Rattleblog: Tales from the blogosphere

18-12-2006

by Damien Mulley

This week Rattleblog covers even more Wii news, and gets into the Christmas spirit.

Like a demented Australian talking about crazy prices on radio ads, the insanity with the new Wii continues unabated. We wished everyone a MerWii Christmas on the last Rattleblog and everyone that read it groaned, but the Wii hype has increased not decreased.

First of all, the "little engine that could" message Nintendo is sending out has made bloggers cheer that they are making money from every console they sell. Nintendo's move is contrary to the stance of Microsoft and Sony who heavily subsidise the cost of their game machines. Who would have thought the public would cheer when they found out Nintendo was making a tidy profit from its consoles -- but this is exactly what happened when the Younewb blog revealed how much it costs Nintendo to make a Wii.

Search engine results also reinforce the popularity of the Wii. Latest results show that the console is outranking searches for PS3 three to one.

Meanwhile, with the lack of Wiis worldwide and the Irish nation's addiction to gaming, one local Irish Wii blog gives readers six tips on how to get that Wii you want before Santa comes visiting.

One final piece of Wii news. The Engadget blog has suggested a better strap for the Wii remote as the existing strap doesn't seem able to prevent "flying Wiimote syndrome". Their suggestion? Tie it on to a handcuff. Are they predicting an increase in reports of lost handcuff from the police in 2007?

On a Christmas present theme, the Street Tech blog looks at Robosapiens that have been given a teddy bear "layer", effectively turning them into something from a child's nightmare. One not to give your kid this Christmas.

Staying with Christmas gift ideas. If you want to go really cheap, you can create paper covers for your relations' iPods.

The A Whole Lotta Nothing blog shows us a cool Christmas present from Flickr to their users. You can now give anyone in your photos a Santa beard or Christmas hat.

So, it seems the new generation of web users are better at picking safe passwords than the older generation. Bruce Schneier cites a report which shows that MySpace users are better than most for having hard-to-crack passwords. Good news for the giant web destination which only seems to have received negative press about their security.

Who's not acting like Scrooge this holiday season? Craigslist. The dealbook blog mentions the fact that the millionaire owners of Craigslist have shocked, and possibly disgusted, business people by just making enough to keep them moving along nicely. The owners are not wishing to make mega-millions from their service, instead they'll just make multi-millions.

Staying with the Scrooge theme, from leaked documents published by the Techcrunch blog they confirm that the previous rumours of Yahoo buying Facebook.com for over USD1 billion were true, and the offer of USD1.6 billion was turned down by Facebook. Judging by the YouTube acquisition deal by Google, it appears Facebook should have taken their money and ran.

Still with Yahoo, it's now upgraded its own in-house video offering to make it easier again to share and edit videos. This already has been matched by YouTube, however.

Google released its patent search engine this week. A great game is to search for how many patents the big tech players such as IBM, Sun, Google and Microsoft have: IBM is the winner so far.

In other IBM news, John Battelle reports that Big Blue has partnered with Yahoo to provide enterprise search for IBM and IBM clients.

This is the last Rattleblog before Santa arrives and we hear this year he'll be live-blogging his worldwide journey, so make sure to leave the Wi-Fi on for him as well as the usual milk and mince pies. Thank you for reading and Happy Christmas.

Damien Mulley is an Irish blogger and works as a technical writer in Cork.