?). What I do like, though, is the Facebook platform and its API. It lets me stay active on Facebook and keep the friends on there informed of my web going-ons without ever needing to actually use Facebook. Through various applications and tools, my profile automatically grabs my latest weblog posts, my del.icio.us links, my Flixster movie reviews (a service I semi-used before Facebook but now often use through Facebook) and my flickr photos. At this point, I log onto Facebook only for Scrabulous.
Scrabulous is a Scrabble ripoff game that you can sign up for and play against other people online. Once Facebook opened its API to developers the makers of Scrabulous seized the opportunity and began to integrate their service with Facebook’s. if you do use Facebook, then all you need to do is add the Scrabulous application to your account and then you can immediately see who amongst your friends has it installed and you can start a game with them right there. You don’t need to sign up on their website and segregate yourself from your social network friends since it seamlessly integrates into the experience. This is great. Facebook is a game platform [1]! That’s something that’ll get more use from me than a social platform.
Meanwhile, all other game networks exist as closed gardens. You have your XBox Live friends and a whole other set for Steam or PSN. Maybe some people are on two or three, though sometimes with different user names. You can only access data and management functions while connected to the network and the best you can hope for outside of it is a gamer card or some stats — none of it standard or uniform.
It would be nice if all these game platform holders could decide on a standard or, at the very least, allow a certain degree of openness. It would be nice if I add a real life friend with an XBox account into Facebook that they would be automatically added to my own XBox Live friends list. It would be very nice. It’s the kind of thing that OpenSocial, or any open system, would be great for. Unfortunately, for everything to work there needs to be a level of participation from all platform holders and that’s not going to happen. The game console makers like their closed gardens. The chances of an open console game network happening are about as remote as an open hardware platform: not gonna happen[2]
The best we can hope for is something new. A new game built on top of all these social networks. The userbase is there. The technology is there. Somebody just needs to make an investment.
Edit: Guardian games gets in on this.
- Facebook is the new AOL, after all.
- The 3DO doesn’t count.
- Microsoft has been expanding that connectivity a lot — you can log into Messenger and talk to your MSN friends while playing a game on your 360 — so I’ll give them credit for this.
delicious milestone
A milestone of sorts as I recently bookmarked my 5000th link in my del.icio.us feed, and that link was to Avatar Machine (in reality, the 5000th link was added over a week ago but that was counting links I marked “private”, this is the 5000th public facing link). That’s almost four links per day for four years.
This, along with Gmail, is the one web application that has really struck a chord with me and I can’t ever see myself not use it. That is, unless they start requiring Yahoo logins. *ahem*
I can pin-point the exact moment when I discovered del.icio.us and started using it: a dyslexic post by me in Metafilter, complaining about the lack of subcategories. This was before I “got” it. Before the tag concept, which was still pretty much new at the time, became so obvious. Also before tag intersections and bundles and all those minor, but very drastic, features were implemented. But the idea of del.icio.us seems like common sense now so here’s hoping to another 5000 more!
And of course, as I write this I get an invite to yet-another-web-app #48. My new profile on pownce (I don’t know if you need to be registered to see it). I don’t get the point of this one — is it a love child of Twitter and SendSpace? — but maybe I’ll be struck with an epiphany after some usage. Or I’ll sign up and forget it. It’s hard to say.
Video Unavailable
I was browsing my “Music videos” playlist on YouTube the other day and I was amazed at the number of dead videos. LARGE image follows.
Information Overload
There came a time, many months ago, when I realized that the wealth of information that I had subscribed to had become unwieldly. There was so much to read and watch that it became a fulltime job keeping track of it (which, you know, cut out time to actually read and watch it all.) At any given time, my Bloglines account had in excess of seventeen thousand unread entries. My so-called “shrinkwrap shrine” of games and movies (in other words, those titles purchased but never even opened) was piling up. The emails from the four high-volume mailing lists that I’m subscribed to with my work account are deleted and never read. Podcast subscriptions languish, unplayed. I’m paying a monthly fee to Zip.ca to have a movie sit on my counter, unwatched. I’m paying a monthly fee for Gameaccess. And my stack of unread, but fully purchased, books is demanding a new bookshelf.
Enough is enough. I have to do lists about finishing to do lists. It’s time to start fresh.
I’ve exported my subscribed feeds as an OPML file (for future reference) and purged everything from my Bloglines account. I’m canceling my online rental accounts before the end of this month. And, hopefully, I can start at the backlog of media that I already own. I’m still anticipating Crackdown for the 360, but the next game I write about might very well be Mercenaries or Way of the Samurai. Or, if I want to get real old school, I can dust off my disc of Carnage Heart.
Wild Light - Mount Sims
After buying and watching the Massive Attack Eleven Promos DVD, I went looking for some other music videos to pass the time and came across Wild Light - Video works by Tobias Knipf. His two videos for Mount Sims (never heard of them until today) are great.
One of them, for “Ashes”, is really nothing more than an interpretive dance sequence and the other, for “Failling Up”, is nothing but rain hitting a puddle for the length of the track. But there’s something about them. The way they accentuate the music and the mood and the way they are shot makes them more than the sum of their parts. They’re fairly minimal, but they work well. I like.
(And Karmacoma is still, after all these years, my favourite Massive Attack video.)
Dark Room
A little late on this, but Dark Room is the coolest tiny simple freeware app that I’ve seen in a while. Functionally, it’s more bare than Notepad. It doesn’t do anything but take text input and save it, but it’s the idea behind it that deserves merit. A writing tool that removes all distractions and just leaves nothing between the writer and the text.
Of course, such a distraction free environment is illusory. The whole of your music library and all those episodes of that TV show that you downloaded and the entirety of the internet is just an Alt+Tab away. But psychologically, Dark Room remains interesting and, hell, I managed to write more in that one application today than I have all month so something must be working.
A constant struggle.Of all those distractions, YouTube is likely the most time consuming. It is “Hinterland Who’s Who” spoofs and whatever the fuck this is and sports highlights showing the most ludicrous play in a hockey game in years (Video — funny enough, of the top eight most viewed sports videos for the day, seven involve that play) and music videos. It’s amazing that anything gets written at all.
Open Letter to YouTube
Dear YouTube,
you have amused us greatly with your SNL clip videos (which get pulled down due to legal threats) and your “Snakes on a Plane” trailer (which got pulled), and all your other and future videos that will be replaced with a This video has been removed due to terms of use violation
message. You cover the full gamut from videos of people geeking out to Guitar Hero on camera to videos of random people dancing to crappy music on camera. All the while you do this using Flash video.
I’m not going to make a judgement call on your decision to use Flash. It is what you chose and it is what I shall tolerate. However, you have made one annoying mistake. You spent all this time coding the site and coding this embedable flv player, yet you forgot one easy to implement thing. One thing that your competitor, Google Video, does do. One thing that *I* could code in five minutes for you guys: volume control.
Please add this feature. Your “all or none” volume button is very presumptuous in its assumption that your video is the only media I have playing on my computer. It’s not. I do not like having to adjust my system volume to view your video at a tolerable level when my system volume is perfectly fine the way it is. Please resolve.
Your viewer,
Mike Nowak
technorati
The top 5 tags at Technorati right now are:
- Islam
- Cartoons
- Bush
- Recensioni
- big dick shemales
Proving that spam is still as viable as it ever was. If you’re in the game of relying on other people’s content, as Technorati is, you are going to get gamed.
Yet Another Web App
Newsvine has gone into public beta and I’ve been playing with it a little bit today (Here’s a look at it).
Like many such apps, it’s an amalgam of other tools. del.icio.us meets digg meets google news meets weblog software. It’s got tagging, a user reward and moderation scheme, community interaction, rss feeds, and its own set of buzz words (you don’t post, you seed). It’s a solid, well designed app that’s going to grow fast. There are some issues with the interface and data organization, but those should be worked out during the beta.
The problem is that as more of such applications pop up, saturating the market, the less useful each individual one becomes. The more social services there are, the smaller the social network for each one gets; the more services that I use, the less control I have of my data.
I already use del.icio.us to bookmark and tag links. Some of those can be classified as “news.” Using newsvine would either segment those links between the two services or it would cause an overlap (cross posting). Either way, it means that more of my generated content is being seeded across the web across various services. I lose control of it. I lose the data. In the end, they lose their usefulness.
As I try it out, you can find me at n0wak.newsvine.com. I posted hockey stories there because I don’t post any of that elsewhere. More game commentary would border on redundant.
Regardless, if you want to try it out and want an invite, tell me.
The Virtual Earth — minus most of the Earth
Another month, another online map service. While Microsoft’s Local Live does have some very nice “bird’s eye view” shots, they don’t have any for this metropolis. But worry not. If you’re in Canada, you can still see some of it, so long as you don’t mind staring at Niagara Falls’ cheesy, slimey “strip”. Now there’s a way to get an impression of Canada.
The Falls is nice, though, even if it is poorly sliced in the other views (hit the cardinal direction buttons).
