The UpStream (Page 550)

Joe Perry, Aerosmith guitarist, wants help naming his upcoming solo album, and he has resorted to the tool all old people who don't understand the Internet use: Twitter. What better way to communicate your thoughts on the title of an album that no one has heard than to use the site whose slogan is "What are you doing?" I do have to admit that the prize is pretty damn cool, though; a guitar from Joe Perry himself.

Do any of you ever respond to these businesses using Twitter for advertising and contests?

Firefox 3.5 went up for download this week, and it was downloaded 5 million times within the first 24 hours. That is a commendable stat, but not as impressive as Firefox 3's launch day which rounded out at 8 million. In fairness, Firefox was going for a world record (that didn't exist) and advertised like CRAZY. This was a pretty quiet launch in comparison, yet nearly as successful.

Microsoft has announced that they are bringing their Silverlight platform (Microsoft's answer to not owning Flash) to the Xbox 360 as a way to allow enhanced advertising on the console. Any time anyone mentions advertising on a gaming console, the gamers start crying, and this was no different. The fear is that we will get a larger quantity of advertisements in the dashboard, but Major Nelson disagreed, saying:

One of our core principles is to enhance, not interfere with the gaming experience, and we work directly with our partners to only deliver experiences that are relevant to the LIVE community. Silverlight will help make those ads a more organic part of the dashboard, like we've done with some of the NXE slots in the past.

The thing to remember here is that dashboard advertising is not new. Silverlight will only give developers more capabilities with the cards they already have. I normally ignore the ads in the dashboard, unless they are for the Pre or something else cool. What about you guys?

Prank calls are fun, aren't they? you call someone up, ask them if their refrigerator is running and then laugh! Well, things aren't always fun and games, as Matthew Weigman, a 19-year-old telephone hacker, learned this week.

Matthew was sentenced to 11 years in jail for prank calls. He did what is known as "swatting" or calling 911 in different areas and creating havoc. Most of his friends are already in jail for being idiots, but Matthew and his brother decided to take it a step farther and drive to the home of a Verizon employee who was investigating his misconduct to intimidate him. It backfired and ended up getting him more jail time.

Apparently this swatting is a semi-popular activity, ending in thousands of dollars in emergency costs per call, and almost always jail time. Morons.

The Sony Walkman is 30. Yay! Who would have ever imagined that 30 years later we still wouldn't be able to get away from the name? Before the Walkman phones from Sony Ericsson and the Walkman line of MP3 players and even before the red-headed stepchild, the DiscMan, the Walkman was a portable cassette player.

Not believing that people could actually carry around a device that large, Scott Campbell, a teenager who edits a news website, decided to carry one around for a while to see how reasonable it was. His friends at school made fun of him, he disliked the hissing sound and it took him 3 days to figure out there was more music on the other side. My favorite quote, though, was "It was the size of a small book."

"Did my dad ... really ever think this was a credible piece of technology?"

We talked about the videogame creation tool Kodu from Microsoft on the show several months ago. If you listened, you know we were really impressed with the walkthrough we saw at how easy it was to create and edit a game with a very powerful scripting language and intuitive interface. The god news is Kodu is finally here.

If you want to start creating your own Xbox games, the Kodu Game Lab is available through the Xbox Live Community Games for only 400 Microsoft Points (only $5).