The Gong Show

I don’t understand Facebook Fan Pages (and would love for that to change).  What’s the biggest thing that fan pages do for businesses?  Anyone have any examples of well-executed fan pages that a business would deem successful?

Quick List of Big-Pixel Games:

• Pixel Grower - Don’t let any pixels drop… watch your character grow fractal-like over time.
• Pixel - You’re a pixel that shoots other pixels. That description sounds like EVERY game, which means it’s the opposite of true because the experience is very unique.
• Small Worlds - Explore a world.
• Squareball - iPhone games.  Slide the world to move. Watch a video of gameplay to see if it’s your cup of tea.

I think a big part of my attraction to these games is they don’t try to do too much.  The is rarely a narrative or character arc because it’s hard to “identify” with a blob of over-sized pixels.  These types of games are often super-concentrated gaming paradigms that most gamers can instantly recognize and quickly get engaged.

Plus, I just really like pixel art.

Know of any other good games in this pixel-style that I should check out?

Why are all external links on Wikipedia marked as Rel=Nofollow? For those unfamiliar, rel=nofollow means that search engine web crawlers will not follow these links; therefore, they will not benefit the destination site’s PageRank in Google.

I know the obvious arguement for marking Wikipedia external links as rel=nofollow, which is that it will prevent spammers from using Wikipedia’s PageRank for their own benefit by pointing a bunch of Wikipedia external links towards their own spam sites.

But, that argument is lame because spammers already have PLENTY of incentive to make a bunch of external links to spam sites on Wikipedia.  Wikipedia is a traffic firehose because of all its visitors, and each external link a spammer points to their external site will generate a bunch of traffic for them. So, I don’t think marking external links as rel=nofollow discourages spammers.

Instead, marking external links as rel=nofollow just punishes legitimate sites that should rightly benefit from being linked to by Wikipedia.  For example, The United Nations Human Rights Council page on Wikipedia references the official website for this organization in the first link of the External Links section of the page.  Yet, the UN Human Rights Council receives no PageRank benefit for that mention. If anything, the official site of this organization is more canonical than even the Wikipedia page itself and deserves to rank highest for a search on this term.  So, it should really receive the benefit of Wikipedia’s link.

If I thought rel=nofollow actually discouraged spammers at all, then I could understand Wikipedia’s decision, but I really doubt there’s any benefit to spam prevention, so I would love to be able to remove the rel=nofollow attribute whenever I make an external link while editing Wikipedia.

There’s a WSJ article today which credits Barney Frank with sparing venture capital from SEC registration and “systematic risk” testing.  That’s great news, and I think it makes a lot of sense because VC is not leveraged, doesn’t use derivatives, etc…

But, I wonder if the fact that Barney represents Massachusetts 4th congressional district had anything to do with it…  the 4th district overlaps part of the 128 Beltway, which is littered with VC firms.  I’m sure that, as a percentage of overall VCs in the country, Barney is the directly elected representative for a fair number of them.  I doubt this overlap had a significant effect on Barney’s decision, but I’d be curious if it came into consideration at all.

Sergey Brin wrote a great op-ed in the NYT regarding the Google Books settlement and the concept of a library that will last centuries. Here the link: http://bit.ly/MluIK (writing on an iPhone, so I can’t hyperlink that URL).

Sergey’s column is very insightful, but it makes one core, implicit assumption at the outset which I think is a bit controversial: he assumes that data rot is worse when the data is stored in a physical, analog form than when it is stored in a digital form. In other words, he assumes that when your high school English class final paper is stored digitally instead of in physical form, you are more likely to have the digital form than the physical form 10 years later.

This is not obvious to me, and often untrue in terms of the data I have kept over the years. I don’t know which form of data rot (physical or digital) is worse, but I do know geeks are prone to thinking that a digital solution is better simply by virtue of being digital.

Physical data rot is usually due to misplacement, destruction, natural disasters, spills, theft, or plain careless treatment. Copying physical data is harder than digital data, so physical data is typically not protected by geographic redundancy.

But, digital data is subject to all those same problems (because digital data is manifest physically in a laptop or hard drive which is subject to physical issues). Additionally, digital data is subject to viruses, magnetism, and general human error (Ever run rm -r on the wrong directory? I have.)

I trust Google to preserve data more than I trust the Library of Congress, but not solely because Google will work digitally. Data rot is a fun problem with often non-obvious loopholes, and I bet the Sys Architects at Google who get to solve it really enjoy their jobs.

When Pitchfork redesigned their site earlier this year, they baked LaLa widgets into all their track and album reviews.  This means that you can stream the entire album being reviewed, for free, right on the review page.

It’s really too good to be true. I do not use those words as an expression; I think it’s actually TOO GOOD to be true because I am shocked this is a sustainable model. Perhaps it’s not.  There is a small catch, you can only stream a song from LaLa once before it you are prompted to buy additional access to it for subsequent plays, but I still can’t get over the fact that I can listen to an entire album while reading the album review, for free.

I’m streaming the new Girls album as I write this post, right after I finished reading the review.