Stefan Hayden

Intense Debate seems like a cool new service. You can install it on your site as a commenting system to replace the default system in popular systems like blogger and wordpress. It seems to integrate pretty well with the ability to import and export comments and just a lot of work was put in to not seem like a silo stealing your information.

The functionality seems a little over kill for small site like mine but I do like the benefit of knowing more about who is leaving comments. I can’t see my self being an early adopter but if this catches on and tons of people use it I would not be opposed to setting it up.

YouTube is starting a major redesign and have made some odd and interesting choices. Amazon recently impressed me by hiding away alot of interface to fit more contest on the screen. YouTube seems headed in a similar direction.

Their new layout definitely looks better then the old one but they have made a choice that does not sit as well with me. In hiding away all those interface elements in dropdown menus they have taken all that new space and put a 300x250 add on the page in place of the 160x600 ad.

Perhaps it’s not glaringly obvious to most people but I can’t look at that page with out imagining a designer told to redo the page so a 300 ad could fit on it. Design that purely motivated by ad placement always make me queasy.

Okay.. in a post Passion of the Christ world a movie on the Ten Commandments will make tons of money. But this has to be the worst looking animated movie in almost 20 years. Who let this horrid movie in to production?

Carl Malamud really makes it seem easy to reclaim a lot of these cordoned off public domain works that many government agencies try and sell. It make me wish there was a Wikipedia style todo list of ways I could help. (via Lessig)

The new myspace series Roommates reminds me a lot of Scott Zarkarin’s NoHo Girls which was mildly interesting but over all low on worth while story.