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Thursday, October 19, 2006

Borat (Video)

Borat is fun... can’t wait to see his movie.

YouTube Losing Appeal Now?

The San Francisco Chronicle writes:

If you check out YouTube right now, the Web site looks pretty much the same as it did two weeks ago, before Google bought it for $1.6 billion. (...)

But for many of us, there’s a definite vibe that the wild fun times will soon be coming to an end. It’s like your parents are coming up the driveway, and you’ve broken the crystal egg and are going to be grounded for the next eight months – leaving you with nothing except the crazy memories of that brothel you ran out of their house over the weekend. (...)

When giant corporations take interest in online cultural phenomena, they instantly become exponentially less cool. From Napster to MySpace to “Snakes on a Plane” -- all stopped being a good thing once the Man showed up in the room.

If the article is right, boy was it an overpriced acquisition... ’cause the community would manifest elsewhere, leaving Google with little but millions of copyright-infringing videos containing stuff that’s likely to feel completely outdated in a year or so. But let’s wait and see – I’m not even sure the community minds as long as the site stays messy, which, like a teen’s desk, is part of its charm... to the teen.

[Thanks Brinke Guthrie!]

Artistic Abuse of Google Maps

All you do on this Google Maps API hack is to move around on a hi-res table showcasing books and manuscript and such. Individual tiles load slowly here, though this might be the fault of Google Maps itself... [Via Digg.]

IE7 Is Out

The final non-Beta version of Internet Explorer 7 is out now. After 10 minutes and 2 reboots I can say I still don’t like the UI of this new version... it feels like Microsoft is reinventing where it shouldn’t (potentially confusing new users, who might figure now is a good time to give Firefox a try then), and not allowing customization where it should (appalling power users). For web developers, today is the day all IE7/ CSS rendering bugs on your pages (if any) become official, too...

On another note, Internet Explorer is doing the right thing when it comes to keeping the default search settings... they don’t make any new opt-in setting default as Google likes to do lately (see screenshot).

[Thanks Brinke Guthrie.]

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