"Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people that you exist. Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.

I feel like flow is ascendant these days, for obvious reasons—but we neglect stock at our own peril." This is good.

"In five years, the coolest stuff on the iPad shouldn’t be Spider-Man 5, Ke$ha’s third album, or the ePub ver sion of Annabel Scheme. If that’s all we’ve got, it will mean that Apple suc ceeded at invent ing a new class of device… but we failed at invent ing a new class of content. In five years, the coolest stuff on the iPad should be… jeez, you know, I think it should be art."

Gorgeous retro-styled, genuinely-3D space combat strategy game for PC and (hurrah!) Xbox 360 Indie Games. Love the jaunty, Jetsons-y typefaces, the gentle piano music as combat plays out, the turn structure, and the hints at what's to come in the preview video. (Although: why anyone would make ships with weak bottoms (as opposed to bottoms & tops) in a genuinely 3D game seems strange. Gravity Bone was delightful, so this could be great; will buy it as soon as it's out.

"With every piece of metadata that you don’t throw away, you gain a factor more potential ways of slicing through your content and delivering it as a separate product, simply as a result of a database lookup. In the case of Vogue today, say, commissioning an editorial product that simply shows every dress designed by Christian Dior that appears in the archive would involve weeks of intern-work, instantly making it unprofitable or too late. A metadata-complete archive in the future would give you that with a single line of code." Hammersley on the value to journalism of sensible datastorage. Data-driven journalism in the sense that it is not *about* data, but in that it is *treated as data* – and from this more stories can flow.

"The weird thing is that you can view these “wholesome” games as being just as bad for girls as Grand Theft Auto’s random bloodshed and rampant criminality is for young, impressionable boys. And while GTA’s influence on boys has been dissected to death, what about the Nintendo DS’ upcoming avalanche of games for tween girls? What kinds of values do preteens learn from these titles? Valuable life lessons, or bad habits?" As bad as GTA? Many, many times worse, if this sample is anything to go on.

This session was genuinely excellent, and I'm probably going to write about it in the near future. In the meantime: bookmarked.

"Use our tools to author playable tracks. Upload and submit your tracks for review by the Rock Band Creators community. Approved tracks become available in the Rock Band Store and on the Xbox LIVE Marketplace*, and you get a cut of every purchase." Um, as pointed out elsewhere, this is utterly brilliant. Harmonix are smart cookies, and thinks like this remind me why.

"Fast-forward ten years, and I'm now using all those accessibility features on a daily basis. At some point during the dot-com bust it turned out that the written word was the payload, and regular people started using alternative (browsing) devices to access text from the web. Arguments about device-independent, semantic markup and graceful degradation suddenly have an additional halo of legitimacy because they affect everyone."

"LEDs pulse back and forth in the mantle to indicate roughly how many friends are on Xbox Live. It goes into red alert if anyone's playing Left 4 Dead." Nicely done; might poke something similar into life for myself, just for kicks.

Tim O'Reilly on what he learned from studying the classics at University. Simply because of competence at the languages, I know more of the Romans than the Greeks, but this is thoughtful stuff. I was often asked at school by peers why I'd study something of "no practical value"; O'Reilly has some smart answers.

"I think that there are really obvious reasons this isn't currently happening. Tech-oriented, web-trained, fast-paced, hard-nosed Silicon Valley culture is not really that similar to game developer culture. Outside of GDC Austin… I haven't seen a lot of opportunities for the two industries to mix. Most crucially, everybody's too damn busy trying to get their jobs done to really spend a lot of time or thought on the issue." That gap in culture is something that still fascinates me.

It's Oregon Trail, but where you take everybody's favourite emo band on tour of the states. Surprisingly deep and detailed, an affectionate tribute to Apple II entertainment and the rigours of being a touring rock band. It is very silly, and somewhat ace, and will be getting a blog post in due course.

"Tips and tricks only the pros knew, UNTIL NOW! Get ready to PWN up some NUBS on Xbox Live and get some MAD BP'S BRO!" I'm pretty sure I've played this guy.

"These are just various photos taken during the development cycle of the businessib. Enjoy them. We hope you think they are as hilarious as we do." Oh my word.

"If you keep the city and concentrate on putting more world into it, imaginativeness becomes the primary obstacle– you can add things into this city without having to add much physical space and new assets. There's legions of empty storefronts and empty buildings, waiting to be filled. And media– web sites, radio stations, tv shows– don't take up space either. Think of this cheap empty space as a place to tell new stories, because as a developer, you are good at this." Iroquois, hitting many nails on the head all at once, again.

The Guardian Open Platform launches, with their Content API, their Data Store, and a selection of client libraries for the API (one of which I did a smidge of work on). This is not just a good thing, it's a good thing Done Right, and I'm looking forward to what's next from the Open Platform team.

"A collection of accidents that happened while working on maps and other graphics." Bloopers from interactive infographics. Delightful; the patina and happy accidents of the 21st century.

Custodian is the Ruby gem for accessing the Guardian Open Platform Content API that James Darling, Kalv Sandhu, and I (although my contribution was minor) built. There's a Google Code link to it, but I'd imagine the github version is where the action will be.

"You may not know his name but you will certainly know his work: Morris Cassanova (aka Mr Chicken) designs and makes signs for most of the fried chicken shops in the UK." That's a good market to have sewn up, I'd imagine.

Jones annotates his screengrabs from the James Coburn classic; lovely to see it all captured so well, even if I'd disagree that the plot is a thing of "gossamer" – it's a _tiny_ bit thicker, surely?

"KNiiTTiiNG uses the Nintendo Wii to knit. KNiiTTiiNG was created by an artist and an engineer turned behavioral scientist." Says coming soon; presumably some kind of homebrew – Wii or Wii controllers, I ask? – but worth a link for the delicious pun in the title.

"Scans of sandwiches for education and delight." Yes.

Some interesting links here, but I swear: could people please find something OTHER than *that* Daigo Umehara video to link to when they talk about fighting games? There's this massively rich space to be explored, and it goes beyond 15-hit parries.

How to get proper HD out of iMovie 09, which is something it makes surprisingly difficult.

"I copy-and-pasted the text of my unread articles from Instapaper into a PDF, uploaded it to Lulu.com, and ordered a single book. Naturally I thought about scripting all of this but Instapaper doesn’t provide an API to retrieve articles, and I didn’t really want to bother with authentication headers and screen scraping and all of that hackery. I just wanted the book." Emmett makes an analogue version of Instapaper for himself.

"One of the great things about working at a company with both interaction and industrial designers is that when collaboratively designing a device, you have better control over where bits of its functionality are located: in the hardware or the software. At Kicker, we call the activity of figuring out where a feature “lives” Functional Cartography."

A story, between two people, told through email. Not looking like email; actually, originally, told over email. Now, it can only be read in order – but once, it would have been delivered. Can't imagine how striking it might have been.

"Watching classics like The Apartment and Manhattan made me wonder at the romances we’d write about some cities, and Slumdog Millionaire bizarrely seemed like a continuation of that: a romance of the maximum-city." Yes; my favourite thing in that film was the growth of the city around Jamal, Bombay becoming Mumbai, and the skyscrapers growing.

"The thing that caught my eye about the Unbook was the idea of accepting a book as a version: an evolving beast that spits out periodic iterations of itself before crawling away to mutate some more."

"See, the RAF reckons research has shown them that the best drone pilot candidates are those who are experienced video game players, rather than experienced pilots. Sounds crazy at first, but when you think about it, pilots are experienced at actually flying. But flying something remotely via a 2D monitor? That's a gamer's area of expertise."

"Whiskey Media provides fully structured data APIs for the following: Giant Bomb (games) Comic Vine (comics) Anime Vice (anime/manga)". This is a really good page for both explaining what you can and can't do, and explaining what the damn thing is. Wonder how good the data is?

"Have you ever wanted to sink your hooks into a gaming database full of release dates, artwork, games, platforms, and other sorts of related data? I'm going to guess that, for the bulk of you, the answer's probably no. But if you're out there wondering what to do next with your developer-savvy smarts, you've got another big source to pull data from. The Giant Bomb API is now available for non-commercial use." Giant Bomb really are doing some pretty interesting stuff, alongside their more traditional content.

"Customers seem to respond better to the Sims than all the adventure games ever made combined together. Then there are Bejeweled and Peggle and other game games. Who needs a stink’n story? I prefer making interactive stories." The writer of "Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble", interviewed on RPS, drops an interesting one.

"The baseline grid. Oh yes, the baseline grid. Let's be honest this is the sort of thing you know you need to know about. And you do know about, you know, sort of. But. Do you really know about it? Of course you do if you work on a magazine or a newspaper, but when was the last time you used one? I almost re-taught myself how to use a baseline grid. I certainly re-read all about it and it pretty much saved my life." Ben, on the details of The Paper. Good stuff in here.

"This is by no means an exhaustive list, just a start. In each of these you’ll find other resources to help you dig deeper." Which, right now, is what I need. For a former front-end-dev, I'm a bit behind the curve.

"So we’ve progressed now from having just a Registry key entry, to having an executable, to having a randomly-named executable, to having an executable which is shuffled around a little bit on each machine, to one that’s encrypted– really more just obfuscated– to an executable that doesn’t even run as an executable. It runs merely as a series of threads." Fascinating interview with a smart guy, who at one point in his life, did some bad (if not entirely unethical) work.

"I do think that during the coming years we will continue to try to bridge the gap between simulated musicianship and real musicianship. That said, the path there is not obvious: As the interactivity moves closer to real instrumental performance, the complexity/difficulty explodes rapidly. The challenge is to move along this axis in sufficiently tiny increments, so that the experience remains accessible and compelling for many millions of people. It’s a hard, hard problem. But that’s part of what makes it fun to work on." There is loads in this interview that is awesome; it was hard to choose a quotation. Rigopulos is super-smart.

"On June 17th, every year, the family goes through a private ritual: we photograph ourselves to stop, for a fleeting moment, the arrow of time passing by." Perfectly executed.

"The Bop It commands are called out in different tones. These tones differ from version to version as well. In Bop It Blast, distinct tones are employed by both male and female speakers." I did not know that.

"A couple of other examples of this kind of thing we like, are the bookish experimentations of B.S. Johnson, whose second novel Alberto Angelo contains both stream-of-conciousness marginalia, and cut-through pages enabling the reader to see ahead – possibly the most radical act I know in experimental books." Yes! And which I bang on about interminably. I love this stuff.

Now the NDA is gone, this looks like a good starting point. Honest.

"Content is an expensive, messy business and fraught with quality risk. Network resources like minutes and texts are an attractive commodity and one where the wholesale price is falling all the time." Interesting analysis of Blyk.

"Ladies and gentleman, Hello World 2.0 uses no fewer than 7 messages queues, three command line applications (which can be executed on physically separate machines), and two Inversion of Control frameworks (but I’m fixing that tomorrow)." Huddle look at moving towards message queues.

Web Inspector gets an overhaul; it's looking pretty nice, now.

"The Pencil Project's unique mission is to build a free and opensource tool for making diagrams and GUI prototyping that everyone can use." Hmn.

"Here is a video which gives some insight into how Little Big Planet ( and Media Molecule! ) evolved from next to nothing into what it is today!" MediaMolecule put the LBP repository into codeswarm, and then published the video. Lovely.

"Rososo shows you which bookmarks have updated, and hides the rest. It is a good alternative to newsreaders, which, like your email inbox, tend to accumulate obligation and guilt." Not sure about only showing sites, rather than content, but I like the idea of peaceful software a lot.

"The Geoblogomatic is little machine that turns blogs into maps. It's in beta" "If you have a blog about places, or things in places, the Geoblogomatic can make a map of your blog posts." Awesome. Another fun thing from Tom.

"This is the funny thing: appreciation of Mega Man music is a microcosm for the kind of snobbery you see in indie-music-loving white people. It's also a microcosm for the popularity of the series as a whole." Definitely exhaustive, and quite sweet. (Also: Michael's blog's tagline is pretty much spot on).