News: Holy Shit, Basically
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Tycho: I just read through one of the conduits of Leipzig gaming news, and was jolted by a piece of news: Xbox Live is going to be moving into classic board games. I don't mean, like, Chutes and Ladders or some shit - though I don't doubt that GrowPot420 would snap that up on day one. No, I mean like Settlers of Catan and Carcassone. Pillars of the tabletop gaming community, so to speak. This is probably the biggest news of that convention for me. Getting people together to play these games, or finding people to play them with at all can be a trying endeavor. This is near Goddamn optimal.(CW)TB
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Also: The sound of hacked dolls' heads. Read these stories and more from around the Web on News.com Extra.
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Also: DJ alert: Crack for music techies. See what people are saying on News.com Extra.
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Also: Windows worm travels with Tetris [News.com Extra]
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Tycho: The recently conducted Xfire chat has now been collated into this easy to digest transcript. In case you wanted to digest it. In addition, the latest page of our insane Prey project has now gone online. Just click the link on the left, for "We Have Visitors."  Also! Your mom is trying to get a hold of you. You should give her a call.(CW)TB
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Google buys a mapquest of its own. Also: Sharp takes us to the future of television in 3-D & hellip;.  PayPal finds a way to make amends for mistakes & hellip;. and more.
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Tycho: Gabe had to watch the other Gabe today, so we made the comic a day in advance. It's about the guy who wrote that ridiculous Mass Effect article. We decided to put it up a day early because, just as we predicted in the strip, he's taken a swipe at gamers. The young man quoted in his piece did not represent our community well, but locking horns with a professional liar would bring out the worst in anyone. (CW)TB
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roundup Plus: More colleges get cheap online music...Glitches hit some EarthLink-hosted sites...More money for fuel cells...Linux release features Windows support.
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I just woke up in Paris, it's 5:34AM here, but back in California, it still never ceases to amaze me, the day hasn't yet flipped. You guys haven't even gone to bed yet! Now that's amazing to me. What perseverence! Keep up the good work everybody.  I just started posting a couple of twits that really should be a blog post, so let's get started. First at some point, after a suitable period of mourning, I'd like to rasie the issue of what's to happen with Marc Orchant's web presence. Which of course is a way of focusing attention on all of our web presences.  None of us like to think of it, but truth is none of us are going to live forever. Yet if you read this, it's likely that you're creating a digital body that can and imho should continue to exist even after your physical body stops existing. People are humble, no one wants to come out and say their work has any value that's worth preserving past their death, but come on, we know that's not true. If Shakespeare were alive today, he'd be writing on the web. As would Hemingway or Faulkner, Vonnegut or Mailer, John Lennon or Dylan Thomas, Carl Sandberg or Robert Frost. Mozart, Bach and Beethoven. You think there isn't any great literature out there on the web? I wouldn't be so sure about that. What if there is? And what if a baby born today becomes a great creative force? Or what if there's a social disaster like the Holocaust? Did you know that there are preserved diaries from pre-revolutionary America? Writings of ordinary people can be of enormous help to historians. And if we believe in citizen journalism (I do) why not citizen historians? Shouldn't we be thinking out into the future? We should! With all possible humility, I'd like to tell you that a few days after I die my entire web presence will likely disappear. My servers require some attention from me from time to time. The first time that happens, poof, there goes 10-plus years of Scripting News, and all the docs for the OPML Editor and the OPML spec, the XML-RPC site, to name just a few. Anyway, within a couple of months it will all certainly disappear, unless someone pays my hosting and DSL bills. Maybe someone will, but isn't it ridiculous that that's what it depends on? And when my sites disappear so will my uncle's. He died in 2003. His site is still accessible because I keep it that way. When I die, who will will take over for me? I'm sure the world will survive without his writing, but why? If I love the memory of my uncle, and I do, what can I do to reserve a place for him in the archive of the future. It seems such a small thing, but it's most of what remains of his life.  And what of academics, Nobel Laureates and others? I know for a fact that a great university (Harvard) has no plan to protect their web-based work after they pass. It's so ironic that the web offers an archival solution for non-digital work, yet the web information is more fragile than the physical stuff. Preserving our digital heritage is going to require some foresight, some planning, but it seems possible and we surely can do much better. Marc's fate awaits us all. While we're still alive, there's still time to solve this problem. When we're gone, it will be too late. Part of his legacy can be that he helped focus us on this issue, and his life work could be a great test case. Do we want to see his work preserved? And if so, how will it be done? PS: The RSS 2.0 site will likely persist, because I gave it to Berkman, and then used it as a test case to learn about future-safing. It seems likely to continue to exist, knock wood, praise Murphy, as long as Harvard exists.
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The Obama Express. My latest piece on Huffington.  If you like it, please feel free to pass it on.  "cheesecake"
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It's not very often that you see something new in News.  News is not exactly new technology, but when personal computers came along, and then widespread networking, it created a whole new playing field for news, that has shaken things up for most of my life. Change comes in fits at starts. First there was the web, then RSS, and now I think we're on the cusp of another bit of change. If you want to see what I think it looks like, check out the home page of nytimesriver.com. But that's not the end of the story. A flat completely chronologic view of news probably isn't enough. And earlier this month at a meeting in NY, two engineers at the NY Times set me off in a new direction, with a very simple bit of advice. They told me to look in the HTML source code of their stories. When I did I saw they had applied a taxonomy to their news flow, and this opened the door to what I would like to show you today -- an outline view of the news.  http://nytimesriver.com/outline/  I believe it's fairly self-explanatory.  The topics are arranged in order of frequency in today's news.  In a previous rendering, the stories were shown in a histogram, but this view I think is much better. You can still see how many pieces relate to the indicated topic, but by clicking on the plus next to each topic, you can actually see the headlines and descriptions, and if you want more you can click through to the full stories. (Initially, the outline was sorted by frequency, with the most frequently occurring keyword appearing first. I changed it, based on feedback, to be alphabetic.) Now, there's still more to do, I showed this to a number of people during the weekend and got some excellent clues on ideas to pursue next, and I will do that. Further, in the process of exploring this, I've been shown the work of other developers who discovered the keywords on their own, and one in particular is very interesting. I'm hoping that these projects will come public so I can show them to you and tell you what I think they mean. This is what I live for, professionally -- the sense of being somewhere with great unexplored potential, a virgin landscape of the intellect. I'm never happier than when I get to play in such a place.  Om Malik: A new way to view news. Please comment on the screen shot page.
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Obeying the courts, Windows will no longer have a Media Player in Europe. Also:  Monsanto buys another seed maker & hellip;.  Robot soldiers ready for Iraq & hellip;. and more.
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Tycho: Keek directed me to a radical (and potentially even "badical") article on BioShock over at Gamers Wif Jobs. I've been wondering about the recent PR shift the game has gone through, because I don't just keep hearing that it is a "shooter first," but I keep hearing specifically that it is a "kick-ass shooter," even though it's a game where you learn about Objectivism underwater while helping jealous composers get revenge. I've never doubted that the game will be great, by whatever road it reaches that greatness. The recent WWE slant just had me curious about whether I'll be able to perform a suplex in-game. You may not think that is important, but it is totally important.(CW)TB
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Tycho:  Our newest comic is available here, regarding the blogger that Nintendo fired recently.  As usual, Gabriel and I disagree absolutely on virtually every point of this discussion, my own perspective favoring greater liberty while he presents a naked defense of fascism.  The two universal axioms we were both able to agree upon were that:
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Plus: eBay outlines policy on racist language. [News.com Extra]
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Tycho: Some of you have probably already heard it, since I put it up yesterday - but we're trying new hosting for the podcast, and I wanted to make sure everything made sense before I dropped it on the front page. The podcast is for Wednesday's strip, "The Ungift, Part Two." You can download it here, or subscribe to the feed here. The levels are a little crazy in a couple spots, for which I apologize. I think we've got those ironed out, now. (CW)TB
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Also: Microsoft plans new BizTalk release for this year. [News.com Extra]