The text-messaging portion of the game is optional, and requires one cell phone. You text “SPY” to Hasbro’s servers, and then you’ll receive six texts during the course of the game which give additional instructions and add an element of chance. Players pass the cell phone along as they take their turns, and if the text arrives during your turn, you get to act on it. I played once with the texting (as recommended, to get used to the game itself) and then once without.

You have two years to play, apparently.

It states on the box that Hasbro will maintain the servers until the end of 2011, at which point it’s not clear whether the text-messaging portion will continue or not. I would guess it depends on the success of these games.

[…] they discovered, a stable group of high-level editors has become increasingly responsible for controlling the encyclopedia, while casual contributors and editors are falling away.

[…] One of the measures the Parc team looked at was how often a user's edit succeeds in sticking. "We found that if you were an elite editor, the chance of your edit being reverted was something in the order of 1% – and that's been very consistent over time from around 2003 or 2004," he says.

Meanwhile, for those who did not invest vast amounts of time in editing, the experience was very different. "For editors that make between two and nine edits a month, the percentage of their edits being reverted had gone from 5% in 2004 all the way up to about 15% by October 2008. And the 'onesies' – people who only make one edit a month – their edits are now being reverted at a 25% rate," Chi explains.

The entire article is a really interesting look at how the site is changing.  The article discusses the eternal battle between two factions:

On one side stand the deletionists, whose motto is "Wikipedia is not a junkyard"; on the other, the inclusionists, who argue that "Wikipedia is not paper".

Deletionists argue for a tightly controlled and well-written encyclopedia that provides valuable information on topics of widespread interest. Why should editors waste time on articles about fly-by-night celebrities or wilfully obscure topics? Inclusionists, on the other hand, believe that the more articles the site has, the better: if they are poorly referenced or badly written, they can be improved – and any article is better than nothing. After all, they say, there is no limit to the size of the site, and no limit to the information that people may want.

We regret that it came to this, but all of our efforts to avoid it failed. No business we approached wanted to purchase tr.im for even a minor amount.

There is no way for us to monetize URL shortening -- users won't pay for it -- and we just can't justify further development since Twitter has all but anointed bit.ly the market winner. There is simply no point for us to continue operating tr.im, and pay for its upkeep.

Top 10 Thinking Traps Exposed page explains things like the “Sunk Cost Trap”:

You pre-ordered a non-refundable ticket to a basketball game. On the night of the game, you’re tired and there’s a blizzard raging outside. You regret the fact that you bought the ticket because, frankly, you would prefer to stay at home, light up your fireplace and comfortably watch the game on TV. What would you do?

Wikipedia’s List of Cognitive Biases goes even further, with dozens and dozens of named biases – influences that make you think wrongly about something.  For instance:

Bandwagon effect — the tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. […]

Reminiscence bump — the effect that people tend to recall more personal events from adolescence and early adulthood than from other lifetime periods. […]

Lake Wobegon effect — the phenomenon that a supermajority of people report themselves as above average in desirable qualities

I thoroughly enjoyed reading both of those.

It's a handy way for internet addicts to get fit: the faster you pedal, the faster your internet goes. The fitness possibilities are wonderful.

It's an exercise bike, with sensors on the pedals, connected to an Arduino and a laptop running Ubuntu with wondershaper.

There’s a video.

psychologists […] are angry that the 10 original Rorschach plates are reproduced online, along with common responses for each. For them, the Wikipedia page is the equivalent of posting an answer sheet to next year’s SAT.

They are pitted against the overwhelming majority of Wikipedia’s users, who share the site’s “free culture” ethos, which opposes the suppression of information that it is legal to publish.

In this project, we consider the problem of reconstructing entire cities from images harvested from the web. Our aim is to build a parallel distributed system that downloads all the images associated with a city, say Rome, from Flickr.com. After downloading, it matches these images to find common points and uses this information to compute the three dimensional structure of the city and the pose of the cameras that captured these images. All this to be done in a day.

The Printed Blog is the world’s first daily newspaper comprised entirely of blogs and other user generated content.

What they do is get permission of blog owners, then reprint their posts in a glossy print publication which they hand out at train stations in major metros. So, it’s like blogging, but in reverse – what started on the Web, is now in print.

He was handing out copies at the conference, and it was very well-done.  Glossy, large-format, very high-end.  Great photography as well.

I talked to Joshua about the potential for Kindles and iPhones and laptops to compete with him for the commuter’s attention span.  He made a really great point; he said:

The Web is about exploration. Print is about consumption.

That’s fairly profound, and it echos what I’ve said before.  Consider this post from a couple years ago about reading print publications on the Net with one of those zooming readers:

[…] it’s tough to keep your attention on Web content, because the Web is ever-changing and it’s so easy to get distracted. Hyperlinks beckon you on to more content and you know that different…stuff, is just a bookmark click away.

What I found when reading content designed for print, was that I spent more time reading it. I would actually read an entire article, rather than just skim it, and I could actually be semi-contemplative about something, instead of rushing to finish so I could move onto the next thing. There was an unmistakable sense of peace about the entire process that I’ve just never gotten from Web content.

I still feel this way.  My Kindle is easier to read things on that the Web.  Paper is easier still.  It tends to shut off the explorer in you, and unleash the consumer.  This guy may have a point.

Massimino writes his updates in space and then e-mails them to Houston, where a NASA employee posts them to his Twitter profile. That often takes hours because e-mails are only transmitted from the shuttle a few times a day.

Over the course of 24 hours, [YouTube] was flooded with a number of pornographic video clips rumoured to be in the tens of thousands.

In what is believed to have been a coordinated attack carried out by the infamous 4Chan group of hackers, clips containing nudity and sexual scenes were made available to the sites tens of millions of users. To circumvent the site's normal moderation policy, they were uploaded with titles referencing such favourite children's entertainers as Hannah Montana and the famous American Christian pop boy band, the Jonas Brothers. The videos began with footage of the artists in question before cutting to video of adults participating in group sex acts, according to the BBC.

It is believed YouTube's moderation team have been working around the clock since the attack to try and take down the offending items

The real way to understand the impact of the economy on trade show type events is to ask event service providers. One Los Angeles event services company manager summed it up this way: “2009 really sucks for us. Last year, our biggest event needed 340 booth pods for their expo hall; this year, the same event needed only 60 pods. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that we’re not going to be in business for long if this keeps up.”

[…] They are fun and provide cubicle-dwelling knowledge workers with something to look forward to—an escape, if you will, from the daily grind. The help us network with our peers in social settings. They help us grow as professionals—and, for those who seek the spotlight—as presenters. These benefits are difficult to duplicate outside of in-person conferences. Difficult, but not impossible.

I think conferences are a great tool for employee development and morale. It has value to get out and meet other people, see what they’re doing, etc. There are intangibles you get from a conference that you just don’t get otherwise.

Qimo is a desktop operating system designed for kids. Based on the open source Ubuntu Linux desktop, Qimo comes pre-installed with educational games for children aged 3 and up. Qimo’s interface has been designed to be intuitive and easy to use, providing large icons for all installed games, so that even the youngest users have no trouble selecting the activity they want.

I love the caption under one of the people’s names: “Owns Home Computer.”