The guys at Mozilla Labs launched yesterday the Game On competition, geared at kickstarting development of web games based on open technologies, including the nascent WebGL^w. As you may know, Flash is the cornerstone of nearly every game available on the net today, with more complex games like Quake Live opting for proprietary plugins not compatible with all browsers, and others like Minecraft preferring to use the ubiquitous Java plugin.


But recent advancements in HTML standards, plus the furious race to develop much faster JavaScript engines, have made possible for game creators to finally leave plugins behind and code games to run directly in any browser that supports the latest standards, an excellent example being Biolab Disaster. With almost all browsers now capable of running these games, and Mozilla encouraging further development, true web games will begin to be the rule, rather than the exception.

Further information is available at the site linked above. Naturally, all games must run on Firefox 4 (which this competition also helps promoting), but apart from that, the rules are pretty relaxed, as expected from Mozilla. The deadline is on January, 11th 2011, though some people have been working on a concept for some weeks now, and I hope they share something with us ;)

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via Asa Dotzler and Mozilla Links

It's pretty telling when the founder of one of the pioneers of news aggregation says the model doesn't work at all. Perhaps that's why FARK has an editorial team that promotes links to the frontpage, while the rest remain in the back.


Of course, the statement has to be taken with a grain of salt, as he's talking about comments, which are personal opinions on a matter, not a combined effort of a group of people in order to reach a single answer. Plus, this is FARK we're talking about.

On Friday night, Ars Technica decided to set up a system to catch those visitors running "a very popular ad blocking tool" (presumably Adblock Plus), which in turn would block those users, not allowing them to see any content on the site. As expected, shit hit the fan once the users stopped freaking out, and found out what happened (kinda expected for a tech-centric site) with the articles. So, on Sunday, Ken Fisher, one of the site founders, explained everything about the experiment, and the reasons for doing it. Nothing new there, expect for the fact that ads on many Internet sites now are paid on a per view basis, instead of clicks.

While the post sounds very reasonable, and no one is threatening to cut access to those running adblockers, many people think otherwise, and express so in the post comments. What's more, now the debate spreads to the rest of the Internet, as the post gets slashdotted (and probably digged as well), and people starts weighing on the issue, ranging from John Gruber noting the complexity of the situation to Tech Dirt telling Ars that it's time to evolve and stop complaining. Other people, like Scott Wasson at The Tech Report side with Fisher, painting a situation very similar to Ars Technica.


One of the most ironic things about the whole situation is that the same Internet sites that are supposedly replacing newspapers as major sources of information are also struggling to find sources of ad revenue, and many say that their business model is 'dead' and they should be researching alternative models. So, are 'old' and 'new' media sharing the same dying model? Fun.

I should note that all the arguments 'for' and 'against' have been beaten to death, even here on this forum, but it's always interesting to see the affected business expressing their opinion on the whole matter. Now, if the ad companies said something as well...