Google Blogoscoped

Sunday, November 28, 2004

Advanced Google (Video)

In case you are looking for the new
Google Video Search, here’s the information.

KnowItAllVideo

At KnowItAllVideo.com, after registering you can watch homemade instructional videos in a lot of different categories (technology, cooking, garderning, parenting, video games, health, employment, religion, and a lot more). The current highest-rated video is teaching you bird grabbing...

Note if you want to submit a video note it must be below 4 MB of size and 4 minutes, and that you give all your copyrights to KnowItAllVideo.

Subservient Stickman

OK. It started with the Subservient Chicken, a Burger King guerilla marketing effort where internet users could type commands and see the chicken perform them. Then there was the political clone Subservient Bush. Then, the NSFW Subservient Bartender. And now... the Subservient Stickman (this one with spoilers right in the HTML source).

Online Money Transactions?

I would like to ask those experts who read along: how do I set up money transactions online? I know how to create a secure members-only area in PHP along with MySQL and registration, but the missing piece is validating and securely processing credit cards to handle a monthly subscription fee (I know some services, like 2checkout or PayPal, I just don’t know them by heart, and I don’t know which is best for this purpose). Your help is vey much appreciated, and my email as always philipp.lenssen@gmail.com.

Balloon on String (Flash)

Just a well-implemented minute of fun: a balloon on a string follows your mouse.

Life Before the Internet

A cartoon tells of how we lived before Google, Amazon, and the World Wide Web in general. [Via Welsh View.]

The New Adventures of Zak McKracken

When I was a kid and early teen playing computer games, there were no 3D rendering engines*, nor were there online games... but we still had a lot of fun. The graphics weren’t really simple either, as the Amiga 500 (my first computer) had many colors and pixels to display good 2D graphics.

*Well, there was a limited selection of games with wireframe graphics, such as Star Wars or Elite.

One of my favorite games was Zak McKracken. This was one of the many Lucasfilm adventures. In adventures, of course, you need to solve puzzles to drive your main character through a plot.
But as opposed to the Sierra adventures, Lucasfilm – later called Lucasarts – would offer verbs and objects to click on to make sentences, e.g. “take knife” or “open door”. Another difference to other adventure games was you couldn’t die or get stuck in an adventure. Which didn’t mean Zak McKracken was easy. It was a really long and complex adventure and I never quite made it to the end (though I made it onto other planets).

Today, you can freely download The New Adventures of Zak McKracken (as well as Maniac Mansion Deluxe) by LucasFan Games. This is an inofficial sequel to Zak McKracken taking place after the end of the first one. The game was created using the free Adventure Game Studio (an AGS tutorial is available, as well as many games created with AGS).

Dave Gorman’s Googlewhack (Video)

I had the chance to see Dave Gorman’s “Googlewhack” comedy show on DVD and it’s very moving and funny. In a nut-shell, Dave was on mission to find Googlewhacks around the world, but I don’t want to give anything away. See a minute for yourself [MPG]. (The DVD is available at Amazon Germany and UK; at Amazon USA, there’s his Googlewhack book.)

New Googlebomb: Arabian Gulf

There’s a new Googlebomb in town: type Arabian Gulf into Google and hit the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button. [Thanks Ali S.]

A Welsh View connects this to a Chicago Sun-Times article.

Blogger Kills Mom

16-year old blogger Rachelle Waterman of Craig, Alaska, murdered her mother with the help of two ex-boyfriends. From her blog at LiveJournal from November 18th (four days after the killing of her 48-year old mother, who apparently always made her go on a diet):

“Just to let everyone know, my mother was murdered

I won’t have computer [access] until the weekend or so because the police took my computer to go through the hard drive. I thank everyone for their thoughts and e-mails, I hope to talk to you when I get my computer back.”

Advertisement

 
Blog  |  Forum     more >> Archive | Feed | Google's blogs | About
Advertisement

 

This site unofficially covers Google™ and more with some rights reserved. Join our forum!