Author: Raanan Bar-Cohen

Raanan Bar-Cohenhttps://raanan.com/
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Video roundup: Crysis Physics demo, Homeboy Chanukah, and “Here comes another bubble”

Three great videos to share today.

The first, is demo footage from upcoming game called Crysis. It shows off a pretty amazing physics engine. This game and a few others may get me back into PC gaming one of these days:



The next video is called Homeboy Chanukah, and is simply hysterical. My buddy Tom who runs the film company New York Street Films created this video:

And lastly, Kara Swisher just blogged about a new video called “Here comes another bubble” sung to the tune of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire”. Pretty funny and well produced:

Haaretz: “How do you ‘open’ a blog using WordPress”

haaretz - the markerNice write up (in hebrew) in the top israeli newspaper Haaretz on why WordPress is the best choice for blogging.

They walk you through the basics of what it takes to setup ( self install from WordPress.org ) including MySQL requirements, getting an ftp client, and making the config file changes. Next week they plan to cover plugins. Good stuff ! (Thanks to my buddy Nimmy for letting me know).

We’ve seen lots of great activity in Israel around WordPress, including a very successful WordCamp Israel held a few weeks ago.

Dinosaur Bar-B-Que in Harlem NYC – best BBQ I’ve had

dinosaur_t.jpgI generally don’t comment on food 🙂 But when something stands out I feel compelled to share ! I just wrapped up dinner up on 131st at Dinosaur BBQ. (yelp review here) The food was fantastic, the portion just-right, and the service was impeccable. I ordered the “traditional sampler” that included a little bit of everything.

Now some of you who know a little bit about Automattic know that we all take BBQ very seriously. My title even includes “QA for the secret company BBQ sauce”. It will be interesting to see what my other colleagues who have a long history with BBQ think of this place.

Catching up on the last two weeks: Ad Tech, BlogWorld Expo, Quigo & Yedda, WordPress iPhone plugin, Writers strike, and WSJ & Digg

Been traveling and just super busy the last couple of weeks, and started a bunch of posts that are still saved in draft.  So here is a wrap up of what I would have posted, and using a very John Paczkowski-like long headline 🙂

* Ad:Tech New York. Was in town for a few meetings, and a great dinner put together by Mike Hirschland (aka “VC Mike“). It was my first trip back to New York since I moved to San Francisco in July. My overall impression: every industry segment and media outlet is finally aligned to make the online ad world take a huge leap forward. Lots of smart people looking at significant ad dollars moving online and how best to capture them. Measurement will be key.

* I attended BlogWorld Expo in Vegas. I was impressed by the attendance and diversity of companies & speakers. It was also great to meet people in person that I had only emailed or Skype’d with previously (Shoutout to Karen & Dana of ContentRobot and John LoGioco of outbrain). Mark Cuban gave a great closing keynote, and our very own Matt Mullenweg was the opening keynote q&a session and interviewed here by webpronews. Lots of photos of the two day event on flickr.

* Good week to be an Israeli tech company. Quigo, founded by Yaron Galai, was purchased by AOL — congrats to Yaron & team ! Later in the week word spread that Yedda, a Y! Answers like service, also was purchased by AOL.

* On the WordPress front, the winner of the WordPress iPhone plugin challenge was announced. You can download the plugin here.

* The writers strike shows no signs of coming to an end. On how it might all shake out — Marc Andreessen has a superb post titled “Rebuilding Hollywood in Silicon Valley’s image“. A definite must-read.

* Great to see wsj.com and Digg working more closely together. Kevin Rose posted details on the Digg blog and TechCrunch has some thoughts too.

Google Maps Street View: Halloween style

google street view halloween pic A day early, but good to see the Google holiday treatment isn’t confined to just logos on google.com.

While trying to find a good cafe in SF today I noticed something a bit different in google maps street view mode.

It appears to be a witch on her broomstick in place of the normal icon.

Click over to google map and select “Street View” (upper right corner) to see it in action.

Waiting for Mac OS X Leopard: Why no digital download option ?

OS X Leopard imageThe newest version of Mac OS X “Leopard” is out in the wild, but my Amazon.com order has an estimated delivery date for next week.

Not a big deal, but made me think: In today’s world of broadband and on-demand user behavior, why doesn’t apple offer a digital download option ? On top of it, it’s environmentally more responsible to do away with all the extra packaging, fuel costs for shipping, etc.

As far as expertise and DRM issues, Apple has the experience with it’s iTunes store and .Mac service to offer this kind of option and make it secure.

In the gaming space I’ve seen Valve‘s digital efforts evolve over the last few years into a really impressive offering. They have a service called Steam (gigaom review) which essentially allows you to purchase games and download them instantly. They also use the service to foster online gaming, do auto patching, premier game trailers, and fight against cheats. It was initally conceived because they had trouble with 3rd party distribution, and ironically today Steam is used as a distribtuion platform for other game publishers.

The other company that could also facilitate this would be Amazon themselves. They distribute music digitally with their new amazon mp3 store — so why not do the same for software ?

NYTIMES Mag: “The Future is Drying Up”

The New York Times Sunday Magazine is one of the few things I still read in print. Something about the weekend and a 5,000+ word cover story makes for a perfect combo.

The West is the fastest-growing part of the country. It’s also the driest. And climate change could be making matters much, much worse….

Scientists sometimes refer to the effect a hotter world will have on this country’s fresh water as the other water problem, because global warming more commonly evokes the specter of rising oceans submerging our great coastal cities. By comparison, the steady decrease in mountain snowpack — the loss of the deep accumulation of high-altitude winter snow that melts each spring to provide the American West with most of its water — seems to be a more modest worry. But not all researchers agree with this ranking of dangers

This week’s cover story was fascinating, and what stood out for me was the great cost of inaction, but also the exciting challenge of a big problem that has to be solved.

Gravatar turned on

With a quick copy & paste I now have gravatar enabled on this blog. I’ll tweak the look & feel a bit later, but you can see it in action on this post.

Matt has also enabled gravatar on his blog and has posted his implementation here. You can see other examples, including code examples for other blog platforms, by reading the “implement” page on gravatar.com.

Don’t have a gravatar yet ? Signup — it’s free and takes 2 seconds.

Latest comScore report on social networking sites

Comscore September 2007Interesting to see the latest September 2007 report from comScore.

WSJ.com talks about Google’s Orkut success internationally, but also the challenges in monetizing Orkut:

In the third quarter of this year, 48% of Google’s revenue came from outside the U.S., up from 43% in 2006 and 39% in 2005. Thanks partly to the fact that Brazilians are some of the most active Internet users in the world, Orkut now has about as much global overall traffic, or “page views,” as Google’s top-ranked search engine, according to data from comScore Inc.

And SeekingAlpha points out the changing landscape in the blogging world.