Cruel 2 B Kind

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.

Web-Based Toilet Fixture Companies

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.