Category: Things I think about

Reminiscing about Nintendo and Sega

Mario vs Sonic by Michael Dale

Watching Google and Yahoo! compete is like watching Sega and Nintendo back in the day when it was SegaCD vs Super Nintendo (wow, now I get to date myself with “obscure” references to old skool technology!). Oh yeah, and meanwhile Microsoft is pricing itself out of the market, just like NeoGeo did.

With Google’s more staid bundle of desktop-cum-web applications being the talk of the town, Yahoo!, (represented by upstarts Flickr and Upcoming) not wanting to be upstaged, has launched its own cross-application barrage of new features.

It’s funny, because I use many of Google’s services but I actually like Yahoo! better. I mean, maybe it’s because they actually come to my events or because I’m friends with many of their WebTwenny staff or because if I were reincarnated as a web app, I’d want to be Flickr… I dunno.

It’s like I used to have a SegaCD but I still always played my Nintendo because it felt like it had a heart. It was about more than just the game. It was subjective for sure, but you can’t really rationally argue against intuition.

Maybe that’s the key to Robert’s question… and my criticism. Google has a ton of blogs and newsgroups, but I just don’t connect with them the way I do with the blogs, services or people of Flickr and Upcoming… I mean, I know there is, but it just makes me wonder, “Gee Tinman, is there really a heart in there?“

Bad Behavior Misbehavin’?

A couple weeks back I installed Michael Hampton’s for WordPress. Seemed to have a attracted a lot of positive comments while I’ve been drowning in spam, so I figured, what they heck.

Well, it turns out that this is a pretty heavy duty solution that can bring some unintended consequences.

For one thing, forget about going directly to your WordPress blog from your Gmail account. Bad Behavior blocks the Google proxy.

And, as Tom Raftery and I discovered, forget about showing up on TechMeme.

Though you can edit BB’s whitelist.inc.php file to ignore TechMeme’s IPs (70.86.131.10, 70.86.46.66, and 82.165.180.34), Tom hasn’t seen any success yet.

With Akismet’s recent nap, I’m going to leave BB running for awhile longer with the IPs whitelisted and see what happens. Unlike Tom, I’m not that concerned about getting on TechMeme, but it is kind of a bummer that we haven’t found a simple and reliable solution yet.

A River of Fruit

xFruits RSS to MobileEmily Chang, Pete Cashmore and the Download Squad all talked about xFruits months ago, but it seems pertinent to bring it up again now that there’s been some pickup of Dave’s River of News meme.

Interestingly, you can either run your own rivers without relying on Dave to offer the content or set up your own at xFruits, as John Walker suggests.

Heck, while we’re on the topic of decent mobile sites, I’ll point out a few other destinations I frequent on my Blackberry:

Events that you should be at

In Valleywag style, here are events that you should go to (though no, sorry, they’re not all Valley-centric):

Add these to your calendar.

Finally — track new co.mments by email!

Now instead of relying on individual bloggers to email-update enabled their blogs, will take care of the work for you — on any blog! Ever want to get follow-up notifications on responses to comments you’ve left on someone’s blog? Or just wanted to find out about new activity on a given blog post? Well, now you can. Via email.