An anonymous reader writes "Apparently, Yellowstone National Park has been having a very unusual number of earthquakes. Many of the most recent tremors have been deeper underground, an ominous sign. Combine that with a rapid rise in elevation over the past three years, and the possibility that earthquake activity from surrounding areas could trigger such an eruption on its own, and you've got the possible warning signs of a supervolcano eruption that would wipe out half to 2/3 of the continental US, plunge global temperatures, and wipe out a very significant chunk of world food sources. Here's a little more info to make your New Year brighter!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's no secret that Microsoft's "iPod killer" Zune device has been a pretty big disappointment in terms of sales -- but who knew that the most attention the Zune would get in ages would be for having all of the 30 GB models fail at once. Obviously, there's some sort of software bug that caught Microsoft by surprise (apparently Zune's were never taught to understand leap years), causing a ton of Zunes to freeze up at the same time. At least, Microsoft can take a little comfort in knowing that there really are some people out there who use their Zunes.

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Over in the Czech Republic, the education ministry has drawn up "guidelines" for how schools can deal with "cyberbullies" and just like other recent stories, it's the teachers who are afraid of being bullied more than other students. But, as you read the details, it sounds that what the teachers define as "cyberbullying" is actually something more like "students exposing teacher abuses." We've seen this before. A school district in the US punished students for recording a teacher's outburst, and in another case, a student was suspended for filming the principal smoking on school grounds -- against regulations. In this case, the rules against cyberbullying came after students uploaded a video of a teacher hitting a kid. It's difficult to see how that's cyberbullying at all. It sounds like the students were effectively exposing a teacher abusing his position. Yet, the response, again, is to figure out a way to blame the kids and make it more difficult for them to expose teachers acting badly.

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NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In court papers filed in New York in Capitol Records v. MP3Tunes, the CEO of MP3Tunes, Michael Robertson, has accused the plaintiffs EMI, Capitol Records, and other EMI record labels of flooding the internet with free MP3s of their songs for promotional purposes, 'free to everyone (except, apparently, MP3tunes).' His 10-page declaration (PDF) provides exact details of specific song files, including the URLs from which they are being distributed free of charge, both by paid content distributors, and by EMI itself from its own web sites."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Steve writes in -

Serv O'Beer is a project showing you step by step how to turn a bottle of beer using Construx, servo, and an ioBridge module. The system uses the accelerometer feedback to turn the servo controlling the position of the bottle. Enjoy the perfect pour while taking out all of the physically demanding work. Happy New Year and Cheers!

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Despite the silly name the Wunder Boner looks like a useful gadget for people who like to catch and eat fish. Do you think it works as advertised? (Via Arbroath)

This is a really cool game demo by Lok Neville Lee that uses an Arduino, accelerometer, and Papervision3D to interact with the character on the computer. The graphics look great, and the controls are awesome. I really hope more games are in the works!

More about Interactive gaming with an Arduino

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nandemoari writes "The second month of Microsoft's campaign against fake security software has resulted in the removal of the rogue "Antivirus 2009" application from almost 400,000 infected PCs. Microsoft claims that December's version of the Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT) — the free utility included in Windows Update every month — specifically targeted 'Antivirus 2009.' According to Microsoft, MSRT removed the rogue application from over 394,000 PCs in the first nine days after it was released on December 9."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While this happens pretty frequently, you can bet that battles like the one going on between Viacom and Time Warner Cable are going to become more and more bitter in the next few years. Unless an agreement is reached (which is likely), Time Warner Cable customers may lose access to popular Viacom channels such as MTV, Nickelodian and Comedy Central. The issue is that Viacom wants to significantly raise the costs to TWC for those stations (between a 22% and 36% price increase). TWC would just pass those costs on to consumers, and the company accurately realizes that this would seriously piss off customers at a time when customers are increasingly realizing that they can drop cable TV and just go online for much of the programming they want.

And that, actually, is part of the issue. One of TWC's big complaints is that Viacom now offers most of the shows on those channels for free online -- where TWC isn't able to get any of the associated ad revenue. The real question is who is in a stronger bargaining position. If TWC dumps Viacom stations, and people start realizing they're fine with just being able to view the content online, both TWC and Viacom will likely lose out (the ad revenue that Viacom gets online won't come close to matching the carriage fees from TWC). The whole thing is a big game of chicken, but we're going to see it play out many more times, as the relative value of the cable provider as the exclusive delivery mechanism for television content starts to decrease. Of course, that only makes the content companies want to increase prices more to make up for the loss -- and the cycle actually accelerates. Both sides stand to lose out unless new arrangements are reached.

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An anonymous reader writes "Open Source Software is about more than just the Linux operating system, and 2008 brought advances in the form of OpenOffice.org, IBM Lotus Symphony, Firefox and Android. But Linux is still the heart of the FOSS movement, and this year brought key developments in the operating system as well. Here's a look at the coolest open source products to come across the transom in 2008." Along roughly similar lines, davidmwilliams points out the year in review of the iTWire's "Linux Distillery" column.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While the major record labels still insist that BitTorrent and any sort of file sharing is evil and needs to be wiped out, it's great to see some indie record labels fully embracing how BitTorrent is actually a much cheaper and much more efficient distribution and marketing tool. Take, for example, Open Your Eyes Records, who not only embraces BitTorrent, but has now teamed up with one BitTorrent tracker, What.cd, to distribute all new tracks that way. Even though for many readers here this doesn't need to be repeated, this is (once again) more evidence that BitTorrent and BitTorrent trackers have plenty of legitimate purposes -- and the efforts to shut them down completely are quite short sighted.

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EdIII writes "The dispute between Time Warner and Viacom over fees seems to be without any resolution this year. Time Warner faces the possibility of being without content for almost 20 channels. Alexander Dudley, a spokesperson for Time Warner, is fighting back: 'We will be telling our customers exactly where they can go to see these programs online,' Mr. Dudley said. 'We'll also be telling them how they can hook up their PCs to a television set.' Why pay for digital cable when many content providers are now providing it on demand via the Internet? Not to mention the widespread availability of TV shows in both standard and high definition on public and private torrent tracker sites. It is entirely possible to watch television with no commercials or advertising with only an Internet connection. So getting your content via the Internet is not exactly free, but it certainly isn't contributing to Time Warner or any other cable providers' revenue stream. The real question is why Time Warner would fight back by so clearly showing how increasingly obsolete they are becoming and that cable providers are losing their monopolistic grip on media delivery." If no agreement is reached, those channels are supposed to be dropped just after midnight tonight.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I've never quite understood the complaints of some that free market capitalism somehow goes against morality or good deeds. As we've discussed in the past, moral questions shouldn't even come up at all in scenarios where everyone is better off. Moral questions only arise in scenarios where some are worse off and some are better off, and a decision needs to be made about who is worse off and who is better off. The nice thing about free market capitalism is that it tends to increase the overall pie, allowing a much larger number of people to be better off, and tends to do so in a more efficient manner than other systems.

Yet, then we have odd stories about people complaining about for-profit charitable organizations even when those charitable organization end up raising significantly more money for charities than their non-profit "competitors." There's nothing inherently evil about profit -- and if you look at much of the important charitable giving out there today, it was created because of profit. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation -- which is based on this very idea of doing good through capitalism is built off of the vast profits earned by Gates and Warren Buffet. Google's charitable wing, Google.org, is also designed as a for-profit enterprise, recognizing that if it can make everyone better off while making itself better off, there's no moral dilemma at all.

But, still, there are some who suddenly question whether or not the free market takes away a moral backbone -- but the only situations in which that would clearly be true are in cases of either outright fraud, or where you're dealing with a zero-sum game. In an economy that has the potential for growth, then one should encourage more growth to increase opportunities for everyone. There may be additional moral questions later concerning overall allocation, but increasing the wider opportunity, which is exactly what free market capitalism does, seems ridiculous to question.

In the end, it seems that some have this odd guilt associated with money -- as if because one person has made a lot of it that it somehow takes away from others. That's simply not true. Adam Smith, who wrote the original book on free market capitalism, The Wealth of Nations, only did so after first writing a book on morality, called The Theory of Moral Sentiment. Free market economics and morality go hand in hand. To think that they're mutually exclusive shows both a misunderstanding of morality and economics.

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Super cute! Make a little chair out of a champagne cork holder via Lifehacker. Dot writes-

This is a fun and easy thing to do with those little wire pieces that hold in a champagne cork. And with New Years Eve coming up, you know we'll have a few of those lying around!

The resulting tiny chair makes a cute little christmas ornament, or dollhouse furniture, or just an interesting little nicknack! And a neat way to save a momento from an important bottle of champagne (like from a wedding, hot date, or special event)

This is very easy, and some would say obvious, but when I first saw this done I thought it was so cool. And I figured you guys would too !

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Santa Cruz, CA has its very own DIY parade tonight. Several years ago, when the town's First Night organization could not raise the funds for a formal celebration, this DIY parade emerged as its replacement.

Now, the annual New Year's Eve, Do-It-Yourself Parade has become a regular affair in its own right, inspiring school girls and square dancers, flame throwers, trash-orchestra members and many, many people dressed in illuminated lights and wires to saunter from Laurel to Water streets to ring in the New Year.

All anyone needs to do to join the parade is show up.

from Santa Cruz Sentinel report.

The parade starts at 5:30 pm. If you're in Santa Cruz or going there for the parade, take some pictures and tell us about it. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in DIY Projects | Digg this!

Far Side Reenactments is a Flickr pool devoted to photographic stagings of Far Side strips. (Example a left by entitee.)
Far Side Reenactments (via Laughing Squid)

Another installment in our "faves from 2008" BoingBoing tv retrospective -- this two-parter in which Mark Frauenfelder gets an exclusive tour of Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea. Above, part one, below, part two, and MP4 links for download here:

* A Morning at Intelligentsia Part 1
* A Morning at Intelligentsia Coffee Part 2

Snip from the original post:

Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea is based out of Chicago, Illinois and has recently opened up a new store in the Silverlake neighborhood of Los Angeles. Kyle Glanville, head of research and development at Intelligentsia and winner of the 2008 US Barista Championship shows Mark how they acquire and roast some of the finest coffee in the world.

The word intelligentsia derives from the Latin word intelligentia, meaning a group of people engaged in complex mental and creative labor directed to the development and dissemination of culture. Kyle Glanville has been laboring to promulgate a new coffee culture with Intelligentsia to combat the "get up and go" mentality, and Mark is along for the ride to learn the careful art of roasting coffee.

Intelligentsia is located at 3922 West Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, California 90029 and is open 7 days a week.

And see also this related BBtv episode: Looking for the Perfect Bean: Kyle Glanville's World Coffee Tour, part 1 - Brazil (direct MP4 Link).

We are among the thousands without power in the northeast. Day four actually, and we've decided to look into generators so that next year's New Year's doesn't involve fears of frozen pipes bursting and hypothermic babies and cats. At the very least we just need enough juice to run the furnace blower, but if we're going to lay down the cash I'd like to know what it would take to get a little more power ... like enough to run a fridge, router, laptop and lightbulb. I know nothing about this sort of thing, but figure there are more than a few experts out there so I call out to the wisdom of the mob. What am I looking for? How difficult is the wiring? What will it cost me? On the extreme edge, what would it take to get off the grid entirely? (And on a side note, thanks to DTE Energy for telling us we had power when we didn't, for losing the ticket for our neighborhood, for telling us it would be back every single day when it wasn't, and for the helpful DTE representative who warned us that our pipes might burst. Thanks)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

How to roll your own Mac for under $240 via HAD. The useless ninja writes -

MSI is a company known mostly for its PC components. They recently jumped into the netbook bandwagon with just about every other major pc manufacturer. Their Eee like machine, the MSI Wind, ended up being an extremely popular little laptop. Along with the laptop they made a not too well known desktop with roughly the same dimensions as a ream of printer paper.

The MSI Wind PC is a great computer; I have three of them. It comes with a 1.6GHz Intel atom CPU, two SATA connections for 3.5" and 5.25" bays and 6 USB ports. You can pick a barebones one, requiring ram, a hard drive and possibly DVD drive, for $140 or so..

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Here's a brief, introductory video on how to make your own clay plaster and lime paint from skilled cob builders who have written a step-by-step book on building with cob:

(Via Chelsea Green)

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It's been nearly two decades since I first read Robert Anton Wilson and Bob Shea's The Illuminatus! Trilogy. Like plenty of people influenced by that book, parts of it have stuck with me ever since -- even if it's been at least a dozen years since I last picked it up. One key thing that I remember taking away from the book is a recognition that "the truth" isn't always as clear as it seems -- and anyone claiming to tell you the full truth is misleading you in some way or another. One key scene (which I think was actually buried in a footnote in an appendix, but as I said, it's been many, many years...) is where the authors point out that the only way people recognize the real truth of a situation is by figuring it out for themselves -- and present a scenario whereby that happens. If you took a low level army private and put him between two equally high ranking generals, with one screaming for the private to sit down, and the other demanding he stand up -- the likely response is for the private to "wig out" and finally make a decision for himself. To me, investigating the "truth" is always something along those lines. I find it compelling to have various generals screaming totally contradictory concepts until I have no choice but to look at all of the evidence and decide for myself.

Apparently, some people feel quite differently.

Over in Forbes, there's a column by Melik Kaylan, where he claims that the internet is "bad for truth" because it presents so many contradictory ideas. He bemoans the fact that, in the good old days, the truth was whatever the elitist and limited media told you was the truth, no matter how wrong it might have been. But, these days, with so many different and contradictory voices, Kaylan worries that the actual truth just gets blurry and people simply surround themselves with the truth that they want and ignore the "official" truth.

This is, really, just a rehashing of the old "echo chamber" insult that gets thrown at various online communities -- and I've yet to see much evidence that it's true at all. Folks involved in extreme communities often seem to actively seek out opposing viewpoints, if only to trash them. Yes, I'm sure there are some folks who refuse to read anything critical of their own viewpoints, but those people are so far gone already, I'm not sure it really matters. As someone who is occasionally accused of having "extreme" points of view, I actively read the viewpoints of various critics and people who disagree with me, because it helps me to continually understand that "truth" that I seek. It keeps me sharp as I keep refining and adjusting my own beliefs -- whether it's figuring out why someone I disagree with is wrong, or if I can't figure it out, refining my own beliefs. Not everyone is necessarily like that, but I'd argue that people are a lot better off having more information at their fingertips to make their own decisions than when they got the word from on high from some "official" source.

It's not that the internet is bad for truth. It's that people have started to realize that the "truth" provided to them from official sources wasn't true at all. The real problem for "the truth" was that the actual truth didn't match up to it. That's not the "fault" of the internet -- it's one of the benefits of the internet.

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You may remember Danny Choo from an earlier Boing Boing tv episode this year -- the "prince of Akihabara" donned his Stormtrooper finery and led some of Silicon Valley's finest CEOS through a tour of Tokyo's famed otaku district, with Joi Ito. So, Danny is also the son of famed fashion designer Jimmy Choo, and he is very well-known in Japan as a web personality, and a curator of truly wonderful nerdy things. He's like a long-lost Boing Boing cousin! Anyway -- today, Danny checks in with some amazing snapshots.

"I was at the creator of Afro Samurai's house the other day and he dug up some Japanese style Star Wars art," Danny says. This stuff is incredible. Here's the photo set link for Danny's visit with Takashi Okazaki. And below, beneath the snapshot, the trailer for Afro Samurai, which I have yet to see. Thanks Danny!

We're revisiting some of our favorite Boing Boing tv episodes during the holiday break, and while the one I'm embedding here (MP4 link here) is perhaps not going to win any Pulitzers, it was one of the most fun we had shooting anything ever. I won't spoil the surprise, but it involved making people in an office building very uncomfortable, and had absolutely nothing to do with George Lucas or Boba Fett. As for the bait 'n' switch title -- just work with me here, this was our April Fool's Day episode for 2008. And as for why it's worth posting today? If you're anywhere near an office park or an elevator with strangers in it, I strongly recommend you do this on New Year's Eve.

ThinSkin writes "Now that the folks at ExtremeTech have finished writing about the best keyboards for every occasion, they conclude their roundup of input devices with the best computer mice in every category, which includes ergonomic mice, gaming mice, notebook mice, and so on. While this year's crop of gaming mice didn't impress much, there were advancements in non-gaming mice and tracking, as demonstrated by Microsoft's Explorer Mouse with BlueTrack technology--which is considered more precise than optical and laser. Even ergonomic mice saw little growth in the year--prompting the reviewer to rely on the older Zero Tension Mouse as a favorite." Link To Original Source

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Another in my continuing series of behind the scenes photos from the Make: television set. This is the tilt and shoot rig we built for the pole camera. We mounted it on top of a very long pole and used a remote control and two servos to take photos. You can see next to the rig a piece of paper with every single screw, nut, washer, bolt, drill bit, etc. taped to it, along with annotations. Bill Gurstelle created this prop sheet so that I had all the parts to build it on-camera.

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This isn't new, but a quick search finds no prior mentions of Ennio Marchetto on Boing Boing and I'm sure many of you will appreciate the One Man Living Cartoon Factory. This clip is from a show in Amsterdam in 2004.

Thanks, Susan!

(Shawn Connally and Bruce Stewart are guest bloggers)

My Institute for the Future colleague Lyn Jeffery, a cultural anthropologist specializing in China and co-editor of the 88 Bar blog, turned me on to Youku Buzz, a blog devoted to one of China's largest video sharing sites. On the front page right now: videos about Chinese college girls becoming "professional housewives," a public serenade, and a drunk driver pissing on armored cars. Youku Buzz

It's really amazing what sort of laws are being passed in the name of "protecting the children." The latest is a law in Georgia that requires all sex offenders not only to hand over all of their online usernames and email addresses (which some other states require), but also the passwords to all of their accounts. The idea is that authorities can now log into their accounts and see what they're doing -- which seems like a massive privacy violation. I have absolutely no problem whatsoever with punishing convicted sex offenders, but these sorts of laws go beyond punishment -- especially when the majority of sex offenders these days aren't the "internet predators" that everyone's so worried about, but people who already know the victim in some way. Also, this would mean that any time a convicted sex offender signed up for a new account somewhere, they'd have to hand over the info -- and even one slip-up can put them back in jail. It's hard to see how this law could possibly be constitutional, and I'm guessing that eventually we'll see a lawsuit to address just that issue, wasting plenty of taxpayer money. I'm not sure how that actually protects any children.

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Lowering the TV volume a little more each day can help you improve focus. UC San Francisco neuroscientist Michael Merzenich told Prevention magazine that the technique trains your brain "to filter out background noise." TV-Brain Workout

DynaSoar writes "Lake Superior State University in Michigan's Upper Peninsula ('The land of four seasons: June, July, August and Winter') has just published its 34th annual List of Words to Be Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness. Besides such unsurprising inclusions such as 'green' corporations being 'game changing' due to concern with their 'carbon foot print,' this year's list contains an emoticon for the first time — not a smiley face or variant, but the 'heart' symbol made from the characters 'less than' and 'three.' It's perhaps a sign of the evolution of language, or at least of this volunteer linguistic watchdog group, that a symbol compounded of two characters, neither of them a letter, is considered not only a word, but a particularly egregious one."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Show Me How: 500 Things You Should Know
Derek Fagerstrom, Lauren Smith & the Show Me Team
Collins Design, $24.95

I wanted to like this book more than I did. Don't get me wrong, overall, it's pretty darn cool. I'm a big fan of both creative information design and comics, and the two forms are used here to fairly impressive effect. It's just that, trying to present 500 different how-tos, on a staggering number of subjects, almost exclusively in graphical form, is a tall order. I give the authors A+ for effort, but in many cases, a B- in effectively communicating the information required. These are, after all "how-tos," and if they don't effectively communicate how to accomplish the task at hand, they fall short.

As a test, I looked up anything I already knew something about. In almost every instance, I found that what was presented landed just shy of communicating the essentials of what one would need to know to satisfyingly complete the project. For instance, for the "Pulling a Perfect Espresso Shot" how-to, it doesn't say anything about the amount of pressure to apply to the pellet in the porta-filter (extremely important in getting a "perfect" shot) and it uses time (25 seconds) to determine when the shot is pulled, rather than color (which is a far more relevant determinant).

Where this book excels is in giving you an overview of a subject, say wine basics, or basic style tips (for men: how to shine shoes, look dapper in a tie, understand suit fabrics, etc), how to identify cuts of meat -- that sort of thing. Also, the more whimsical entries are fun, like how to make a clandestine sidewalk graffiti painter, how to mount an elephant or a camel, how to make a voodoo doll.

I also found the book generally inspiring, the sense of activity and creativity that it encodes, and the colorful and fun way that it attempts to convey the excitement of making things. If nothing else, this book is a great overview, a survey, of things you should know how to do and some things you might want to do just for fun, and after you've been introduced to them here, you can hone your skills elsewhere, with stuff you can find online, for instance.

The greatest reason to recommend this book is its cover price. It retails for $25 and is only $16.50 on Amazon. It's a handsomely-designed, full-color, 320-page tome, for less than a Yuppie Food Coupon. For a bargain like that, how can you afford NOT to have it handy in the outhouse?

Show Me How: 500 Things You Should Know

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A couple years ago, my pal Ken Hollings, a UK journalist and outré culture chronicler, presented a mind-blowing radio series called Welcome To Mars, about the "fantasy of science in the early years of the American Century." In the series, Ken maps the connections between UFOs, weird science, vintage science fiction, the space race, and LSD. It's an amazing series and now it's been followed by a fantastic book, Welcome To Mars: Fantasies of Science In The American Century 1947-1959, published by Strange Attractor Press. Timed with the book's publication, 3am Magazine have just published a fascinating interview with Hollings. From the interview:

The Flying Saucer, like the effects of LSD and the dangers of atomic radiation are all phenomena whose real power exists outside the human sensory spectrum: each in its own way defies detection and categorization in any conventional sense. They are, in the words of former RAND president Donald Rumsfeld, ‘known unknowns’. One way of studying them is to examine how large organizations, such as RAND and the Pentagon, respond to their existence; another is to examine them obliquely through popular culture, to see how the public imagination responds to it. Reactions to the Flying Saucer were conditioned to an appreciable extent by the spread of the new electronic media and the interdisciplinary approach to mass communication that accompanied them during the period covered in my book. It’s not an accident that 1957, the year which sees Sputnik launched into Earth orbit is also the year when Marshall McLuhan first publicly states that the medium is the message. Both incidents represent a threat to the established status quo which had previously been embodied by the Flying Saucer. Fantasy is only theory that has subsequently been rendered unworkable.

Ken Hollings interview (3am Magazine), Buy "Welcome To Mars" (Strange Attractor)

Over at Cryptomundo, Loren Coleman ends 2008 with his annual Top 10 list of the biggest cryptozoology stories of the year. Topping the list, of course, was the Georgia Bigfoot Hoax. Number 2 was a BB favorite, the Montauk Monster. Find out more about the rest of the magical mystery beasts, from the Giant Elephant Shrew to the Colorado Lion, over at Cryptomundo. Top 10 Cryptozoology Stories of 2008

Here my new media predictions for 2009: what to expect when it comes to new media, professional web publishing and learning, collaboration and social media? Find out everything I see coming across these key areas in this two-part report opening today. I have prepared this report, which gets published every year end (here my 2008 new media predictions Part1 and Part 2), by focusing on what I think you, my reader, are most interested in knowing: what a professional new media publisher needs to know. The contents and topic areas I have decided to include are particularly interesting to those who are involved in media, communication, marketing or education and it is directed primarily at non-technical individuals who are passionate about communicating effectively with new media and who want to know ahead of time what awaits them next. My look at future trends on these fronts is a personal one. I don't claim to be an expert in these fields, but I spend loads of time experimenting and working in them, and therefore I develop my own opinions about what is going to be happening next. These below are the new media areas I will analyze for my 2009 predictions which I have divided into two parts. Part 1, the one you are reading now, which is devoted to online publishing, marketing and advertising, video and net television, digital imaging, visual communication and site design, and Part 2, tomorrow, dedicated instead to social networks and social media, identity, future events strategy, learning, education, online collaboration.: Here all the details... and have a great 2009!

2009 Media Predictions - Part 1

If you are an online web publisher, a pro, or a would-be one, what I am covering here below are the areas that I believe you should pay most attention to in the upcoming 12 months. I expect again all of these areas to show lots of activity, announcements and the release of new tools. Since there are over twenty web publishing publishing-related areas I personally follow, I am structuring these 2009 trends and predictions reports in two parts. The first part today covers essentially web and video publishing, visual communication and site design, marketing and advertising trends, while Part 2, to be published tomorrow, January 1st, will cover social networks and social media, the future of events, learning, education, online collaboration. As in most of the areas I analyze here, while I am not an insider in any, my position of online publisher and external observer allows me at times to notice things that may not be so obvious and evident to those working in my same direction. These are the ones that I feel are going to be most interesting for online web publishers in 2009:

Online Advertising

1) Average online ad prices will be falling. Here's why:

"The Internet advertising market, like all markets, responds to changes in supply and demand. In the current recession, demand for advertising is likely to decrease. At the same time, supply of online inventory, page views, is continuing to increase. Social networks and other social media sites in particular are creating masses of new inventory. As a result, the price of online advertising will continue to fall in 2009."

2) Advertising markets are expanding

"The US market represents about half of all online advertising, which is partly what makes monetizing international traffic so difficult. Building up direct ad sales teams (and networks) internationally will partially help to bridge the gap, but this will not be enough. ....in Asia direct monetization models (i.e. selling things directly to users) have proven to be a better business model than advertising. U.S. companies will need to understand and embrace the direct monetization models that have worked well overseas, principally mobile monetization, premium subscriptions models and digital goods models based on selling greater functionality, scarcity or status." (Source: Consumer Internet Predictions 2009 - by Lightspeed Venture Partners)

Check out also this recent video in which Google's Vint Cerf explains how informational advertising meets the social network in 2009: When writing about online advertising future it is a little harder for me to separate what I would want to see from what it's going to take place. As many others, I personally feel that traditional advertising is losing more and more ground in terms of effectiveness and that the winning new front is the one of highly targeted, contextual advertising both via established media venues, but more and more via smaller and highly targeted content outlets (blogs) and via communities, forums and social media venues. If online advertising prices keep going down like they have in the last few months, a few good things are likely going to happen: 1) Those that will keep spending will try to target their marketing messages in the most effective way possible. 2) Banner-like CPM advertising will be increasingly ineffective and albeit inexpensive it will not provide tangible benefits to neither advertisers nor publishers.

Monetization via Google AdSense

I know you will think I am crazy, but I really think that in 2009, AdSense will become a superperforming money making machine for a good number of online web publishers. Thanks to the long-awaited marriage between AdSense and Analytics now web publishers can dip into the hard data they were looking for to understand what their readers click that makes them money. This is pretty revolutionary from my personal viewpoint and I would expect that for those who have enough skill or resources to study and analyze in depth the wealth of this data there will be an ocean of opportunities to improve their AdSense-based revenue stream. Under these circumstances, the use of heavy A/B testing to find best placement and ad style as well as the optimization of targeted ad placement opportunities for advertisers interested in specific pages or sections of your site are likely the two most valuable strategic actions you can plan on taking during the coming year.

Search-SEO

What to expect? The world of search is under heavy transformation and 2009 will positively be bringing new surprises, features and new search tools. What appears as irreversible is the fact that search engines, Google first, are going to increasingly value your choices and clicks as a reference value to serve relevant results for your queries. After links and <a href="http://www.masternewmedia.org/2003/11/14/guide_to_understanding_google_pagerank.htmPageRank, your actual attention and behaviour patterns are going to increasingly influence the results that Google and others are going to serve you. This is especially true for Google, who, by monitoring via Analytics, Adsense and AdWords can now see your site behaviour from all of the most critical viewpoints, and is therefore in the ideal position to decide whether and when your content is relevant as a reading and / or advertising destination. What SEO strategies to put in place for 2009? Video and conversational media marketing, via forums and social communities will be among the most effective ways to keep your content visible inside major search engine result pages. That is: if you want to populate search results for your specific niche your presence must be solid and well spread across diverse media outlets. Adding therefore the likes of Twitter, Friendfeed or of a dedicated Facebook group or Knol page are going to be fundamental requirements for all professional web publishers. The rest, what you should know already quite well, remains all valid and useful: titling, linking, quality content, avoiding bad practices and so on. The new interesting thing about link juice and PageRank, is that now you can be a lot more efficient about where and how you hand out PageRank to others even if, like me, you like to heavily promote other sites and news and offer plenty of reference links inside your articles. By utilizing tools like Apture, you can now provide valuable links and multimedia references, that keep your reader on your site and do not dilute your link juice across too many different sites. This by itself, especially if the Apture model catches on and other competitors move into this area, is a major shift for SEO and for delivery additional value while improving SEO benefits to any site.

Ad Management and Optimization

Ad optimization and ad management platforms will increase in number and featrures offered. This is a fast growing area for online independent publishers and the need to manage and coordinate in an easy and efficient way all of your advertising inventory, from AdSense to your personal direct advertisers is increasingly felt. 2009 may actually see the crowning of OpenX as one of the best solutions in this area for independent web publishers, with many other contenders, including YieldBuild, Pubmatic, Rubicon Project as well as Google own not so easy to use powerful Ad Manager fighting for a piece of this pie.

Internet Marketing

Internet marketing tactics get wide adoption. 2009, at least in my eyes, may be the year in which businesses of all kinds, not just how-to-make-money-on-the-internet guys, will start leveraging many online marketing tactics and strategies while extracting the best parts of these and making them less extreme and artificially hyped. As a matter of fact, sales letters, squeeze pages, scarcity triggers, identification and social proof are all great marketing components that deserve to be popularized and put to use by a much larger number of online businesses. The key difference we will see is how effective these marketing techniques can be even when used in a more sober, credible and professional looking fashion, and how much more they can outperform their traditional counterparts when mixed in with the right doses of common sense web 2.0 and social media marketing savvy.

New Advertising Agencies?

I don't know whether 2009 will be the year that this happens, but I know it is about time that it does. Independent web publishers need a new kind of small advertising agency that leverages groups of high quality, tight focus, strong community building blogs to sell highly targeted advertising opportunities to small and medium sized advertisers that match their ideal audiences. Outside of a very few and rare exceptions I am increasingly amazed at the size of the untapped market for direct advertisers that high quality small sites and independent blogs are leaving on the table for lack of resources and time. We have web-based self-service advertising outlets, we have auction-style ad clearinghouses, we have AdSense-AdWords and its many counterparts, but we do not have a group of small advertising agencies willing to sell marketing, branding and sponsorhsip to specific sectors. The Google competition is too strong and it is very hard to go and convince traditional advertisers of the benefits of new media marketing. Then it may very well be that this is the wrong way to look at things and that the future is all about small publishers rolling up their sleeves and setting up their own personal ad management system and small direct marketing team. Given the economic times, this may the very best way to go for independent publishers in the next 12 months, next to their already established revenue channels.

Professional Web Publishing

2009 will see the establishment of automatic web site builders that go, in terms of usability, features and cost of maintenance well beyond blogs and personal publishing tools we have seen so far. There have been a number that have already surfaced in 2008 but given the premises I think we are going to see a lot more interesting ones coming out this year. Most of the existing solutions are fully hosted services and based on the past approach to publishing, this would normally appear as something reserved only for the novice and beginners. But as we move more and more to a cloud-based access to all of our services and data it makes sense that we may be looking at a lot more hosted professional solutions, than do away with the classical equation, professional site requires dedicated server and publishing software running on it. 2009 may likely bring the confirmation signs that this is indeed the road we are headed to. At LeWeb08 I was truly impressed with the work of Czech automatic site builder webnode.com, one of the winners of the startup competition, and I can't wait to experiment using it as an affiliate partner in 2009 to give voice and a publishing platform to those people in my community network who are not geeks.

Content Creation

Content creation and syndication tools will keep increasing in variety and use and adding content of whatever kind to your blog page will become as easy as clicking and dragging stuff over your desired page destination. Automatic website builders will give a hard time to WordPress and other traditional blog publishing platforms. A serious quality service that will provide automatic WordPress site installation and customization will become available. This is the single most frequent request that would be pro web publishers have. Who can install and customize me my WordPress site. New tools that will pull in different types of content from multiple sources, allowing you to create related stuff boxes or complementary info sections, will become more sophisticated and will allow even small individual bloggers to add lots of quality content to their articles. External content gets to be visited in place. That's right, differently than what it used to be until now, you are not going to be sending as much people around the web by providing great links to content destinations not on your own pages, as new technologies provide increasingly the ability for that external content and resources to be displayed right within your content pages via pop-up windows and other effective on-the-page visual solutions. (for some great examples please see MasterNewMedia review of Apture) They key point to pay attention to on this front, is that the new content creation, aggregation and referencing tools that will have the most appeal will be the ones which will allow for the editor to play a strategic role in selecting, sorting, and cleverly juxtaposing and grouping content units contextually and according to the editorial focus of their site. Therefore I am calling 2009 the year that will see the birth of content creation and publishing tools that will be at the intersection of where Apture, Splashcast, Iterasi and Mixwit/Muxtape are and have been. It is not just the ability to aggregate, find and republish that interests online media publishers but specifically the ability to add editorial value to existing content out there, by acting as curators, compilation masters, news djs or content mash-uppers, something that has been too often dismissed in the past as having no value. The opposite is becoming true. To create extreme value you need not create new content. Greatest value sits in having the ability to find great, unknown, disconnected, content pearls and to bring together in editorially effective ways. Beyond the sheer quantity of content published, differences between popular independent sites and traditional media web outlets will sharply decrease, with each side increasingly borrowing ideas and solutions from the other part. As a matter of fact I dare to say that some of the most successful blogs and independent sites will be those that will most effectively mix-in big online media solutions into their approach, while traditional media web sites who will integrate typical blog and social media solutions may also see a greater appreciation by those already fluent in the digital universe.

News Aggregation and Newsmastering

I was extremely happy to attend the Gillmor Gang session at LeWeb08, as it was rich of insightful exchanges. Among these, Gabe Rivera, the wizard of Oz behind technology news aggregator Techmeme, stated something I have been vouching for much before Techmeme even existed: newsmastering, that is the work of aggregating and republishing selected news according to a specific theme / focus or topic must be the fruit of human editor. Yes, you can definitely take advantage of automated news aggregation and filtering technologies but the last vote on which stories should go up on your newsradar should be reserved only to the newsmaster. Yes, crowdsourcing and bottom up network votes and suggestion can further help uncover gems, but to me, nothing beats the result one skilled one human editor can produce, when not delegating to algorithms or followers their ability to choose what is really worth looking at. Here is Gabe Rivera from LeWeb08 stating exactly this when asked if the perfect algorithm for a news aggregation service could ever be found.
NewsMastering: Gabe Rivera On Why A Human Editor Is Better from RobinGood on Vimeo. Morale of the story: the art of newsmastering has yet to catch on with greater strength and 2009 will keep seeing growth of evangelism, tools and adoption of this content filtering and republication approach. By all means this will become integral part of news making for both mainstream media and small independent publishers everywhere. Extend now the same concept to any other digital media format beyond news: video, social bookmarking, clippings, audio, presentations, social conversations and so on. The more content gets to be produced in any of these formats the larger the need for someone to search, aggregate and select the most relevant items. Obviously this can be done in an infinite number of ways depending on what is the community focus you are doing this for and the editorial style you want to maintain. The role of the DD digital distiller, or CC content curator is a natural conseuqence of the above, and while these terms may not be the best ones to capture the idea they are for me now the simplest way to describe this new emergent media producer role. There have been a few services bringing forward this idea (Splashcast.net and Magnify.net for video, Mixwit / Muxtape - now dead - for music) but they have either not yet provided users with the right tools and approach or have been crunched by legal pressures from traditional media who are yet coming to grasps with such unstoppable free flow of content. Without a shadow of doubt these early services show tremendous potential both in creating strong spontaneous communities of passionate fans as well as in generating loads of truly valuable content. This is why content licensing schemes limiting such approaches should rapidly fall and let more innovative monetization opportunities to fluorish "around" the content and not by selling it directly.

• WordPress

  For everyone else with some geekiness inside her DNA, WordPress remains the reference platform especially for those who want to start their own blogs while feeling free to experiment and change with literally thousands of different design templates (themes) and plugins available. WordPress, which is an open-source product, has also on its side a powerful distributed community of fans and supporters who openly share great little tools and contribute to improve and refine the existing infrastructure. What may fall into place for the multitude of those who would want to use WordPress but are too busy or too little tech savvy to spend time installing and configuring, is the launch of a few services / tools that will provide seamless WordPress installation on your server, either by doing manually for you, or by offering pre-configured and easily upgradeable solutions. I, for one, would have a ton of customers to refer to it.



• Live Blogging

  Live Blogging will increasingly be a growing trend of independent news publishing and 2009 will see further synergies between real-time reporting tools, such as real-time blogging, chat-IRC-IM, live mobile video streaming, multi-cam reporting, audio streaming, twittering and other social media. Providing a dashboard of such tools to leverage the potential reporting fire-power of a small team of distributed reporters at an event is the next frontier to be challenged by players in this field.

Web Video - Online Video Publishing

More web publishers will start using video in 2009. Driving forces behind this are going to lower prices for high-quality camcorders which have become very simple to operate and much better video sharing services accomodating all kinds of original video formats, resolutions and even HD video at no cost to the video publisher. At the end of the equation, there is more video content available on the Internet and therefore a greater need for effective video search engines as well as sites or blogs that make sense of all of these content by letting the most interesting content emerge through various means and approaches. Expect 2009 to see the announcement of new services and tools dedicated to video search as well as to aggregating, filtering and assembling topic and theme-specific video playlists. In 2009 you will also see the first group of automatic video to text transcription services and tools. This is a very hot area because as soon as there is some reliable solution to automatically transcribe audio inside video clips into text format, a universe of new content becomes accessible to everyone via traditional search engines. So, video to text transcription and innovative video search engines go hand in hand. Other video publishing features that will need to move to mainstream status in 2009 are:

• deep linking as well as
• captioning / annotating,
• direct linking from any video frame to any specific URL and
• personalized - user controlled ad overlay space
• hot video spots (a visual indicator of the hot / most viewed points in the video) which will have all to become part of the basic video publishing feature set for any video sharing site.

Strong competition from early adopters and power users will drive adoption by more mainstream publishers and bloggers as well. On the live video streaming front Ustream and Mogulus will consolidate their leading position and may be likely acquisition targets by anyone of the large players being among the most popular and feature-rich video streaming services available. Kyte, Qik, Stickam, Flyxwagon and many of the more recent entries in the mobile live video streaming arena, like Finnish startup Floobs which I recenty discovered at LeWeb08, will see several new entries with some quite innovative features. Multicam / multi-view reporting of events will take off in 2009. Conversational social video platforms like Seesmic have a more uncertain future due to their tendency of trying be too many things to too many different audiences. Seesmic as a video commenting and Twitter-like conversational platform is not bad at all, and as I have suggested to Loic in the past, having the opportunity to de-centralize its deployment, by having the opportunity to create Seesmic-enabled communities (what I called MySeesmic) would be great motivators for wider adoption. I see such tools having a much easier business life if they were targeted to specific uses and markets rather than as a final destinations a-la Facebook, Myspace or Twitter are. 2009 will likely tell, before it is over, whether I am right or wrong on this one. In 2009 we'll also witness a growing number of video sharing and publishing services going the Pro route. That is: either you have a professional, commercial use for publishing your videos, and therefore appreciate having specific advanced features like video analytics and ad management, or you can go to any of the free and open video sharing sites. Brightcove has been among the first to make a distinct move in this direction, but I think you will see more soon. YouTube itself may actually be the one that will surprise everyone by releasing a number of truly powerful tools to empower new and more effective ways to create highly distributable video playlists on specific topics and themes.

• HD Video

  HD video is the new wave to ride. If you are already into video publishing online this is definitely the year to step into HD. The new high definition format is increasingly supported by major video sharing sites and the prices for a decent HD camcorder have dropped down to $150 or less. 2009 will see all video sharing sites embracing the new standard with the best ones integrating encoding and distribution of your video at the most appropriate bitrate for each viewer.



• Video Distribution

  Video, like any other content, wants to be as findable as possible. Until now there have been a handful of web services and software tools that have taken your video to as many video sharing sites as you desired. End result your video is duplicated across 10 or 20 video sharing sites and supposedly this gives you some extra exposure and visibility. In reality what you want to achieve to get greater findability via the search engines is diversification of keywords by which your title and key meta-data are found. By having multiple video destinations you are in the ideal position to diversify your title, description and tags multiple times to serve different but complementary target audiences. In 2009 you should see video distribution services like Tubemogul and Heyspread add these new features alongside lots of new and highly detailed metrics.



• Internet TV

  More and more traditional television channels will be broadcasting also to the web. The sooner they will do so, the better. P2P distribution offers extreme cost advantages to any media publisher interested in international distribution (read live sports) and the ability to gain orders of magnitude of more data about who is watching what and where. Isn't that what advertisers and sponsors are looking for? In 2009 you should not expect any major moves by traditional media channels on this front as it will take them longer to resolve the licensing issues involved in distributing content across such new unexplored channels. In the meanwhile a small army of minuscule companies and small borderline publishers are generating millions of extended video views daily via the use of mostly unathourized P2P television sharing platforms. As a matter of fact I would expect some harsher rules and restrictions to be implemented against users in 2009 when it comes to P2P TV in some Western countries. Asian companies manufacturing such tools and users in those regions will likely increase their mastery of the technology and business opportunities and will likely be among the emerging new players in this sector in a year or more. One thing stands clear in my mind: whichever mainstream TV channels will embrace soonest open P2P distribution will have tremendous audience and business oppurtunities advantages relative to their over-the-air- and cable-only counterparts.



• Video Related Services

  In 2009 a tremendous market opportunity will present itself to those able to organize and deliver good quality video stock footage for the typical web video publisher. There is a total scarcity of this kind of resources and the few out there charge outrageous prices for 5 to 10 seconds video clips. Also in the realm of visual effects for creating video titles and other opening sequences are in very high demand with very little available on the market. It will not take but a few months before you should see some really interesting services pop-up on this front.



• Video Shooting Equipment

  When it comes to video hardware for online video publishing work, my basic advice remains the same: go for good brands that provide you with recording on solid state memory cards (hard disk is second choice), a microphone input jack and a wide lens adapter. These are the three things that can make a huge difference in the quality of your video. Camcorders with such characteristics are available from several brands and start from prices as low as $150 (Kodak Z6). My favorite ones remain the Canon models of the series FS and HF (Vixia) which start at around $350. If you buy a camcorder in 2009 make sure it is an HD (high definition) model.

Mobile

In 2009 it will be a must for any serious web publisher to have a mobile version of their site. While there are already a number of services providing free mobilization of your site, they mostly rely on creating a portable device compatible version of your RSS feed while integrating some kind of advertising into it. Since I hate being bombarded by ads when looking at my mobile phone I am not yet sold on any of these early solutions, but I am pretty sure that in 2009 I will find a new service, maybe from Google or maybe from my blog publishing platform provider, that will allow me to easily publish a mobile phone optimized version of my site contents automatically.

Web Site Design Trends

Web site design will keep evolving in 2009 as well. My personal preferences in the coming year are for:

• three or four column designs that has a fixed body width,
• footer area to provide additional information and resources,
• clear separation of traditional display advertising from content, as well as
• greater integration of highly contextual and relevant ads (a-la AdSense) with the content,
• mean and lean mastheads saving lots of vertical space for above the fold content and premium ad spaces,
• larger-sized font size inside body text to provide less coolness factor and more legibility
• use of tabbed interfaces for main navigation as well as for information boxes
• better integration of video and other multimedia links inside text content

In January 2009 MasterNewMedia will launch a new design characterized by all of these traits. Stay tuned.

Visual Communication and Presentation Tools

This is a time of profound progress in the area of visual communication. In no more than two or three years we will look back at PowerPoint presentations with the contempt we reserve today for those old, static, institutional web sites. The tools that will make this possible are all to be invented and the innovative web presentation tools we have seen emerge in these last two years are good indication that 2009 will bring more of these tools and with greater innovative metaphors for their use. If you take as an example the area of live annotation and whiteboarding, most of tools available out there still reflect the original paradigm developed by Microsoft Netmeeting and its original basic toolset. End result is that when we attend live web seminars, the artwork created with the existing whiteboarding tools looks always something like a first grader first attempts at drawing. Instead of making us look more professional these annotation tools make us look more amateurish than we really are. Very few companies so far have ventured in studying and analyzing which would be the tools and features users really need when it comes to communicate clearly and in a visual way a specific idea, and given the fast increasing need for tools that help us communicate more clearly our ideas, I really see plenty of opportunities in this area.

Online Digital Image Editing

The coming change here is: Your complete digital imaging workflow will soon be all online. Capturing offline, editing, uploading, redownloading, editing, re-uploading is time consuming and inefficient from many standpoints. If our digital cameras started to capture directly in the cloud, and if stock and image sharing libraries started to integrate more image editing tools in their basic feture-set we would be moving in the right direction. In 2009 you will see exactly some of these innovations and improvements materialize, while making the use of Photoshop and other complex and sophisticated image editing tools obsolete for most web publishers.

Legal issues - bureaucracy -censorship

2009 will likely bring new rules and restrictions independent publishers will have to comply with. This will vary from country to country but it is apparent that the trend is clearly headed in this direction. As I see it, such issues may actually be a great medicine for independent publishers as it will require for all of them to get more involved in lobbying for their rights and to start getting involved in the debating of new legislation that will impact the publishing universe they operate in. Those proposing and introducing conservative, restrictive legislation seem more concerned with extending the commercial lifetime of existing media rather than providing the fertile grounds in which new media can truly flourish. Providing research, examples and data that proves how suicidal this can be is really a responsibility for all web publishers to take on.
End of Part 1 - Part 2 tomorrow
Originally written by Robin Good for MasterNewMedia and first published on December 31, 2008 as "New Media Trends And Predictions 2009: What Independent Web Publishers Should Expect - Part 1".

jddeluxe writes "There are multiple reports springing up all over the internet of a mass suicide of Microsoft 30GB Zune players globally. Check Zune forums, Gizmodo, or other such sites; the reports are spreading rapidly, except apparently to the Microsoft official Zune site."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

jddeluxe writes "There are multiple reports springing up all over the internet of a mass suicide of Microsoft 30Mb Zune players globally. Check Zune forums, Gizmodo, or other such sites; the reports are spreading rapidly, except apparently to the Microsoft official Zune site."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mad Maxine sent in this amazing Rubik's Cube puzzle, for the truly dedicated cube solver. You could glue it together if you wanted a permanent installation for an art piece or tabletop.

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The Agitator points us to quite a ridiculous story coming out of Florida. An incredibly law-abiding citizen almost got seriously punished for going above and beyond to live up to the law. Apparently he bought some things for personal use at a local hardware store -- and then noticed that the store forgot to charge him sales tax on the $23 bill. It was probably because the guy also works for an organization that is tax exempt, and the store just assumed he was buying on that account. Now, most people would think "cool" and move on. But, not this guy. He felt obliged to send in $1.50 and an explanation to Florida's Dept. of Revenue.

You would think that Florida would be thrilled to find such an incredibly honest person. Instead, it sent him an angry letter fining him $50 for failing to file a business tax return. He wrote back, explaining the situation again, noting that it wasn't a business, and he was just making up for the forgotten sales tax charge. The state's response? A demand for $650 in business taxes and a threat of criminal charges. It was only after a local TV news channel contacted the state on the guy's behalf that Florida admitted its mistake. Isn't bureaucracy great?

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Wow, this is very clever!

The situational awareness mast (or Zippermast) from Geosystems Inc. is a telescoping linear actuator that can vertically translate a robot's sensor suite for better visibility. In this video, a Zippermast is affixed to an I-Robot Packbot...

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Not enough sleep.

An anonymous reader noted a story discussing the aftermath of the Wikipedia fundraiser and says "The writer suggests that Wikipedia can earn $50-100 million a month by a simple text ad. He also suggests that contributors should be financially rewarded and that the lack of financial reward is the reason why 98.3% of registered Wikipedia users are inactive. What do you think? Should Wikimedia Foundation put ads on Wikipedia? Should contributors be financially rewarded? What compensation structure would be best?" Personally I think the independence of Wikipedia is great, and any advertising would not only compromise that integrity, but give contributors a sense of entitlement that the site is better off without.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Finally, you can recharge your iPod with Clif bars. When the military needed to recharge batteries on the move, they turned to University of Pennsylvania professor Larry Rome, an expert in muscle power and, it turns out, a capable inventor. His solution the world's first electricity-generating backpack Rome, who studies fish muscles, says the idea struck him in a Navy meeting. US troops were lugging 50-pound packs, including 20 pounds of batteries for high-tech gadgets. The brass wanted to use muscle power to generate electric power, but the best existing technology was shoe generators, straight out of Get Smart. I said, "That's a terrible idea," recalls Rome. "The force of the heel strike is only over a couple millimeters. The right way became obvious: with every step, these guys are lifting 80 pounds 5 to 7 centimeters - that's potentially 36 watts of mechanical energy." To turn his brainstorm into hardware, Rome grabbed an old external-frame backpack from college days and called his lab's "very line machinist" Fred Letterio. In their basement shop full of mills and lathes, the two added springs to suspend the cargo compartment from the pack frame. As the wearer's stride raises and lowers the pack. the load slides up and down. driving vertical rods to spin a geared DC servomotor up to 5.000 rpm to generate electricity.

With a 40-80 pound load. Rome's pack generates 7 watts, plenty of juice to simultaneously power a two-way radio, GPS receiver, and night vision goggles (or cellphone, PDA, digital camera, and iPod). The load can be locked for stability on sketchy terrain, and then unlocked to generate power again. Ultimately, the generator pack (patent pending) will weigh just a couple pounds more than a regular backpack. Carrying it burns 3% more energy, but wearers say it's more comfortable, and the extra work costs only a couple of extra candy bars. ("Food is 100 times more efficient than batteries.") Green bonus: the technology could keep tons of toxic batteries out of landfills.

>> Lightning Packs lightningpacks.com

From the column Made on Earth - MAKE 5, page 20 - Keight Hammond.

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We can thank instructables user arcticpenguin for this excellent explanation of cross-head, cross-point, cruciform, and square drive screws and drivers!

These screw types have a "+" shaped recess on the head and are driven by a cross-head screwdriver, designed originally for use with mass-production mechanical screwing machines. There are a few other recessed drive screws presented that you also want to be aware. So, why all the confusion? Why all the damaged screw heads and drivers? Why is this screw and driver thing so awkward? Read on and be amazed while I unravel the mystery of screw drives and present some you may have never seen.

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Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories - Cheap Perpetual Calendar...

A quick, handy, geeky, and seriously inexpensive perpetual calendar for your desk.
Got 12 cents and a scrap of cardboard? You're good to go!


Cut twelve slits, stick in your pennies, and... here it is, all built...

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Another day, another case where someone tried to blame a website for the actions of its users. In this case, a guy used the website SexSearch (seriously) to find someone to have sex with (ah, the internet...). The woman he met claimed in her profile that she was 18 years old. In reality, she was apparently only 14 -- and the guy was eventually brought up on statutory rape charges. In turn, he sued SexSearch, claiming that the site had a responsibility to verify the ages of its users -- something he failed to do himself. After a district court ruling tossed out the lawsuit, an appeals court has also tossed out the lawsuit, noting that none of the various 14 claims the guy brought against the site seemed to hold up under scrutiny. Basically, as the judge in the district court noted: "Plaintiff clearly had the ability to confirm Jane Roe’s age when he met with her in person, before they had sex, yet failed to do so." Thus, it's pretty difficult for him to then claim that it was the website's responsibility to accurately verify the age of participants.

Still, as Eric Goldman notes in the link above, the appeals court differed with the lower court on one point: saying that it wasn't dismissing the case for section 230 safe harbor reasons -- which ordinarily protect a service provider from the actions of its users. The lower court felt that 230 applied, but the appeals court feared that such a ruling would extend the coverage of section 230 "potentially abrogating all state- or common-law causes of action brought against interactive Internet services." I'm not sure I agree with that at all. No one is saying that safe harbors get service providers off the hook for illegal activities they perform. The point is that they should not be responsible for illegal actions performed by their users.

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Side steering car... Modern Mechanix, 1932.

FORDS have been forced to do strange things in the past, but the honors for odd performances to date go to a machine, built by a Pontiac, Mich., mechanic, which can move sideways at an angle of 65 degrees, and thus make parking an extremely simple matter.

As demonstrated in the photo above, the machine has each of its wheels mounted on a steering hub, so that a turn of the steering mechanism operates all four wheels.

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These two Super Mario Bros-inspired flower pots bring back the 8 bit graphics found in that game to your private garden or home. Pretty cool idea to integrate the old school graphics into modern living. Just don't try to head-butt them like Mario used to do.

via FFFFOUND! and via Blade Diary

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John Hering writes "With over 25 papers submitted, the results of the 2008 Malware Challenge are in. Malware has become an ever-present danger in today's connected world: The 2008 Malware Challenge was created to help increase awareness and understanding of the threat associated with malware by challenging contestants to reverse engineer and analyze real world malware from the wild."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the MAKE: Flickr pool

Tremble at the feet of Rusty Sheriff's mighty "555 astable tone generator with tuned keys" - sporting a big ol' 8" woofer and a laser-cut case. No performance samples to be found but the name/design alone is satisfying enough - Rusty Growler

Please, share pics of your awesome works in the Make: Flickr pool - we love this stuff!

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My pick for best gift of '08, Boris writes -

My sister suffers from seasonal affective disorder, also known as winter depression. A commonly prescribed therapy is light therapy - about thirty minutes of bright light in the morning. Bright in this context means more than 10 000 Lumens. You can of course buy commercial light-boxes, but I wanted to construct one by myself...

What a good brother, truly heartwarming. He even cared enough to share his build process ;)

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It's been well over five years since we first heard about a plan in Oregon to attach GPS devices to cars and tax drivers based on how much they drove and the idea hasn't become any better in the intervening years... but apparently it's still being pushed. Against Monopoly points us to the latest report that Oregon's Governor is trying to move forward with the plan. One of the reasons behind the bill has nothing to do with a more efficient way to tax drivers, but because the state is gaining less revenue from its gas tax since there are more fuel efficient cars on the roads these days. Of course, rather than reward drivers for driving more fuel efficient cars, this sort of tax punishes them, and actually encourages the use of less fuel efficient vehicles. And, of course, that doesn't even begin to get into the potential (and likely) privacy problems brought about by any system whereby the government has full access to a GPS system on your car.

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Zonk writes with news of a collaboration between Massively and GamerDNA to analyze the state of MMO player bases for 2008. Sifting through the data brought out several interesting trends. For example, Age of Conan took a substantial hit when Warhammer arrived on the scene, but none of the other major MMOs were significantly affected. Also, it seems Lord of the Rings: Online got a big shot in the arm from its Mines of Moria expansion — even moreso than World of Warcraft from Wrath of the Lich King, relatively speaking. The article also asserts the following about the recently-canceled Tabula Rasa: "... until the cancellation announcement in November, numbers were trending in the right direction, however slightly. Players were growing more interested in the sci fi MMO shooter, and logins were on the rise. If its development had not been so long, so expensive, and so vastly overhyped and mismarketed, this title could have been left alone to find its legs and found some small measure of success in a long tail environment akin to the Sony Station Pass."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The movie industry has been whining about its plight for ages in the new digital era, even as the industry brings in record revenues year after year after year. The latest is a NY Times piece which, while 'fessing up to those record revenues, tries to suggest that the industry isn't doing so well because so-called movie "blockbusters" don't attract as big an attendance as in the past. Of course, that really misses the point. The industry is in the business of making money -- not in putting the largest number of people in seats -- so if it's bringing in record amounts of cash, that's really all that should matter. If the industry wanted to get more people in seats then it should start by lowering the price and improving the overall movie-going experience. However, for the most part, the industry has shown little inclination to go in that direction -- so the fact that "blockbuster" movies of 2008 matched attendance numbers of less-well known movies from a decade ago is fairly meaningless.

The article seems to place the "blame" on studios overhyping openings, so that we hear so much hype about some new movie that many people are immune to the hype, filtering out all of the claims about how such a movie is a "must see" or whatever. I'm not sure that's true, however. It would seem that a much more likely culprit is that there is a lot more competition for any individual's entertainment hours these days than there was a decade ago. There's the internet, for one, which has grown massively in popularity and as an entertainment source since 1998. Then there's the rise of gaming consoles, home theaters and DVD rental services (you could rent VHS tapes, but services like Netflix have made DVDs even more popular) and plenty of other options that just didn't provide the same sort of competition a decade ago.

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Wow, this is crazy - a few folks emailed us and said all the 30GB ZUNEs in the world all stopped working at the same time (today) it seems that there might be some type of date bug with them (Z2K9)? Some folks are reporting that taking their ZUNE apart and unplugging the battery and re-plugging it in works, but it's a bit unclear what's going on.

ZUNE meltdown.
ZUNE frozen.
Z30s frozen.

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ackthpt writes "Headlines have been popping up on Google News: 'Terry Pratchett declared himself "flabbergasted" to receive a knighthood as he led a group of writers, actors and performers honoured today.' The Discworld author and stalwart adversary of Alzheimers Disease has been a member of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for Services to Literature since 1998. He will be entering the new year as Knight Commander. Well done and Oook, Sir Terry."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pedal power to light up Times Square New Year sign...

The ritual dropping of the ball in New York's Times Square on New Year's eve, seen on television by millions around the world, is becoming a bit greener than in years past.

The 2-0-0-9 sign that will light up when the New Year's ball finishes its descent will be powered by batteries charged by people pedaling on bicycles.

"This is our way of involving consumers in the whole process of powering the 2009 lighting when the ball drops on New Year's Eve," said Kurt Iverson, spokesman for Duracell, a unit of Procter & Gamble Co and which supplied the batteries.

Duracell has set up a "power lodge" in Times Square where visitors are ushered to a row of bicycles with generators connected to a set of massive batteries.

So far the project has collected 95 hours of pedal power, or about 35 percent of the total needed, Iverson told Reuters.

The power is generated from old-fashioned rotary technology -- pedal power and spinning wheels.

PHILIPS LIGHTING provided the new solid state lighting technology for the Ball, resulting in an astounding increase in impact, energy efficiency, and color capabilities. Capable of creating a palette of more than 16 million colors and billions of possible patterns, the 32,256 Philips Luxeon LEDs in this year's Ball represent more than three times the number of LEDS used last year, to deliver a brighter and more beautiful New Year's experience than ever before. And this year’s Ball is 10-20% more energy efficient than last year’s already energy-efficient Ball, consuming only the same amount of energy per hour as it would take to operate two traditional home ovens.

More:
New Year's eve ball.
Ringing In 2009 with People Power.

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Over the past few years, as the newspaper business got in deeper and deeper trouble, we seemed to increasingly hear some particularly clueless suggestions on how newspapers should save themselves -- almost always revolving around some sort of backwards effort to put the genie back in the bottle, such as by all banding together, violating all sorts of anti-trust rules and colluding to charge for content. Of course, this also ignores basic economic reality on how people view information and news. It also, falsely, assumes that newspapers are the only source for news, and that in stupidly taking themselves out of the market, upstart competitors won't fill the void.

Yet, it seems there's no shortage of silly suggestions along those lines. Mathew Ingram recently pointed to two such examples, with the San Francisco Chronicle publishing journalism professor Joel Brinkley's unoriginal suggestion that newspapers openly collude to start charging and the NY Times' David Carr's misleading profile of a tiny newspaper that has "thrived" by "ignoring the web."

Along those lines, a few people have submitted a rant by another old school newspaper guy, saying that the internet is the "cause" of all of the newspaper industry's woes, and that things would have been fine if all newspapers had simply stayed off the internet entirely. Now, obviously, these are journalists, rather than economists, but anyone with even the most basic understanding of economic principles or just the basic history of markets and innovation would know what happens to companies that ignore how a market is changing. The buggy whip makers didn't thrive by ignoring the automobile industry. They went out of business.

The newspaper industry won't be saved by putting its collective head in the sand (or by agreeing to some anti-competitive price fixing.) The newspaper industry will be saved by finally realizing that their "product" is their community of readers, and that anything they do to serve that community better is the future, not by clinging to a past when there was no real competition.

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The friendly iPhone Dev Team hackers have been hard at work over the holidays and have promised to release the iPhone 3G software unlocking utility, called yellowsn0w, sometime tomorrow for New Year's Eve.

A few details from the iPhone Dev Team blog:

We have been working hard on a few other things. The main one being the 3G unlock codenamed "yellowsn0w". This is now completed and is currently being packaged into a user-friendly application with the simplicity that you see in QuickPwn or BootNeuter.

• The target release date for the unlock is New Year's Eve 2008.
• This unlock method is available to iPhone 3Gs that have 2.11.07 baseband or earlier, we did warn you.
• You can tell what version baseband you have by going to Settings->General->About->Modem Firmware
• The unlock requires a jailbroken 3G iPhone. It'll be installable via Cydia and so it doesn't matter if you have a Mac or PC.
• Please refrain from updating your baseband, regardless of what version you're at.
• We'll have complete directions on New Year's Eve.
• We'll stream a live demo of the unlock before Christmas (see the update at the end of this post)

The software exists, as you can see from the video above, which was released last week, so I'm pretty confident we'll see the release as promised. From what I understand, the software is non-invasive and needs to be run every time the phone is booted, which will be executed during boot and invisible to the end user.

You do need an un-upgraded <2.11.07 version of the baseband, and for the near future you'll have to be careful not to upgrade it if you want to keep your phone unlockable. If you want to upgrade your phone but not kill the possibility of unlocking it, the team has some information on using PwnageTool to upgrade the iPhone firmware while keeping the baseband firmware intact. If you've already updated your baseband, consider yourself stuck with AT&Tuntil a new hack comes along.

Dev Team Blog (watch here for updates)
Original yellowsn0w Announcement
yellowsn0w Preview Demo

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huzur79 writes "Electronista is reporting that Kevin Martin, Chairman of the FCC, has dropped the content filtering provisions from the proposal for free wireless broadband service, according to an interview with Ars Technica. Previous drafts of the plan required protection methods to prevent users from accessing objectionable content, such as pornography. 'I'm saying if this is a problem for people, let's take it away,' Martin said. The proposal has received criticism and opposition from a variety of groups including the Bush administration, wireless companies, and consumer interest organizations. T-Mobile has argued that communicating data on the allocated frequency bands will cause interference and quality degradation. Civil liberties groups argue that the FCC would overstep its authority and violate the Constitution."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ed Felten has the details on a rather worrisome bit of information released by some security researchers on how to forge site certificates. Generally speaking, secure certificates for sites were considered to a pretty definite sign that you were safely connected to a particular site -- and transferring any data between you and that site securely. The ability to forge such certificates throws all that into doubt, and it severely disrupts the ability to be confident in a secure transaction online. Felten describes how this is fixable (though, some certification authorities should have made changes a while ago to prevent this), but it's yet another reminder that what's secure today might not be so secure tomorrow.

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We see plenty of frivolous lawsuits around here, but that doesn't mean all lawsuits are frivolous, obviously. Sometimes you come across a lawsuit where it's stunning what a company tried to get away with in terms of fraud. Take, for example, the case that was just settled between SuccessFactors and its competitor Softscape. Apparently, Softscape put together a totally bogus PowerPoint presentation of a made up disgruntled SuccessFactors customer and passed it around anonymously to potential customers. SuccessFactors sued, and Softscape settled before getting hit with a judgment that certainly would have gone in SuccessFactors' favor. There's plenty that's "fair game" in business competition, but this clearly went over the line.

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Iddo Genuth writes "Cliff Kushler, the inventor of the T9 keyboard technology for numeric keypads, has developed a new alphanumeric entry technology for touch-screen laptops and Smartphone devices. This latest technology, named Swype, works with an on-screen QWERTY keyboard similar to ones found on Windows Mobile and the iPhone. The difference from the usual method of typing in the letters is that a finger or stylus is used to slide in the first letter, then without lifting the finger, the user continues writing the entire word. Only once the word is completed can the finger be lifted off. According to the developers, this leads to a much faster way of 'typing,' or as we might call it soon, 'swiping.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today on Offworld, still feeling the holiday pinch of a games industry still not running on all rotors until after the New Year, we looked instead at a number of happenings on the fashion front, from a hoodie fit for Punch-Out!'s Little Mac, to the latest in the series of gawpingly gorgeous Pokemon t-shirts (!), to a shirt fit to be Offworld's own. We also saw plaintive graffiti in Left 4 Dead, a fantastic new energy drink commercial from the man behind epic pixel-art explosions 'Pirate Baby's Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006' and 'Kings of Power 4 Billion %', listened to a live four-man Korg DS-10 jam, and saw how Japan has channeled Chris Cunningham to advertise its newly released version of BioShock. Finally, we took a long look at Spelunky, a new procedurally generated freeware PC game that blends the best bits of Rogue/Nethack with 8-bit platforming, and is setting the bar very high for 2009's indie ilk.

I was talking with Doc Searls today, he's interested in using the OPML Editor to create and edit pages on a Berkman-hosted Media Wiki.

I wondered if they have an API, and sure enough, they do.

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API

I have a couple of questions...

1. Has anyone done any coding to the API? What's been your experience? Is there glue? For what languages?

2. Do you have a server I could try writing some code against to test it out? I don't want to experiment with Doc's site for fear of doing some damage and also disturbing his users.

Any help would be much apprecicated. TIA.

A few weeks back, we wrote about a site that seemed to have modified the old "dollar auction" concept and created a borderline evil business plan that would get plenty of people to pay money to "bid" on way underpriced goods. People keep bidding, because the costs seem so low -- but since everyone has to pay to bid, the companies ends up making a ton of money -- often many times the actual cost of the product. Basically, the company and whoever "wins" the auction are likely to make out okay -- while every other bidder loses. Apparently, there are a number of such sites doing similar models, and the UK government is noticing that it's pretty similar to gambling and probably should be regulated as a gambling site.

The reasoning is that people are paying money and might not get anything back for it -- which makes it akin to gambling. However, depending on how these sites are run, it's not as though the results are a real gamble -- it's still about whoever bids the highest for a good, so it seems like a stretch to call it gambling. It is a dumb move to get involved in any of these auctions in the first place (in many ways, worse than gambling), but that doesn't necessarily mean that they should be regulated like gambling sites.

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mytrip writes "Privacy advocates are questioning an aggressive Georgia law set to take effect Thursday that would require sex offenders to hand over Internet passwords, screen names and e-mail addresses. Georgia joins a small band of states complying with guidelines in a 2006 federal law requiring authorities to track Internet addresses of sex offenders, but it is among the first to take the extra step of forcing its 16,000 offenders to turn in their passwords as well."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

How to tap a phone - Mechanix Illustrated, March 1957 - fun for the whole family.

THERE are many ways to tap a phone; most of them against the law. Our little gadget, however, is quite legal and can be used to great advantage at home or in the office.

Basically, the unit consists of a pickup coil, an amplifier and a speaker. The pickup coil is placed under, or near, any transformer-type telephone without being in physical contact with it. As the electrical currents pass through the phone, part of the energy is induced into the pickup coil. This energy is fed into the amplifier where it is amplified to the point where it will operate the loudspeaker, enabling everyone within range to hear what is being said at the other end of the telephone line. This will come in handy when some relative is calling long-distance; your whole family can hear what he is saying. Or, in the office, the whole staff can hear a salesman’s report. There are other uses for the pickup, limited only by your own imagination.

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In general, it seems like a good thing that President-elect Obama has identified improved broadband as a key issue to focus on in the new administration. Broadband infrastructure is becoming critical infrastructure to any successfully functioning economy these days, and boosting our overall broadband is a necessity in trying to open up new economic possibilities. However, as with any government-sponsored program, when the government suggests it's ready to open its massive wallet on an initiative, special interests, incumbents and lobbyists see it as a way to get free money from the government. This is the problem in any sort of announced plan to give away money for infrastructure projects. It's not that the infrastructure isn't important. It's incredibly important. It's just that the system is often so corrupt that plenty of taxpayer money is likely to end up in the hands of those who need it the least, and who won't actually spend it to do much on infrastructure. We've seen broadband boondoggles like this in the past -- such as the Universal Service Fund, that really turned into a massive slush fund for telcos to charge more to customers without doing much of anything to provide universal service. I'm hoping that any plan this time around would be different -- and I've heard from multiple different people involved in the Obama transition team who insist that it really is different this time -- but some things are hard to change, and this sort of sucking at the government teat is hard to stop.

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Today at Boing Boing Gadgets, we saw a portable Nintendo 64, flipped through a box of fluffy disks, and reviewed one of those newfangled Atom-powered MIDs. Rumors abound that Steve Jobs may be in perfect health. Vogue has an $830 sleeve for your $380 netbook. John found a crazy bookshelf, a delux 12-inch notebook from Asus, and a freaky nail-brush. He marveled at 10 vintage erector sets. Rob saw the forthcoming Sony P's keyboard in glorious art-o-vision, a super-thin TV set from LG, an intelligent toilet, and a beautiful (or maybe hideous) walkman clone that doesn't work. There was a magnetically attachable iPhone camera lens, a USB eraser, and a transforming flashlight in disguise.

Over at Boing Boing Offworld, Brandon blogged a TV commercial for the BioShock PS3 vidgame. The ad reminds me of the nonsensical, arty Mr. Plow commercial on The Simpsons. (Thanks for the reminder, TR0NK!) a Simpsons bit where Homer stars in a nonsensical, arty perfume (?) commercial. Anyone remember that?
BioShock commercial

Here's a basic, introductory papercrete project: save some newspaper and soda cans from the garbage / recycling, add a bit of cement, and end up with a funky cool wall! I've also seen walls of this style with glass bottles instead of aluminum cans. I believe there's less of a recycling market for glass than aluminum, but you'd have to go a few inches thicker on the wall to match the bottle's height...

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TaeKwonDood writes "LEDs don't beat CFLs in the home yet, but it's not simply because PG&E is getting rich making people feel like they are helping the environment buying CFLs made in China that are shipped to the US using a lot more fossil fuels than they save. It's a problem of indication versus illumination. However, some new discoveries are going to change all that."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've posted quite a bit about DIY biohackers over the years, but the trend continues as the tools become cheaper and the information easier to find. A few days ago, the Associated Press took a quick look at amateur gene jockeys. From the AP:

In her San Francisco dining room lab, for example, 31-year-old computer programmer Meredith L. Patterson is trying to develop genetically altered yogurt bacteria that will glow green to signal the presence of melamine, the chemical that turned Chinese-made baby formula and pet food deadly.

"People can really work on projects for the good of humanity while learning about something they want to learn about in the process," she said...

In Cambridge, Mass., a group called DIYbio is setting up a community lab where the public could use chemicals and lab equipment, including a used freezer, scored for free off Craigslist, that drops to 80 degrees below zero, the temperature needed to keep many kinds of bacteria alive.

Co-founder Mackenzie Cowell, a 24-year-old who majored in biology in college, said amateurs will probably pursue serious work such as new vaccines and super-efficient biofuels, but they might also try, for example, to use squid genes to create tattoos that glow.

"Amateurs are trying genetic engineering at home"

M2Z's big plan to provide wireless internet to the entire country, if the FCC would just hand over free spectrum, never made all that much sense to us. Yes, the country could have a much better broadband infrastructure, and there are some interesting possibilities in the wireless space, but simply handing over a bunch of spectrum to a single startup company with a promise to provide free wireless to most of the country just seems like a boondoggle. There's little evidence that the plan would work or that it is even necessary. So, it seemed good that the plan went down in flames earlier this month -- though, most of the criticism was focused on the pointless requirement for anti-smut filters on the free connectivity.

However, Kevin Martin is making some news today by telling everyone who will listen that he's willing to drop the filters part if he can get the rest approved. This is a little surprising from Martin, as he's been a pretty big anti-smut crusader in his role at the FCC, but perhaps he's looking to leave a legacy beyond "AT&T lackey" now that he's about to leave the FCC. It still doesn't appear that he has the support to push this through, but that could change. Still, it would be good if someone (anyone?) could explain why it makes sense to just give a single company this spectrum without any clear reason why it should get the spectrum or proof that it can provide what it wants to provide in a reasonable manner? We've seen tons of promises about broadband wireless over the years from upstarts and very few have gone anywhere. Before just handing over valuable spectrum to one provider, why not see if (a) it's actually necessary and (b) if the company in question can actually provide what it claims it will provide.

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As promised, here’s a post about kids’ books, and specifically Meomi’s fabulous The Octonauts series.

We’ve tried to give Mark F. credit for turning us on to The Octonauts, but he refuses to take it, going so far to insist that he’s never seen these books. OK, fine. The books in question are The Only Lonely Monster, The Sea of Shade, and the new release, The Frown Fish. All hold the attention of the grownups, the teenager, and the school-age tike in the house. Seriously, everyone should run out and get these.

But how to describe the books? They’re cute and creative. There’s a hip Japanese influence and engaging storylines. The 6-year-old says, “They live under the sea in a big Octopod. They’re cool. They have adventures.” Nuff said.

The Octonauts

(Shawn Connally and Bruce Stewart are guest bloggers)

Continuing in our retrospective of favorite BBtv episodes from 2008, today's feature is an encore presentation of our three-part visit to the delicious, trippy, techy TCHO factory in San Francisco. The "chocolate for a new generation" startup was hacked together by a space shuttle technologist, Timothy Childs, and the founder of Wired, Louis Rosetto.

Part one is embedded above, parts two and three below, and here are direct MP4 links to all: one, two, three. Snip from the original post:

In part one of Boing Boing tv's multi-part exploration of Tcho, we begin in the lab, and learn about the origins of chocolate: it's a weird looking fruit with biological roots in faraway tropical lands. How this fruit is cultivated, harvested, and cured determines the flavor of the final product, and we learn about the hedonics -- the sensual nuances -- of this exotic and temperamental element.

Blog posts with more chocolicious background on all that we experienced there:

Migraineman writes "NASA has released a 400-page Columbia Crew Survival Investigation Report [16MB PDF.] If you're interested in a detailed examination and timeline of the events leading to the destruction of Columbia, this is well worth the time. The report includes a number of recommendations to increase survivability of future missions." Reader bezking points out CNN's story on the report, which says that problems with the astronauts' restraint systems were the ultimate cause of death for the seven astronauts on board.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MIT researchers have built a tiny microhabitat to study the food chain of marine microbes. The microbial ecosystem is about the size of a piece of chewing gum, or microscope slide. From the MIT News Office:

The MIT study is one of the first detailed explorations of how sea creatures so small -- 500,000 can fit on the head of a pin -- find food in an ocean-size environment...

Depending on the organism being studied, nutrients or prey are injected with a syringe-based pump into the device's microfluidic channel, which is 45 mm long, 3 mm wide and 50 micrometers deep. "While relying on different swimming strategies, all three organisms exhibited behaviors which permitted efficient and rapid exploitation of resource patches," (professor Roman) Stocker said. It took bacteria less than 30 seconds, for example, to congregate within a patch of organic nutrients.

This new laboratory tool creates a microhabitat where tiny sea creatures live, swim, assimilate chemicals and eat each other. It provides the first methodological, sub-millimeter scale examination of a food web that includes single-celled phytoplankton, bacteria and protozoan predators in action.

Tiny ecosystem

We have a lot of posts on MAKE (20,000+) and while we have our favorites we like to look at what ended up circulating around the web the most each year - it's always an eclectic mix of projects and passions. Besides our main blog page, magazine page, video/podcast and paginated pages we've put together the top viewed posts in 2008 on MAKE, check them out and relive the fun of 2008!

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PS3 Grill - When the final case design of the Playstation 3 was released, it was widely critsised as looking exactly like a George Foreman Grill ... we decided this would be a great project and challenge to actually build the Real PS3 Grill.

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Make your own vacuum tubes - Check out this absolutely mesmerizing (17 minute!) video of a French amateur radio operator who rolls his own vacuum tube triodes! I love the ease with which he performs these rather high-end skills (like glass forming), the gestural flourishes (like it's hand magic), and the Zelig-esque soundtrack.

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Entire NES stuffed into its cartridge kinda makes you cry - This amazing mod crams an entire Nintendo Entertainment System from the 80s into one of it's cartridges complete with power and reset buttons, controller ports and composite video and audio output jacks. This is equivalent to the gaming version of the "clown car" where there is so much stuffed into such a small physical area that it's pretty hard to understand how this could work.

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Man builds a living out of LEGO - A fun story about artist Nathan Sawaya who makes incredible LEGO sculptures.

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Weird bass guitars - Check out these great bass guitars! Which one is your favorite?

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Segway's new RMP! It uses the same parts that a Segway uses but just doubled, it can haul up to 400 lbs. The engineer was going to load the firmware on for demos later, but I took some video of video they had on a screen, it's creepy cool for sure.

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Open source hardware 2008 - The definitive guide to open source hardware projects in 2008 - Each year we do a guide to all open source hardware and this year there are over 60 projects/kits - it's incredible! Many are familiar with Arduino (now shipping over 60,000 units) but there are many other projects just as exciting and filled with amazing communities - we think we've captured nearly all of them in this list. Some of these projects and kits are available from MAKE others from the makers themselves or other hardware manufacturers - but since it's open source hardware you can make any of these yourself, everything is available.

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Zombie Pumpkins! - pumpkin carving patterns - This guy has been updating his library of pumpkin stencils over the years and his catalog is just brilliant. He's a great artist and the site covers everything from movies to classical monsters. Some stencils are more involved than others when it comes to carving but the results have always been amazing. The best part is that you can get lifetime access to the library with as little as a $2 donation. Well worth it.

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HOW TO - build a water mortar - This water mortar is made from PVC using a variation on the "drill press lathe" technique from the book "Eccentric Cubicle." The finished product launches over a quart of water per shot!

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DIY Lamborghini - The car, called the "Woodighini" was made by a 33 year old Canadian named "Woody".

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I know Lenore Skenazy’s terrific blog, Free-Range Kids, has been mentioned on BB before, but IMHO it’s relevant, especially when our kids are home from school for two weeks and we as parents have to choose between letting them zone out for hours with the new videogame Santa brought them, or giving them the opportunity to explore the world around them and perhaps push their abilities with a difficult project.

For Skenazy, Christmas Day included a call from the police about her son because he was trying to ride a commuter train by himself to visit a friend. The friend’s parents were waiting on the other end, but that apparently wasn’t good enough for the train conductor. She describes their experience:

He – Izzy — has ridden this route solo a dozen times before. It’s a straight shot on a commuter train and, as always, he was being met at the other end by his friend’s family. But today’s conductor was appalled to see a boy riding alone.

For some reason, the conductor wouldn’t talk to me, even though Izzy called from the train when the ordeal began. The man had no interest in hearing me state what Izzy had already been telling him: We believe a child of 10 is perfectly capable of taking a half hour journey by himself.

So instead the conductor and his superior got off at Izzy’s stop and then, as the train just sat there (I’m sure no one was a rush to get to their families on Christmas day), they awaited the police. I got a call from the friend’s dad who was waiting to take Izzy home. “We cannot leave the station,” he said.”

“Why not?”

“The police have to decide what to do next.”

This is the sort of story that really chaps my ass. I’m firmly ensconced in the camp that believes today’s kids are being robbed of self-reliance and instead being instilled with fear and couch-potato health. Our own kids have to wear their helmets when biking or skating, but they get to go on adventurous bike rides; the 13-year-old frequently rides on his own or with friends. The 6-year-old doesn’t venture out on his bike without us, but he does explore the few acres of woods around us by himself and he’s so fond of sliding down the hill by our house that we bought him a long rope for Christmas so he can “rappel” back up the hill and slide down again.

And we understand that a small hamlet in the forested hills of Sonoma County isn’t the same as the wilds of NYC or Chicago, but we’re fairly secure in thinking that we’d lean toward the free-range side even in those environs. We make it a point to take our kids to big cities several times each year, and they’re allowed to wander a bit. Sometimes it’s scary – I once lost my then 10-year-old in the American Natural History Museum in NYC for about 20 minutes after he begged me to let him take the top route while I took the bottom. When we eventually found each other I scared him even more by yelling at him; this was my own fear actualized, which I later had to apologize for. But hey, he knows I care and that I’m not perfect, and hopefully I gave him an example of cleaning up your outbursts. And when we returned to the museum this year, he had a great story to tell his little brother.

--Shawn

Free Range Kids

(Shawn Connally and Bruce Stewart are guest bloggers)

AdamWeeden writes "According to research done by the Boston Globe, HP has been secretly using a third-party company to sell printers to Iran. This is illegal under a ban instituted in 1995 by then U.S. President Bill Clinton. The third-party company, Redington Gulf, operates out of Dubai and previously stated on their web site that the company began in 1997 with 'a team of five people and the HP supplies as our first product, we started operations as the distributor for Iran.' though now the site has been changed to remove the mention of Iran. Has HP unknowingly been supplying Iran with technology or have they been trying to secretly get by the U.S. governement's export restrictions?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Flickr user pokerchampdaniel posted a video of a very strange worm he found under a log in New South Wales, Australia. He couldn't identify it but commenters say it's a Nemertea. It's very odd.
"Strangest Invertebrate Ever" (Thanks, Justin Ried!)

Boing Boing partner and Federated Media founder John Battelle publishes a list of predictions every new year -- and at the end of that year (like, as in now) he revisits them, to see how he did. In short, he was pretty spot-on for 2008. His year-in-review posts are fascinating and insightful, and he's frank about even the parts that missed the mark. Snip:

Reading over my predictions for 2008, I was struck with one thing: It wasn't a list. It was more of a narrative, making decoding how I did that much more difficult. After the narrative, I focused on the biggies - Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft, AOL, and Newscorp/FIM. I'll have to keep that in mind when I post my predictions for 2009 on Jan 1 next year.

Excerpts from a few of the company-specific predictions, reviewed:

Google:
1. 2008 will be the year Wall Street gets frustrated with Google. Sometimes, a picture says it best [ Image above, at top of post - XJ ]. It's clear the bloom came off the Google Wall St. rose in 2008.

2. Google will continue to struggle with its display advertising business, at least as it is traditionally understood, in part due to a culture conflict between its engineering-based roots and the thousands of media-saavy sales and marketing folks the company has hired in the past two years
I think this clearly occurred (note Armstrong's acknowledgement of this issue here, Comscore noted that Google had just 1.5% of the display market by June), but with the appointment of David Rosenblatt as President, Display, I expect the conflict to be resolved, at least temporarily. I do not believe, however, that this issue is anywhere near off the table. To do display right, you have to act like a publisher.

Yahoo:
1. Yahoo, meanwhile, will spend most of 2008 trying to figure out what to do with what it bought in 2007, and attempting to articulate a strategy that is anything but "we have 500 million users, so we must be important." By mid year, it will have succeeded.
Well, I was right about the first part, and very, very wrong about the second. I guess I was just too optimistic that Yahoo would get its shit together by mid year. Both the bear hug that was the lost Microsoft deal, and then the goat rodeo that was the lost Google deal, killed any clarity at Yahoo. But I do believe there is a comeback story to be written there. It just won't be Jerry writing it.

Predictions 08: How Did I Do? (Battellemedia)

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved a new prescription drug, Latisse, for lengthening eyelashes. The active ingredient in the drug was first used to treat glaucoma. Then the manufacturer, Allergan, realized that one of the side effects, eyelash growth, was marketable. From Scientific American:

The med... should be available by March from a doctor or with a prescription from one. Price tag: $120 for a month’s supply. According to manufacturer Allergan, the drug usually nets results two to four months after users start it. Potential side effects: Some 4 percent of users experience eye itching and redness, and it may also temporarily darken the skin of the eyelid, according to the company...

It's not clear exactly why Latisse promotes eyelash growth, but the company speculates that the drug may increase the length and amount of hair that sprouts during the growth cycle. It’s possible that the drug may also spur eyebrow and scalp hair growth, doctors told the Wall Street Journal. But Allergan spokesperson Heather Katt says the company hasn't explored using Latisse for those purposes.

New eyelash-lengthening drug approved

As promised here's today's year end Q&A. We'll try to keep the topic focused on what we thought were the biggest stories from 2008 and what will be the biggest stories in 2009, and see how well that works. We had some problems last week with the CoverItLive software, but hopefully this week will work better. The folks from CoverItLive have been in touch and are working hard to get rid of some of the bugs we encountered. Anyway, looking forward to seeing what people think were/are the biggest stories:

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Talk about a niche. Sky Blue Radio is an Internet radio station for hardcore flight simulator enthusiasts. In operation for more than a year, the station says it has 750,000 listeners a month. Of course, real pilots aren't permitted to listen to the radio. From Air & Space Smithsonian:

The music selections are largely pop/rock, old and new, everything from Frankie Valli and the Beatles to John Cougar Mellencamp. “We have a little something for most,” says (founder Richard) Rudd. “We prefer to stay away from songs containing vulgarity, as we like to think of the station as family-orientated..."

When he’s not running his business, Rudd is a flight simulation enthusiast, or “flight simmer.” As a virtual pilot, he favors the Boeing 737-700 for short hops and the 767-300 for longer hauls. He’s also a home-builder of simulated cockpits, with two projects in the works: cockpit replicas of the Aero Vodochody L29 and the Beechcraft 65A. With Sky Blue Radio, Rudd wants to entertain his fellow flight simmers with music, yes, but he also wants to keep his listeners informed about the latest trends in flight simulation. “As far as news is concerned, we tend to only look at things that are happening within the flight simulation community,” says Rudd. “We will not cover world topics. The belief is that people tuned in to Sky Blue Radio are carrying out their hobby, and so do not need or want to have ‘real life’ thrust on them during that time.”

Tuning In