Dude, these games are, like, old

I am just about to begin another semester of school, so my mission in these final days is to waste as much time as humanly possible. I've managed to keep IQ-lowering stuff to a minimum. When it involves the TV, it is something of quality like Renoir or Ozu. I read an entire series of mysteries by Robert Crais. Harry Potter...check. In fact, if you have finished Harry, check out the wiki. I had to use it a couple times just to figure out who the heck so-and-so was. Unfortunately, something brainless was bound in enter the scene in these dog days of Agosto: Rogue!

The 1980 UNIX classic lives on, now as an addictive java game. There are tutorials for the curious, but my overview goes like this: You are the @ symbol. You get objects that look like punctuation. You fight letters of the alphabet that represent monsters. Excited? Go there now: http://www.hexatron.com/rogue/

Paging Dr. Evil

Um, I don't think there is this much money in the whole world! Anyway, somebody is suing Michael Vick (the dogfighting ring-involved football player, for those living in caves like I am). It's a lot of money.

Web Awards, if they must

We humans like to give awards to everything. Back in the days of Infoseek (see previous post), there was some dumb logo people slapped on their websites that said "Top X% of All Web Sites" like anybody cared. The systems have changed, becoming more fluid and interactive, but the awards remain. Behold the 2007 Web 2.0 Awards, from your friends at the rank-crazy Seomoz.

The most striking observation of the list is that there is so much stuff that creates Web 2.0 and that is just the ones that actually registered in the rankings. If you actually tried to use all of these resources to the fullest extent you would have no life! Somebody should make the ultimate mashup and combine all of these wonder web utilities. I think I will be putting something up that links them all from my blog, essentially creating my own personalized web portal.

Secondly, the different domains of Web 2.0 are divvied up by each one's various competitors. Most telling and easiest to relate is the MySpace versus Facebook wars (oh yeah, Friendster was in the running once upon a time). Most people relate to one or the other and most people settle on one or the other. Of course there is nothing stopping you from doing both (like me), but that is twice the work. Now I have Facebook friends and MySpace friends and I have to run back and forth to appease both camps. I lose. It is like having a lot of email addresses; it splits the focus. This mashup I referred to in the last paragraph should be called the "ultimate aggregator". It should be simple. MyLifeBrand lost me on the very first page, but perhaps I need to give them more time to get set up. The bottom line is the the Web 2.0 apps need to learn how to talk to each other even better than they do now. XML is the key, but everybody will need to their XML homework so nobody gets shafted. MySpace, especially, needs to clean up its act and do something to halt the tidal of hideous HTML work its pages sport. My advice to anybody with a MySpace account is DO NOT CHANGE THE DEFAULTS. Well, at least learn proper XHTML before doing something terrible with wallpaper.

And so I bid adieu to the Summer Fun Program, exhibiting the wonders of Web 2.0 and proclaiming myself a believer in the power of building better web applications and then messing with them for the power of good. I think I'll keep blogging here, so stay subscribed and I will attempt to entertain in my delightfully ham-fisted style.