Imagine the six degrees of Kevin Bacon game and the mass knowledge of Wikipedia were to combine and you would get The Wiki Game. The game is simple. They give you a starting article and a finishing article. Your job is to navigate between the two following links within the first one. The game has a tendency to distract you from remembering you are even playing a game. Often I would come across an interesting article and the clock would expire because I had been stuck reading.
Here is an example:
Goal:
Yahoo! > Larry Bird
Solution:
Yahoo! » Jerry Yang (entrepreneur) » Stanford University » National Collegiate Athletic Association » Basketball » Larry Bird
The game is a lot of fun, check it the Wiki Game.
I’ve been reading a lot of these “most popular posts of 2009″ rundowns, which got me thinking. Aren’t all most popular posts really only self-fulfilling prophecies? For example I have the something in the sidebar about the most popular posts over the past 60 days. Once something make it into the bottom spot it gets more traffic and moves further up the list, until it it is older than sixty days and is removed.
Regardless, here are the most popular posts of 2009 from my blog. Some were obvious attempts to game search engines and generate more traffic. The popularity rating is a combination of views, searches, comments, trackbacks, etc., that is automatically tracked for all posts. The percentage next to each post is the relative popularity rating out of a maximum of 100.
Simple little flash game I cannot stop playing. Check it out here.
I’ve been busy, but that’s not really a good excuse for lack of frequent updates. Check out Endless Zombie Rampage it’s bound to kill some time this morning.
Clockwords is a lot of fun and is borderline educational. Skip the intro movie, it’s completely pointless.
Canabalt is really simple. Run as far as you can and click to jump. Admittedly I’m not very good at the game. Post high scores in the comments.
Sporacle is a web site full of user generated quizzes. They have a huge range in both difficulty and topic. The quizzes are divided into general categories and can also be sorted by difficulty. Here a few of my favorite quizzes to get you started:
This weekend I saw Zombieland, which sent me searching for some zombie inspired flash games. It turns out someone has already beat me to it. Zombiefied Games is a web site dedicated to listing all of the Zombie related flash games people have created. I highly recommend checking out “Last Stand 2.” It is one of the more addictive games listed on the site.
Craigslist itself can be a huge distraction. The Best Of Craigslist section is home to of some of the greatest humor on the internet today. Last month Wired ran a cover story about Craigslist. The article is too long to summarize here, but one of the thing it mentioned is that Craig Newmark doesn’t like other sites using the Craigslist data and often either gets them shut down or changes Craigslist itself so third party sites no longer work. It looks like those days are over (at least temporarily). CraigsLook is a third party site which takes the data from Craigslist and allows you to search through it graphically. The only feature it is missing would be to lock in a geographical location. The service is still in beta so maybe that is coming soon.
Toss the Turtle is a great flash game I recently found. Imagine the classic game Kitten Cannon except with some upgrades. You get money based on how far you launch your turtle and then you can buy things to make him go even further. The items you can get range from a jet pack to a tank to shoot him out of. My best was over 800,000 feet, I could have gotten a lot more but the game crashed.
