From BoingBoing today, comes a short piece on the collapse of the website digg.com.

Note: I wrote a longish piece attaking the digg model in 2006, back in it's heyday, and I wasn't the only one; see "How Digg Gets Everything Backwards.. And How to Fix It".

The only way to consistently get stuff on the home page was to work at it like a job. ... everyday users were realizing that nothing they submitted ever even had a chance in hell of going to the front page. They weren't empowered netizens visiting from the future, but chumps who were being played by Digg and a bunch of "social-media consultants."

http://www.theatlant...ts-community/259770/

1. Newsletter Editorial

Hello dear readers and greetings from Illinois, where I've been hiding out in my air conditioned bunker while the temperature outside breaks the triple digits.  It's been nearly 100 days since the last DonationCoder newsletter, so this is going to be a big one.  I apologize that it's taken so long to get this one out, and I promise it won't take so long to get out the next one.  The last time we talked we were just kicking off our March fundraiser, which turned out to be a wonderful success.  A huge thank you goes out to everyone who donated and cheered us on.  The fundraisers have such an invigorating effect on the site -- I can't overstate the morale boost they provide.  Thank you all.

On other news, we've been very steadily working on the transition to a new content management system for the website, which will make it a little easier for us to update and maintain content.  DC member Mitzevo is leading the project and the new site layout looks great.  Unfortunately, it's proving a not insignificant challenge that we have so many different esoteric areas of the website, so we still have quite a ways to go -- but that's the nature of the site so what can you do?  Ok enough rambling, onto the newsletter sections!

The JayIsGames puts on one of the funnest flash/casual/browser game building contests.. And they just announced their latest one.

Design a browser game that incorporates the theme "ESCAPE". You may use any browser-based technology platform you are comfortable with (Flash, Unity, Javascript/HTML5, etc.). If we can embed your finished game file(s), you may use that platform to design and develop your game.
...
Prizes:
1st place: $1,000
Armor Games Awards: $500 - to each of the top 3 Flash games for a non-exclusive license to appear at Armor Games.

Deadline:
The deadline for entries is Monday, September 03, 2012 at 11:59PM (GMT-5:00).

http://jayisgames.co...n_competition_10.php

Note: As we have before -- we will send a rare DC "Game Division" mug to any DC members who *submit* a working entry.

Long time DC member Jibz writes a mini-review of SmugMug and Flickr:

"We recently got a digital video camera, so I was looking for a convenient place to make our photos and videos available to friends and family. This led to a trial of SmugMug and Zenfolio, and I thought I would share my experiences with my fellow DonationCoders.

I have been using Flickr as a place to put photos for friends and family in the past, and I have been quite happy with the way their service works. I had a pro account for a year, but when it expired, I didn't really feel there was a big need to renew it. Flickr only allows you to upload very short videos, so I had to find a different solution -- I considered using YouTube for videos, but having to use hidden links as security would mean I had to send a bunch of new links every time I uploaded something. It would simply be more convenient to have both photos and videos in one place.

I had heard a lot of good things about SmugMug over the years, especially people always praise their zealous support -- I had an image of a company run by geeks who cared about what they did, which seemed like a good fit .

While looking through some reviews of SmugMug I found out about Zenfolio (and a couple of other sites, but I was aiming for a place with both video and photo support), which I had not heard of before, but I got the impression it was "the other site" in that segment.

So, I signed up for a 14 day trial of both to see how I would get along with them..

Microsoft announced yesterday that they were going to go up against apple with a new table/thinlaptop hybrid, codenamed "Surface".

Links for more info:

• http://www.microsoft...ace/en/us/about.aspx
• http://hardware.slas...unces-surface-tablet
• http://www.extremete...nd-fold-out-keyboard

Looks pretty cool.  Apple has a long history of locking down their machines and making it hard for users to use them flexibly.  Let's hope Microsoft can do something different.