Earlier this month, TechCrunch dubbed Blippy’s 404 page as the “best ever.” As can be seen in the image up there, the unicorn is kinda cute, but not impressive, is it? Then again, the fun doesn’t end there. The page is actually interactive, making it a “joy” to explore the 404 page. I am not going to go into the details – go visit Blippy’s 404 page. Have fun clicking!

That post prompted me to sniff around for more interesting 404 pages, and guess what I found?

This is the 404 page of Thomas Alan Design Agency. I’ve never heard of them, but this page gets two thumbs up from me! (Guess why?)

Family Guy fans will want to keep entering the wrong address just to see this 404 page from Desizn Tech. Victory is indeed Stuey’s!

So everyone loves bacon, right? No one more so than Matilda, the dog who finds pages for Booyant. Their 404 page is also interactive – you simply have to feed Matilda three bacon slices, and she’ll help you with whatever you need. Remember to follow the instructions when you get to the page!

Tell me about people who make excuses! Site Sketch 101‘s excuse is a pretty good one, though. Indeed, what can you do if a ninja attacks you? Unless you’re a better ninja, you’re lost.

Saving the best for last…Urban Pill’s 404. What can I say? Nothing beats Chuck Norris, and if he wants to keep the page you are looking for, there’s nothing you can do about it! Well, you can try getting it back but be ready to die.

This past week I spend days fretting over my internet speed. Internet is not cheap here in the Netherlands, I pay an average of 60 euros a month for a broadband cable connection. The package used to be 50 Mbit down and 5 Mbit up. Since then my provider has upgraded the speed to 120 Mbit down and 10 Mbit up. There is no data limit, fair use mostly.

For the upgrade I got a new modem from the provider which is supposed to handle gigabit speeds. But since the new modem my download was around 30 Mbit only. After calls to the helpdesk and lots of forums posts, I discovered my router can’t handle gigabit speeds from internet to the network. Also wireless has a lot of overhead which makes it real slow compared to the actual speed.

So I ended up researching and buying a new router within three days while I usually plan and save for any computer related purchases. I had a friend drill a hole in the wall so I could connect through cable with the router instead of wireless. I did countless of speedtest through wireless, cable or directly to the modem so I could form a good image of the average speed.

I know I’m coming of crazy, I mean a lot of people don’t even get 30 Mbit download while I complain about not getting more then 90 Mbit. But fact is once you get used to very fast internet speed you’ll notice a slow down right away. Internet speed is addictive you’ll only want more and more. Streaming HD media needs to play without a flickr, torrents need to download in a blink of an eye and web pages must load on the instant.

I asked a couple of people to take the speedtest to give an impression. The speed shown on Aruba is not reached with home connections so far I know. Only large companies have it. The next one in Preston is the slowest which the user knows about. Third connection is by a “home user” which means they have no idea about internet speed. And last would be me, who spend money, time, research and friends favor to reach that speed.

Ten years ago when I came to Holland I was ecstatic with a broadband cable connection having just left from Aruba that only had 56K modem connection back then. And now I’m a high demanding internet user and I’m sure a lot of you guys expect a lot also from your internet connection. This is prove that internet has become as unmissable as electricity in our life. If your had to chose between your TV or internet, internet would win hands down.

Feel free to take the Speedtest and share your results in the comments section.

I’m not a gamer at all, I don’t even own a game console or have any games installed on my computer. My geekery limits to code, comics, gadgets and random other things. But I still love point-and-click games, the more nostalgic, the better. A couple of years ago I came across MOTAS, which stands for Mystery Of Time And Space. It’s an “escape the room” kind of game.

The game starts in a room with a locked door, you have to click around and look for items to help you escape the room. And so you advance to each level of which there are 17 currently. When I discovered this game I spend hours trying to escape each room, it can get pretty frustrating. Since then I found and played a few others like The Crimson Room and the Viridian Room. And to me a very difficult one Escape the room.
Who am I kidding, I find them all difficult to solve, I will try for hours, sometimes solving it but mostly resorting to walkthroughs.

Most of these game by now are pretty much known or commercialized, except for MOTAS which is still on the makers own site. That’s the appeal to me, obscure old skool games with nostalgic feeling to them. I haven’t been able to find anymore games like MOTAS; independent, old skool and obscure. It’s because it’s such time consuming searching these games that I don’t have a list full of them. But if I did my productivity would be taking immense blows.

I once bought the classic Nintendo off eBay to play old games again, unfortunately the console only lived through a couple of games. It is thanks to Sheldon Cooper lamenting evils playing Donkey Kong on his classic Nintendo, that awoke this small gamer in me today, remembering me that there are still lots of unknown games awaiting on the internet.

The link.

By nature, websites are interlinked and content is discovered. Search engines link based on user queries, bloggers publish critique and commentary, and we can drift either aimlessly or with a purpose around cyberspace for hours and hours.

Simply following links.

So when the link is threatened by bureaucrats in repressed organisations that either don’t get the Internet, or want to play in it on their own terms, it’s time to sit up and take notice.

I’ve seen some pretty stupid “linking policies” over time, but they’re usually published by small websites and are a good source of ridicule.

When the big boys of media start shouting about it, you can still ridicule them, but unfortunately there’s also the possibility they might swing things their way.

Take Rupert Murdoch, for example. He’s the head honcho at News International, a beast of a media company that owns… pretty much everything. Or so it seems.

He wants to put a wall around most of his content, and stop search engines linking to it. Apparently, the tradition of linking and fair-use quoting is not OK in his eyes.

He’s not the only one, either.

Despite the fact that many more traditional news organisations have been proven to steal content, without attribution, from blogs and other online sources, when anyone innocently links (with full attribution) to one of their websites, that’s labelled stealing.

There’s even a ridiculous notion that publishers of any size or motivation would need to seek permission for every link they want to use (to an objecting web site).

Pathetic.

It’s true that there are many sites that rip off content. No-one’s immune.

Yet I don’t see what the problem is with links to original source material when a writer wishes to comment on that.

It seems that these media moguls don’t want the free publicity that search engines, bloggers and anyone linking via social networks can provide.

Maybe we should all voluntarily stop linking to those publishers that object so much, and simply find sites that embrace the spirit of the Internet instead.

Long live the link!

Right2Link.org

Now, either I spend way too much time online (read, just the right amount of time) or people are underestimating, because the figures from a survey by a price comparison website found that Brits spend just three days per month online.

I spend three days a day online. (Yes I did mean to type that, it was supposed to be humorous.)

UK peeps say they’d struggle to organise their lives without access to the Internet, and that they’d contact their friends and family far less without the Net.

If I find out my Net connection isn’t working, I don’t even bother to get up. Quite frankly, what’s the point?

(Photo credit: believekevin)

Putting in “John Smith” might not get you a very personalized result, but it’s quite interesting to see what comes up.

The web site describes Personas as:

“a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently on display at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab. It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.”

Here’s my final profile, which seems to have expanded each time I ran it.

Anyway, a Facebook friend of mine shared a link the other day and it just cracked me up. Titled “6 New Personality Disorders Caused by the Internet,” it outlines some existing personality disorders which have been given a new twist by the Internet.

So these are the 6 new personality disorders:

1. Online Intermittent Explosive Disorder (a.k.a. The Thin-Skinned Rage-o-holic)
2. Low Forum Frustration Tolerance (a.k.a. The Frantic Browser Reloader)
3. Munchausen by Internet (a.k.a. The Sob Story Teller)
4. Online Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder (a.k.a. The Grammar Nazi)
5. Low Cyber Self-Esteem (a.k.a. The Guy Who Everyone Hates but Who Never Leaves)
6. Internet Asperger’s Syndrome (a.k.a. The Troll)

The a.k.a.’s pretty much describe the disorder for you, but Jonathan Kimak’s descriptions are well worth reading for yourself. Naturally, I had to take a step back and think…do I have any of these Internet personality disorders? I don’t think so. I mean, I am level headed enough NOT to have my personality distorted by technology. Everyone who knows me would know that. (Wait – did I use the modal verb “would” correctly in that sentence???)

What is YOUR Internet personality disorder? Pray tell!

Apparently this is the fourth version of the map though I hadn’t seen it before – wish I had.

As you’d expect, all the big boys are on there — Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Skype, StumbleUpon, WordPress, Reddit, IMDb…

There’s a lot of media there too including News Corp, BBC, The Guardian and so on.

It’s well worth spending time scrolling around looking at how sites are linked up together and who the key players are.

The taller the building, the more successful it’s deemed, while its width denotes how stable it is.

See the full sized map here.

• I took one of my domains, dullest.com, and moved it to TigerTech from pair Networks.
• I installed the latest version of WordPress on dullest.com and copied the MySQL database from mattcutts.com to dullest.com.
• I changed my blog layout to the excellent Thesis theme by Chris Pearson. Previously I was using the Almost Spring theme.
• I added an .htaccess file that will do 302 redirects from www.mattcutts.com/path/file.html to www.dullest.com/path/file.html.

Bit of an experiment and nice to see someone at Google publicly breaking “the rules” of how you should carefully and sequentially move things around.

“Sometimes it’s fun to mix things up. It’s not as if I make any money from my blog, so I don’t mind if my search rankings drop for a while. In fact, it will be a pretty interesting experiment to see what happens with search engines and traffic.”

I moved a bunch of sites from one host to another, but I didn’t dare attempt other changes at the same time. They can wait.

Well, the wait is finally over. Microsoft has just announced the official version of Internet Explorer 8. I really believe this is something that IE needs, and this is the most “open-sourced” version it has. It has greater security features that help the typical user protect himself from the simplest to complicated vulnerabilities.

What surprises me is the “private browsing” option. With a click of a button you can tell IE not to store websites you browse from the history list. This was one of the things I loved about Apple’s Safari browser and I’m glad IE has caught on!

There’s something really cool with the tabs too. When you hover over a tab you’d see a preview of the page! Cool isn’t it? I’m not too sure how much system resource that consumes though, but it’s an improvement nonetheless.

I think most IE improvements will at the very least firmly hold IE’s 70% of the browser market share.

You can download IE8 right here. It’s available starting RIGHT NOW!

Big deal, you might think. Any printed magazine these days publishes its web address and readers can visit online and interact. Sure, that’s true, but what if the magazine had a unique RFID (Radio frequency identification) chip attached to it, and even its own email address and mailbox?

Last week, the quarterly magazine went on sale in various stores across Europe and the US. The RFID tag is attached to page two, and as soon as the reader touches the tag to the scanner, a request is sent to a remote server (Violet, in fact, makers of the nabaztag rabbit) that triggers various unique online content.

In the first edition, for example, appeared a video game designed by the artist Messhof, an interactive multi-user device by Digital Shadow, an interactive installation by Factoid (Pierre Nouvel, Valere Terrier) and The Tone, a 3D video by Gkastere and wallpapers by Philippe Jarrigeon.

The magazine’s editor could even interact with individual readers thanks to their unique email addresses.

Just a paper magazine? Not any more it seems.