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March 19, 2007

Mobzombies video on Gametrailers @ 2:15 PM

Just noticed that the Mobzombies video that Aaron and I cut last week at sxsw got posted on gametrailers.com, which is pretty cool, but also pretty weird. It's a little strange seeing it juxtaposed against what I would consider like, normal Game games (right after a new Prince of Persia thing???), but a cool nonetheless. It's been viewed a bunch of times at this point, Here are some of my favorite comments:

"Ooooookaaaaayyy. Looks kind of like a rip off of the original Gauntlet"

"Awesome! This is almost as much a godsend for pedophiles as DS Chat! "Over here, little boy, I'll save you from the zombies!" lol...."

"haha that looks freakin awesome.. gotta watch out for fat kids runnin around though"

"Wow did I just teleport to the 80s terrible"

"Graphics look really bad for a PSP game."

posted by will | comments (0) | permalink

November 13, 2006

mobile monday @ 8:54 AM

Just a quick note for anyone interested: mobile monday is tonight (monday), themed around Location Based Services (LBS). I'll be presenting some ideas regarding Asynchronous LBS.

posted by will | comments (0) | permalink

October 24, 2006

outside.in + open geodata rant @11:28 AM

This is definitely the most interesting content aggregator I’ve seen in quite some time, mostly because it takes Local Content - mainly posts from local bloggers - and doesn’t try and just plop it on a map. Outside in realizes that the content is the critical thing, and that the location information is secondary - a way to filter a wealth of information into more managible chunks. As far as I can tell, the geo-location of posts is all done via zip code trickery, and some posts are tagged with numerous zip codes. A post I found from Curbed.LA for instance, is associated with 3 zipcodes, even though the post refers to a pretty specific area. Basically, it’ll do local filtering, but it’s not going to get you super close to things. In my mind, the map interface that’s up there, which makes it magically mashed up , is more or less without warrant because it’s an inefficient way of simply trying to change zipcodes.

Overall, I think the premise is totally spot on, if not totally obvious: blog posts should be geotagged according to the subject of the post, not the location of the blogger. My critique would be that the design is really not so great, in that it feels claustrophobic (for a portal site like this, the design should be more welcoming). The other main thing is that the data is not transparant, not even exposed by RSS feeds. Of course, I would say that’s an area where something like geotagthings has a leg up on this, even though it don’t have a super great portal design, or a wealth of automagically derived content.

for more, keep reading the full post here.

posted by will | comments (0) | permalink

September 15, 2006

Cruel 2 B Kind @ 1:31 PM

Jane McGonigal + Ian Bogost are debuting their new game, Cruel 2 B Kind at the Come out and Play Festival in NYC next week. The game sounds really amazing, especially in the way that they've made it really easy to Roll your Own instance of the game by just visiting the website and saying what date/time you want the game to begin. Sounds really great (I am getting more and more disappointed that Mobzombies had to pull out of the COAP Fest this year, nuts). More details here.

posted by will | comments (0) | permalink

September 7, 2006

Web-Based Toilet Fixture Companies @ 2:11 PM

One of the more immediately exciting kinds of toilet fixtures (like, maybe the stainless steel ones) is video. Served up as a smallish flash file, you can easily embed whatever video you want onto your own site. Youtube is serving most of this video up, and you can easily use their tools to encode your quicktime movie into a more web friendly file size. So you want to easily get a video on your blog? Those YouTube guys will give you want you need - but no bother actually visiting the YouTube site - then you might have to see their bad attempt to create a portal. How many times have you just gone to youtube.com to browse video vs. the times you’ve watched a video served from youtube on a friends’ blog.

But what about the more esoteric toilet fixtures? Like those brass bits that you don’t really see, but really make for some sweet toilet-usage. Well what about those huge boring databases of public domain real-estate data that zillow threw a nice UI on and rode to $32 million in investments. Why doesn’t the government clean that up, slap some nice web hooks on stuff like that and let people go to down. Or reduce property taxes and start licensing access to that data. The list of toilet fixtures goes on, from other flashy stuff - photos (like flickr or smugmug), events (upcoming or evdb), music data (last.fm) or places (platial) - to the more nuts and bolts stuff of geocoding data or geotagged urls (geonames, geotagthings), government census data in digital form, crime and fire info, etc.

more here.

posted by will | comments (0) | permalink

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