The next step in web development has been claimed to be the semantic web, sounds great but I think we’re a few steps away from that. The next step I believe will be to integrate web services seamlessly into our user experience, essentially making them part of our everyday lives without gluing us to the screen with 789 tabs open.

Enter Ubiquity, the command line interface that lets you use all web service functions from a standard browser window. Check it out, the example video will blow your mind.

http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-ubiquity/

Games have been under attack for a long time from gamers and game media for being unoriginal. Developers have been harassed for not trying new things while developing costs keep increasing forcing publishers to stick more and more to the tried and true formulas.

A few noteworthy games such as Spore have broken this mold and have been, rightly so, highly acclaimed for innovation. Another greatly anticipated title that is applauded for innovation is little big planet. Media Molecules astonishingly universal cloth toy platform game that is more then half level editor.

I need to be honest here, without ever playing LPB I’m in love with the game. I’ve preordered it with a bundled PS3 just to play it as soon as possible. Something I’ve never done before. But is it really that original?

Actually no. But that doesn’t matter, because the thing is that it’s the gaming press that is highly unoriginal.

The reason I’m kicking the press is that, while LPB looks like it’s going to be a great game, the innovation that Media Molecule is bringing to the table has absolutely nothing to do with the game part of LPB at all. The innovation is that they’ve sliced the world editor into the gameplay itself and making it (hopefully) fun to create and share work. The game itself is more or less just a cooperative version of Mario. But in the package is all the freedom and never ending entertainment that we are used to finding in blogs and on youtube.

I have high hopes that Media Molecule has pulled this off, creating the first MMO “game platform” platform game.

I started a guild in WAR yesterday. So far I’m pretty impressed by the fact that there is actually incentive to do so in WAR. Guilds level up and give skills and features for all members to brag about.

This might be the first guild/convergence/corporation/whatever that I actually feel inclined to be active in. More on this as it develops.

The cloud based computing term is thrown around a lot on the web these days. While we wait for a completely cloud based computer to be released (www.cloudo.com) we’ll have to make do with what we’ve got. This is my rundown of how I solve the common everyday problems.

I bought an Asus EEE pc. It’s great, it’s small, it has battery life and a full qwerty keyboard. The biggest problem is the OS (xandros) which I can thankfully replace with a proper one (ubuntu, xp is to slow). But it still doesn’t have the kind of power I’m getting used to while at my computer.

Sure for office work I mostly use google documents, and for storing images (if I needed to) I have picasa or flickr or oosah or a million other services. But what I really want is a place to put all those things that I want to keep with me. Bookmarks, notes, files and so on. Google had most of these needs covered with google bookmarks and google notebook, but Google have yet to release their fabled online drive. And they also messed things up when they released Chrome, which is a great browser, that doesn’t support it’s own products such as bookmarks!?! Way to go Google, your age is showing. Is this the first step towards becoming Microsoft? Seems to be.

But lo! Saving the day a small upstart called Drop Box smashes into my life and makes things work. Drop Box is a small program or online interface that lets you sync a folder on your computer with an online storage space. It runs in the background, doesn’t take up any RAM (a lot of bandwidth though if you handle a lot of files) lets you sync the folder to an unlimited number of computers (windows, mac or linux) and has no file size limits. Sounds awesome? It is.

But whats the catch? Well, drop box is still in development and you can only sign up for 2GBs of storage… Sure, their free and that’s great. But I was hoping for more. This is a service I’d be happy to pay for though.