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AddictingGames, a popular Flash game portal, has announced plans to hold a large-scale awards show pertaining to casual games. The show will take place in 2009, with a series of voting rounds conducted on the site that will allow AddictingGames’ users to decide the final outcome (though judges will have some say).

The show will be open to any casual game on the web, but the results will likely be heavily skewed towards games on AddictingGames, since that’s where voting will actually take place. Few details have been released, but the Nickelodeon-owned site promises content spread on websites and television programs across “the entire Nickelodeon/MTVN Kids and Family Group”.

While the execution is flawed (the voting will be totally biased), developers could use an incentive to create casual games that are more involved than the mind numbing junk games that litter countless sites and development platforms across the web. Alongside a compensation program that AddictingGames will be rolling out for its most popular developers, this could at least help gamers pick out the best of the crop.

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Yacrosoft or Michoo – too Icahnish? When America was once prosperous, not too long ago and most U.S. industries had at least a bright near-term economic future, the greedy class of American could enrich themselves privately, away from the media and general public – but, those times have changed. This recent statement in The Washington Post article says it all - “Icahn, who owns a 5 percent stake in Yahoo, emphasized he still believes a sale of all or part of Yahoo may still be the best way for the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company to lift its sagging stock price.” No mention whatsoever has been discussed publicly of what to fix that people don’t like about Yahoo that may be causing the lack of financial windfall that Carl Icahn believes he should benefit from by investing in Yahoo, the well liked consumer based Internet icon stock.

Some very successful Indian entrepreneurs are sharing their wisdom with the community :

Imagine creating Web-page graphics dynamically using just code. Creating and manipulating images is yours for the doing with the power of PHP. This tutorial steps through using the GD library, showing you how to create and alter images on Web pages. It starts with the GD construct, and then builds on it to showcase graphics techniques.

Google Earth is turning out to be a great resource for scientists to visualize and communicate the phenomena they study. You can see the migration patterns of endangered and other threatened animals, based on data collected by the Commission for Environmental Cooperation. (The image above shows the range of both the Northern spotted owl and the Mexican spotted owl).

Anybody can take geographical data and turn it into a layer on Google Earth. Scientists are doing this in droves. You can also track storms, the paths of solar eclipses, volcano activity, arctic ice melting, bird flu mutations and biomaps of emotional stress levels in different cities (see this Popular Science article for more info).

Since these are all KML files, they could be made into layers on the regular Google Maps as well. Although they wouldn’t look as cool, more people would see them.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Just because the Internet makes it possible to offer a near-infinite inventory of goods for sale does not mean that consumers will start wanting more obscure items in any great numbers. That is the conclusion Harvard Business School associate professor Anita Elberse comes to in a recent article in the Harvard Business Review that takes on some of the sacred cows of the Long Tail theory.

The Long Tail is Wired editor Chris Anderson’s theory (based on an article and resulting book of the same name) that as it becomes easier to distribute a wider variety of items, consumers will venture down the long tail of the distribution curve and find the products that exactly match their interests and idiosyncratic needs. Elberse questions this notion:

Is most of the business in the long tail being generated by a bunch of iconoclasts determined to march to different drummers? The answer is a definite no.

. . . Although no one disputes the lengthening of the tail (clearly, more obscure products are being made available for purchase every day), the tail is likely to be extremely flat and populated by titles that are mostly a diversion for consumers whose appetite for true blockbusters continues to grow. It is therefore highly disputable that much money can be made in the tail.

Elberse looks at data from Rhapsody, Quickflix (Australia’s version of Netflix), ans Nielsen for songs and movies. Out of one million tracks she studied on Rhapsody, the top one percent accounted for 32 percent of all plays and the top ten percent accounted for 78 percent of all plays. Similarly, the top one percent of videos on Quickflix accounted for 18 percent of rentals and the top ten percent accounted for 48 percent of rentals. Anderson responds that she defines “head’ and “tail” differently than he would. Even so, he adds, that top one percent of Rhapsody songs is still 10,000 songs, more than what you’d find in a typical record store.

What is more interesting about the study is that Elberse cites evidence that, even given more choice, consumers still flock to the blockbuster products that make up the “head” of the distribution curve. This might be because we are all lemmings or, more likely, that taste in music and movies has a social component. We tend to like a song or movie, in part, because other people like them too. Taste doesn’t form in a vacuum. It is socially reinforced.

Even adventurous consumers who venture into the more obscure realms of inventory tend to buy more hit products than long-tail ones. For instance, QuickFlix customers who rented the most movies from the bottom 10 percent of the distribution curve only did so 8 percent of the time. The largest chunk of their consumption (34 percent) came from the top 10 percent of titles just like everyone else. (In the chart below, the red parts of the bars represent the top ten percent of movie titles, and the black parts represent the bottom ten percent. Each bar, in turn, represents a different set of customers and how their rentals are distributed among each decile of popularity). Elberse concludes:

No matter how I slice and dice the customer base, customers give lower ratings to obscure titles. A balanced picture emerges of the impact of online channels on market demand: Hit products remain dominant, even among consumers who venture deep into the tail. Hit products are also liked better than obscure products. It is a myth that obscure books, films, and songs are treasured. What consumers buy in internet channels is much the same as what they have always bought.

So does this disprove the Long Tail theory? Not exactly. (Lee Gomes’ gleeful grave-digging notwithstanding). All it proves is that blockbusters are more durable than we’d like to think, even in an age of limitless inventory and perfect search.

But to say there is no money in the Long Tail is nonsense. It is just more finely distributed and harder to find. True, there are not many businesses that have figured out how to collect it. Google is one with AdSense and search ads. Each search ad is insignificant in and of itself, but all of those obscure terms add up to billions of dollars.

Is this repeatable in other markets? Elberse herself notes that demand is being pushed down the tail. Even if they can gather up that new demand, Long-Tail businesses may not become the most profitable. The economics have changed. And Google is likely the exception rather than the new rule. But neither can that Long-Tail demand be ignored.

In the end, Elberse presents a false dichotomy. The choice is not head or tail. It’s both.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Did you know that many parts of the MySQL web sites provide news and updates via RSS Feeds? Markus Popp from our web team did a great job on making some of these more visible by adding RSS icons to the respective pages. If you want to keep up with what's happing at MySQL, consider adding the following feeds to your feed reader:

• New downloads on dev.mysql.com
  
• New DevZone articles
• PlanetMySQL (You probably knew that one already)
• MySQL Forge - All New Items
• MySQLForge Wiki - Recent changes
• MySQL Announcements on Launchpad.net
• Branch activity on Launchpad.net
• New MySQL Training Courses
• MySQL Live Web Seminars
• MySQL OnDemand Web Seminars
• Latest Quickpolls from MySQL AB
• Latest Updates from MySQL AB
• Latest Press Articles about MySQL AB
• The MySQL Bug database allows you to subscribe to the results of any search using the 'Feed' link that can be found on the search result page.
• The MySQL Forums provide an RSS feed for each forum, e.g. the Announcements Forum

Did I miss any? Do you know any other feed? Please let me know.

RSS feed readers exist for a wide range of platforms. I personally use Akregator, which is part of the KDE Desktop environment.

 

Internet Broadcasting, a local media network for broadcast publishers, announced today the official launch of Slantly, an online opinion tool. Slantly is intended for web publishers to integrate into their site to create discussions and spark debate. Several major web publishers have already partnered with Slantly to use the tool, including Meredith Publishing and NYCtv.

Slantly offers several key features to online publishers. With their customizable polls, publishers are able to create polls on news and issues to engage their readers. Through these polls, users can vote and add comments to a forum attached to each poll, after they vote. These polls and discussions, while hosted on each publisher’s site, are all available on the Slantly site. A very useful feature to publishers is the ability to track the demographics of your voters and commenters. All of this is available on the Publisher Dashboard, where you can create, moderate, and manage your discussions, track activity, and customize the look and functionality of your discussions to match your site. Slantly also offers an open API, enabling publishers to customize the tool to suit their needs. I’ve included a widget from Slantly that rotates through several popular opinions.

var SLANTLY = (typeof SLANTLY!= "undefined") ? SLANTLY : {}; SLANTLY.embedconfig={ version:"1.1", topic: "Technology", layout: "custom", width: "100%", height: "250", query_type: "top-opinions" };

There are several competing online opinion sites, in the form of polling sites like Polldaddy, Survey Monkey, dPolls, SodaHead (recently received new funding, covered here), and Vizu. Slantly does offer a similar service, but a bit differently. After playing around with the site a bit, they focus more on the opinions, not the polls. Given the nature of the associated sites (local news outlets), the audience is a bit older, and presumably a bit more opinionated and educated. This allows for more consistent users, as opposed to SodaHead, for example, which is marketed mainly for MySpace pages.

Internet Broadcasting, a company established in 1996, has been leading the market in local media online solutions. Originally, a web development company for major TV stations, IB saw the potential in the local media market. They have developed a system to optimize the way TV stations converge with the web to enable viewers to access and interact with the local news. Their network currently reaches 16 million unique visitors per month nationwide. Some of their clients include Hearst-Argyle Television Inc., Mcgraw-Hill Broadcasting, NBC, Meredith Broadcasting Group, Cox Television, and CNN.

IB is hoping that Slantly will bring their network a better user experience by enabling users to interact with their local news station and media outlets. Their intention by offering Slantly to any web publisher, in addition to their partners, is to engage readers in active discussion in order to provide meaningful interaction on their sites.

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This API provides easy access to user investment portfolio data, including current returns and market value.

Whoisi is a central site that allows users to add people and their associated web feeds, and then track any number of these people and their feed items using a follower model. Whoisi is a side project by open source evangelist and Mozilla contributor Chris Blizzard. Currently it supports feeds from Flickr, Twitter, LinkedIn, Picasa and any Atom or RSS feed. Once you have added a number of people that you follow, it presents their feed activity in a time-based interface similar to FriendFeed and MugShot, making it easy to track a large number of feeds.

In Whoisi, any visitor to the site can define a person or an identity, and add the feeds associated with that person for other users to find and follow. To prevent vandalism, there is a revision history so that changes can be reversed. The database already has a large number of names within it - and when you search for a friend or feed you’d like to follow, if they are not already on the site, you can add or edit their feeds easily. Users do not need to signup for an account with Whoisi, as user data (such as followers) is all session-based using a browser cookie, which means you can’t move your follower list between browsers.

You can edit and customize any persons profile with “aliases” to provide alternate names or groups. What this means is the TechCrunch feed can be tagged “Michael Arrington” or “Mike Arrington.” You can also have a TechCrunch group, so Nik Cubrilovic’s feed could be tagged “techcrunch:nik.” The grouping feature is very simple and it could be developed further by users and used for other purposes.

Whoisi is a very clean site, as there is little on the site except for data. An open API is provided that publishes RSS feeds for each defined user, so that the data can be integrated into other applications.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

The ambition of the Cloud technology is to offer a "pay per kilobyte" model for using a software development infrastructure. How will this change the life of the developers?

Internet Explorer 8 beta 1 is available to download and begin testing. Understanding your options when dealing with IE8 will help you keep your sites in line.