It’s not surprising, following Google’s use of the goo.gl domain name, that Microsoft might use something based on its Bing search engine, but while Google keeps it nice, short and from Greenland, Microsoft has gone for the more popular Italian .it TLD and then stuck a longer name on the front.

Binged.it

Presumably as in “I just Binged it”.

The thing is, although Microsoft has partnered with bit.ly (six characters), it has chosen to use a nine character name.

Bitly and Google both use six, Facebook’s version fb.me is even shorter at just five, while YouTube has gone Belgian with eight at YouTu.be.

Binged.it uses nine characters.

I suppose it’s worth noting that one of the original shorteners, tinyurl.com, used eleven characters, but people have demanded much shorter names since.

Microsoft currently isn’t offering the service to anyone outside the company, so presumably this is all an ego trip.

I can imagine the memos.

“Please ensure all links that you send to one another use our binged.it URL shortener. Other services, particularly goo.gl, will not NOT be tolerated.”

Via

No that’s not Michael Arrington’s dog I want to discuss!

Those among us who have reached their ’30s, or especially Europeans, might remember the dog, Lycos’ dog. Today this ‘pre-Web 1.0′ portal, which started as a search engine in 1994/1995 and was the worldwide most visited website in 1999, has shut down in several European countries.

The news was announced last month already, still this is a dinosaur in the deadpool. Not just a dinosaur, for many Lycos was where everything started: their first email account, their first online dating profile and even their first website (Tripod and Angelfire hosting).

Shall we call today a _sad day_ for the internet?

I’m a sucker for addictive flash games. I don’t know about you, but I think the best video games are almost always simple and fun. Flash games tend to have both qualities.

Now, I know that Flash games often don’t have much depth. But that’s ok for me. I just like to jump in and have some mindless fun. And Flash games do that for me.

TechCult put together a list of the 150 Best Flash Games currently available. Lots of new gems on that list that I hadn’t seen before.

What do you think of their list? Are there some great games they left out?

How many times have you clicked on a video you really wanted to see from some search results only to stumble upon an annoying red message saying that the video has been removed or no longer available?

Thanks to Michael Arrington from TechCrunch, you now have a small, yet reliable, list of alternatives for videos that infringe copyrights:

Full length copies of well known TV shows and/or movies are readily available on a number of YouTube competitors. Watch, for example, The Office on DailyMotion, Scrubs on GoFish, or SouthPark on Veoh (update: GoFish and Veoh have apparently removed the shows I linked to).

And if searching for the shows on these sites is just too much work, there are other sites that aggregate and organize this content, and embed it on their own sites. Watch any episode from any of the 11 seasons of SouthPark on Allsp.com. And new site VideoHybrid is in a class of its own, with dozens of full length movies and virtually every popular TV show. VideoHybrid even gives statistics showing exactly how many times copyrights have been violated.

So, which copyright video are you going to see first? I went to see Linkin Park’s latest video.

If you’ve always thought that Wikipedia was this great bastion of Web 2.0-edness, with ideas of the site being the encyclopedia that anyone can edit, you’ve probably thought wrong all this time. While I’ve always had an inkling that Wikipedia was probably not what it markets itself to be, I still tried to make myself believe that it’s still good in terms of being a contributor-driven site, in that more or less anyone can simply click on the edit button and post his or her contibutions to any entry.

That can’t be farther from the truth.

That’s marketing for us, I guess. All that buzz about how Wikipedia has radically changed how knowledge is built up, organized and archived–it’s mostly just hype. There have been a lot of theories and commentary trying to debunk the “Wikipedia myth,” and this one posted recently by Nicholas Carr on roughtype.com summarizes it all too well.

… Wikipedia is an amazing achievement, with considerable strengths and considerable weaknesses. But it has become wrapped in a cloak of myth that many people, for whatever reason, seem intent on perpetuating. Wikipedia is not an egalitarian collective. It is not an example of mob rule. It is not an expression of collective intelligence. It is not an emergent system. What might in fact be most interesting about Wikipedia as an organization is the way it has evolved, as it has pursued its goal of matching the quality of Encyclopedia Britannica, toward a more traditional editorial, and even corporate, structure. We need to bury the Wikipedia myth if we’re to see what Wikipedia is and what it isn’t – and what it portends for the organization and economics of content creation in the years ahead.

Wikipedia isn’t actually the free-for-all site it attempts to define itself to be, as on its about page.

This website is a wiki, which means that anyone with access to an Internet-connected computer can edit, correct, or improve information throughout the encyclopedia, simply by clicking the edit this page link (with a few minor exceptions, such as protected articles and the main page).

Not anyone can just edit stuff on Wikipedia, after all. There is a perfectly bureaucratic and hierarchical means by which articles and editions are managed. And Wikipedia’s owner, Jimmy Wales is on top of the “power pyramid!”

Nick earlier wrote that Wikipedia never claimed that anyone could just edit anything.

Jimmy Wales informs me that in fact there was never a time when “anyone could edit anything on Wikipedia,” as I originally wrote. “There have always been restrictions on editing,” he says. I guess I made the mistake, as others may have as well, of taking literally Wikipedia’s slogan that it is “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.”

However, this point, IMHO, is much-downplayed on Wikipedia’s about page, or at least you aren’t likely to pick up this point at first glance/reading.

Wikipedia just recently went from being this site where the editors used to try to protect against vandalism to now trying not to be excessively protectionist (meaning henceforth many articles would start out semi-protected in the first place).

So much for being “written collaboratively by people from all around the world.”

[Thanks to Corsarius for the link]

A highly addictive first person shooter written in Shockwave. Very “Unreal Tournament-like” in the look and feel of it. You can even customize what keys are used to control the movements, the mouse sensitivity, the view bob…basically everything you could set in an FPS that runs on your machine. You can also tell it how many bots to put in the game.

The FAQ says that AI and network play are currently in development.

UPDATE

Apparently this was just a beta test and the software has now gone back into development. It was fun while it lasted.