• "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.
  • It's Mario. And then it's Tetris. And then it's Mario. And then it's Tetris. Copyright-infringing Flixel awesomeness – much better than the concept initially sounds. You should check this out.

My friend Steve Gaynor has put up his review of the year in gaming over at his blog, Fullbright. He’s got some sharp points, but I really liked his commentary on Street Fighter 4 – one of my favourite games of the past year. It deserved quoting in full:

Street Fighter 4: Simply put, I haven’t laughed so much at probably any game as I have playing SF4 in the conference room over lunches at 2K Marin. The fact that humor in games is “hard to do” comes up fairly often– only because people think of “humor” as “jokes,” which lose their power after their first telling. But humor is when something funny happens, and games are the only entertainment medium capable of making funny things happen in completely unplanned and unexpected ways. In the right company, Street Fighter 4, with its cartoonish brutality, over-the-top animations, and always-surprising reversals of fortune is a consistent laugh riot. Thank you, Capcom.

(Emphasis my own).

  • "The following is a list of 99 free games (in no particular order) that I’ve enjoyed this calendar year, nearly all of which have been released in 2009 or very late in 2008. So why don’t you take a break from funding corporate overlords and see just what a feast there is out there in the wide world below the big ticket level—all you can lose, really, is just a little bit of time." Turns out I've played a lot of these. Many are good; some are excellent.