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The NPD Group has released US PC software sales datafor the week ending June 21, with EA's Spore Creature Creator comingout on top.
Maxis reported that one millionSpore creatures were created and shared during the stand-aloneprogram's first week of availability. The full Spore game will bereleased in September.
Sales of Spore Creature Creator werestrong enough to place the game at number six on the All Categorieslist - the only game to appear alongside business, education andutility software.
The Top Ten best-selling PC games in the US for the week ending June 21 were:
1 Spore Creature Creator (EA)
2 The Sims 2 Double Deluxe (EA)
3 Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures (Eidos)
4 World Of Warcraft: Burning Crusade Expansion Pack (Vivendi>
The Spore Creature Creator was software that allowed players to create their own creatures with a standalone version of the Creature Editor from Spore; the software was one of the first aspects of the game to receive focused development, and had undergone ten rewrites since the start of development. It was rated E by the ESRB in early March 2008, indicating that the editor would be released separately well before the game's release as a utility program. Electronic Arts told MTV Asia that "EA Screen will provide visitors a chance to interact with EA's game producers hailing from the studios, and unveil the hugely anticipated SPORE Creature Creator demo version to gamers for the first time in Asia." Electronic Arts VP Mark Buechner stated on the Spore Facebook page that the editor would be released in June or July 2008, saying, "We are looking at releasing it two to three months before the launch of the full game."
The SimCity Box artwork showed a blurb stating that the creature editor would be included with it. IGN revealed that the Spore Creature Creator utility will be available in two different versions on June 18, 2008. There was a paid version (for $9.95) and a free demo that was downloadable from Spore.com and included for free, bundled with The SimCity Box. The free version of the editor only contained 25% of the available creature parts that were found within the full version.
The utility included a test environment for players to see their creatures go through animations and allow the player to import other user-created creatures through the Sporepedia at Spore.com. The utility included screen capture and video tools as well, including YouTube functionality.
The editor also gave the user the ability to create animated avatars,and output in RSS and embeddable HTML code to facilitate easy incorporation into such sites as MySpace and Facebook.
Shortly after its introduction, the Creature Creator was used to create creatures with oversized genitalia, either stand-alone or engaged in coitus (a phenomenon quickly dubbed 'sporn'). EA responded with e-mails sent to those who made pornographic machinima from its demo, and has flagged certain on-line accounts for "TOS violations". Furthermore, YouTube has pulled several such videos for violations of its own TOS.
By June 24, 2008, users had already created over one million creatures.
It has been noted by those using the Spore Creature Creator, that while the Social and Attack categories can reach a max score of 20 with enough parts on the creature, the Abilities category does not achieve a max in the Creature Creator. This has led to speculation from it being the brain levels to advanced sensory abilities to telekinesis.
Electronic Arts confirmed that Spore will be receiving post-release expansion packs. No other information is available as to what sort of content the packs will feature, but EA has hinted it will be similar to The Sims expansions.
A Wii spinoff of the game has been mentioned by Will Wright several times, such as in his October 26, 2007 interview with the Guardian.Buechner confirmed it, revealing that plans for a Wii version were underway, and that the game would be built from the ground up and would take advantage of the Wii Remote, stating, "We're not porting it over. You know, we're still so early in design and prototyping that I don't know where we're going to end up, so I don't want to lead you down one path. But suffice to say that it's being developed with the Wii controls and technology in mind."The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of Spore are still under consideration.
Merchandising
There will be an iTunes-style "Spore Store" built into the game, allowing players to purchase external Spore licensed merchandise, such as t-shirts, posters, and future Spore expansion packs.There are also plans for the creation of a type of Spore collectible card game based on the Sporepedia cards of the creatures, buildings, vehicles, and planets that have been created by the players.There are also indications of plans for the creation of customized creature figurines; some of those who designed their own creatures at E3 2006 later received 3D printed models of the creatures they created. The Spore Store also allows people to put their creatures on such items as T-shirts, mugs and stickers.
The Spore team is working on a partnership with a comic creation software company to offer comic book versions of your own Spore story. Comic books with stylized pictures of various creatures, some whose creation has been shown in various presentations, can be seen on the walls of the Spore team's office.
Of course your content is your copyright and others should not copyit without your permission. But a feed can be repurposed in many ways,and we need to look at what parts of the feed are being copied and whoprofits.
Copyright lawyers will have to fill me in on the latest case law onall of this, but I think in practice we have despatched the question whether links are legal (is the web legal?) with a resounding yes.
Shouldn’t You Have To Ask Permission If You Want To Take A Blog’s Feed For Your Profit? which has attracted considerable comment.
As Sir Tim father-of-the-web-but-not-a-lawyer Berners-Lee has said:
There are some fundamental principles about links onwhich the Web is based. These principles allow the world of distributedhypertext to work. Lawyers, users and technology and content providersmust all agree to respect these principles.
What of link+title? In principle there is copyright in a title, butit’s hard to see anyone any longer seeking to enforce copyright here.
But an RSS feed is an aggregation, so what of a bunch oflinks+titles? Here there is a stronger case for saying that thisaggregation is protected by copyright, and if we’re talking about anaggregation of links+titles+descriptions or even +excerpts, that isclearly protected. So let’s talk about permission, express or implied.
I don’t believe there’s any implied permission for others to republish feeds.But in practice, why publish a feed if you don’t want it to berepublished? It will be, and there’s little you can do to stop it. Youcan frame some stern T & Cs or apply a more friendly CC licence,but most, whether intentionally or by default, will take little notice.
Susan makes much of others taking your (blog) feed “for profit”. Weare all miffed if we see others profiting from our work at our expense.But, with feed repurposing, in most cases we profit too, sufficientlythat we do not see it as being at our expense.
Google indexes, caches and republishes parts of my website, myblog, my feeds without my permission. Google profits handsomely, but Iprofit too.
Other specialist search engines and directories - like Tehcnorati,Blawg Search - also index and repurpose my content. If I’ve submittedmy site to them, I’ve probably given them permission to do this, but inmost cases my signing up only legitimates what they have been doing /would do anyway. (Susan, Technorati indexes your blog whether you’veclaimed it or not.) They profit, but I profit too.
Smaller fish might also republish my feeds, but in all cases shortof their republishing my full text, I profit as much as or more thanthey do. All items link back to me. And I really am not going to losesleep if they choose to wrap Google ads around it or seek to profit inother ways. (I do view sploggers etc as the scum of the earth, but I blame Google Adsense.)
So in practice, what we are all most concerned about is othersclaiming our real work - our full posts or articles - as their own; andthere is a simple answer: if you want to protect your content, includeonly excerpts rather than full text in your feeds. Syndicate yourmetadata, not your data.
t seems that everyone has their own idea of what Web 2.0 means.Thatis one of the pitfalls to using a single buzzword to define everythingyou see on the internet. I have heard people describing nearly everynew website as being Web 2.0 as if it was describing the launch date ofa site. The term ironically is the most popular category on ResourcefulIdiot. In leu of this, I am going to finally give you the definition ofWeb 2.0 and the principles that define it. In order to do that however,I need to start from the beginning with Web 1.0.
You can group each of the “Web x.x” as a different movement when itcomes to internet usage. Web 1.0 is the movement that took place duringthe beginning of the internet.
Think AOL, Geocities, and Netscape.
Back then the primary use of the internet was taking print media andposting it online. Web 1.0 saw books, news, music and everything elsebeing moved into a digital format. This movement is still going on andwill probably never stop. This is because as new data becomes availableit needs to be made available online, but the majority of the communityhas shifted focus toward data integration since there is not muchinnovation remaining in posting data online.
Now that brings us to Web 2.0. Many think that this is the currentmovement of the internet, and in some ways you are correct. After allthis data was posted online with the Web 1.0 movement, the onlinecommunity began to look for ways to share all of this data. The mainquestion that drove this movement, “How can I take this data and shareit with other people?” Since this question was asked, sites have poppedup all over the internet trying to answer this question with differentapproaches. One of the most adopted solutions involves the idea ofsocial networking.
Facebook is a popular Web 2.0 site utilizing social networking as a solution
All of these sites, like Facebook, use the concept of a socialnetworking to create a community. Each community member is responsiblefor contributing information to the rest of the users. Even thoughsocial networking is the most popular approach, another prominentapproach is the development and utilization of web services. I wrote anarticle a few weeks ago about different web services and their technologies (REST and SOAP),and I mentioned that the majority of sites you visit have a web servicerunning in the background. These services allow you to integrate databetween sites through API’s (Application Programming Interface) such asyou see on Flickr and Amazon. RSS/Atom feeds are also products of the Web 2.0 movement. This movement is still very much alive and being actively addressed.
Now to look into the upcoming movements, Web 3.0. It is difficult todefine what Web 3.0 will be as you cannot define something that has yetto occur on a large scale. The best way I can define what we will seewith this movement is the integration of data on the internet. Now thatthe data is online thanks to Web 1.0 and sites can share data throughAPI’s and social networks (Web 2.0), the next obvious direction is todo something with this massive amount of data we have available. Acommon way of describing this is the use of internet as a platform.With Web 3.0 applications we will see the data being integrated andapplying it into innovative ways that were never possible before.Imagine taking things from Amazon, integrating it with data from Googleand then building a site that would define your shopping experiencebased on a combination of Google Trends and New Products. This is justa random (possibly horrible) example of what Web 3.0 applications willharness. An illustration would be to draw nodes to represent all thesites on the internet and then draw a new node. Draw lines from allthose existing nodes into the one you just created. The consumption andpresentation of the data is what Web 3.0 will potentially be.
The definitions of Web x.x terms is highly debatable. Even whenwriting this, I was told that technology is what defines Web 2.0. Theuse of Javascript and AJAX is the “essence” of Web 2.0. However, thesetechnologies have been around since Web 1.0 so obviously this isincorrect. The technologies that have been developed during thesephases are simply there to help answer the question in a more accurateway. To prove my point let’s look at history. The guillotine did notdefine the Enlightenment movement back in the 1700s, the guillotine wasdeveloped in response to the questions the Enlightenmentmovement sought answers for (in this case, “Humane death”).
Three Scottish stories of interest today.
The first arrived on my RSS doorstep yesterday - Games to be taught in Scottish Schools shouted the headline from MCV. The crux:
Scottish schoolchildren are to be taught the basics of video gamedesign as part of the country's new national curriculum ... the move isto designed to 'create the next generation of young programmers'.
That's a lot for a games company. Admittedly Realtimehas an exclusive partnership with Microsoft Game Studios and its firsttitle, Crackdown for Xbox 360 in early 2007, sold about 1.4m copies.But the money looks likely to head towards it's online gamesdevelopment. Realtime Worlds already runs All Points Bulletin, amassively multiplayer online game. I can tell you right now, VCs arehighly interested in that space.
Apple snags 6.6% share of US PC market in first quarter Mac maker Apple Inc. enjoyed strong retail sales during the first calendar quarter of 2008, boosting its share of the US personal computer market above 6 percent, according to a report released Wednesday by market research firm Gartner.
Stateside ...rss&itemLink=http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=3965&itemDate=2008-04-16 17:00:00&itemTitle=Apple snags 6.6% share of US PC market in first quarter">
Apple releases Safari 3.1.1 to address four security issues Apple on Wednesday afternoon released version 3.1.1 of its Safari web browser to address a handful of security issues, including one widely publicized vulnerability that allowed a MacBook Air to be compromised during a recent security conference.
...rss&itemLink=http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=3966&itemDate=2008-04-16 17:00:00&itemTitle=Apple releases Safari 3.1.1 to address four security issues">
Report waves caution at shadiness of would-be Mac clone maker [u x2] A brief investigation into Psystar Corporation reveals the self-proclaimed Mac cloner maker to have no operating history prior to this week, and further suggests the company may be little more than one-man basement operation.
IBM launches internal pilot program to test migration to Macs Long-time Microsoft Windows supporter IBM has recently initiated an internal pilot program to study the possibility of moving a significant number of its employees to Apple's Mac platform, leaked company documents show.
The documents, obtained by ...rss&itemLink=http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=3963&itemDate=2008-04-16 11:00:00&itemTitle=IBM launches internal pilot program to test migration to Macs">
UK iPhone price cut boosts confidence in June 3G launch A 100 pound price cut on Apple's 8GB iPhone in the UK, confirmed by wireless carrier O2 on Wednesday, is the latest bit of anecdotal evidence to hint towards near-term release of a redesigned 3G model, according to one Wall Street analyst.
The 37...rss&itemLink=http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=3962&itemDate=2008-04-16 09:00:00&itemTitle=UK iPhone price cut boosts confidence in June 3G launch">
8800 GT for 1st Mac Pros; iTunes/Starbucks giveaway; Wall St. store? Apple has released a GeForce 8800 GT card compatible with first-generation Mac Pro workstations. Also, Apple and Starbucks are giving away free songs, voice-over-Internet calling has come to iPhone through a third-party app, and Apple is reportedly ...rss&itemLink=http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=3961&itemDate=2008-04-15 19:10:00&itemTitle=8800 GT for 1st Mac Pros; iTunes/Starbucks giveaway; Wall St. store?">
Mac clone maker vows to test Apple on OS X licensing terms Psystar Corporation, which this week began selling a series of Mac clone systems without Apple's blessing, is determined to challenge the Mac maker in court over the licensing terms for its Mac OS X operating system.
Speaking to InformationWeek, ...rss&itemLink=http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=3959&itemDate=2008-04-15 13:00:00&itemTitle=Mac clone maker vows to test Apple on OS X licensing terms">
Apple plants two more Mac OS X 10.5.3 seeds Apple over the past few days has provided its developer community with two more builds of its upcoming maintenance and security update for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.
Builds 9D19 and 9D20 of Mac OS X 10.5.3 arrived on Friday and Tuesday, respectively, ...rss&itemLink=http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=3960&itemDate=2008-04-15 13:00:00&itemTitle=Apple plants two more Mac OS X 10.5.3 seeds">
Amazon expanding digital music sales without eating at iTunes Much of Amazon's early success in digital music sales has come by way of customers who have never tried Apple Inc.'s iTunes Store, a sign of broader growth potential within the music download business.
NPD, one of the leading market research firms...rss&itemLink=http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=3958&itemDate=2008-04-15 10:00:00&itemTitle=Amazon expanding digital music sales without eating at iTunes ">
Apple, O2 to slash 8GB iPhone price in the UK - report Apple and wireless partner O2 this week will slash the price of its iPhone handset in the UK to 169 pounds from 269 pounds as part of a limited promotion, according to a new report.
The move will see the localized version of the 8GB iPhone sell fo...rss&itemLink=http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=3957&itemDate=2008-04-15 09:00:00&itemTitle=Apple, O2 to slash 8GB iPhone price in the UK - report">
iTunes Russia; no iPhone China talks; battery suit; Apple TV 2.0.2 Websites suggest Apple will introduce its iTunes Store to Russia. However, China Mobile is dampening hopes in its own country that isn't discussing the iPhone. Also, reports have Apple stores coming to New Orleans in the US and Bristol in England, ...rss&itemLink=http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=3956&itemDate=2008-04-14 19:00:00&itemTitle=iTunes Russia; no iPhone China talks; battery suit; Apple TV 2.0.2">
