Emmy Huang, the Flash Player Product Manager at Adobe, has posted an article on her blog discussing the recently released penetration figures for Flash Player 8 and the updated survey methodology employed.

It’s great to see that the installed user base is now at a staggering 86% after a mere 9 months. The ubiquity of the plug-in will ensure that the exciting features offered by Player 8 are employed by an increasing number of web developers.

Time Magazine have unveiled their top 50 websites for 2006. A number of predictable favourites such as YouTube, MySpace and Digg make the cut; lesser-known sites also feature such as Yahoo’s The 9, a daily video round-up of viral content, and Wolfgang’s Vault, a rock memorabilia website.

The evergreen Helvetica is celebrated in a new documentary film by Gary Hutswit, scheduled for release in 2007, the 50th anniversary year of the typeface. The film promises to offer a valuable insight into the history of this ubiquitous font.

No trailer has been released yet, but you can sign up to the mailing list to find out more about the film and screening dates.

Snipplr is a public source code repository that allows users to post and share classes, functions and code fragments. The site offers downloadable code packages that integrate with the popular TextMate editor.

The site is clearly very new, and the quality of some of the submitted code is questionable, but it offers a useful alternative to code search engines such as koders or sourcebank.

Forecasts in July this year predicted MySpace membership numbers would reach the 100 million mark by the autumn. Well guess what? It’s happened already according to an article in NMA today.

The rapid increase in subscribers and visitors alike culminated earlier this year in News Corps‘ acquisition of Intermix Media, the site’s owner. With the additional commercial weight of Rupert Murdoch behind them, it seemed certain that MySpace would dominate the social site market, and the recent $900m deal beween News Corp and Google, which followed the staggering statistic that MySpace supplies 8.2% of Google’s traffic, seems likely to further cement their position at the top of the community charts.

In the face of this fearsome opposition, is there any hope for smaller rivals to grow and prosper on the web?

From its humble beginnings as FutureSplash, Flash has grown into the leading platform for delivery of multimedia on the web. Adobe have posted a selection of interviews with industry figures, each of whom discusses how they discovered the technology, and how they’re using it today.

The first version of Flash I encountered was the trial download of release 2 whilst working for Games Domain back in 1997. The animation capabilities of Flash instantly endeared me to the software, and I tried hard to convince my employer at the time to use it for online advertising. (Remember, this was during the dark days of gif-only advertising, when you were expected to create a compelling, uber-clickable banner in 10kb or less). Unsurprisingly, my Flash evangelism fell on deaf ears due to the low penetration rate of the plugin at the time, but within a couple of years things were very different indeed…

The internet has changed beyond recognition over the past decade, and Flash has consistently evolved and adapted to maintain its position as the most popular delivery platform for online multimedia. Greater challenges lie ahead with the proliferation of broadband, mobile/cellphone and other emerging technologies: hopefully Flash will continue to thrive in the post-Macromedia era.

Goggles is a fun flight simulator game that uses graphical data from Google Maps. A great idea from Mark Caswell-Daniels.

O’Reilly Radar has posted a feature on programming language trends based on sales of computer books (figures taken from 70% of US bookstores, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders, and many smaller chains and leading independent bookstores).

The article shows some predictable sales based on new trends and technologies: Javascript books are more popular following the emergence of AJAX, and Ruby On Rails has been growing rapidly over the past year to eighteen months.