There is no way for reasonable adults to argue that the most awesome car on the planet is the Eliica.

It's an all-electric car developed by Tokyo's Keio University -- and it goes from zero to 60 in 4.2 seconds, has a top speed of 230 miles an hour, sports gull-style wings, and has EIGHT WHEELS. As SpaceMart reports:

"We will initially target the wealthy clientele usually using chauffeured cars as well as rich company owners for their private use," said Hiroichi Yoshida, Keio professor for media and governance in the Eliica project.

"We are talking about something like watches -- a machine combining motors and batteries. As its price can fall quickly in the future, we think it's important to establish a superb brand image first," he told AFP.

Apparently it'll cost $260,000 US. For those of us proles who can't afford that sort of bling -- though can anyone afford NOT to have AN EIGHT WHEELED CAR?? -- here's the alternative: A papercraft Eliica! Click here to get the full-color PDF you can print out, cut up, then fold into your own tiny approximation of what the future ought to look like.

(Thanks to Wired for this one!)

Dig this: The physicist Richard Taylor has developed a technique for authenticating Jackson Pollock "poured" paintings -- by analyzing their fractal dimensions.

Taylor, who also has a degree in art theory, got interested in Pollock's work back in the 1990s. He suspected that Pollock's famously chaotic paintings -- created by the artist standing over the canvases and dripping paint -- displayed fractal mathematics: They had self-replicating geometry, such that the larger shapes in the picture were similar to the tiny shapes you'd see if you looked at closely the edges of the splatters. He put computer-generated grids over images of five Pollock splatter paintings and, sure enough, there they were: Two sets of fractal patterns, one that resolved on a 5 mm scale, and another on a 1 mm scale.

As a story in Nature notes:

There were two reasons to suspect that Pollock's paintings might obey fractal geometry. Moving around a large canvas laid on the ground, the artist let paint fly from all angles, using his whole body. Human motion is known to display fractal properties when people restore their balance, says Taylor, and films of Pollock seem to show him painting in a state of 'controlled off-balance'. Second, the dripping and pouring itself could be a chaotic process. [snip]

"Pollock was in control," says Taylor. The large-scale fractals are a fingerprint of the artist's body motion, he notes. "But the small-scale fractals are also to do with his choices -- his height over the canvas, the fluidity of his paint, angle and force behind the trajectory, and so on."

Cool enough, eh? Now dig this: Last year, 32 new "poured" paintings -- purportedly by Pollock -- were uncovered for the first time. Art historians have been arguing heatedly over whether they're real Pollocks, because the official Pollock authentication board was disbanded in 1995 when it was assumed there were no new Pollocks to find. One of the former members of the board is launching a new show of Pollock's work that includes some the new-found paintings; after seeing one of Taylor's papers on his Pollock-fractal work (in Pattern Recognition Letters, a just awesomely-titled academic journal), the art expert sent Taylor six of the new paintings to analyze.

His verdict? They didn't display Pollock's distinctive fractal patterns. While Taylor says his technique shouldn't be regarded as a final word on Pollock authenticity, it's a pretty nifty use of fractal math.

(Thanks to Erik Weissengruber for this one!)

Three years ago (jesus, I've been blogging for three years?) I had a suggestion for TV advertisers who were worried about the threat of Tivo: Try steganography. If Tivo users were fast-forwarding through ads, then why not create ads that are optimized for this behavior? Create ads that produce one coherent visual when viewed at normal speed, and another coherent effect -- an entirely different one -- when viewed in fast-forward. Sure, that'd be hard to do, but hey: Life's hard.

So I was intrigued this weekend to learn that KFC is the first company to tweak an ad specifically for Tivo. They've released a TV spot that contains a subliminal message that can be seen only when you scroll through the entire ad on slow-motion. Go frame-by-frame through their new "Buffalo KFC Snacker" ad (pictured above), and you'll encounter a single frame that lists a secret code you can use to get one free!

I love it. Phil Swann of TVPredictions.com has written a short commentary about the ad, echoing my original point:

There's no question that the DVR makes it easier to skip commercials, but the KFC ad demonstrates that the advertising industry will adjust to the change. Future TV commercials will include more DVR gimmicks and other techniques to stop viewers before they skip.

Wired News has just published my latest video-game column, and this one points out an interesting trend: While George Lucas' movies have declined drastically in quality, his video-games have begun to rock with voluminous force. Why? I think it's because video-games have begun to siphon off most of the cultural juice of sci-fi.

The piece is online here, and I've archived a copy below. It's also available as a podcast, with me doing an oh-so-dramatic reading of it, complete with beyoo-beyoo sound f/x from the game:

Forget Film, Games Do Sci-Fi Best
by Clive Thompson

Ah, the subtle pleasures of intergalactic fascism. My flotilla of TIE fighters swarmed through space like locusts, picking off rebel troops at will. My mammoth Star Destroyers had reduced a rebel base to a smoldering hulk, and Darth Vader had personally blown up the Millennium Falcon and killed that jackass Han Solo -- twice.

As you might have guessed, I was playing Star Wars: Empire at War, the latest strategy title from Lucas Games. And something quite rare was happening: Even though I was deep inside a George Lucas creation, I was having a total blast.

Normally, I cringe whenever Lucas launches another movie. Ever since the Ewoks appeared in 1983's Return of the Jedi, his films have steadily tobogganed downwards into a vale of unwatchability. It's hard to figure out what Lucas has done worse: Is it his increasingly Disneyfied characters? His wooden scripts? Or the plots that, having been carefully denuded of action sequences, instead focus on, y'know, trade disputes?

Which brings me to my point: In the last 20 years, Lucas' vision has arguably been far better expressed in video games than in movies.
For me, this epiphany began back in 1998, when Rogue Squadron came out on the Nintendo 64 -- a note-perfect evocation of in-flight combat. I played it nonstop for four months. Then every year or so, another superb Star Wars title came along to get me addicted, from Knights of the Old Republic to Jedi Starfighter to Battlefront. Each time, Lucas did a much better job of recapturing the original spirit of his universe: A mix of campy voice-acting, moral dread, and -- most of all -- pell-mell action.

Why were the games so comparatively good? A cynic would say it's because Lucas probably isn't as closely involved in the games, so his young designers aren't hampered by his inane creative decisions. But I actually suspect it's deeper than that. I think it's because games are beginning to rival film -- and even eclipse it -- as the prime vehicle for sci-fi and fantasy.

After all, there have been vanishingly few original, mass-market, sci-fi or fantasy movies in recent years. We had The Matrix and then ... what? (I said "original" movies. Stuff like The Lord of the Rings, I, Robot and Minority Report were all based -- however loosely -- on pre-existing books. The shining exception is Joss Whedon's superb Serenity, a movie that, sadly, tanked at the box office.)

In contrast, the game industry has produced dozens of worlds as lovingly rendered and lush in detail as a Bruegel painting. Think of the weird, vaulting steampunk buildings of Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee, the operatic scope of the Final Fantasy series, or the calm beauty of Ico.

Perhaps this shift is taking place because games have an inherent affinity with sci-fi and fantasy. Those genres are based on what-if premises; they're the literary version of the Sim, the author as world-builder. Part of the fun of watching a sci-fi movie is mentally inhabiting a new world and imagining what it feels like to be inside. But now there's a medium that actually puts you in. It's why I reacted to Rogue Squadron with such a jolt of deja vu: As a kid, I'd fantasized about flying my own X-wing fighter -- and suddenly, bang, there I was.

So if you were a creator wandering around Los Angeles and hankering to forge a new universe, why do a movie? Why not try for a game? For today's youth, the go-anywhere, exploratory feel of immersive worlds is where the cultural mojo resides. Even the few popular fantasy stories in the mainstream today borrow from this vibe. When J. J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof were writing Lost, they explicitly modeled it on a video-game world: An overarching mythology and a cohesive world-picture, slowly revealed through creepy exploration by the main characters.

Of course, assuming I'm right about this trend, it's not all good. There's arguably something lost when games become the central site for flights of fancy. Even the best "narrative" games can't replicate the emotional undertow of a good film. When I wander through Shadow of the Colossus -- or even the old Myst series -- I'm filled with a sense of awe. It's like visiting a breathtaking Renaissance church; I'm struck by the beauty and the neoclassical detail. But it doesn't drag my heart along a path the way a plain ol' linear movie does.

Then again, when's the last time Lucas did that on the silver screen? So I take what solace I can. I boot up Empire at War again, join the dark side, summon Emperor Palpatine, send another couple hundred TIE fighters off on howling suicide missions. Plenty more where they came from, m'lord. My training is complete.

I blogged a while back about "why conservatives hate MP3 players" -- the folks on the cultural right who think personal audio-players seal young people into self-involved bubbles of existential onanism, in which they pay no attention to the world around them.

Now it turns out this debate has arisen in the winter Olympics! Apparently, this year's young Olympians love their iPods so much that many listen to them while they're competing. The US snowboard team has even wired their uniforms to accomodate iPods, with iPod-sized pockets, speakers in their hoods, and control panels on their left sleeves. The music, says snowboarder Dustin Majewski, helps him stay in the zone: "It enables you to focus on what you're doing without actually focusing, if that makes any sense," he told the Baltimore Sun. "You're not over-thinking, and that's the best way to perform the harder tricks and maneuvers."

That description is both hilariously incoherent and oddly spot-on. I think he's trying to describe the sense of "flow" -- being so joyously immersed in a task that the rest of the world seems to drop away: Perfect concentration without any sense of effort. But as it turns out, not all trainers and athletes think music has this sort of effect, as the Sun story goes on to report:

"I'm not certain it's such a good idea" to listen to a music player during events, said Mike Jones of Dundalk, the president of the Baltimore Ski Club. "When you're doing aerials and everything, you have to concentrate and focus on positions. On a day when it's cloudy, you don't know whether you're looking at snow or sky, and distractions can be very dangerous."

In fact, Spyder -- the company that sponsors the alpine ski team -- didn't rig its Olympic uniforms with iPod-ready wires in part because of safety concerns.

"The skiers are racing down at 40 miles an hour," said Laura Wisner, a company spokeswoman. "You are in a completely different realm. It would not be a good time to listen to your iPod."

(Thanks to Yishay Mor for this one!)

Complex mathematical concepts are difficult to teach, so textbooks frequently try to explain things by referring to everyday phenomenon. But textbooks are often pretty culturally specific, so it's hard to translate them from one country to another -- or even from one cultural group to another. A textbook written using farm examples from rural Idaho ain't gonna cut it with kids in New York who've never even seen a tree, and vice versa. So the trick is to find relevant culture that also represents high-end math.

Such as ... cornrow hair braids. Some educators realized that cornrows were a great example of fractal geometry, and developed some software that illustrates how it works. Ron Eglash of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute wrote about it on his web site:

Each braid is represented as multiple copies of a "Y" shaped plait. In each iteration, the plait is copied, and a transformation is applied. The series of transformed copies creates the braid. In the above example, we can see the original style at top right, and a series of braid simulations, each composed of plait copies that are successively scaled down, rotated, and translated (reflection is only applied to whole braids, as in the case where one side of the head is a mirror image of the other). One of the interesting research outcomes was that our students discovered which parameters need to remain the same and which would be changed in order to produce the entire series of braids (that is, how to iterate the iterations).

(Thanks to Yishay Mor for this one!)

You may have heard of the Realdoll corporation -- makers of the highest-quality, full-sized, photorealistic artificial love companions on the planet. If you haven't, do not click on that link if you're at work, comrade. Suffice to say that Realdolls are very expensive ($6,000), highly customizable, available with a stiff internal skeleton rendering them "posable", and thus, in summary, creepy as all get out. For years I'd snickered about Realdolls and assumed they were a toy for people who actually preferred the landscape at the inky bottom of the Uncanny Valley.

But photographer Ellen Dorfman took a different view of it. She called up dozens of Realdoll owners and convinced them to let her take intimate pictures of them to illustrate their relationships with the dolls. Dorfman ran the photos as an exhibit, published them in a book, and has a web site devoted to the project: "Still Lovers". (The photos on her site are mostly safe for work, but a few aren't, so be careful what you click.) As she writes:

My introduction to this world began on a suburban, tree-lined, mid-western street, but ultimately took me throughout the U.S. and the U.K. Jerry and Adriana had not one doll -- but five -- and at that time they kept them hidden from their children and visitors in a secret closet built into a wall. This closet was cushioned and climate controlled, with the girls' shoes lined up neatly beneath their dangling feet. Adriana was the collector of the dolls, not her husband. She was convinced that each girl represented a different part of herself: lover, child, friend, toy and intellectual partner.

Man, Carlo Collodi is spinning in his grave.

(Thanks to Chris Foley for this one!)

A year ago, I blogged about a question that Daniel Luke, a Collision Detection reader, emailed to me: Why isn't there a tool that lets blog commenters keep track of all their comments at various blogs? After all, many people who aren't themselves bloggers are prolific commenters, and those "commentosphere" conversations are often as rich -- or richer -- than the original posts from which they spawn. Being able to quickly collect together and parse your comments would be a very cool way of reviewing your thought processes of the few years -- much the same way a blog functions as an "outboard brain", in Cory Doctorow's formulation.

Anyway, in a nicely recursive fashion, that posting of mine was heavily commented upon, and several people pointed out various elegant hacks that commenters had used to collate their comments. But I still hadn't seen a specific tool that existed solely for doing this ...

... until today, when Daniel Luke pointed me to coComment. As the creators describe it:

coComment is free, and will help you keep track of the comments and conversations you and others are making on blogs.

Did you ever lose track of a conversation because you lost the URL of the post you've commented on? Have you ever wished to be informed when someone responds to your comment, rather than frantically refreshing the page looking for a reaction to your latest comment? How much would it improve your life if you could see all our conversations in one easy and simple page?

coComment will address these issues by giving you an easy and seamless way to track and follow your online comments and conversations.

I've no idea how well it works, but the evidently the designers have been absorbing the Web 2.0 mojo: Their page listing the most-frequently-commented-upon blogs and postings uses the classic Flickr style, where point size increases with popularity.

(Thanks to Daniel Luke for this one!)

A few weeks ago, I blogged about a web page, purportedly written by two college students, discussing how to cook an egg using two mobile phones. The page had been slowly wending its way through the blogosphere, and a few days after my posting it hit Boing Boing and Slashdot, whereupon it totally blew up.

But as several commenters on my posting noted, the story seemed like a hoax. Having guilelessly posted it, I gamely attempted a few half-hearted defenses of my gullibility ... until the actual hoaxster himself arrived to explain that indeed, it was all a joke, and I was simpy too gormless to have seen through it. Winner.

Anyway, the folks at Gelf Magazine actually interviewed the hoaxster, and discovered that it is Charlie Ivermee, a 60-year-old British man. Ivermee confirmed that the hoax has enjoyed several epidemiological outbreaks of success: It got 50,000 hits last September, and the week Boing Boing and Slashdot wrote about it, another 18,500 visitors came by:

"I really underestimated how many people would take it seriously," he tells Gelf over email. "No other page on the site has grabbed people's attention and ire button as much as this one. What seems to be happening is that it 'travels' from blog to blog, forum to forum. It was big in Australia last year and seems to be big in the US right now." [snip]

Why did he write the piece? "It was 6 years ago but I seem to recall that there was a lot of concern about people's brains getting fried and being from a radio/electronics background I found it all rather silly," he writes. "So I thought I'd add to the silliness."

(Thanks to David Goldenberg for this one!)

Dig this: The Department of Defense is developing a ship that can travel at high speeds while producing virtually no wake. It's called the "M Hull" ship, because its hull is composed of four arches laid sidelong, like two Ms. According to the manufacturers -- the M Ship Co. -- the arches channel the water into spirals, which reduce drag, improve efficiency, and ease the transition from slow to high speeds. But they also impart an element of stealth, as their press release notes:

The M-hull geometry is designed to capture the bow wave, which is a significant component of the wave pattern around a ship. By capturing the bow wave, the vapour/fluid flow field passively dampens the visible and acoustic signature of the vessel. The stern wake energy that moves away from the ship through the momentum transfer process of water molecules is inhibited by the presence of millions of captured air bubbles under and trailing the ship. In the same way, noise from the vessel's passage and its machinery is reduced.

Here's a story about it with a cool graphic illustrating the water spirals.

New York magazine asked me to write a piece on the blog economy, and it's finally online! A copy of the piece is online at their site, but here's an archived copy below too. I also wrote a sidebar on Chris Anderson's "Long Tail" theory as it applies to blog popularity.

(Sorry postings have been light lately; I've been pounded by work. I'm hoping to do more this week.)

Two years ago, David Hauslaib was a junior at Syracuse University who was, as he confesses, "totally obsessed with who Paris Hilton was sleeping with." So he did what any college student would do these days: He blogged about it. Hauslaib began scouring the Web for paparazzi photos of Hilton and news items about her, then posting them on his Website, Jossip.com. (Sample headline: PARIS HILTON SPREADS IT IN THE HAMPTONS.) "My friends got a chuckle out of it, but it didn't get really big or anything -- maybe a few hundred visitors a day," he says.

Then one day Hauslaib took a good look at Gawker, a gossip site owned by the high-tech publisher Nick Denton. Gawker's founding writer, Elizabeth Spiers, had pioneered a distinctive online literary style and earned a large following in the Manhattan media world. What really got Hauslaib's attention, though, was Gawker's advertising-rate sheet. According to Denton, the site received about 200,000 "page views" a day from readers. The site ran roughly two big ads on each page, and Gawker said that it charged advertisers $6 to $10 for every 1,000 page views -- almost the same as a midsize newspaper. There was also a smattering of smaller, one-line text ads bringing in a few hundred bucks daily. Doing a quick bit of math, he figured that the income from Gawker's ads could top $4,000 a day. The upshot? Nick Denton's revenues from Gawker were probably at least $1 million a year and might well be cracking $2 million.

Not bad, considering the blog had no serious expenses other than its writers -- first Spiers and now Jessica Coen and Jesse Oxfeld, all working for journalist wages -- and Webhosting fees of maybe a few thousand bucks a year. "The rest of it," Hauslaib points out, "just goes into Nick's pockets."

"And I was like, I can do that," he says, laughing.

So in June 2005, Hauslaib packed his bags and moved to a sparsely furnished sixth-floor walk-up in the East Village, where he parked his massive Dell laptop on his kitchenette counter, installed a flat-screen LCD TV to catch breaking celebrity news, and began working on Jossip in earnest. He'd start each day at dawn, trolling the Web for dirt about celebrities and media stars. ("You gotta have something posted before people get to work," he explains, "because my audience is people who hate their jobs.") By the end of the year, Hauslaib's site was steaming along nicely. He had almost everything Gawker had: He stalked the same celebrities, posted with the same speed and frequency, and wrote prose in the Spiers vernacular.

The only thing he didn't have was ... Gawker's audience. About 30,000 visitors a day, Jossip's traffic is a mere 15 percent of Gawker's. Hauslaib was generating a "comfortable five-figure income," but certainly not millions. He'd hit a glass ceiling, in a medium where there weren't supposed to be any limits.

BY ALL APPEARANCES, the blog boom is the most democratized revolution in media ever. Starting a blog is ridiculously cheap; indeed, blogging software and hosting can be had for free online. There are also easy-to-use ad services that, for a small fee, will place advertisements from major corporations on blogs, then mail the blogger his profits. Blogging, therefore, should be the purest meritocracy there is. It doesn't matter if you're a nobody from the sticks or a well-connected Harvard grad. If you launch a witty blog in a sexy niche, if you're good at scrounging for news nuggets, and if you're dedicated enough to post around the clock -- well, there's nothing separating you from the big successful bloggers, right? I can do that.

In theory, sure. But if you talk to many of today's bloggers, they'll complain that the game seems fixed. They've targeted one of the more lucrative niches -- gossip or politics or gadgets (or sex, of course) -- yet they cannot reach anywhere close to the size of the existing big blogs. It's as if there were an A-list of a few extremely lucky, well-trafficked blogs -- then hordes of people stuck on the B-list or C-list, also-rans who can't figure out why their audiences stay so comparatively puny no matter how hard they work. "It just seems like it's a big in-party," one blogger complained to me. (Indeed, a couple of pranksters last spring started a joke site called Blogebrity and posted actual lists of the blogs they figured were A-, B-, and C-level famous.)

That's a lot of inequality for a supposedly democratic medium. Not long ago, Clay Shirky, an instructor at New York University, became interested in this phenomenon -- and argued that there is a scientific explanation. Shirky specializes in the social dynamics of the Internet, including "network theory": a mathematical model of how information travels inside groups of loosely connected people, such as users of the Web.

To analyze the disparities in the blogosphere, Shirky took a sample of 433 blogs. Then he counted an interesting metric: the number of links that pointed toward each site ("inbound" links, as they're called). Why links? Because they are the most important and visible measure of a site's popularity. Links are the chief way that visitors find new blogs in the first place. Bloggers almost never advertise their sites; they don't post billboards or run blinking trailers on top of cabs. No, they rely purely on word of mouth. Readers find a link to Gawker or Andrew Sullivan on a friend's site, and they follow it. A link is, in essence, a vote of confidence that a fan leaves inscribed in cyberspace: Check this site out! It's cool! What's more, Internet studies have found that inbound links are an 80 percent–accurate predictor of traffic. The more links point to you, the more readers you have. (Well, almost. But the exceptions tend to prove the rule: Fleshbot, for example. The sex blog has 300,000 page views per day but relatively few inbound links. Not many readers are willing to proclaim their porn habits with links, understandably.)

When Shirky compiled his analysis of links, he saw that the smaller bloggers' fears were perfectly correct: There is enormous inequity in the system. A very small number of blogs enjoy hundreds and hundreds of inbound links -- the A-list, as it were. But almost all others have very few sites pointing to them. When Shirky sorted the 433 blogs from most linked to least linked and lined them up on a chart, the curve began up high, with the lucky few. But then it quickly fell into a steep dive, flattening off into the distance, where the vast majority of ignored blogs reside. The A-list is teensy, the B-list is bigger, and the C-list is simply massive. In the blogosphere, the biggest audiences -- and the advertising revenue they bring -- go to a small, elite few. Most bloggers toil in total obscurity.

Economists and network scientists have a name for Shirky's curve: a "power-law distribution." Power laws are not limited to the Web; in fact, they're common to many social systems. If you chart the world's wealth, it forms a power-law curve: A tiny number of rich people possess most of the world's capital, while almost everyone else has little or none. The employment of movie actors follows the curve, too, because a small group appears in dozens of films while the rest are chronically underemployed. The pattern even emerges in studies of sexual activity in urban areas: A small minority bed-hop, while the rest of us are mostly monogamous.

The power law is dominant because of a quirk of human behavior: When we are asked to decide among a dizzying array of options, we do not act like dispassionate decision-makers, weighing each option on its own merits. Movie producers pick stars who have already been employed by other producers. Investors give money to entrepreneurs who are already loaded with cash. Popularity breeds popularity.

"It's not about moral failings or any sort of psychological thing. People aren't lazy -- they just base their decisions on what other people are doing," Shirky says. "It's just social physics. It's like gravity, one of those forces."

Power laws are arguably part of the very nature of links. To explain why, Shirky poses a thought experiment: Imagine that 1,000 people were all picking their favorite ten blogs and posting lists of those links. Alice, the first person, would read a few, pick some favorites, and put up a list of links pointing to them. The next person, Bob, is thus incrementally more likely to pick Alice's favorites and include some of them on his own list. The third person, Carmen, is affected by the choices of the first two, and so on. This repeats until a feedback loop emerges. Those few sites lucky enough to acquire the first linkages grow rapidly off their early success, acquiring more and more visitors in a cascade of popularity. So even if the content among competitors is basically equal, there will still be a tiny few that rise up to form an elite.

First-movers get a crucial leg up in this kind of power-law system. This is certainly true of the blogosphere. If you look at the list of the most-linked-to blogs on the top 100 as ranked by Technorati -- a company that scans the blogosphere every day -- many of those at the top were first-movers, the pioneers in their fields. With 19,764 inbound links, the No. 1 site is Boing Boing, a tech blog devoted to geek news and nerd trivia; it has been online for five years, making it a grandfather in the field. In the gossip- blog arena, Gawker is the graybeard, having launched in 2002. With 4,790 sites now linking to it, Gawker towers above the more-recent entrants such as PerezHilton.com (with 1,549 links) and Jossip (with 814). In politics, the highest is Daily Kos, one of the first liberal blogs -- with 11,182 links -- followed closely by Instapundit, an early right-wing blog, with 6,513. Uncountable teensy political blogs lie in their shadows.

In scientific terms, this pattern is called "homeostasis" -- the tendency of networked systems to become self-reinforcing. "It's the same thing you see in economies -- the rich-get-richer problem," Shirky notes.

TO SEE JUST HOW PRECISELY RICH BLOGGING CAN MAKE YOU, it's worth visiting Peter Rojas, the cheerful, skate-punk-like editor of Engadget -- and the best-compensated blogger in history. When I meet him one December evening in his bachelor pad on the Lower East Side, he's sitting at an Ikea desk bedecked with three flat-panel screens and looking relatively fresh, considering he's just come off another eleven-hour blogging jag. Like most A-list bloggers, he hit his keyboard before dawn and posted straight through until dinner. "Anyone can start a blog, and anyone can make it grow," he says, sipping a glass of water. "But to keep it there? It's fucking hard work, man. I've never worked so hard in my life. Eighty-hour weeks since I started."

For Rojas, the toil paid off handsomely. Last fall, AOL bought Jason Calacanis's company Weblogs, Inc., which includes Engadget, for $25 million. Rojas himself didn't disclose the precise amount he got from the deal, but he had a good deal of equity in the company and says that, technically, he doesn't need to work anymore. Nonetheless, he's still slogging away at Engadget because he's still obsessed with cool new technology. His idea of a good time is hunting down samizdat pictures of the latest Palm Treo. "I didn't intend to become a millionaire," he says, "but I wound up there anyway."

Very few bloggers have come anywhere close to Rojas's struck-by-lightning success, of course. But putting that sort of good fortune aside, the blogosphere is slowly developing solid business models, which take roughly three forms.

The first -- and most common so far -- is the accidental tourist: A lone writer who starts a blog as a mere hobby but then wakes up one day to realize his audience is now as big as a small city newspaper. The liberal journalist Joshua Micah Marshall went this route: He started the Talking Points Memo blog during the November 2000 election recount "just for fun," and his audience grew slowly, reaching 8,000 a day in the first two years. Then, in December 2002, he broke news of racially charged comments by Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, and his audience surged to 40,000 daily. The blog was eating so heavily into his paying gigs that Marshall began soliciting donations from his readers; in 2003, he signed up with Blogads, an advertising broker, and by this January he was grossing in the low six-figures. Talking Points Memo has become a small company with three full-time staffers and an office in Manhattan. His daily traffic is 150,000 page views, and he now charges advertisers up to $5 per 1,000 views. "When I started it, I had no idea it would become a source of income," he says.

A variation on this theme is when a lone blogger teams up with the mainstream media. Andrew Sullivan is the first example of an endgame strategy that may become quite common in the future. In 2000, Sullivan started his blog, The Daily Dish, as a part-time sideline, funding it via donations and ads for five years. Then in January, Time magazine agreed to lease his URL for one year, making it part of its online offerings. Though Sullivan says "I didn't get rich," he figures the deal will earn him almost half his income this year.

For advertisers, the whole lure of blogs is that they're cheaper than regular newspapers and TV. Plus, blogs offer tightly focused niches, which advertisers love. "You wanna reach New York, you buy on Gothamist. You want to reach mommies, you buy on Busy Mom. How does traditional media match that?" asks Brian Clark, an ad buyer who orchestrated Audi's blogvertising last year. The Audi campaign -- which ran online for three months, and got 68 million page views, and cost only $50,000 -- was cheap compared with the $500,000 for a Yahoo front-page banner that runs for only one day.

According to Henry Copeland, founder of Blogads, the first big wave of advertising emerged during the 2004 election season, when political campaigners and interest groups realized that advertising on political blogs was more powerful than direct-mail appeals. "It's really the audience -- younger voters who are motivated and interested," says Michael Bassik, a political consultant who ran online ad campaigns for John Kerry and other Democratic candidates. Perhaps more important, blogs are buzz-creation machines: If an ad campaign appears on the blogs, it'll often become a subject of conversation among the bloggers. "They're social connectors," Bassik says. Yet each blog has a different sphere of influence. To get a message out widely, he'll buy on Daily Kos because it has the largest readership of any liberal blog (though it's also the most expensive, at $4,000 a week). If Bassik needs click-throughs -- someone who'll click on a candidate's ad, visit his site, and perhaps make a donation -- he might buy Talking Points Memo instead, which has a smaller audience but a much higher click-through rate.

Since blogs set their own ad rates, each one offers a different value proposition, Copeland explains. A gossip blog like Perez Hilton has a huge readership -- 220,000 page views daily -- but since the audience is broadly based, the rates are very low, costing $202 to run an ad for one week. Meanwhile, a smaller blog might have only 10,000 visitors daily -- but if it's a lucrative, tightly focused niche, the blogger could charge much higher rates per visitor.

How big and lucrative can an accidentally professional blog grow? The biggest so far is Boing Boing, a pioneering site run by five former Wired editors and writers. By posting wittily, and more voluminously than almost any other blog -- up to several times an hour -- they built up a devoted audience of 1.7 million readers. (Boing Boing is also the most-linked-to blog in the world, according to Technorati's rankings.) The site began running ads two and a half years ago, and the expensive ones can currently command more than $8,000 a week, according to John Battelle, whose ad co-op, Federated Media, manages the blog's finances. Despite those premium rates, the five Boing Boing bloggers still retain their day jobs, blogging only part time. "I always figured my life was fueling my blogging, so I didn't want to be just a blogger," says Cory Doctorow, a novelist, copyright activist, and one of the Boing Boing five. "We could make a living at this. I mean, we've got the circulation of a good-size magazine -- better than a good-size magazine. And our overhead is much smaller." Or as Shirky puts it, "The Boing Boing thing is, they have more readers than Wired and yet they have a part-time staff of five. That's the new math."

The second basic blogging business model is the record-label approach: Crank out dozens and dozens of sites and hope that one or two will become hits. The pioneer here is the new-media entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, who founded Weblogs, Inc., in September 2003 and began rapidly shotgunning new blogs into obscure niches: Tablet PCs, Microsoft Office, "telemedicine," and the like. It is not, many note, a recipe for quality writing. "What do his bloggers get? Two dollars a post?" jokes Brian Clark, the advertising buyer. Nonetheless, Calacanis scored an enormous hit with Engadget, the second most-linked-to site on Technorati. "AOL basically paid $25 million for Engadget," more than one envious blogger carped to me.

The third and final model? The boutique approach: a publisher who crafts individual blogs the way Condé Nast crafts magazines -- each one carefully aimed at some ineffable, deluxe readership. This is Nick Denton's modus operandi. Though he set up shop three and a half years ago, making his the oldest blog empire around, he has launched a mere fourteen blogs. They are all, however, in niches that target high-spending, well-educated readers -- such as gossip, sex, and politics. The aim is to hit the sweet spot: big readerships, but not hoi polloi. Gawker even claims to turn away advertisers that are too low-rent; the site's ad manager boasted to Mediaweek that it takes no Ford or Chevy ads because "we hate American cars" and no pharmaceutical ads because "our readers are healthy and beautiful."

Denton is famous for spending months hunting for writers with the snark and wit that his audience likes. (Obligatory disclosure: Denton sometimes calls to pick my brain, and last year hired somebody I recommended.) He's also equally famous for being tight with a buck: His bloggers work from home, get no equity, and make salaries that are by all accounts unremarkable, even by the paltry standards of journalism. (Health insurance starts on March 1.) Indeed, before Calacanis sold his company for $25 million, Denton was fond of proclaiming that there is little money to be earned in the blogosphere. "Blogs are likely to be better for readers than for capitalists," he wrote on his personal site in 2004. "While I love the medium, I've always been skeptical about the value of blogs as businesses."

But as his critics note, this is precisely what you'd say if you wanted to scare other people away from competing with you. "When Nick said you can't make money at it," says one of his frenemies, "everyone believed him." Denton and partners, veterans of the dot-com boom, sold their last company for $50 million, so ... why would he need any more money? "But that was just his strategy, and it works." One terrific way to stay alone on the tall side of the power law is to discourage anyone else from trying to climb the curve.

AMONG BLOGGERS, FEW THINGS PROVOKE MORE RANCOR than the subject of the A-list. Much as in high school, C-listers quickly suspect the deck is stacked against them, and the bitterness flows like cheap wine. No one knows this better than Elizabeth Spiers, the original Gawker girl. She is arguably the most famous professional blogger, since she invented its dominant mode: a titillating post delivered with a snarky kicker, casual profanity, and genuine fan-girl enthusiasm -- sonnets made of dirt. Yet no good deed goes unpunished; the player-hater e-mail she received during her tenure at the gossip site was astonishing. "I'd get these e-mails saying, 'You're a dirty slut who can't get laid,'" she recalls. "How can I be dirty slut and not get laid?"

The very subject of the A-list is so toxic that Denton refused to be interviewed for this story and told his bloggers to refuse interviews, too. (Calacanis also refused.) For her part, Spiers argues that Gawker is now so well entrenched that it is virtually unmovable.

"You'd have be a total fuckup to ruin that site right now," she says. "It's got so many links, you're just going to have a positive growth rate."

If the star system rankles the C-listers, it is partly because they have such a weirdly submissive relationship with A-listers. They envy them, but they need them, too, because one of the quickest ways for an unknown blog to acquire traffic is to feed scoops to an A-lister, in the hopes that the editors there will use the tip and include a thank-you link pointing back to the tipster. Even better is becoming so well loved that an A-lister puts you on his "blogroll," a permanent list of favorite sites -- the blog equivalent of Best Friends Forever. Over at Blogebrity, the gossip blog born out of the original A-/B-/C-list joke site, the writer Nick Douglas told me he'd often used another common trick: posting things about an A-lister -- Gawker -- to try and catch the editors' attention.

"Any time I run something on Gawker, even if it's a little mean, they'll link to it and send me some traffic. They're watching. All these bloggers are watching each other." He laughs. "It's a tricky balance there, because you're trying to get a high-profile link but not be seen as a sellout. I get accused of sucking up." (Indeed, Denton just hired Douglas to edit his new tech-gossip blog, Valleywag.) Less-sophisticated supplicants will simply e-mail an A-lister, begging to be linked to, a technique that's about as successful as wearing a will you be my friend? T-shirt. "I'll get these guys who start a blog and e-mail me like every single new post they put up, hoping I'll link to it," says Rojas. "It's not polite! I'm like, 'Dude, if you send me a really cool news item, I'll totally link to you. But don't spam me.' "

Yet one can understand why the tiny blogs are so hungry for approval. A single mention from an A-lister can provoke "firehoses of traffic" -- as John Battelle describes it -- that can help pluck a neophyte blog out of obscurity. (This has even happened to me. I run a small science blog -- avowedly C-list, a pure vanity project -- and the times that Boing Boing or Gizmodo have linked to me, my traffic has exploded.) When Gawker linked recently to a posting at Blogebrity, it nearly tripled the smaller site's traffic, from 1,200 visitors a day to 3,500. Even a link from a smaller, B-list blog can help a struggling newcomer. In his first two years blogging, Trent Vanegas -- the 31-year-old creator of the gossip site Pink Is the New Blog -- barely rated 200 visitors a day. Then in January 2005, a few medium-size New York blogs -- including Ultragrrl and Thighswideshut -- gave him a shout-out, and his traffic doubled. The virtuous cycle began, and today he has 1 million page views a month, VH1 is calling to use him as a commentator, and he's fielding job offers from E! and Bravo.

"It's crazy," he says, laughing. "After a point, you're like, Where are all these people coming from?"

"REGULARITY AND RELENTLESSNESS," says Arianna Huffington. "That's how you break through the static of the 5,000-channel universe."

In May 2005, Huffington, the political columnist and sometime candidate for California governor, started the Huffington Post, a blog where her celebrity friends post their rants about politics and culture. By the end of the year, it was clocking 18 million page views a month and had become the fifth-most-linked-to blog in the world. Its ad rates are at the top of its class, about $10 to $30 for every thousand views. With financing from a slate of investors including Ken Lerer, former executive vice-president at AOL Time Warner, the Huffington Post launched with a full-time staff of four and an office in Manhattan -- and the ability to post around the clock.

Huffington also neatly intuited the importance of linking, putting scores of A-list bloggers on her blogroll, realizing they would probably return the compliment. But even more important was the sheer force of the site's famous names -- not just Huffington but the spectacle of her friends Nora Ephron and Norman Mailer blogging merrily away on her site. Mainstream media lavished attention on the site's every move, giving ever more publicity to the venture.

Huffington showed that it was still possible to quickly move up to the top of the charts. "You think the A-list is the A-list is the A-list," says David Sifry, the CEO of Technorati. "But I'm telling you, boy, does it shift -- and does it shift fast." Cultural winds can drive blogs in and out of favor: When Sifry founded Technorati in 2002, many of the bloggers on his top-100-most-linked list were computer geeks, such as journalist Doc Searls and programmer Dave Winer. But as blogging grew to encompass politics and pop culture, Searls dropped to No. 96 and Winer to No. 126.

What's more, a blog is like a shark: If it stops moving, it dies. Without fresh postings every day -- hell, every few minutes -- even the most well-linked blog will quickly lose its audience. The A-listers cannot rest on their laurels. Federated Media owner John Battelle recently published a book on Google, and while on the book tour, he neglected his own well-trafficked blog (No. 81 on Technorati's rankings) for several days. "And suddenly I was getting all these e-mails going, 'If you don't get your shit together, I'm out of here,'" he recalls. He stayed up late that night frantically adding posts. "If you start sucking," he says, "it's through."

Yet the rapid rise of the Huffington Post represents a sort of death knell for the traditional blogger. The Post wasn't some site thrown up by a smart, bored Williamsburg hipster who just happened to hit a cultural nerve. It was the product of a corporation -- carefully planned, launched, and promoted. This is now the model for success: Of Technorati's top ten blogs, nearly half were created in the same corporate fashion, part of the twin blog empires of Jason Calacanis and Nick Denton.

"The good news is that it's still possible to create a top-ranked blog," says Shirky. "The bad news is, the way to get into the top ten now seems to be public relations." Just posting witty entries and hoping for traffic won't do it. You have to actively seek out attention from the press. "That's how they're jump-starting the links structure. It's not organic." Indeed, when Huffington announced her venture and her celebrity guests, bloggers grumbled that it weirdly inverted the whole grassroots appeal of blogs. Larry David and Danielle Crittenden are hardly what you'd call outsiders to mass media.

Will professionalization turn blogging into media-as-usual? Or will the idiosyncratic voice of the lone blogger prevail? Elizabeth Spiers thinks that both statements are true. After she left Gawker, she learned about the power of the first-mover advantage the hard way, by trying to repeat her success. Last year, she spent three months launching eight media-gossip sites for Mediabistro, a career-development site for journalists. They amassed an impressive 1 million page views a month, a healthy amount, but hardly Gawker-class. Then in January, Spiers jumped back into the blog pool with a splash, announcing that she was launching her own blog empire.

When I call her, she is at her desk in her new company's offices in Tribeca. She's being backed by two angel investors -- Carter Burden, head of the Webhosting company Logicworks, and Justin Smith, president of The Week, a news magazine. Their first blog, launching in March, will be called Dealbreaker, and devoted to Wall Street gossip. Her advertisers would be? "For Wall Street? Pretty much everybody," she says. "It's a high-income demographic, pretty attractive." The start-up money lets her pay for a full-time blogging staff, which she'll need since she wants her writers to actually do reporting and break news. And this, she argues, is the future of the professional blogosphere.

"It'll be more like the mainstream media, really," she adds. "Blogging is increasingly becoming a survival of the fittest -- and that all boils down to who has the best content. The blogs that are going to stand out are the ones who break news and have credibility." Plus, it can't hurt that Wall Street scuttlebutt is one of the last truly huge unfilled niches in the Manhattan blogosphere. "This is a business, and we'll build business infrastructure from the get-go." The age of the blog moguls is here.

Today's top video-game designer are masters at visualizing information. Every time I buy a new piece of software or use a new website and discover that it's got a horrid, horrid user interface, I always think -- why didn't they hire a good game designer to do this? The best games are superb at collating massive amounts of information and quickly displaying them in psychologically nuanced ways, rendering rapidly-changing streams of data -- your health, your speed, your location, dialogue -- as twinkling, glanceable ambient icons. Much like a superbly designed car dashboard, a good video-game display brings Edward Tuftean concision to the art of visualizing information.

Thus I was intrigued to hear about Visitorville -- an application that takes a website's traffic information and renders it as a Sim-City-like world, where each page in a site is a building, and visitors appear as human avatars that travel to and fro. As the Visitorville site describes it:

Buses deliver your visitors to their landing pages. There's a bus for every major search engine; plus, you can create your own custom buses for any other referrer!

Watch realistic-looking people move around your page. Different avatars exist depending on the type of visitor (commercial, academic, military, etc.).

To move between pages, your visitors take taxis, ambulances, fire trucks -- or any other vehicle you like. They each have their own distinctive sound, so you can alert yourself when a particular page is accessed (or even a particular person accessing a page!)

Pretty cool. Though it'd be even cooler to have the reverse: A java application that takes your web site and renders it as a 3D city, so that visitors navigate it like a game inside their web browsers.

(Thanks to Roger Spence for this one!)

Heh. A website called House of Tartan has an automatic tartan generator: Just enter your favorite colors, pick the order and density of each thread count, and voila -- your own personal clan cloth. That one above? I generated it using the traditional heraldic colors of the House of Collision Detection: Dark blue, light blue, white and grey. Even cooler, House of Tartan actually has an option that lets you order bolts of cloth of your custom tartan, so I could make my own kilt!

As the site's history FAQ notes:

References to tartans occur in various historic documents, paintings and illustrations. A charter granted to Hector MacLean of Duart in 1587 for lands in Islay details a feu duty payable in the form of 60 ells cloth of white, black and green colours (the colours of Hunting MacLean of Duart tartan), and an eyewitness account of the Battle of Killecrankie in 1689 describes "McDonells men in their triple stripe". It is reasonable to assume that any tight knit community would wear the cloth produced by the local weaver in quantities that would limit the variety of patterns, and that when they went to war, many would be dressed in the same material.

I envision an enormous army of robots, all wearing my tartan as they fight bravely in the great squid uprising.

(Thanks to Simon Munro for this one!)

On Feb. 8, the best play in the history of the universe will open in Manhattan: Heddatron. It's an adaptation of Hedda Gabler in which half the parts are played by live robots onstage. The description of the plot, from the theater group's web site:

Les Freres Corbuser continues its irreverent massacre of historical icons and academic esoterica by taking on famed playwright Henrik Ibsen, the well-made play, and contemporary issues in robotics. Ibsen is thwarted by August Stringberg and his kitchen slut throughout his fevered struggle to write the great feminist drama, Hedda Gabler, while a contemporary housewife in Michigan is abducted by robots and forced to perform Ibsen's masterpiece over and over again.

According to a little profile group in the last issue of Wired, the robots will deliver their lines using prerecoreded text-to speech. The play opens up mostly with humans onstage, but the robots gradually take over -- such that by the end the only human onstage is Hedda herself.

I. Am. So. There.

Apparently some Australian scientists have discovered a new species of flatworm that fences with its penis. Okay, "fencing" may be a slight anthropomorphism -- perhaps a more accurate phrasing would be "a species of flatworm that does incredibly weird things with its penis."

From a story in the Sydney Morning Herald:

The new flatworms are all hermaphrodites, meaning they have both male and female parts. To reproduce they try to stab each other with their genitals. The first to penetrate inserts sperm and then goes on to spar with another flatworm, while the "loser" lays and broods the eggs.

Heh. Ah, the "loser" in the sexual conquest -- talk about your anthropomorphizations.

(Thanks to John T. Unger for this one!)

A couple of students in the UK have just developed an innovative new kitchen technique: They've used two mobile phones to cook an egg. The instructions are online here, and the concept is basically that you prop up the phones so their antennae are about a half an inch from either side of the egg. Initiate a call from one phone to the other, leave 'em running for a few minutes, and pretty soon lunch is ready. As the instructions on their site note:

Cooking time: This very much depends on the power output of your mobile phone. For instance, a pair of mobiles each with 2 Watts of transmitter output will take three minutes to boil a large free range egg. Check your user manual and remember that cooking time will be proportional to the inverse square of the output power for a given distance from egg to phone.

Of course, it makes sense that this idea would come from the UK -- a country that is simply addled with fear that mobile phones cause brain cancer. While that worry has never really taken off in the US, it's a staple of British newspaper health coverage. The reality is that the health effects of non-ionizing radiation -- the stuff emitted by mobile phones -- has been not been closely studied in any longitudinal way, so while we're probably okay, who knows? Maybe we'll all grow third eyes. One thing is sure: Power usage alone causes mobile phones to heat up a lot during a prolonged phone call -- which is why I suspect this egg trick might actually work.

If you wanted to worry about mobile phones at all, that'd be the concern: Not that radiation will harm your brain, but that the heat will scramble your noggin like a mess of lovely eggs.

(Thanks to William Braine for this one!)

Everyone knows the USSR lost the race to put a man on the moon. But in other ways, they totally kicked the US's butt -- because the Soviets sent the first probes that orbited the moon and sent back photos of its hidden dark side. That's one above! It comes from the Mental Landscape blog, where there's a terrific writeup of this mission, as well as the Soviets' many other pioneering lunar shots:

Using a phototelevision camera, pairs of images were simultaneously exposed through 200mm and 500mm lenses. [snip] The camera held 40 frames of film, and 12 images were received via frequency-modulated analog video (some reports claim 17 images were received). The full moon appears to have very little detailed texture, because the lunar mountains and terrain casts no shadows when lit from overhead.

Check out the rest of the site for dozens of increasingly cool shots of the missions -- including wild panoramic vistas assembled from Soviet lunar landers. They're quite reminiscent of the panoramic shots from NASA's recent Mars probes. Indeed, I'm sure those moon pix seemed even more weird and eerie than the Mars ones do today, because the moon is visible to the naked eye. When people gazed on photos of the lunar soil, it must have felt more sensually, proximally tangible, and thus more uncanny, than you-are-there pictures of a faraway planet like Mars -- a planet that exists almost purely in our imagination.

(Thanks to the Cynical-C blog for this one!)

There is clearly no point trying to think of a clever headline for this one. Behold "The Anguish" -- a painting by the extremely cool artist Brandon Bird. The caption on his web site is:

My sister's husband says Michael Landon refused to cut his hair because his father's name was Sam, and he felt this literally made him "Sam's son."

It's already sold, unfortunately.

(Thanks to Brian Corcoran for this one!)

A few years ago, the Japanese educational theorist Fumia Kayo discovered that nursery-school children were obsessed with creating hikaru dorodango -- balls of mud polished to such smoothness that they shine. Kayo started using an electron microscope to figure out precisely how mud could be made to shine best, and, as Web Japan reports, came up with the following technique:

1. Pack some mud into your hand, and squeeze out the water while forming a sphere.
2. Add some dry dirt to the outside and continue to gently shape the mud into a sphere.
3. When the mass dries, pack it solid with your hands, and rub the surface until a smooth film begins to appear.
4. Rub your hands against the ground, patting and rubbing the fine, powdery dirt onto the sphere. Continue this for two hours.
5. Seal the ball in a plastic bag for three or four hours. Upon removing the sphere, repeat step 4, and then once again seal the sphere in a plastic bag.
6. Remove the ball from the bag, and if it is no longer wet, polish it with a cloth until it shines.

Apparently this is now a national trend, and preschool children in Japan are busily making dorodango as we speak. Which is to say, preschool Japanese children are spending two hours polishing balls of mud! I love it.

Kayo has developed a 5-star rating system for the luster of the balls; that one pictured above rates a "4". He's got a "5" at home, and damned would I love to see it.

(Thanks to Ian Daly for this one!)

Wired News just published my latest column, and this one is about how free, indie games are breaking out of gaming's rigid genres -- by innovating odd new mechanics for play. You can read it online here for free, and a permanent copy is archived below:

Sometimes there is a free lunch
Aching to see the weird new forms of gameplay? Check out the burgeoning world of free indie titles lurking online.
by Clive Thompson

Has gameplay innovation ground to a halt? Surf the aisles of your local game store, and you'd suspect that game publishers have have kinda given up. It's always the same tired play mechanics, over and over. Shoot the bad guys while avoiding flying lead. Level up your character in an online world. Drive like hell in a souped-up rig. Match the pretty colors in a puzzle.

Obviously, part of this endless looping is that success works: Like backgammon or baseball, these tropes appear to stand the test of time. But it's also the curse of genre. With games costing millions to develop these days, few publishers are willing to risk serious bling on some weird new style of play that might fail.

If you really want to see innovation, there's only one place to go: Off the grid. You have to find game designers who actively opt out of the market -- by producing indie games they give away for free online. These days, this subculture is happily thriving, fed by game-school grads and underemployed programmers who, like indie musicians, crave to break out of old boxes and want to get as huge an audience as possible.

Want proof? Here's a short -- and totally idiosyncratic -- list of some of my favorite free games, each of which innovate one thing cool and new:

Strange Attractors: Are you sick of games that create faux complexity by forcing you to learn hundreds of button combinations? The designers of Strange Attractors went in the radically opposite direction: They use one single button -- the space bar -- to control the action. Your goal is to maneuver a little craft through free-floating space by using the button to activate and deactivate "gravity," drawing yourself toward larger objects. It's like navigating a NASA probe by slingshotting it around celestial objects. The lesson here? Super-simple control schemes strip twitch gameplay down to its pure essence: raw, gorgeous physics. If you like this conceit, there's a world of other free "one switch" games out there waiting for you.

Facade: You walk into an apartment to visit two old friends, and discover their marriage is rapidly falling apart. By typing in dialogue, asking nosy questions, and playing totally sick mind games, you help to steer the course of the evening -- and their marriage. (The first time I played, the husband threw me out after I made a pass at his wife.) Facade is interactive theater so open-ended -- and with such juicy voice acting -- that it puts paid to the supposedly "immersive" qualities of today's blatantly tree-forked narrative games. Bonus: It's fun enough that you'll ignore the graphics, which appear to have been culled from an ancient Mac HyperCard stack.

RSVP: There are a zillion card games online, and they mostly emulate existing real-world titles -- like Hearts, Bridge or the endless limbo of Solitaire. But since anything is possible in the online world, why not design an entirely new concept from scratch? Thus was born the genius of RSVP, which -- like any good card game -- can be learned in about five seconds, but never entirely mastered. The goal is to place "guest" cards around a table so their colors form a connecting chain. In a neat bit of design, the cards look like they're from the 1920s, yet their faces shift and morph as you play, making RSVP feel like a sepia-toned, Depression-era opium dream. (Caveat: This game was designed by Pop & Company for a client -- Lifetime TV -- so it was technically paid for, though you can play it for free.)

Dyadin: In Dyadin, you and a friend play co-operatively on different computers, but stare at the same mazelike playfield, where enemies hunt and energy gates swing open and closed. The thing is, though you're playing on the same board, you each exist in a different dimension -- so you each interact with different elements on screen, allowing you to pass through walls that hem in your buddy, and vice versa. The lesson? A single update in gameplay can breathe new life into an otherwise traditional puzzle-action game.

Cloud: Flying games are innately fun because, well, you get to fly. But inevitably the flying is regarded as a mere conduit to another task -- mastery of the cockpit in a simulated 747, or success in a pitched dogfight over Germany. Cloud charts a different route: It foregrounds the inherent joy of simply gliding around in the air. You control a little child who flits about the air, collecting up clouds and then jetting them back out again as you skywrite on the blue horizon. Sure, there are puzzles to solve -- but mostly I just enjoyed the trancelike state I achieved from soaring around. Why don't more games seek to instill a sense of calm?

Arcadia: Those early video games from the '80s can seem awfully quaint -- so easy to master that you wonder why you ever found them fun. Arcadia riffs off this by forcing you to play four different retro games -- simultaneously. As you'd imagine, things start off fairly simple but soon descend into perfect madness. The lesson? If you're going to plunder from the classics, don't just reskin Tetris or Galaga -- remix the culture into something new. (This title comes from Gamelab, a New York design shop that produces so many artistically innovative forms of play that I had trouble picking my favorite. Again, the designers do this stuff for hire, but the results are mostly free.)