How the Xbox 360 Can Reinvented Itself

The entertainment industry is shifting. Video games dominate all forms of media as an estimated 46 billion dollar industry. Your local video chain likely carries as many video games as it does DVDs. Blueray has beaten HD-DVD as the new media for watching movies at home, but it has the potential to be squashed by digital downloads. Not watching movies on your computer, but rather watching them on a box that is already hooked up to your entertainment system: your gaming console.

Here’s what I’d like to see changed about the Xbox 360

What Have You Done For You Lately?

For Earth Day this year I decided I was going to try to make a real change by commuting to work under my own power instead of using my car. I’ve been riding a wave of endorphin high as my body goes through the shock of experiencing exercise again for the first time in a long while. I can feel the winter doldrums lifting [1], and I asked myself: when was the last time I did something that makes a positive change in my life?

How to Get an RSS Feed for your XBOX 360 Gamertag

My geek want of the day is getting an RSS feed of my Xbox 360 game activity so that I can use it with lifestreaming services. I’m not sure why Microsoft doesn’t make an RSS feed of your Xbox Live activity available. The information is all there, they publish it as a gamercard. But they don’t give you access to the raw data to do with as you please.

Here are the various ways you can access your Xbox 360 Gamercard to use with other websites.

The Fragmentation of Identity and Discussion

Once upon a time the way someone would comment on something you wrote would be to write a blog post of their own in response. Then blogs got a comment section and people could write what they had to say directly on the post. Now the discussion around a post has completely fragmented: people are saying stuff about your content on Twitter, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Facebook… pretty much anywhere except for the post where you originally wrote it.

Mashing Your MP3 Music Collection with Last.FM

One geek itch I’ve been wanting to scratch is to be able to listen to my MP3 collection using the recommendations from Last.FM. I’ve you’ve never heard of Last.FM, it is a music service that lets you listen music as a radio station over the internet. I’ve been using it for a year and a half and I love it; it’s helped me discover so much good music.

I’ve found two ways to automatically build MP3 playlists using online recommendations. The first way uses iTunes replacement Media Monkey and some extensions to connect to Last.FM (thanks TJOHO!) and the second way uses software by a new startup called The Filter (backed by Peter Gabriel).

Book Review: Halting State by Charles Stross

If you’re a programmer/gamer geek and looking for a gripping book that you won’t be able to put down then look no further than Halting State.

My Favorite Albums of 2007

New Year’s Resolutions for 2008: release my “Best of” lists in the beginning of January, not at the end of January.

Online Survival Guide: 9 Tips for Dealing with Idiots on the Internet

Winter is one of the worst for flame wars because environmental conditions make people more irritable and more likely to spend more time online. Here are some tips for navigating online discussions from someone who has been participating and managing public forums for over 15 years.

Book Review: Everything Bad is Good for You by Steven Johnson

The thesis behind the book is simple: if you look at the popular media culture over time it is becoming more and more complex. There have always been avant garde examples that wove complex stories but over time the same techniques are used in mainstream pop culture. IE: It is becoming common place to produce tv shows and movies that require multiple watchings to fully digest.

7 Tips to Optimize Windows XP for Gaming — Playing The Witcher on Minimum System Requirements

One of the lures of the holiday season is to be able to hopefully squeeze in some time between eggnog, family and friends to exercise your vices. No, not heroin, but that other life consuming addiction: gaming. PC gaming is quickly going the way of the dodo, with console gaming taking over because it is so much easier to prevent piracy and ensure that the games will “just work” with the minimum of effort. But PC games are still my drug of choice, the combination of mouse and keyboard can’t be beat, especially for real time strategy or roleplaying games.

The Attention Age: Accelerando, Software Agents, Filters and Gatekeepers

Last night I finished reading Accelerando by Charles Stross. Like many of the books I read these days, I heard about it from another blogger. It feels like a spiritual sequel to Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock, John Brunner’s the Shockwave Rider and Warren Ellis’ Transmetropolitan. It is about information overload to the nth degree and too much change in too short of a time.

What I’m Playing: PC, Nintendo DS, Xbox 360

I’m on day 10 of “one of those weeks” so I haven’t had time to fully develop the usual cornucopia of rainbow-coloured blog post ideas. All of my time has been spent on work and family with a smidgen of video game playing to decompress my brain. This isn’t one of those “I’m sorry I haven’t been blogging!!” posts that means it’s time to hit ‘J’ in the feed reader - instead I’m going to talk a little bit about video games. Feel free to interject in the comments with what you’re playing. (It’s Halo 3, isn’t it?)

Book Review: Overclocked by Cory Doctorow (and Fair Use Day)

Last night I finished reading Cory Doctorow’s new collection of short stories, Overclocked, and I was very surprised at how much I enjoyed it.

[TV] When Good Heroes Go Bad

I just finished watching the first season of the new hit TV series Heroes on DVD and I have to say that I’m disappointed. I’m still an avid reader of comic books, so when a new TV series starts that seems like a mild rip-off from X-Men came out, I didn’t really have a choice when it came to watching it.

And we have a winner…

Never has there been a truer mantra than “those who can’t, teach.” I might write posts about using online calendar applications, but I think by now we’ve all realized I don’t use them. That’s why I’ll do things like schedule a contest to end the day before leaving on vacation… knowing fully well that I [...]

Create Buzz by Doing the Unexpected and Being Remarkable (Puzzle Quest Case Study)

A game company called Infinite Interactive have a break-away hit on their hands with a new game called PuzzleQuest. Their success has come from two key differentiators:

• Mashing the puzzle gem (IE: Bejeweled) genre with the old school Japanese RPG (IE: Final Fantasy) genre.
• Releasing a demo for PCs over the Internet even though the game was only available for the Nintendo DS and Playstation Portable handheld consoles
• (and possibly) very limited available at game stores causing scarcity and a lot of buzz around how hard it is to find a copy

But why is it so successful?

Electronic Civil Disobedience

People are calling the Digg user revolt the “Internet story of the year.” The Digg community fixated on the 32-bit encryption key for HD-DVDs protests against the site owners giving in to potential censorship requests by HD-DVD producers (who are also advertisers on the site) and censoring stories that published the key.

Group Writing Project #3 — Theme = T-shirts or Movies (Win Free t-shirts contest for bloggers)

Group writing projects are a way to connect with other bloggers and increase your readership. Every two months I run an on-going group writing project where bloggers can write around a similar theme. I offer prizes and freebies as incentives for participating (past prizes include Amazon gift certificates, free web hosting, and WordPress.com upgrade credits).
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Five Ways to Fix Digg’s Comment System

Many negative things have already been said about the Digg comment threads.

Cyber-bullying - Not just for teenagers

I’ve been thinking about featuring 31 bloggers over 31 days for my one year anniversary and Kathy Sierra of Creating Passionate Users would be tops on that list. Which makes the death threats and cyber-harassment against her even more saddening and sickening. It constantly amazes me how “Just Add Internet” and people get up to the kind of actions and harassment they’d never do in real life.

Blogging seems to attract lonely, obsessed and unhinged people.