The success of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook has spurred a landslide of niche social network development throughout the online world. Many categories of interests, such as dogs and shoes and music, have seen their own online networking platform come to life through the power of Web 2.0 technologies. Now it’s time for video games .

Today, GarageGames has released, to the world, the new video game social networking site, Great Games Experiment (http://www.greatgamesexperiment.com). This site boasts a current user base approaching tens of thousands and tons of games.
The idea of a social networking site for video games is by no means revolutionary; however, the adjoining of all video games (both indie and mainstream) in one central location, with a democracy of users has never before been implemented. This is more than database of video games. On GreatGamesExperiment.com, a user can rate, review, play, download, search for, browse for, [keep inserting verbs here] any type of video game imaginable. Users can also interact with each other on a multitude of levels. Create your own internal network within the walls of GreatGamesExperiment.com by making friends with, tagging, kudo-ing, commenting on other users throughout the site. Users can also band together to form groups.

The main objectives of the site are as follows:

• Provide to game fans and developers an opportunity to share and promote their own games!
• Help gamers and developers network with each other!
• Help people discover new games! Many of which they may have never heard!
• Make it easy to download and play games in one place.

Also, check out the cool badges you can get on the site and post around the web:

If you enjoy video games, this is the site for you.

Flash Games Role-Playing Games Free Games First-Person Shooters All Games

This article on mashable.com speculates that the NHL may no longer be allowing YouTube visitors to embed hockey videos on external sites. Is this because it’s going to take away from revenue sharing that YouTube is promising to the Hockey Association to use their footage? That’s my assumption. Anyways, if the video in this post disappears, I’ll be a sad panda.

“And in another YouTube shakeup today, it seems that the NHL has banned external embedding of its YouTube clips.”

“The NHL has a substantial presence on YouTube. However, they told one person who was legally embedding these videos on his site to skate to the penalty box.”

Coming soon…

Contact me for a sneak peak.

I’ve been looking into the wonderful world of Google Maps API recently.  In my search to find some of the cool mashups that people are creating with the awesome service I ran across this link, which helps you easily find satellite images of some of the coolest spectacles on Earth from space.  My personal favorite is The Colosseum under the Medieval Wonders category!  Check it out!

Over the past months, a large question on people’s minds concerning the over-night Internet sensation YouTube has been, “how will they monetize”. After reading this article featured on ClickZ, it seems that through an effort to create a marquee relationship and generate revenue, YouTube is walking a very fine line of appeasing its users and stakeholders alike. The big news this week in concerns to YouTube has been the reported deal between the Internet video site and Warner Music Group, in which Warner will allow its library of music videos to be used on the site and even make available its content for inclusion in user-created videos.

The danger that YouTube is going to encounter in this relationship is the outcasting of the 16-year old kid making a video for their site, whose creative energy alone is the reason that YouTube has obtained the clout it has. Basically, what we are running into is this line drawing fallacy in which Warner’s intellectual property is being considered of worth for profit sharing but nobody is compensating the little guy who spends countless hours in his bedroom editing his video in Windows Movie Maker. The question I ask is, should everybody involved be compensated? Where do we draw the line? I think this is going to be a continual theme with the rise of user-generated content…

It appears that these stories I keep hearing about batteries randomly catching on fire on Dell laptops is not completely bull like I thought. This article states that Dell has issued a recall on all laptop batteries sold from October 2004 - October 2005.

The batteries, which were bundled with Dell notebooks and also sold as add-ons via the company’s Web site and catalogs, can overheat and thus pose a fire risk, Dell said in a statement.

I fear my laptop may fall into this category and I may have to go ahead and send in my battery before it blows up on me!

Well anybody who has been paying attention to any news whatsoever related to technology or gaming has probably caught wind of the major intiative launched by Microsoft to promote the indie video game developer. As providing top-tier tools to independent game developers has been the mission and goal of the GarageGames team since the company’s inception at the beginning of this decade, a strong partnership has formed between the two entities. (kudos to Nate for the awesome art in the second screenshot)

Pat Wilson writes a little into depth with what exactly this means and provides a great quote from one of the press releases circulating.

Congratulations to the GarageGames XNA team, you guys rock!

This morning marked the major keynote speech [listen here] at Microsoft’s Gamefest, located in Seattle, Washington– an exposition geared toward the game development industry. Taking the stage front and center at the keynote was GarageGames President Mark Frohnmayer. Mark provided an excellent synopsis on the mission and goals of GarageGames and the excitement level of our company to bring the Torque family of tools to the XNA platform, ripping down major barriers to entry previously keeping indies from the video game console market.

Along with hammering out code and development decisions today, I did a lot of scanning the blogsphere and forums to see the excitement level video game enthusiasts were expressing for the announcement.

Mark speaking and Adam marbling it up during the keynote!

First of all, what is Web 2.0? What is this crazy buzzword “Web 2.0″ that people keep throwing around. Well, to be honest with you, it really depends on with whom it is that you are talking that determines your definition. Probably the most famous of this Web 2.0 age are sites with heavy social networking aspects such as myspace and thefacebook. However, the concept of Web 2.0 goes a little bit further than just a glorified title behind sites that provide the ability to set up a profile and link it to other users. What we are seeing happen in this age of Internet technology concerning sites is a revolution in the sense of content delivery.

On the Internet, content is always king. It is the hardest piece of the puzzle when designing or putting together a website. How do I optimize my content for my prospective customers? What are the most important pieces of my business that should be displayed on my front page, where my traffic lands and dictates the length of their stay? On true Web 2.0 sites, you as the site owner don’t necessarily make those decisions anymore. The most popular sites on the Internet currently– YouTube, del.icio.us, digg.com– all of these sites have a major factor in common. That commonality between these sites is the ideal of what sifts to the top is the content that users choose to place there through rating, views, etc…

I am going to raise an interesting question. Can this content model adapted by major Internet sites be applied to traditional business sites? To enter this realm really requires innovative thinking but provides an excellent opportunity to break the mold. The issue that I think you see brewing throughout the Internet is that users have been infected with this disease of active involvement in dictating the presentation of a site’s content. We like to provide our input. We like to rate things. We like to give quick little blurbs and our two cents on products we have purchased or services that we have used. How many business owners will take the risk of giving their site visitors a completely open channel to actively involve them in their business site’s content and deliverance of that content? It may be a radical thought or concept because these traditional business sites have a very standardized way of spelling out what it is they sell/do. However it is something I am looking to investigate/experiment with further because this interactivity disease that Internet users have developed is only going to get worst and there’s no cure in sight. I would be curious to see what readers input / ideas are on this particular topic.

As simply put as the title states.  You would think that with all that ad revenue the site pulls in they’d be able to handle some traffic.  YouTube serves up serious streaming media to what looks like an even wider audience base (after insane traffic spikes to the site over the past few months) and I don’t recall that site ever going down as often or have as many errors popping up…  I digress but it’d be nice if MySpace would take heed and invest in some more power.  Maybe Google will buy them out and MySpace can be hosted at Googleplexes throughout the country =)

Oh speaking of social networking… check out http://www.eons.com - social networking for 50-plus’ers.  Looks like the guy who founded Monster.com is behind it.  Kind of an interesting idea.

Has been a very productive morning already.  Got linux running on my Linksys WRT54GS router (which previously had some horrible excuse for a firmware running on it).  Everything seems to be a lot zippier now and the GUI system for admin is much nicer and expansive.

Read about DD-WRT here

I was having problems with my connection randomly dying a couple times a day, forcing me to power cycle my cable mode / router.  So this was something that had to be done.  If you have one of these routers (they are indeed quite popular), I would recommend undergoing this process as it seems you can get a lot more for your money in this device.

The router also has this problem with P2P apps or any software that generates a lot of connections.. any way here are some commands to execute in Telnet to fix this kind of problem:

The following instructions are for DD-WRT only

• Do not use the web interface method as it cuts off part of the commands.
• Enable SSH (Admin, Services) as we are going to use the NVRAM method @ http://wrt-wiki.bsr-clan.de/index.php?title=Startup_Scripts#NVRAM_Method
• Login to the router with an SSH client (root/your password).
• Put the following commands into the SSH client.

~ # nvram set rc_startup=”
> echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/icmp_echo_ignore_broadcasts
> echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/icmp_ignore_bogus_error_responses
> echo ‘600 1800 120 60 120 120 10 60 30 120′ > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_conntrack_tcp_timeouts
> “
~ # nvram commit
~ # reboot

Make sure your “Maximum Ports” is set to 4096 on the Management page of your Admin GUI

Footnote:  rockin’ out to Alabama 3 this morning per Dan’s recommendation.  Pretty rockin tunes!