Saturday 6 February 2010

The Weekly Links Post (Revived and Slightly Revised)

An entirely subjective weekly selection of 15 links, collated under the six broad categories you see below.

Highlights from Guardian Technology

How to become an indie games developer in eight steps. Some of them are quite big steps; but you'll still find plenty of links to interesting indie games.

Gordon Brown's smile won't crash your computer. Honestly.

Small businesses are the new mass market. The first results from The Guardian's crowd-sourced research project into the latest trends in technology start-ups.

What if you got all your news from Twitter and Facebook? Some journalists spend five days with social media as their only news source.

Books, Writing & Storytelling

Mapping a parallel world and history onto our own, Kcymaerxthaere: a global work of three dimensional storytelling. Here's The Believer's article on the physical monuments, and even a museum, that have been placed around America (and the world) by the grandson of Charles and Ray Eames.

Vintage Books has started an online reading group, to discuss Vintage titles and deliver extra content (and presumably attract readers).

IndieBooks is a new online store to highlight independent publishers. Each month 50 titles are selected: 25 new ones, plus the previous month's 25 bestsellers.

Social Media

Lamebook: a collection of funny and worrying status updates and photos culled from Facebook.

A top 5 of Twitter gaffes.

Useful Apps & Downloads

After I wrote about Panda Cloud Antivirus recently, a commenter highlighted Immunet Protect, another free antivirus which draws on the processing power of the cloud. Here's a Tech Herald review. At present, though, it looks like it's best run alongside something else as additional protection (as the commenter suggested).

Games & Other Distractions

The Asylum: you are a psychiatrist at a hospital for psychologically damaged cuddly toys; you have to work out how to cure them. Dark, funny, oddly moving, wonderful cut-scenes of their repressed memories, excellent characterisation. Probably one of the best free games I've seen. [Walkthroughs here and here, if needed].

Openfilm: a new platform for discovering, distributing and watching independent films.

Miscellaneous

Are paywalls a bad idea, or has this one just been implemented badly? "Only 35 people will pay to get past Newsday's paywall." And now: the other side of that story.

Stylus magazine, the sadly defunct online music magazine, makes a slight return, to round up the best albums and singles of the last ten years: The Stylus Decade.

Having funded a story, but then had commissions fall through, a journalist attempts to get paid, by hosting and publicising the story herself and asking for micropayments.

No comments: