Interactive movie makes clever use of YouTube

Ladies and gentleman, you are here for a first: a Lindsay Lohan reference on this site! Given all the drama surrounding Lohan's jail sentence, one group of clever folks decided to make some lovely lemonade out of lemons, and created the Lindsay in Court: Interactive Game. Just like the old choose-your-own-adventure books, you decide what happens next in the melodrama-filled courtroom. The first segment is below to get you started. Warning: no all segments are safe for work. But hey, it's Friday!

2010: The Year Flash Dies.

Adobe Flash, you've had a good run. You've humored us through the years with various updates. You've made our workday a little slower with buffering, and CPU overload. And in all seriousness, without you, we may have never known the words "embed code" on websites. Alas, like all good things, this too must end.

When Apple released the iPhone, and it didn't support flash, we scoffed. How dare they turn their back on the predominant 3rd party content delivery platform! This will be the Achille's heel of the iPhone! Instead, in the latest in a string of events showing just how mighty Apple has become, in announcing their support for html 5, the rest of the industry slowly started to follow suit.

And now this week, the site with the largest amount of flash-encoded content in the world, YouTube, has started making its videos available without Flash. Vimeo has announced they will follow suit, and thus begins a sudden, dizzying spiral. It will still take a few months for the death certificate to be signed. After all, we have to still rely on Flash for our live video stream, but that will all change soon enough. What YouTube(google) and Apple do, the rest of the industry surely follows.

Let's meet back at this post in a year, and see if our dear, CPU-hogging friend is still with us...

Google Counters Bing Ads on YouTube

Thanksgiving is over, but I'll tell you what I'm thankful for: I'm thankful those Bing ads that seemed to run incessantly over the summer are finally gone, or at least greatly reduced. And it does look like Bing has captured a decent size of the search pie here in the early going. 

Google wasn't going to sit idly by and let Bing takeover though. Although you probably won't see a Google ad on tv anytime soon, mainly because that would indicate that they truly are concerned about the prospects of bing. Instead, Google has cleverly started a campaign to remind everyone why search is so wonderful, presumably even more wonderful when you do it with Google.

There's a new ad campaign (I mean, video series) on Google-owned YouTube aimed at keeping you googling for more:

Google About To Make YouTube Clips Far More Accessible

From my time in Apple Retail, I knew that thanks to a long history of universal access features, Apple products have had a large following within the hearing impaired community. We've tried to find simple captioning solutions for our videos to help reach that audience. Well it looks like Google is about to do that heavy lifting for us and other YouTube channels.

The New York Times reports that Google plans to roll out captioning services, eventually to all channels. For now, it's a test consisting of just a few educational partners. It's been awhile since the company founded with the philosophy of "do no evil" has done something that might just be altruistic, but it looks like this might be one of those times. Good job.

Retro Tech Tuesday: LEGOs and 8-Bit Music Combined!

We'll admit it: we're cheating this week. Rather than talk longingly about some technology from a far off year, today we're looking at a new video featuring two of our favorite things: LEGOs and the glorious world of 8-bit music in this music video from Daniel Larrson. (Kudos to BuzzFeed for the find!)