The Internet has spoken

Memes are a bitch. Someone just reminded me of the search results in Google if you enter "failure" as your query term. Oldie but a goodie - wisdom of crowds? The Internet is a strange place...

Welcome Userplane to the AOL family

Congrats. I've blogged a small bit about the value of web eco-systems. Its along this path that AOL regains relevancy and value. You must be present to win - and that means everywhere, not just through your first-order destinations.

XBox 360 Games: Now Created by You

The "user generated media" trend is, in the Internet space, just the latest name for one small aspect of the "personal computer" revolution in an increasingly connected computing environment (or at least, the empowerment thereby afforded; remember the DTP revolution?) - the whole idea is to enable you to make and run software. Only natural that this should be fractal (i.e. running software that lets you make software...)

For example, Microsoft is now enabling user-created Xbox 360 Games - a first for a major console (AFAIK).

And its a good example of why "general" computing environments (hiccups aside) will beat application specific ones - flexiblity of content deployment.

I'm not sure I was clear with the idea in my Flash Player 9 posts - but that idea is that the "edges" will be become more and more general (data driven, generic "content" runtimes) while specificity gets pushed to the core. The browser is one instance of this, but its not clear if it will be the only (or even "final") version.

Remember, Microsoft doesn't make products for end users...

Beside the (floating) point

Nice article that puts into "laymen"-esque terms one of the computational idiosyncrancies of binary arithmetic.

I've written about some of the fun you can have exploiting floating point formats in the past, but didn't delve as deeply (or clearly) into the precision issues as I might have liked - brevity is NOT something I'm known for :)

I'd suggest that numbers are like strings: given fixed precision, you should deal with them in their "native" base/format.

AOL Video Portal and then some...

In beta, and a review - its got some very nice, high quality content.

And proving that no good deed goes unpunished: oops (and then some)... the idea was to provide the search research community access to significant data they might not otherwise have had - a good goal - and heartfelt apologies have been issued for the privacy snafu.

About Time (Warner): AOL Goes Free

Time Warner announced its earning today.... did pretty well.

Oh, and some big News: AOL software and services are now free.

One the positive consquences (for consumers :)) of our increasingly connected computing world: artificial value propositions quickly erode when distribution is ungated. You can fight it, or you can embrace it.

Just ask the RIAA.