I've always divided people into two types: visual and verbal. The first time I talked to a game developer at length, I realized there was a third type of person.

If Wright brings anything to TV programming - never underestimate the ability of a genius in one thing to be a boob in another - it may well be in a renewed sense of story, one that is neither the unfolding of information-loaded pictures, nor of narrative, but of the constant ebb and flow of agents interacting on a reward trajectory. It will be interesting to watch, whether or not any of it is interesting to watch.

Top photo by Javier Aroche
Bottom photo by Jacob Metcalf

Below we summarize and follow up on the 10 most-read stories on ReadWriteWeb in the month of September. These aren't necessarily the best stories, but they are the most popular. We hope you enjoy this little trip down short-term memory lane. Do these posts already feel like old news to you, our hyper savvy readers?

Google released its own browser at the start of this month and at launch the software had some really egregious claims in the End User License Agreement. An anonymous commenter pointed out in our previous coverage of Chrome that Google claimed to have rights to all the information you send through their browser to reuse for promotional purposes! Google quickly backed down and removed the clause, though we questioned in a later post (It's Time for a New Terms of Service Regime) why such conditions were a part of the default "boilerplate" licenses for all Google services.

This post was discovered by readers from a wide variety of sources, including the Official Google Blog, which called us eagle eyed for catching the section of the license in question. In truth, it wasn't us that caught it, it was one of our anonymous readers, and we weren't the first blog to write about it either - we later noticed that Ina Fried at CNet found it first.

9. Five Ways to Use Social Media to Reach People Who Don't Use Social Media

I wrote this post myself, after giving a presentation to the Oregon Entrepreneurs Network where several people in the audience said that they were concerned their target constituencies weren't using social networks, microblogging and blogs. Could those technologies be useful anyway? We listed five techniques we've found to be effective.

More than 100 other blogs linked to this post in posts of their own, including particularly active conversations at Brazen Careerist (Social Media Is Difficult, Like Intimacy) and StreamXy (The Success System that Never Fails).

8. Top Digg User Zaibatsu Banned - Reactions from Both Zaibatsu and Digg Management

Digg cleaned house this month, closing the accounts of scores of people it accused of cheating the system. Founding editor Richard MacManus covered this story for RWW. One of those users kicked off the site was the popular user Reg Saddler, or Zaibatsu, the person with the 3rd most submissions to hit the front page of all time. Digg said the last straw was Zaibatsu's submission of a page that claimed to have lascivious pictures of a female Digg user on it and actually was a sales page for some product - both of which are violations of the Digg Terms of Service. Zaibatsu offered his own defense but in the end said in comments that he's since decided to "cash in" after all and do the types of things he's been wrongly accused of doing.

For an in depth look at the charming characters like Zaibatsu that make up and surround many top Digg users see our earlier post MrBabyMan: Digg Users Revolt, Against the One Pure Man at the Top. Our coverage of Zaibatsu's expulsion got a whole lot of readers from Digg.

7. Google to Offer its Own Browser: Chrome

On the first of September, we wrote about Google's new browser that would be released the next day. The company mailed out some fantastic comic book style explanations of their plans and we linked to a slide show of those books in my post. There were a lot of questions that came up that day: what about Google's relationship with Firefox? Would Chrome ever go mainstream? Would another browser make web development more difficult?

The idea behind Chrome was to build a browser that was mean for running applications, not just viewing web pages. We think that's a great idea and apparently a substantial percentage of our readers do as well. 6.5% of you visited ReadWriteWeb using Chrome in the first week it was available, in the past 3 weeks that number hasn't grown but it's only fell to 6.2%. We expect that percentage to grow substantially when a Mac version of Chrome is available.

6. Walmart Gives Consumers Number 1 Reason Why DRM is Not The Answer

This weekend Corvida wrote about Walmart's decision to shut down its DRM server and either eat or tie to a single computer the music it sold its own customers. The post was huge on Digg, where conversation was heated in comments. We put the comments people left on that story at Digg in a Wordle.net tag cloud below, just to give you a taste of what that community thought about the post and news.

5. Cartoon: Anything You Tweet Can and Will Be Used Against You

Rob Cottingham's weekly cartoon midmonth was very popular with readers - we'll let you click through for yourself to see it.

According to YackTrack, 30 people Twittered a link to the cartoon out to their circle of friends. Among that group was Spanish poet and political blogger Jaun de Bravo, who said "No todo es tuiteable." We didn't know that was the Spanish word for Twitter!

4. Podcaster Developer Uses Little-Known "Ad Hoc" Mode To Distribute Banned iPhone App

Sarah Perez dove into the mid-month debate about development on the iPhone platform with an in-depth post about a renegade app that used a back door to distribute an app outside the official App store. It was an app that let phone users listen to podcasts without subscribing to them in iTunes, which Apple wasn't very excited about.

The post was submitted to Digg by a Washington state high school student named Zak M. Zak's been on Digg for more than a year now and has had 40 submissions hit the front page. Almost 40% of his front page submissions have been in the past 2 weeks, since sending up Sarah's post on this iPhone app! All we're saying is that Zak's on fire and maybe his success with Sarah's awesome post has something to do with that. Only joking! We offer our most humble thanks to anyone who summarizes and submits our posts well to Digg.

Jason Ankeny at FierceDeveloper wrote just yesterday that Apple has now closed the loophole and the app that Sarah wrote about has been kicked off the platform. The developer, Alex Sokirynsky, says he's headed for Google's Android platform.

3. Rumor: EBay Trying to Sell StumbleUpon

In the middle of the month TechCrunch did the kind of investigative work that, let's face it, no one in the tech blogosphere does better. They unearthed efforts by eBay to sell off social discovery site StumbleUpon. Our own Frederic Lardinois wrote up the rumor and speculated, as did Silicon Alley Insider, that selling off Skype would be an even better idea.

Our post was a huge hit on StumbleUpon, as we presume most other posts were on this topic.

2. Top 10 Apps Worth Jailbreaking Your iPhone to Get

On the first weekend of the month, Corvida wrote a monster post arguing that there were iPhone apps outside of the thousands of approved ones that were so good they were worth nullifying your phone's warranty for.

Think the iPhone is just for Mac lovers? This was the 2nd most read story on ReadWriteWeb for the whole month and almost 80% of our site visitors use Windows. People love the iPhone, almost everyone does. (60% of the RWW writing staff, however, do not own an iPhone.)

And the #1 most-read story on RWW for the month of September was...

1. Serious Security Flaw in Google Chrome

On the day that Chrome came out, September 2nd, Frederic Lardinois wrote about a big security hole in the new Google browser. Tens of thousands of people wanted to know what it the security flaw was - perhaps for their protection and perhaps to gawk at the shortcomings in software from the otherwise triumphant Google.

To be honest, it seems in retrospect like an odd story to be the hottest story here for the whole month. That's the facts, though.

Ryan Narraine, a security evangelist at Kaspersky Lab, wrote the first report on the flaw at ZDNet but after a fairly extensive hunt we can't see any follow up from ZDNet or anyone else about whether the flaw has been fixed. A fair number of people argued that it wasn't even a flaw as it required a user to choose to run an executable. As Frederic pointed out in his point, the "flaw" depends on a lot of social engineering. Many commenters all around the web responded simply that it was too early to trust a brand new browser on its first day online.

Conclusion:

Last month was a big one for the web. As is often the case, the topics our readers came for the most were ones concerning control. That's one way to interpret them, at least. Could Chrome wrestle control over the browsing experience away from IE and Firefox? Could it put users more in control as a more appropriate tool to use in an era of applications, beyond web pages? DRM and the closed Apple iPhone store were the subject of multiple control control stories as well.

Some of our favorite posts from last month that didn't make the top 10 list but that we wish had include User Experience, Learning from the Pros, Sarah Perez's 3 part Scannable World series and Richard MacManus's write up of a report finding that 70% of businesses now allow social media use at work.

Thanks to everyone who stopped by ReadWriteWeb in the past month to read these stories. We appreciate your ongoing support and engagement in discussion.

Image credit on water photo above, Seventh Sense by Flickr user woodleywonderworks.

Pirates Still Don't Care

While this is probably a smart move by Electronic Arts, it is important to realize that these protests were not just triggered by the details of the DRM scheme, but by the fact that the game was DRMed to begin with. If you downloaded a pirated version of the game, you never had to think about the DRM anyway because your cracked copy was always DRM free. In the end, schemes like this do nothing to deter piracy and only punish legitimate buyers. Pirates will always find a way around these schemes anyway.

A major problem that plagued the release of Spore was the inclusion of a DRM system. This has caused multiple reviews of Spore to be disappointing for Electronic Arts (EA), the developing and publishing company of Spore. If EA hoped the problem would go away, it hasn't. Fans and "pirates" have taken things one step further to make Spore one of the most pirated games ever.

The DRM system included in Spore has caused an outrage in the gaming community. We stated in our review of the game that the DRM system would have to go if Spore wanted to succeed. Apparently, consumers of the game seem to feel the same way. As of today, Spore has been downloaded over 500,000 times on various bittorrent sites and doesn't look to be slowing down. The first 300,000 downloads of Spore happened after just one day of the game being released. These pirated versions of Spore remove the DRM system that users encounter when installing the game. While it's not uncommon for popular games to hit those type of numbers on P2P sites, it's unusual for it to happen so quickly. Currently, the game has been the most popular download all week on The Pirate Bay, one of the most popular and controversial bittorrent sites around.

DRM is Not the Answer

The Sims 2 currently holds the record for the most pirated game. Pirates and disappointed fans are looking to change that. According to the TorrentFreak blog,

[Spore's] download rate exceeds that of any other pirated game in history, and in a week or two from now it will be the most pirated game ever on BitTorrent.

Spore is still one of the worst rated games on Amazon. Since its release it has been given a rating of only 1 star by more than 50% of its reviewers. The majority of these ratings address problems with the DRM system. DRM is not the answer and continues to provoke "pirates" to release what publishers should have given to customers from the beginning.

There's no doubt that Spore would've been pirated regardless of the DRM system. However, users of P2P networks are now encouraging others to pirate the game in order to teach EA a lesson. A commenter on the Pirate Bay known as "deathkitten" stated,

"You have the power to make this the most pirated game ever, to give corporate bastards a virtual punch in the face."

For those that don't know, Spore is a game that tracks a world of creatures and the evolution of these creatures. The amount of hype that Spore has amassed is astounding. With a great story line and a ton of publicity, expectations are riding high. EA expects to sell over 2 million copies of Spore before the end of the year. To give users a taste of where things were headed, EA released SporeCreator. This could be viewed as a prequel for Spore. It allowed those who were impatiently waiting for Spore's debut to tinker with one of the game's main focuses: creating creatures. SporeCreator turned out to be a huge hit. Creator Will Wright only expected to get about 100,000 creations or so, yet over 2 million creatures have been created to-date. With such a successful beginning EA was seemed to have a guaranteed hit on their hands.

Bad Ratings, Worse Issues

Will Wright hoped that Spore would "change the way people look at games forever and change hopefully the perception people have of their own creativity." Yet this doesn't seem to be happening if recent reviews are any indication. Currently on Amazon, Spore has a rating of one and a half stars based on the reviews of over 500 people. Taking a closer look at these reviews explains that the biggest problem with Spore is that it isn't evolutionary in any way.

From a technical standpoint, a lot of fans have issues with EA's DRM system in Spore. The system requires users to activate the game over the internet with a limit of 3 activations. Any more than that and you'll have to call EA for help. The problem with this method is that EA requires proof of purchase of the Spore game in order to give you another activation code. This doesn't seem very evolutionary to us in any way. Microsoft anyone?

As for playing the game, we feel we hit the nail on the head when we stated that Spore is a "hugely ambitious follow up to The Sims game series." It was ambitious and a great try. However, we didn't find anything very appealing about the gameplay. Sure we can watch our creatures grow, but you can also do that with The Sims but with people instead of creatures. The graphics and visual effects may have been the closest EA came to "evolutionary" with Spore. Overall, the game itself suffers from being too simple Sims like. Spore is a serious lackluster.

What Needs to Change

There's a lot about Spore that needs to change. First off, DRM has to go. That's so old school EA. We understand you want your product to sell and not be pirated. However when issues such as the one in Europe pop-up, you need to rethink your strategy. Scrap the DRM.

Lastly, the game-play needs to change. Everything was going great with Spore creature creation tools. However interacting within the game is a drab. There isn't a challenge in Spore and it's far from evolutionary. Don't sand-box us. Give us something to work for. In the end, we feel Spore appeals to those who liked the Sims. It's too easy, too repetitive, and not complex enough for the rest of the world.

Spore will be a game that tracks a world of creatures along each step of their evolution, from primordial slime fights to hyper civilized urban environments. If the read/write web is of interest to you, you'll want to give Spore a look.

The creature creator will even be a revenue generator for Electronic Arts - the free version only includes an estimated 25% of the available body parts. We don't feel like squabling over details right now - we're just anxious to get our hands on the game.

Below is a screenshot of the creature created by Ze Frank, from whom we learned about the availability of the creator on Twitter this morning. We think the likeness is pretty good.

We're excited to get our hands on Spore this September and this Creature Creator campaign will likely make good progress towards getting even more people excited.