Lavonardo

A couple of blogs that popped up and piqued my interest enough to keep reading:

• Uusi Renessanssi - Alex Nieminen blogs again (and provides a couple of nifty insights in the very first entries already).
• Tane.li - Just because the term “finnish serial entrepreneur” sounds so much like an oxymoron.
• Wil Shipley’s ramblings are interesting to read (even if I am not a big fan of delicious library).
• Russell Beattie blogs again. This time employed by Nokia.
• Jouni Nieminen has begun a very verbose blog on NHL, neatly coinciding with the first games of the season.

The myfootballcub.co.uk has gone ahead and fulfilled the dream of many armchair managers - the group now owns a bona fide football team: Ebbsfleet United F.C..

A team that’s currently not playing in the four levels of football league in UK.

But it’s a team nonetheless, even if the prospects of a six year rampage to the top of Champions League do sound a bit far-fetched.

At 35 quid the membership in the club is neither cheap nor uncomfortably expensive. But not yet attractive enough to pull me in. But it sure would be cool to visit Gravesend in Kent as an owner of the team. Never mind the fact that by the time there will be forty thousand others in the very same position.

It’s been a while since the last checking which new blogs have been subject of GETs lately.

• Hilavitkutin is the quintessential finnish generic gadget blog.
• Bldgblog is a fascinating blog about architecture.
• Risto Isomäki, the finnish environmentalist, in addition to just launching a brand new technothriller, has expanded his range to blogging.
• Blogging Ultima describes a gamer’s journey through the Britannian tales (and is thematically similar to Blogging Zelda covered back in july, sadly that seems to have been taken over by marketers).
• Juhapekka Tolvanen has moved on to a new site, and still deserved the lifetime award of the finnish blogging scene.
• I seem to have completely missed the start of the Freakonomics blog. Materials-wise it seems to be both frequently updated and as good as the book itself. And speaking of popular economics blogs, the Long Tail remains worthwhile as well.

Google knows no fear, it would appear.

How else could its recent actions be evaluated?

After all, within a few days, it has taken on two 800-pound gorillas: Nokia, with their open mobile phone platform and Facebook, with their open social networking initiative.

Keyword in both of the above is obviously “open”, but beyond that the analysis hasn’t really progressed that far.

The first truly high profile acquisition of a finnish company in a long long while: Google bought Jaiku.

Good luck for both parties - and the way’s now paved for the inevitable Twitter purchase. Yahoo? Microsoft? AOL?

Despite the massive increases in visitor numbers lately, this blog won’t attempt to go commercial any time soon. As a recent article in Hesari shows, blogging isn’t the way to financial success in Finland. Especially in a blog where most of the inbound surfers follow image links.

But then again, I never assumed that writing could provide an extra chunk of income, so that’s all right. For now at least.

Chris Anderson’s idea of a long tail was the subject of one of the best books last year.

Surprisingly, HP has taken an active role in trying to pull the tail much further. The sheer amount of data in archives puts all current efforts to shame.

Something off the side of the trawler.

• Yes, the whole american nation feels the pain of the wrong guy nearing Hank Aaron’s home run record.
• World Domination 201, a surprisingly lucid document from the lately very frothy keyboard of ESR.
• Songbird, an open source love child of iTunes and Firefox.
• Climate change accelerating evolution - sounds fishy, but apart from some clever accounting, the Smithsonian guys aren’t exactly the lowest-regarded scientists on the globe.
• Worst lyrics of all time - turns out that I had always mentally shuffled War Pigs lyrics to a more sensible direction, this tautology is terrible…
• A very upmarket moleskine jacket. I’m happy with mine as-is, though the spine does exhibit worrisome tendency to age less than optimally.
• Launch cost back in the boom: 5M$ and up,
  launch cost now: 12K and change. Things have changed. For the better, obviously.
• Social networking and the chasm.

Viasat and mtv3 failed to show the television ads from Superbowl, but no fear, as noted by Mr. Überkuul in previouscomments, Google Video/Youtube have got the entire collection.

The Economist’s venerable Big Mac index, an indicator of purchasing parity between nations, has a new sister.

The iPod index compares the price of a 2GB nano, and the results vary from 144 to 327 dollars - with Canada as the cheapest source and Brazil by far the most expensive. Finland, for the benefit of those calculating the score at home, places in the top third, unsurprisingly with a lot of other Euro-based countries.

An even more urban legendesque McDonalds-tidbit is that despite a common belief, the Golden Arches do not prevent conflict between McD-equipped nations.

And not light reading at that. Harvard Business Review has listed their ideas on what’s important in 2007.

While a lot of the topics on the list are nothing but fluff, there are interesting ones as well: continuous partial attention and user-centered innovation at the very top.

Cory Doctorow has a good piece in Forbes on making his entire bibliography available for free.

Indeed. His novels and short story collections are all available on his website. I’ve only read his debut novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, and found it both clumsy and filled with captivating ideas.

Being an old-fashioned reader, I’m not much of a reader from screen, so the rest of the books I will be picking up one by one - though not locally as the bookstores in Helsinki seem utterly unable to stock his books.

However, Doctorow is by no means the only author who has thrown down the gauntlet of attracting more readers by giving the books away for free.

Charles Stross‘ Accelerando has been available since last summer. And its downloadability has not been a disadvantage for its sales. It’s a novel that takes the future on a ride, and never lets up on the gas, hence the name. What begins as a conventional study of near future quickly turns completely unrecognizable.

The newest arrival on the scene is Peter Watts’ Blindsight, just out in hardback format, as well as available on his website.

Missed Chris Anderson’s offer of a free copy of the book for reviewers. Bought the book nonetheless, and will attempt to produce a review of sorts afterwards (and aim to do a better job than what happened with the still-pending entry on Richard Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class).

It’s been a while - here’s some things that are worthy a look, but not much more writing than a single witty sentence:

• What if Canada ruled the world? Worth1000 tells the tale in a couple of dozen images.
• Coolness in lego: Cthulhu’s island and the Stargate.
• I already subscribe to both Kari Haakana’s and Tero Lehto’s blogs. No surprise then to note that their jointly authored one is worthy as well.
• The annual 101 dumbest moments in business is here again.
• Amazing collection of High Dynamic Range images in flickr.
• Reveal for those embarrassing moments where you don’t remember how and where you’ve been surfing.
• Guy Kawasaki, an ancient Apple evangelist turned venture capitalist has started blogging. Some interesting and useful tidbits among the cubic fathoms of fluff.

A few that seem interesting enough to warrant a second look.

• UBERKUUL is the most eh… sub-optimal name for a small eternity. But in the age of content being the king, this one cannot be passed by. Interesting topics, good analysis thereof. Will return.
• There’s never enough time to read all the interesting books. Kirjasuositteluja will aggregate reviews from readers. Which may be a good thing, or not. There’s no accounting for taste. Good or bad.
• Long tail is a concept I very much support - good things are good things even when they’re old, outmoded and out of print. Chris Anderson, the originator of the term is completing a book about it for later publication. And trying out concepts and spotting media references in a related blog.
• Ball of Dirt is an aggregator of travel-related blog entries. Will come in useful once the travel bug bites start needing acute treatment.
• Voivod, one of the criminally under-appreciated bands of all time is in studio recording their eleventh album. The progress is documented in a blog. (And nope, I’m not a total rabid fanboy, not all of their albums are worthy of a classic-stamp; just the best few).

Incidentally, the entry numbering in Lavonardo headquarters got screwed up, this creatively renumbered entry picks up the slack. Do not worry about the missing entries. They are nothing like the missing 18 minutes of Watergate tapes. Yes, I am thinking about plunging into the waters of a properly managed blog, database backend and all. Thinking, not doing, for the time being.

Greg Stolze’s Executive Decision is out, and the 1000 bucks have been delivered to the red cross.

And Dennis Detwiller collected enough for the first part of the gigantic Future/Perfect (his blog does not seem to have easy access to individual entries).

Hooray. I’ll be showing up for more.

Otherwise I wouldn’t be holding brand-spanking new Delta Green material right now.

The constantly improving Escapist-magazine has not one but two extremely interesting articles in its newest issue. One on the current state of interactive fiction, the other on Planescape: Torment, still one of the best-written games there ever has been.

Slashdot (from which the previous was nabbed as well) provides a review of this year’s GenCon. However, it’s very shallow on content, and a lot of the named games have already been released. The ever-reliable GamingReview provides much better coverage.

Gamespot has a nice, albeit short, review of easter eggs in gaming. Ranging from classic to obscure, via the ego-stroking variant, it’s an interesting read. But the attendant forum just fails to work.

Dennis Detwiller’s ransomed Insylum is out. And the fund for the next one is open, and progressing towards the goal. The surprising success of the model has evoked a largish thread on the rpg.net fora. To a mixed response: the actual ratio between freeloaders and interested patrons is thus far unresolved. And yeah, I’m a card-carrying pledged member of the latter caste.

While the age of micropayments has not yet arrived, interesting payment models continue to surface.

A recent concept is the use of ransom model. In it a sum is named by the author (around the expected costs to generate the product), and contributions are calculated (with money kept in escrow) until the sum is reached. At that point the product is released for free (under an appropriate license, of course). If the target is not reached within a specified period, the funds contributed thus far are returned.

So what this really means is that the model is actually patronage in a distributed form. Where the distributed part effectively removes “you’ve got to be this wealthy to take this ride”-requirement, now anyone can contribute.

Meatbot Massacre by Greg Stolze was the first ransomed product that I know of. Was aware, wasn’t interested (it’s a “tactical miniatures game”), haven’t even looked at the final product.

However, with the arrival of Greg’s second ransomed game: …in spaaace!, the model saw a lot of discussion in the rpg.net fora, and Dennis Detwiller jumped into the game. Indeed, Dennis Detwiller, apparently the sole remaining Pagan Publishing guy. And he promptly kicked off not one, but two projects - both related to Delta Green, still one of my favorite shared halluc^W^W game universes. So from my perspective this looks to be a very interesting development indeed.

fundable.org seems to be the biggest player of the game, but by no means very big at all yet.

And for added value, NPR interviewed Greg Stolze (though there’s not much more exposure in the interview).

And gaming isn’t the only niche for ransom-model, as it’s used by at least one novelist as well. And there’s been funds and drives in the software industry. Probably the most famous was held for blender in 2002 to raise no less than 100000 euros.

There’s no wikipedia article on the topic yet. And in my quite sleep-deprived current state, I’m definitely not going to start one now.