John Peel's Festive 50s the Spotify playlist edition. Obviously, there are holes, but nice that it exists.

"Because the ability to be in a city and to see through it is a superpower, and it's how maps should work." The maps of New York Jack's been working on for a while are now available to buy. Having seen them in the flesh, I can tell you they're properly beautiful.

"Well, ok there probably aren’t that many to give away, and this isn’t a Government mandate or anything, but Sony Europe are giving away free woolen Sackboy toys to Happy Gadders in the UK and Ireland – yay!" Want. Emailed!

Spaff is now a Molecule, hurrah! Excited by what a community management team for Media Molecule might cook up…

"…let's end the era of Bushnell's Law, not because it's useless or base, but because it's wrong. It doesn't explain the phenomenon we have assumed it does. Or more precisely, let's excise the first half, and keep the rest: 'A game should reward the first play and the hundredth.' How? By culturing familiarity and constructing a habitual experience. By finding receptors for familiar mechanics and tuning them slightly differently, so as to make those receptors resonate in a new way, and then coupling those new resonances with meaningful ideas, practices, or experiences." A rather good – and certainly thought-provoking – Ian Bogost piece over at Gamasutra.

If you tilt N64 cartridges, amusing glitches happen. What you might not predict: loads of Japanese (real-world) videos pastiching "tilted" Goldeneye. This is bonkers.

"PROBLEM: There is no way I can justify to myself spending that much money on plastic cows. Really, there is no way. WIN-WIN: I could however justify giving that same amount of money, or more, to a worthwhile charity. That would be an easy thing." Matt wants cows, in return for giving money to charity.

Oh wow; it's like a developer network for LittleBigPlanet. Smashing.

"On May 3rd 2008, artists Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley invited the Google Inc. Street View team and residents of Pittsburgh’s Northside to collaborate on a series of tableaux along Sampsonia Way. Neighbors, and other participants from around the city, staged scenes ranging from a parade and a marathon, to a garage band practice, a seventeenth century sword fight, a heroic rescue and much more…" Lovely.

'"With respect to the franchises that don’t have the potential to be exploited every year across every platform, with clear sequel potential that can meet our objectives of, over time, becoming $100 million-plus franchises, that’s a strategy that has worked very well for us," Kotick said.' Kotick is very serious about his use of the word 'exploit'.

""The ability to offer these songs on a subscription basis may very well result in the newest subscription opportunity in our portfolio," he said." Kotick wants you to pay Activision to subscribe to UGC. Oh dear.

Beautiful.

"As we move into a world in which we can manufacture things as cheaply as we print them, the skills that tinkerers develop– not just their ability to play with stuff, or to use particular tools, but to share their ideas and improve on the ideas of others– will be huge." Lots of good reflections from "Tinkering As A Mode Of Knowledge".

Visualising the heights of people's towers by importing their savegame. Lovely.

"By understanding the way bees respond to all the different aspects of the natural world, the beekeeper is able to recover his own relationship to the natural world through bees."

"Every time Bobby Kotick opens his mouth, I see a giant cow with "GUITAR HERO" branded on its side, and Bobby Kotick is squeezing two teats as fast as he can."

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).