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Flickr is a game Interesting take on the success of Flickr, saying that it’s more like a game than an application or service. This goes some way to explaining the “why am I enjoying this so much” feeling.

The BitTorrent Effect Nice article in Wired interviewing the creator of BitTorrent.

The Star Wars Christmas Album is quite quite the most awful thing ever, and thus must be listened to. Available to stream or hack the m3u file and download.

How to fix Mom’s computer Another handy list of things to do to make Windows behave.

How To Speed Up Firefox if you’re on broadband and have a clear head.

Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story by Paul Auster The short story that formed the basis of the movie Smoke.

Kottke’s Best Links of 2004 Should you find yourself with a couple of days with nothing to do before NYE, here’s a bunch of quality-controlled articles and longer blog posts of interestingness.

Weblications Nice overview of the emerging world of web-based applications like Gmail and how they’re going to change everything.

Wild Wild East Report on the real movie piracy of mainland China.

The Dresden Dolls website of a current fave band of mine. They’re not what I expected…

Mappr Very cool thing that takes data from Flickr and creates a map (of the US only - shame) plotting photos where they were taken. Like GPS, only without GPS.

Great quote in relation to that play being removed from the Birmimgham Rep this week “We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children are smart.” - H.L Mencken

The ALL NEW Troubled Diva Curiosity Box remembers the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike. Three impeccably left-wing 7″ singles mp3′d for your enjoyment.

The Long Tail has a weblog and will soon become a book.

Movable Type 3.14 released Guess what - it’s got some stuff for dealing with comment spam, specifically preventing server overloads.

Pink Socks gathers the comment spam links Very comprehensive bunch of info and resources.

Hypnotique - interview with a Theremin player That’s my mate, that is.

The BitTorrent P2P file-sharing system Suprnova has gone for good now (eek!) so while the internet scrabbles to find a replacement while wondering if the BitTorrent ride is maybe over, here’s a long and involved analysis of the BitTorrent phenomena on The Register.

Raymond Briggs profile in the Guardian Always nice to read about the master.

See the robot run! Honda’s ASIMO robot can now run at 3mph. This here be a video and it’s very cute.

The comment spam fight heats up I’d always assumed comment spamming was a shady business. Turns out the scripts are widely available and for sale. Here’s the next best solution to physical violence on the buggers.

North Norfolk no longer financially viable Sea defences to be maintained for 20 years but after that “a ‘hold the line’ policy along large stretches of this shoreline will be neither economically viable nor technically sustainable.” So, farewell then, Norfolk.

MonkeyFilter’s mp3 blog listing Very comprehensive. Actually, absurdly comprehensive with some nice loose categorisation. And, ooh! I’m on there!

The Daily Whim on the MT comment spam problem If they don’t fix this, and I’m wondering if they can fix it, MT is doomed. And then whatever blogging CMS that follows it is also doomed. And so on.

Keeping It Peel The Radio 1 documentary (which I missed thanks to silly shiftwork) is online for a week.

Camels and Rubber Duckies Really interesting and funny article about pricing strategies, written with software in mind but applicable to pretty much everything.

Spoof Apple store and it’s actually funny. YogaMac. Heh.

I’m close to declaring the form of personal web design dead. To which I would add, CSS is fucking hard and cross-platform complience is a sick joke. If you’re not a professional web designer you’ve got to put a lot of hours in to get anything vagually original, and even then it’ll still look like a blog. If I was blogging this month I’d write a long piece about the barriers to zine-style rough design and why that’s a problem, but I’m not, so I won’t. Maybe in the new year…

Is Comment Spam soon to be quashed? From the Movable Type newsblog: “Over the last month, we have been devoting a great deal of resources to solving the comment spam problem once and for all and making it a non-issue, not just for us in the Movable Type/TypePad world, but also for all weblogs regardless of publishing tool.” Intriguing…

Suggested Google Alphabet “Each time you load this page, it checks the most popular keyword for each letter of the alphabet given by Google Suggest, and displays them here for your viewing pleasure.”