Over on the boxuk.com blog I found this amazing and comprehensive checklist for a Website Launch.

Next time someone says “How much? It’s just a website!”, show them this list. But really you should always have some kind of checklist when you are developing a new website to make sure you are covering everything you need to be. As you can see there is a lot more to remember than one might think at first glance.

Don’t Ask Don’t Tell Policy in full effect

Microsoft apologizes for the above

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Gaming in the Cloud coming soon?

Oh, it’s already here! Quake here I come!

This Friday will be 1234567890 Day, make sure you celebrate. Unix, Javascript, etc, everywhere will be 1234567890 day. http://www.1234567890day.com/

“To test whether I was being paranoid, I ran a little experiment. On a sunny Saturday, I spotted a woman in Golden Gate Park taking a photo with a 3G iPhone. Because iPhones embed geodata into photos that users upload to Flickr or Picasa, iPhone shots can be automatically placed on a map. At home I searched the Flickr map, and score—a shot from today. I clicked through to the user’s photostream and determined it was the woman I had seen earlier. After adjusting the settings so that only her shots appeared on the map, I saw a cluster of images in one location. Clicking on them revealed photos of an apartment interior—a bedroom, a kitchen, a filthy living room. Now I know where she lives.”

-Mathew Honan

Scary? yes.

But this is the future. I don’t think there is any way of getting around it. I remember reading, I think it was The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil, and he was explaining how in the future there will be absolutely no privacy. He was speaking mostly about tiny cameras, but he made a very convincing argument, and this just adds to the proof.

Who knew the robots file could be so political. Nevertheless, the new administration Today ushered in a new robots.txt file!

Kottke has the full rundown

As Jason said, the robots.txt file tells search engines which part of the website they are allowed or not allowed to index. Before, the whitehouse website was more restricted and dictatorial in its search engine diplomacy, and now it is more open and more democratic!