Fugu Talk

HyperBowl is now on the Thousand Apps page. Here’s just a section. Can you locate HyperBowl?

Despite its pitch as “Gray’s Anatomy in Space”, I started watching episodes of Defying Gravity on the PlayStation Store. (I was looking for Dollhouse, but oddly, that’s listed under Crime instead of Sci-Fi). Defying Gravity is not bad – I like the characters and story arc, could do without the cutesy music, yes, reminiscent of Gray’s Anatomy. But it’s no Firefly. So it’s fitting that when I searched for “defying gravity” on YouTube, I found this homage to Firefly.

A few years ago I attended a talk at the Santa Ana Digital Media Center given an executive from an online gaming company. Someone asked for his opinion on net neutrality and I was startled that he 1) didn’t know what it was, and 2) answered anyway that it didn’t concern him and that the free market would take care of it anyway. I’ll just pose a simple scenario – let’s say Time Warner cable strikes a deal to give broadband preference to a particular game, say WoW or Starcraft, or one of the games developed by a Time Warner studio, and conversely downgrades performance for your game. You’re hosed.

Here’s a nice quick-start graphic on net neutrality, including the latest news of Google once again stepping on and off the moral high ground.

[Via: Online MBA Programs]

I have a rule of thirds when it comes to web ads (along with a rule of popups and a rule of flashing banner ads) – I am not inclined to tweet/share/inflict a web page on others if two thirds of the page doesn’t consist of content. Like this Forbes page, which has a story surrounded by blocks of large type blaring at you to sign up for other Forbes products.

You could argue that ads promoting other Forbes products or promotions or tie-ins qualify as Forbes content (at least on my own web site, that’s the story I’m sticking with). But the reason I got peeved is at the bottom of the page, where it’s clear the entire story might have fit on this page if they’d given it, say, maybe 40% of the page.

To be fair, I’ve seen a lot worse. Indeed, I’ve followed twitter links to articles which just had one or a few sentences, surrounded by a sea of ads, requiring you to click on a link to read more of the story. Eventually, they’ll just feed us a word at a time.

This is me at work in Blue Mars. I’m the guy in shorts standing around.