With flash player based document editors starting to come out of the woodwork, AKA Buzzword, Live documents etc, I start to wonder whats Adobes strategy here. They bought Virtual Ubiquity (creators of Buzzword) which would suggest some sort on invested interest in the direction of these sorts of applications.

But what happened to my favorite bastard offshoot Flash paper? – you know basically the printer driver from Macromedia that allowed you to print off swf's of a word document that were wrapped in a nice viewer, tiny in size compared to PDF's and didn't lock up the browser when viewed inline with html web pages.

I know the future is supposed to be PDF, but I wonder if extending the the Flash Paper document API and getting it ready for this new breed of apps would be a good step. All we don't need is another closed proprietary format on the web you say. Open source it along with Flex 3's framework I say. Adobe now has the experience as they have the Buzzword crew. Wouldn't it be nice?

Ok so we have alot of volcanoes in New Zealand. One new website startup www.mintshot.co.nz decided to simulate an eruption using smoke flares.

Click image to see the video 

"The publicity stunt was lead by mintshot director Marc Ellis, who along with fellow directors Ben Hickey and Nick Dalton ascended Rangitoto in the early hours of the morning and using smoke flares simulated an eruption of the extinct volcano."

"The stunt has been a covert operation for all involved. A behind the scenes account of this guerilla marketing stunt will be revealed on 20/20 (TV2) at 9.30pm tonight (Thursday 15th November)."

Aparently they wanted 100,000 signups in the first 48 hrs. This is in a country of 3.5 million. I wonder how they did. 

Cant believe I totally missed this one.

Alex Hofsteede from over at Better than Flex created a video player for youtube videos. Whoopie you say? well this one has a twist. The video is parsed real time and converted into ascii art. Am I a geek for thinking this is very cool?

Check it out HERE