Links for 01-15-2008

• Games Without Frontiers: Explosion of Indie Games Kills 'Best of' Column - Indie games to check out.


• HipMojo.com - Main Street Meets Madison Avenue, Wall Street and Silicon Valley » Wikipedia Turns Seven, Lessons for MSFT and Zagat? - "Connecting the dots (humor me), I see Zagat a bit like The Britannica: a wonderful brand that previous generations love and respect, but desperately searching for an identity in the 21st century. "


• Apple doesn't care about music. - Duke Listens! - "Apple is still foregoing incredible opportunities."


• How to Brew - By John Palmer - Contents - I don't bew as frequently as I did at one point, but I'll take a look at this.


• Ford: Car owners are pirates if they distribute pictures of their own cars - Boing Boing - The headline is predictably overblown. This is actually a trademark issue about reproduction for products being sold. See this comment: http://www.boingboing.net/2008/01/13/ford-car-owners-are.html#comment-104978 (But still seems excessive.)


• Black Star Rising - Why Photographers Hate Creative Commons - More Creative Commons discussion.


• The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: Dear Gizmodo: Don't even think about fucking with the screens at our show - This is good.


• Why people believe weird things about money - Los Angeles Times - I took a course in school called Behavioral Decision Theory that went into a lot of these non-rational economic behaviors. They have a lot of implications for marketing, advertising, etc.


• Photographer Taryn Simon Shoots America's Best-Kept Secrets - I saw an exhibit of her photos at the Whitney in NY relatively recently. Good stuff. (The photos at the exhibit were quite large so some of the effect is lost here unfortunately.)


• Serious Eats: Zagat Survey Up for Sale - I like Zagat's but the $24.95 annually for online always seemed just a bit steep. I agree with the general point of this post that they may not have done as much with online as they could.


• The Old New Thing : No matter where you put an advanced setting, somebody will tell you that you are an idiot - So very true.


• Maison Fleury: Ruby company raises $3.5 from Benchmark - "It is embarrassing for the zealots that in this day and age one of the most successful companies is a proprietary software model. What? my ideology is not perfect?"


• 3 Hidden Trends in 2008 - eMarketer - "advertisers and their agencies who want to engage with today’s consumers will have to start turning their ads into content. "


• HD DVD fires back, slashes hardware & software prices - Engadget - In other news, there are a lot of great bargains on Betamax recorders out there.


• ‘Sarah Connor Chronicles’ almost enough to make us forgive Fox for canning ‘Firefly’ « Quaedam - I like good science fiction, of which there's very little on TV--even less than fanboys would have you think. This pilot wasn't bad at all.