Media Nugget

Bloglines

Mark Fletcher
Bloglines

How do you deal with brain overload? Well, you can throw your hands up and bemoan the fact that the average person is confronted with more than 14 gazillion pieces of information every day. (An effective strategy, I'll admit.) Or, better yet, you can employ the latest hardware and software to help you manage the media avalanche. If online periodicals are your info-drug of choice, then you'll want to start mainlining content via an RSS aggregator, which is an application that lets you subscribe to many, many websites (blogs, news sites, or even the Media Nugget) and other assorted feeds (searches, weather, and personalized info like your Netflix queue). The aggregator automatically checks for updates to your subscriptions on a regular schedule (usually every few hours) and you get to enjoy the results without having to click through dozens of websites and scan for new information. If you want to ease into the world of RSS, you couldn't ask for a better introduction than Bloglines, an online aggregator that gets you up and running quickly, but also offers a ton of powerful features.

Orsinal

Ferry Halim
Orsinal

Here you'll find more than fifty nifty little Flash games. From cupcake-craving pigs to butterfly-rousing mice, the main theme that emerges from Orsinal -- beyond beautiful animation, orginal gameplay, and oddly hypnotic new-age music -- is a fascination with cute wittle animals. Koalas, bees, fish, raccoons -- you name it, the Orsinal zoo contains it. Plus, there are robots, UFOs, and more abstract creations (reminiscent of another wonderful game). Every few months, designer Ferry Halim adds another selection to the ever-growing menagerie.

Picasa

Picasa
Windows

Picasa is a great photo-album application. And it's free. (Windows only. Mac users are stuck with the equally excellent iPhoto.) The price is a nice bonus, especially since photo management is one of those tasks that everyone does, yet everyone does a little differently. Picasa's quality stems from its simplicity, the quick loading of images, and the clear understanding that photo software is meant to get your pictures from the camera to somewhere else -- a printer, the Web, or stored on disc. If you couple Picasa with a cheap storage reader, right there you've got a great digital photo setup, without having to pony up big bucks for Photoshop. Google recently bought the company behind Picasa, which seems like a big vote of confidence for this smart little piece of software.

Text Twist

GameHouse
Text Twist

I'm a sucker for word games, so GameHouse's Text Twist is right up my a-l-l-e-y. The online version, where you attempt to rearrange six letters into as many different words as possible within the allotted two minutes, is not only addictive, but also a great workout for your Scrabble skills. You advance to the next level by finding at least one six-letter word for each combination of letters, which is definitely not as easy as it sounds. For more of a challenge, both to your wits and and your wallet, download the $20 offline version, which ups the ante to a vocabulary-straining seven letters.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia

The Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia that can be added to or modified by anyone with an Internet connection. It's been around since 2001, but the site has lately achieved an impressive momentum, going from 200,000 to 300,000 articles in the span of six months. I liken the experience of periodically checking in on the Wikipedia as seeing a petri dish of bacteria one day and coming back a few weeks later to find a symphony orchestra playing Beethoven's 3rd. One can't help but wonder when the knowledge contained in the multi-language Wikipedia will outstrip the Encyclopedia Brittanica. Another conundrum: How does an open resource fight off vandals who want to spread disinformation? How do they ensure accuracy? I don't know! It's magic. (Of course, the Wikipedia itself has both answers.) In the end, you don't have to ponder the big questions to enjoy the Wikipedia. You can just check out minutiae like "all your base are belong to us" or learn more about ring-tailed lemurs.

del.icio.us

Joshua Schacter
del.icio.us

There have been online bookmark sites before, with the value proposition usually being access to your important sites from any machine -- home, work, on the road. If that's what you want to use del.icio.us for, feel free, but the site's other features are far more enticing. With del.icio.us, you are entering the world of "social bookmarks" -- where your selections are added to the set of public bookmarks that is accessible to anyone who visits the site. If you tag your marks ("music" or "politics" or "design" or any other word you choose) then they show up in the appropriate category pages, again accessible to everyone. So not only do we have a place for our stuff, but we have a place to discover other people's stuff. If a lot of people bookmark a site within 24 hours, it shows up in the "popular" set. Plus you can subscribe to any of these sets via RSS or within your own personalized del.icio.us subscription page. If that weren't enough, you can also browse or subscribe to individual's bookmarks, say Kevan Davis or Clay Shirky. If that weren't enough, you can integrate del.icio.us boomarks into your own site. If that weren't enough, people are always coming up with cool extensions to the del.icio.us universe. When people join together, powerful things can happen.

PVRblog

Matt Haughey, et. al.
PVRblog

What started as a beta-test for blogging platform TypePad has grown into a crucial resource for anyone who has considered buying (or building) a Personal Video Recorder (PVR). Via the blog, Haughey and company gracefully consider the technologies and trends of this fledging industry, which has a near fanatical following among the initiated. PVRs like TiVo and Replay TV allow viewers to pause live television, subscribe to the entire run of a show with one click of the remote, and search weeks' worth of listings by title, actor, or keyword. Depsite a fairly slow adoption rate, PVR technology is still the odds-on favorite to replace VCRs. It's not really a matter of if, but when and how? If you want the answers to those questions, bookmark PVRblog--if anyone knows, they do.

Samorost

Amanita Design
Samorost
2003

More free-form art piece than competitive game, Samorost is the brainchild (and art-school thesis) of Czech designer Jakub Dvorsky. Ostensibly, the goal of the game is to change the course of an oncoming space-rock and avoid certain death. To accomplish this, you basically just click around within each scene and try to transport the cartoon hero to the next tableau. In practice, Samorost is mostly about oohing and aahing Dvorsky's beautiful use of organic patterns in a medium typically dominated by mechanical designs. Add a sense of whimsy to Dvorsky's love of natural substances and you've got a winning combination. And people are noticing -- the designer was recently commissioned to create a similar piece for the Polyphonic Spree.

Flickr

Ludicorp
Flickr

A funny thing happened on the way to the multiplayer online game that Ludicorp was building -- a photo network cropped up. And like Blogger dwarfing the project-management software that spawned it, Flickr looks like a side-project with some serious legs. At first glance, you could mistake Flickr for yet another online storage space for personal photo collections, but don't be fooled -- it's plenty more. Social network. Blogging tool. Topical groupware. Of course, the kicker may be the effort, enthusiasm, humor, and smarts the Ludicorp gang brings to developing Flickr as a platform for interaction. Check out their blog for random snaps and cool new features, added just about every day.

Scrabble

Scrabble
The Pixie Pit

Everyone knows Scrabble. But did you know that you can play Scrabble online? At the Pixie Pit, two to four players can match crossword wits using a unique web-and-email system. The site offers all the usual Scrabble fun -- triple word scores, 7-letter bingos, getting stuck with the Q. One of the best features is asynchronous play -- competitors don't have to be online at the same time, allowing everyone to move as quickly (or slowly) as they like. Plus you'll find a built-in Scrabble dictionary, which is a blessing, since you know you'd just end up bookmarking dictionary.com anyway. The site is an awesome feat of programming, it's free, and -- fair warning -- it's completely addictive. If you do play, and get hooked, think about donating some cash to keep the site going.