Visualisation (pdf) of the top 140 Twitterers by influence (aka number of followers), including their first tweets. Best opener? Google:

I’m 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101100 01110101 01100011 01101011 01111001 00001010

(solution)

Why I have to play Red Dead Redemption. It has cows, rustling and moseying.

Lovely short history of Pixel art. Make me want to go play Lemmings. Or 10 Yard Fight. Nice to hear an Australian accent too.

There’s been a lot of coverage recently on the growth surge of Google Android phones vs Blackberries vs iPhones in the US. In sales last quarter, Blackberries ruled the roost followed by Google phones and then Apple (though Apple still rules total market share).

Many pundits are putting this down to two things: the AT&T carrier lock-in that Apple has, and the fact that competitor Verizon is agressively pushing Android with things like two for one handset deals. Those same pundits also speculate that if Apple were to open up to Verizon, the market share stats would change dramatically.

One way of testing that theory is to look at markets where there is no lock-in, such as here in Australia.

It’s very hard to get “Australia only” stats (unless you want to fork out $500), but from what I could find it looks like Nokia holds the local crown, followed by Apple, then Blackberry. And according to this more recent SMH report, Apple is poised to take Nokia’s position at the top of the pile. In other words it’s quite a different picture to the US market. 

Google doesn’t really register yet, no doubt simply because they don’t have the mindshare nor marketing push that the iPhone gets. Walk into any of the four main Australian mobile vendors and you’ll see iPhone promos plastered all over the shop, plus Blackberry and Nokia adverts. Google is far less visible, or has been so far.

Whilst this doesn’t prove anything, it probably does demonstrate that there is some truth in the argument that with more carrier choice the iPhone market would grow in the US. And it will be interesting to watch what happens as Android gets more of a push in the unlocked Australian market.

Nas & Mos Def insert their own New York into the breaks of Gil Scott-Heron’s killer track New York Is Killing Me. Download & listen to them back to back for max impact - Gil’s weight, Mos’s flow and Nas’s clean speed.

iPad specific apps for Australian newspapers are starting to trickle out. The Australian have announced theirs, with an “introductory price” of $4.99 per month which seems like pretty good pricing.

Fairfax (SMH, The Age, FinRev) haven’t announced any newspaper apps, but they are releasing an iPad version of their fluffy Sport & Style magazine. Insanely, it’s going to cost $3.49 per issue - when it’s a free glossy insert in the $1.50 newspaper.

Chatting to a colleague today about Google PAC-MAN, I started raving about the good ol' days of arcades and dropping 20¢ pieces. The machine which ate most of my teenage cash money was R-Type, which was pretty much perfection in a side scrolling shooter. It was the natural endpoint that started (for me) with Asteroids & Galaga, upgraded to Scrambler & Defender, was temporarily blinded by Dragon’s Lair, briefly poured money into Gauntlet, memorised the gear throws and corners in Daytona, before becoming obsessed by R-Type¹.

One thing I realised was that back in the day, your 20¢ was sacrosanct. You had no choice but to make that coin last as long as you possibly could. And with something like R-Type, that meant continuously working your way through bullet hell to a particular boss before dying/wiping over and over and over again as you learnt the boss strategy/rotation. It was punishing. So punishing that if you didn’t reach some bosses with all your ship mods complete you pretty much had to start over despite having made it to the boss chamber.

There were no Internets, no strategy guides, no faqs, no videos. It was just you, a pile of coins, and a queue for the machine.

Which made me wonder why the same thing kind of head-beating determination to learn a boss from scratch is largely absent from MMOs. I pretty much point blank refuse to approach a new boss without first having read up on it and watched the videos. And yet it is no harder than facing an R-Type boss unseen. In fact it’s easier, because you don’t have to work all the way through the prologues (aka trash) and other bosses each time to reach your current nemesis, and you don’t only have 3 lives to do it. Plus it doesn’t cost you 20¢ a try :-)

The biggest difference of course is that you are playing an MMO with 4 or 9 (or, lord have mercy, 24) other players. That’s the reason you don’t want to (or can’t afford to) spend time wiping whilst just watching or reacting to what is going on. Trying to co-ordinate that many people is challenge enough, without introducing the added element of learning on the fly. It’s more about implementing and executing than discovering. And maybe the other 9 love faqs. Or are good at execution. Or like following. Maybe they are impatient. Maybe they don’t want to spend hours getting frustrated. Maybe you’re afraid to look like a nub. 

Or maybe the other 9 didn’t play R-Type.

Straight outa the Blue Mountains, more indie pop perfection. I seem to have gone from alt-country to pop obsessed. There’s always something great about listening to local music - it might not always have the same polish, but it feels more, um, ‘real'. Like The Triffids always hitting home more than someone like Okkervil River, who mine the same vein but are unavoidably Americana rather than Australiana.

Brutally personal account of deep, dark drug addiction from New York Times media critic David Carr.

A permanent home for Google PAC-MAN - worth it for the (Flash based) sound alone.