Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

The editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary have chosen 'podcast' as the word of the year.

I bet next year they'll choose 'vlog'. We'll see.

(via digg)

The 2005 Machinima Festival will be taking place in New York City at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, NY, starting November 12.

Here's what Wikipedia has to say about Machinima:

Machinima (a portmanteau word for machine cinema and/or "machine" "animation") is both a collection of associated production techniques and a film genre (film created by such production techniques).

As a production technique, the term concerns the rendering of computer-generated imagery (CGI) using low-end 3D engines (as opposed to high-end and complex 3D engines used by professionals) in video games (typically, engines in first person shooters games have been used). Consequently, the rendering can be done in real-time using PCs (either using the computer of the creator or the viewer), rather than with complex 3D engines using huge render farms.

Have a look at the popular Red vs. Blue if you have never seen a machinima video. Checkout more stuff from the Machinima Archive over at the fantastic archive.org.

I won't be at the festival, but I'm getting more and more interested in video in general and especially in machinima, so I'll probably create some films myself eventually.

(via Digerati University and Slashdot)

The annual report from usability expert Jakob Nielsen:

Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2005

1. Legibility Problems
2. Non-Standard Links
3. Flash
4. Content That's Not Written for the Web
5. Bad Search
6. Browser Incompatibility
7. Cumbersome Forms
8. No Contact Information or Other Company Info
9. Frozen Layouts with Fixed Page Widths
10. Inadequate Photo Enlargement

I agree with all of them, especially number 3 (Flash). I'm starting to like most of the AJAX sites popping up around me, but I have yet to find a Flash site which I really like.

(via Google Blogoscoped)