Lavonardo

How could the western civilization survive without Wrongcards - electronic cards that are equally inappropriate for every occasion.

A List Apart began a nifty-looking series of articles on getting started with Ruby on Rails.

Been intrigued by the concept for a while, and looking for a therapy project - will definitely look into this.

EDIT: OK, so it’s not a series, really… Just two articles in a row on the very same subject. Fooled me for a while.

Andrew Keen’s Cult of the Amateur so percolated to the top of the to-read stack based on Skrubu’s review.

Know thine enemy, and all that jazz.

Just got to love wikipedia for the breadth of the material - the recent “featured articles” have included such topics as Chrono Trigger (video game), Lisa de Giocondo (Leonardo da Vinci’s most famous subject) and the tomb of an antipope.

Can’t beat the feeling of getting accidentally educated.

EDIT 17.4.2008: Fixed the first link. Oopsie.

That’s why the Japanese have switched to using appropriate search terms in advertising. In faux search boxes in the ads themselves.

South Park goes free.
Every episode will be available on the web.
And the logic behind this move (by Trey Park and Matt Stone, the show’s creators) is nothing short of genius:

[we got] really sick of having to download our own show illegally all the time. So we gave ourselves a legal alternative.

Yeah, it’s seriously ad-plagued, but still a better way of catching up with the new episodes than trying to figure out when the finnish channels broadcast them.

… they want their “irrational exuberance” back. Right now.

No other explanation seems to be fitting for the rumored $400 million valuation for RockYou! (yes, the exclamation mark is part of the company name).

After all, providing an facebook-application that allows easy posting of static and live images just is a sure recipe for gigabucks.

The sadly-no-longer-available-in-Finland MIT Technology Review-magazine has put up their annual report on emerging technologies.

Some of the ideas are definitely high-concept, low-probablilty; such as reality mining, whereas some, like offline web applications are sensible off the bat.

The listing of previous years emergent technologies is worth a quick browse as well.

Ilkka Kanerva and Matti Vanhanen have been awarded with spoofed facebook pages. Not in the application itself, even though creating a page for a government official probably bears less severe consequences than pretending to be royalty.

Here’s just a tiny snippet of the secretary of state’s phony page since full takes don’t really fit in the blog’s layout (the full pages available here: prime minister, secretary of state).

Props to the author, this effort must have taken a decent chunk of time.

[ via Lotta Backlund. ]

Guardian has picked top fifty blogs across the whole spectrum.

Some on the list are familiar and expected, some come out of the left field utterly.

The Huffington Post

The top dog is a collectively written political blog. Which I have never laid eyes on before.

boingboing

The eclectic selection of topics covered by boingboing is reason enough to read it daily. And about a third of the odd links featured here originate there.

Techcrunch

Too Bubble2.0 for the most part, but occasionally brimming with insight. Daily read, or skim, actually.

Jason Kottke

One of the very first blogs I started reading regularly, and still do. I even aped my movie rating page from this veteran.

Dooce

Never read this high-end haircut blog.

Perez Hilton

U.S. celebs. Usually in a bad light. Couldn’t care less.

Talkingpoints Memo

U.S. politics. Slightly more interesting than gossip. But not enough to read.

icanhascheezburger

The site that gave us lolcats. And the pictured animals accompanied by stilted english are still enough to draw me in, day after day.

Beppe Grillo

Italian politics and comedy. Might be worthwhile if Berlusconi makes it back to top.

gawker

Another gossip site. And marginally more interesting than others. Not enough to attract, however.

Next batch of ten in a day or several.

The read-ratio for this bunch is 40%, with no new catches, and only one to be checked out.

Encyclopedia of Life seems to have kicked its startup troubles, at least the service seesm to be readily available. The first 25 demo pages on different organisms are interesting, but a negligible scratch on the surface of the whole.

GDC finished a couple of weeks ago, TED was last week, ETech kicks off today, and SxSW is next week.

That’s a lot of press releases to grind and read, not to mention sessions for attendees to sit in and try to craft intelligible blog entries of.

And I’m sure there’s indeed wheat among the chaff, but just haven’t been able to summon the energy to browse the presentations available.

The encyclopedia of life unveiled today crumbled almost instantly.

Sadly, it’s far easier to add capacity to a slashdotted web service than to the multiple threatened ecosystems.

In addition to the raging internet censorship “debate” - of which wise things have already been written.

Debate is intentionally quoted above, since argument-wise this is a case of shooting fish in a barrel, and does not resemble a real debate in any way.

In descending order of international visibility:

Fedora vs. dataportability: Red Hat’s C&D-letter to the newly minted dataportability organization has been tackled with an appeal to creativity - OK, so the logos are similar, let’s get a better one, instead of taking it to the court. A wise decision.

Filmihullu vs. hesari: Helsingin Sanomat published a very deep-drilling one pager last friday. The editors of filmihullu let loose a broadside against the whole movie industry (including criticism thereof). Later on, the interviewed trio were not pleased with the tone of the story, and have railed against its publication. I thought the article was on the harsh side on friday, and having had very limited exposure to Filmihullu, relying on other bloggers to provide insight into the situation is the easiest way to understand what’s going on. I’d bet that several letters to the editor will be published next week’s Nyt, but the damage is already done.

Timo Tolkki vs. Imperiumi: Timo Tolkki, the head honcho of finnish power metal icon Stratovarius has launched an unconventional publicity campaign for his upcoming solo album. Usually
threatening to sue people with arguments is doomed to fail. In this case as well, as the claims have already been proven hollow.

I’ve been waffling about putting some words out on the finnish authorities misguided censorship campaign, but haven’t really been able to write an effective paragraph, let alone a consistent entry.

Thankfully the local EFF chapter laid out the sorry state of affairs in a thorough piece.

EDIT: The sanest man in the finnish parliament also has written about this.

The 2007 Crunchies are here. And there’s something new to all readers amongst the twenty-odd categories. While lots of the categories were won by established (or at least well-known) players, amongst the nominees there’s new companies and products that’ll either evolve into household names or flame out already this year.

More targets for the insatiably curious amongst the readers:

• Internet Explorer’s not yet exactly reeling from the blows from superior browsers, so a few needles into a convenient voodoo doll would be appreciated.
• A group blog by science fiction authors has tens of authors, but not much content yet. It features Charles Stross and Jeff VanderMeer, so it bears keeping an eye out for.
• The Foja mountains in Papua yielded new discovered critters once again, this time a really big rat.

Yet another blog devoted on publicizing worthy advertisements cannot hurt.

• According to the Forbes Fictional Fifteen, Scrooge McDuck is the richest individual. Too bad the image used of the bird in question is of very low quality. Simpsons’ Mr. Burns clocks in at #6, and Lucius Malfoy at #14. On the company side, it’s extremely pleasing to see Infocom’s Frobozz Magic Company featured - especially after a decades long dry spell of new games set in the Empire.
• A long bet is settled, with blogs ranked higher than New York Times in search results in the top stories of the year.
• Practice safe surfing: use two browsers.