I found these images over on artist Mike Libby’s site, Insect Lab Studio (Link), after seeing one of them on BoingBoing.

I like.

Next stop: a mashup between these creations, critters like that six-legged robot I mentioned some time back (reLink), and that steambot spiderthing (reLink).

Fun stuff.

{Image Copyright © 2005 Mike Libby}

In my earlier post (which was mostly about the recent Shirky entry in Valleywag – reLink) I suspect many of you didn’t catch my link to the C|Net article discussing IBM’s new EBO launch (EBO stands for “emerging business opportunity”). You might want to go and check that out. What’s doubly interesting to me now is something I caught over on the WorldCAD Access site yesterday. From the post titled “IBM Expands Presence in PLM” (Link):

IBM has formed a Product Development Integration Framework (PDIF), calling it “the most important announcement that IBM has ever made in the PLM space.”

But it’s not just all about IBM. They got eight PLM vendors to agree to write PDIF applications and connectors:
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BoingBoing has a post about a service allowing people to customize their own action figure (Link). That was okay, but what I thought was more cool was someone had sent in a link to a company that makes custom, one-of-kind action figures. That company is called Highly Flammable Toys (Link) and I recommend browsing through their gallery. Fun stuff. I had to pick one to show how nicely these are done and the image of Herbert Keppler‘s custom figure (shown above) caught my eye because of the words “with Multiple Exposure Action”. That’s something I doubt you’ll see on a mass-produced toy package any time soon.

No doubt it’s too late to get an order in for this Christmas, but you probably have a few weeks before orders fill for *next* Christmas. Personally, I hope they have to give rainchecks.

{Image Copyright ©2006 Highly Flammable Toys}

Lots of talk about virtual world Second Life today; not all of it good. On the one hand, Clay Shirky has considerably upped the volume in his post “Second Life: A story too good to check” (Link) on some things that I and others have been saying: that the media (and to some degree Linden Lab itself) is making too many mistakes(?) in their overzealous effort to fuel and/or be a part of the hype machine. On the other hand comes news from C|Net (Link) that IBM is continuing their relatively large-scale effort inside Second Life. Earlier today I caught that well-traffic’d blog 3pointD had a post (Link) on the bullish atmosphere allowing even new businesses to grab projects. But on the other side of the coin Clickable Culture and I are splitting hairs over “how late is too late” (Link) for LL to get its story straight before it loses credibility (assuming it hasn’t already) and damages future prospects.

So where I come out on this is pretty simple:
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I’ve been reading articles and blog entries about the Wiimote controller since it went on sale, thinking that I might have gotten a prediction right (reLink, and over on the Core forum – Link). Not only is the Wiimote getting some amazing attention, it’s crossed over to other platforms – as expected. And now, via a post on Wonderland, I’ve found that there’s even a Flickr pool just for pictures of people using the Wiimote (Link). I don’t recall the iPod getting this kind of attention when it was first released. It’ll be interesting to see where this goes (though I doubt it’ll reach iPod status; not enough wrapped up in it).

The above image seems to be a favorite and it’s the one I like best from the pool.

{Image Copyright ©2006 Michael T. Gilbert}