Aral's script converts any online statement into CSV for FreeAgent; I don't use FreeAgent, but I have a feeling I could modify this into something useful. (In other news: why is all UK online banking so bad?)

Christian Nutt interviews Jesse Schell Lots of really interesting stuff in here - to be returned to, I think.

"Diller, Brill, and Murdoch seem be stating a simple fact—we will have to pay them—but this fact is not in fact a fact. Instead, it is a choice, one its proponents often decline to spell out in full, because, spelled out in full, it would read something like this: “Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.”"

"Little stories are the internet’s native and ideal art form." Yes. This is a good one.

"The whisky social network". Ooh. Has potential, at least.

"Today, the UK government's Department For Transport unveils a new browser-based MMOG, created by New York-based developer Area/Code. Designed for early teenagers to learn principles of traffic safety, it's probably the largest 'serious games' project ever to be created for the UK. Code Of Everand is the result of over two years of work with the Department For Transport by Area/Code principals and designers Frank Lantz and Kevin Slavin, not only because of its size and ambition, but also because of the complexities of developing it for a government body... We spoke to Lantz, Slavin and Simon Williams, who led the project at Carat, the Department For Transport's media agency, about what Code Of Everand is, how they pulled it off, and why they think it could prove that games can be a powerful platform for learning." Edge interview.

Hmn. Visualisation of tweets about the word "FIFA" (do the maths there) and all games played of FIFA 10 - so you can see both which teams are doing well, and which countries have good FIFA gamers in them. There's little bits of stats-fluff, but it doesn't go nearly deep enough. It's lovely EA are doing this... but it could be, you know, useful, rather than just shiny? Bungie's statistics crown is still a long way off.

"You'll need several thousand gold to launch the business, and then keep it up for many weeks before you make a steady good profit every week. And you'll need to log on every day and spend several hours per week just to keep your glyph business up and running. In the end, getting rich in World of Warcraft works exactly like getting rich in the real world: You need a venture capital to start up a business, hard work, and perseverance. And this is exactly why getting rich with inscription works so reliably in World of Warcraft: It is hard work, there isn't all that much you can actually do with an income of thousands of gold per week, and thus the large majority of players simply can't be bothered doing it."

"...we roped in Nate McFeters, another local, and put together a security talk for indie Mac developers with no budget for security. What does a security talk for Mac developers look like? As it turns out, it’s very much like the talk we think every indie developer, Mac or not, should see, and it’s very much unlike the talk the rest of the security industry is giving." Good stuff: simple, clear, well-thought out, and very hard to argue with.

"Be selective with your innovation. Keep as much of your product predictable, so people can find their way to the gem of awesome that you have pioneered. Too much innovation means you'll have to individually teach each user how to love your product and you don't have time for that." Justin Hall on the end of PMOG/The Nethernet, and lessons learned.

"Google Docs offers an undocumented feature that lets you embed PDF files and PowerPoint presentations in a web page. The files don't have to be uploaded to Google Docs, but they need to be available online." Ooh, that's useful.

"Ikea Heights is a melodrama shot entirely in the Burbank California Ikea Store without the store knowing." Amazing.

"In fact, when Dust 514 launches, the map of EVE, currently divined only by player structures owned in the PC game, will also take into account infantry successes and failures within the console game. Players in the PC MMO can "fund mercenaries and give them goals" in the console title." Oh, now that is nice: CCP build a multiplayer game for consoles, and tie it - with data and everything - to the PC MMO, but it's only an indirect link. As a 360 owner without a PC, I shall have to be proud to serve in the mobile infantry.

Matt Haughey on ten years of MetaFilter.

"Here are nine individuals who know more than you do about some elements of online communities - even if they couldn’t necessarily put it in writing." How did I miss this the first time around?

"I hope you find this overview of the future timeline of Facebook Usernames useful to understand where this exciting feature is going in the future, how our industry will adapt and respond to this sort of innovation, and how our tech trade press will hold the powerful company's feet to the fire as this sort of capability becomes mainstream in the years to come." Meanwhile, Anil Dash drops the awesome.

Ooh, nice - online favicon generator and editor. Might be useful one day.

Alan Taylor on a year of the Big Picture. It's been a successful one, if you ask me, and it's a wonderful site; there are few updates in my RSS reader I look forward to as much as it.

"Professional photographic & art printing with great value? theprintspace delivers. At the printspace we understand what professional quality means, and we also offer 48 hour turnaround time & guaranteed satisfaction." As recommended to me by Jon.

Joel Johnson rounds on Wired for the gulf between their online and printed formats; the comments thread turns into a much more rational, and reasonable, discussion from many Wired staff, past and present.

"See why I say I can't play like a player?" Richard Bartle dives deep into Stranglethorn Vale to explain what he "sees" when he plays MMOs, and to try to explain why he can't play them like, say, I can. It's a nice reading - even if I'm not sure the zone works as well coming from the Horde perspective - and his insights are strong.

"Even discussions of the ban are being locked. At the bottom of the thread "GLBT discrimination in forums?", community manager Sean Dahlberg wrote, "As I have stated before, these are terms that do not exist in Star Wars. Thread closed."" How depressing: can you really hetero-normalise an online, social, MMO? Makes me a bit angry, and I'd have thought BioWare would have been more sensitive around this. Is this Lucasarts turning the screws?

"...I never thought I’d be banned from something for liking it in the wrong way. It’s interesting to discover completely different attitudes to these new ways of interacting online." Yes, I find this a lot; my actions and behaviours are shaped in a particular way, to the point that I've found myself recently (in the case of Twitter) recommending a totally opposite manner of usage to a friend.

"in other words: Please ensure that there is absolutely no way for your customer to know whether we are showing the form or you are. In fact, please train your customer to give their “Verified by Visa” password to anyone who asks for it." Eesh. I knew I never licked VBV, but this just proves, accutely, *why* I don't like it.

"Planbeast is a free service that lets you find people to play your favorite Xbox 360 games with online. Planbeast allows you to schedule and join new online events for any Xbox Live-compatible title." And there was me all ready to build this (albeit just for Left4Dead)... and now somebody's gone and done it already.

"BUGFIXES: Fixed a bug that would sometimes cause characters other than Ken to appear on the Character Select screen during online play." Damn, that one's been affecting me too.

Wonderful interview with Marty Stratton and John Carmack on Quake Live; there's some really smart insight on development and business in here, and also some tidbits of Carmack talking code. Definitely one to mull over.

"write Actionscript3 code in a textarea, and your code will be compiled server side. Your compiled Flash will be reloaded automatically in the right side of the page, so write code and see it real-time." And you can fork other people's code. It's like github and Heroku all at once, but for Flash.

"The artist Keith Tyson is offering 5,000 Guardian readers the opportunity to own a free downloadable artwork by him. The costs you'll have to bear are those of printing out the work on A3 photographic paper – and framing, if you so choose... You will be asked to enter your geographical location – which forms part of the unique title of each print."

"The Firefox add-on "Pirates of the Amazon" inserts a "download 4 free" button on Amazon, which links to corresponding Piratebay BitTorrents. The add-on lowers the technical barrier to enable anyone to choose between "add to shopping cart" or "download 4 free". Are you a pirate?" Almost certainly not the first example; perhaps one of the best realised.

"Though few gamers might be interested in long haul trucking, there is nothing wrong with concentrating on a small group of gamers and offering them the best experience they can get within their limited requirements. In fact, the more MMO developers who realize this—that a small group of loyal players is better than a huge group of disinterested players—the better, honestly." Very true - a nice conclusion to Matthew Kumar's round-up of a somewhat niche - but interesting sounding - browser MMO.

"A series looking at different aspects of guardian.co.uk's rebuild and redesign project, which ran from October 2005 to September 2008." Looks like there's going to be some good stuff emerging from this; great to see the Guardian making it so public.

"We're still going through the stats, but at the time of writing there were almost 170,000 messages on the Strictly [Come Dancing] board." Holy hell. Poor moderators. (And: for such an uninteresting story, as well!)

"If the Barack Obama presidency fails to unite us as a country, I'm going to hold out for a fast-zombie apocalypse." Iroquois on co-op, and the way Left 4 Dead sees online co-op - and the bad behaviour of players online - as design problems to solve, rather than to ignore.

Mirror's Edge 2D flash game - which look, by all accounts, to be an official spin-off. Can't wait to see the full version; it's a very impressive little game.

"China's State Administration of Taxation announced that it will impose a 20 percent personal income tax on profit from virtual money." Woah, the 21st Century really did hit, didn't it?

"His advice for those attempting a project like this, is to get people who understand the web. DICE hired a web development director, and a web producer. "Without those people, we would have never made it as far as we have," he says. He also recommends a web tech director, which DICE did not need to hire "because we had a team in DICE who were pretty strong."" Excellent article about building games for the online age; the section on the socially-driven BH website is very incisive.

"So we decided to treat Availabot as a world probe: it was decided that we would take Availabot through to the position of being factory ready, and in the process learn as much as possible about the processes of manufacture, and how to develop these kind of complex products with so many moving parts." And, best news of all: Availabot will be coming to market. Excellent.

Now that's what I call a UI. Nice idea!

"That’s almost an entire day spent fighting one boss. And they still didn’t beat him. I feel physically ill just thinking about it. How did anyone ever think that’s good game design?" Scary.

How had I never seen this before? Beautiful little puzzle game: find the star in the level. Each level has a different mechanic. Each makes me smile.

"I am stumped by how to excerpt the language on message boards and blogs... My problem with message-board language brings up a prior problem in journalism: the difficulty of translating spoken language into written language."

Disney are shutting down VMK despite its continued success and large userbase; as a "promotion", it's run its course. Some of the comments are very affecting. Lessons to be learned about the implicit contracts you create when you build worlds.

"Manage your conference notes and share them with other delegates, even with unreliable conference wi-fi!" Based on Tiddlywiki - an early piece of output from BT's Open Source division (and Osmosoft). Congrats to Jeremy!

"Yesterday, I discovered that The Times (UK), a well-respected newspaper owned by News Corp., is involved in an extensive campaign to spam social media websites with links to Timesonline.co.uk articles." Andy Baio on the Times' involvement with SEO.

"The web is not suffering from a lack of canonical design. It’s just that canonical design on the web isn’t as glamorous as some want it to be." I have wrestled with so many people about what "design" on the web means. This helps me understand myself

"I cannot, in all conscience, remain within a union I now regard, albeit reluctantly, as reactionary. The digital revolution is here and I am digital revolutionary." Roy Greenslade on leaving the NUJ.

"...indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users..." - you don't say?

Not a bad list, really.

Blimey. Wasn't expecting that at all; I'm hoping the site will remain (as they suggest) a "stand-alone operation".

An online version of Slitherlink. Wonderful puzzle game; very addictive.

Not quite ready for release, but anyway: MacLive is a nice Cocoa front end to XBox Live, with Growl integration (hurrah). Hoping it'll be ready soon!

"Sure you can still make out the words, but you’ve eliminated all the subtleties of hundreds of years of typographic design elements that were put there to make things easier to read." Lots of good articles about web typography right now.

Crazy. And, of course, raises the point that online worlds could be impacting on the real world via environmental damage and power consumption...

"Newspapers must win online, or face a future of painful contraction." Need to read this at some point.

(From a design perspective, but, to be honest, it impacts on everything).

Good Edge piece on XBLA

Great post by Jeff - whom I don't always agree with. This is spot on, though; content management is hard, and when the software isn't failing you, you often hack it into things it shouldn't do. Bespoke is the way forward, and tools like Rails and Django a

Clay Shirky's wiki for discussion pattern languages of moderation.

Raph's keynote from the Korean Gaming conference. Fantastic, and it doesn't even need the notes

Really, really good online tutorial of SQL queries. Need to go over this again

How Halo2 got put onto Live.