Do Unicorns Watch TIVOs Too?

Do I have a TIVO box? You bet I do. A bunch of them, ranging from my first 14 hour one to the now obsolete HR10-250s HD units I paid a grand a piece for. Obsolete, because they don’t do MPEG-4. And because DirecTV greedily killed them off in favor of its inferior PVR.

I sound bitter, only because I am. TIVOs were one of those once or twice-in-a-lifetime technologies that changed the world the first time you used them. Like cars. Like telephones. Like that magic box on Lost.

TIVO was my constant companion for a few years. I even won a free one once by writing a song about TIVOs:

I need a free TIVO
To put here in my den
So when I want to watch a show
It will be on right then
There are lots of good shows
I never get to see
X-Files, Star Trek, Millennium
And good ol’ MST

My time with TIVO was beautiful. There were unicorns running around and I was sure the guy would get the girl (credit Andy from work for that apt description of abject optimism).

And then it ended- at least for those of us who chose satellite over cable. All that’s left of all that great time-shifting entertainment is my little TIVO man. He lies forgotten in my kids’ toy box the way my expensive and obsolete TIVOs lie abandoned in my garage and on eBay.

So yeah, I have a TIVO box. All I need now is a unicorn and everything will be just dandy.

I really miss my TIVO.

Technorati tags: tivo

Why Even Bother Watching New TV Shows?

TV Squad is reporting that Fox has canceled Drive, after a whopping 10 days. The show didn’t blow me (or apparently many others) away by any means, but it was better than most of the mind numbing, generic sitcoms that seem to fill the airways. Plus it had Nathan Fillion from another great TV show that got canceled too soon.

It seems like the life expectancy of new TV shows is falling to moth-like levels. Let’s see: Invasion, Surface, Threshold, Skin, Deadwood, BSG (which, while not canceled yet, is obviously on life support) and now Drive. And those are just the shows I watched. No telling how many more five and out shows there have been that I didn’t know about.

At this point, new shows are like new software versions- I’m going to let someone else beta test them. If they stick, I’ll get the season discs via Netflix.

I no longer trust the networks enough to invest my time in a new show that likely won’t be on next week, or the week after.

Technorati tags: tv, drive

MediaMaster – Update

I wrote the other day about my experience with MediaMaster. I said I liked it, and that I was in the process of testing the claim that there are currently no upload limits. Here’s an update.

I uploaded around 5,000 songs into my account, thereby effectively confirming that there is no current limit. I can’t tell you exactly how many because the album cover-only library interface doesn’t give you this information. As I mentioned the other day, the library interface needs a major overhaul. Badly.

While the songs sound good over the internet, the system doesn’t handle huge libraries very well. I constantly get a message stating that “a script in this movie is causing Adobe Flash Player 9 to run slowly….” Slowly as in not at all. Since I doubt the MediaManager business plan was based around people like me putting thousands of songs in their libraries, I can look past this problem. But it does limit the service’s usefulness as a backup plan for large libraries. I have around 27,000 (legal and unshared) songs on my music server. It would take approximately the rest of my life to upload the rest of them.

I tried out the widget on Newsome.Org for a while, but the interface is (hopefully) a work in progress and it interferes with page navigation and scrolling while it loads. So it’s gone, at least for now. On a related note, unless Blonde 2.0 revisits my blog to counter-balance Randy, Mathew and Earl‘s ugly mugs, I may have to lose the MyBlogLog widget too (I get those guys back by plastering my ugly mug on their pages every chance I get).

All of this is not to say that I am disappointed in MediaMaster. I think it is a neat service that will probably get better over time. It’s not (yet) a place where audiophiles can store and access their entire library, but it is a great way to store and access portions of your music. And it would be a great solution for those with more moderate music collections.

I like MediaMaster a lot now. I hope it gets even better.

Technorati tags: mediamaster, music storage

How Not to Deal with Mainstream Media

When a mainstream or even semi-mainstream publication wants to cover something Web 2.0 related, particularly when it is something owned by your crony, take the reporter’s call. You are not a Rolling Stone and they are not The Rolling Stone.

You are a blogger for crying out loud. You are some guy who’s current claim to fame is that you write an online diary and have some other friends who write online diaries too.

In other words, you need them much, much more than they need you.

They get interviews from people a lot busier, richer and more famous than you all the time. If you won’t accommodate them, they’ll just move on. Or maybe embarrass you and then move on.

I learned a long time ago that there are more of me than there are reporters who want to talk to me for background and/or get a quote from me. The law of supply and demand taught me to welcome the opportunity to be cooperative with the press.

Sure, I’ve been misquoted a time or two. Once badly. But I have also built brands and netted a lot of business by being accessible and cooperative with reporters.

The rules of business, marketing, supply and demand and common sense apply to the blogosphere. To fail to recognize that is just another reason why so much of the real world doesn’t take the blogging culture seriously.

Technorati tags: media, marketing

Yahoo Lyrics Search: A Bad Opening Act

I have been waiting for a reasonable place to find and search song lyrics. Since Lyrics.ch was shut down by the greedy publishing industry years ago, the only way to find song lyrics has been to google the song and visit one of several ad and pop-up infested lyrics sites. Now Yahoo has tried to come to the rescue.

Through a deal with Gracenote, a company I am not fond of due to its conscripting for profit the formerly open source CDDB, Yahoo can now allow legal, centralized lyrics searches via it’s Yahoo Music page.

I should have been suspicious when I first visited the search page and saw mostly photos of artists I either don’t recognize or don’t like. But I soldiered on hopefully. The search engine is fast. I think I know why- because the database is so small.

I tested it first by searching for “my feet are too long” to see if it would return John Prine’s Dear Abby. No luck. I tried “Dear Abby” and found a song by George Strait. No Prine.

Next I tried “no senator’s son” and found CCR’s Fortunate Son. “We can share the wine” returned the Dead’s excellent Jack Straw. “Never leave Harlan” found no results, even though a song search found Darrell Scott’s excellent song of the same name.

“Killed John Wayne” did not find the Guadalcanal Diary song, thereby proving that Mathew Ingram is a better lyrics source than Yahoo.

“Muskrat Love” found neither the Captain and Tennille version I was expecting nor the Willis Alan Ramsey version I hoped for.

My conclusion is that the lyrics database might be fine for the casual music fan who likes current hit songs and middle of the road oldies, but this is not the one-stop shop for true music fans I hoped it would be. In fact, I was pretty disappointed.

It would be so much better to have some open source, Wikipedia-like database for lyrics – which could also be ad supported. But that old greed thing once again stands in the way of logic and usability.

There are also a couple of things about the interface I don’t like.

First, the results are not in any kind of alphabetical order, and they are not sortable. They should be sortable by artist, song title, genre and year. Additionally, you have to manually select lyrics search for every search, because the search box selection defaults to “All” (which includes artists, albums, songs, videos and lyrics). This is an unnecessary irritation.

And the biggest pain in the ass: you also cannot copy (as in copy and paste) the lyrics once you find them. This is idiotic and shows once again how little the music business trusts or respects its customers.

In sum, Yahoo’s lyrics search is a nice attempt to provide a much needed service. But it’s not ready for prime time.

Not by a long shot.

Technorati tags: yahoo, lyrics search

Kawasaki: Home Version

In an exchange that mirrors the blogosphere at large, Guy Kawasaki asks Seth Godin 10 questions, while we get to read along. I thought it would be fun to once again pretend that we’re all part of the blogosphere and give my own answers. Try this at home- it’s fun.

I have to pretend, of course, that I wrote a book about dips. I know some dips, so that should be easy. Here we go.

1) Other than hindsight, how does someone know when it’s time to quit?

When the fun you’re having or reasonably likely to soon have no longer outweighs the effort it takes to do what you thought was going to be fun from the start. Like golf. I played golf for years. I got better for a while, then stopped getting better, then started getting worse. Eventually, it dawned on me that golf was an elitist sport that was unfit for a deep thinker like me, so I took up drinking. It’s pretty much the same cycle, but the clubs are more fun. Later I gave up drinking and started blogging. There are clubs there too, but it takes more than a $5 cover to get in.

2) If I’m in the middle of a dip, how do I know if it’s worth gutting it out to get to the other side?

I generally try to avoid dips. It’s relatively easy to avoid the blatant dips. They generally move in slow packs and attack one at a time, like the bad guys in a movie. It’s harder to avoid the unknowing dip, who is a dip but hasn’t figured it out yet. Avoiding Starbucks is a good start.

3) Is there a place for the intrinsic value of learning a skill – for example, playing hockey or the violin – even though you know you won’t be the best in the world?

Absolutely not. There should only be one hockey player, one restaurant, and one blogger. We’re pretty close on the blogger part.

4) What if the market is not established so there’s no way to know if it even exists and if it’s worth dedicating/rededicating to?

This one is easy. Just put some ads up and give your company a goofy name that is vowel challenged. Next thing you know, Google will buy you for millions.

5) How can a company quit a product and not give the incorrect signal that it’s quitting the market?

See my answer to question 4. If you have ads, you don’t need a product. Products are so old school.

6) What’s more powerful: a short-term pain or long-term gain?

It depends on whether you’re long or short. But neither is a powerful as this.

7) Do most companies quit too early or try too long?

It could be worse. They could quit too long or try too early, like a lot of Web 2.0 companies who put their web pages up the day after they registered their goofy vowel challenged name.

8) Should Microsoft quit the MP3 player market?

Who cares?

9) Should Apple quit the personal computer market?

See my answer to question 8.

10) Should America quit the Iraq War?

Shouldn’t we quit the Korean War first? I don’t know if we should quit the Iraq war or not. But I know that you can’t dump a war like you do a girlfriend or boyfriend. The reject by neglect approach to breaking up with a war didn’t work in Vietnam, and I doubt it would work now. What we need is a decision maker.

Technorati tags: web 2.0, satire

(Text) Size is Everything When It Comes to Start Pages

For years I have used two start pages to organize my internet activities. The Home Place, my hand made page, and My Yahoo. I have tinkered with Netvibes a little as well. But I prefer the tradional My Yahoo look and feel to the Ajaxy look and feel of Netvibes and its newer competitors.

The biggest reason why is text size. My primary monitor is a 24 inch Dell running at 1900 x 1200. Most pages look really good. But the text size on Netvibes is tiny. Less than tiny. Sub-tiny. Until recently, text size on My Yahoo was fine.

But My Yahoo has been moving towards the Ajaxy look over the past year or so. Now the new beta has moved the rest of the way. My Yahoo’s new look is very similar to Netvibes. Including the sub-tiny text size (the clip to the left is the actual size). In fact, thanks to My Yahoo’s decision to run back to the pack, Netvibes has a cleaner, neater look. It’s an easy to implement stock portfolio module away from being the better choice.

But the text sixe problem needs to be fixed.

These applications need to give users a way to permanently set the text size, preferably at the module level. Sure, I can change text size at the browser level, but that makes every other page look too big.

The first one of these applications to give me a way to permanently set text size will become my primary start page. I suspect there are scads of other baby boomers like me who also want and need this feature.

I don’t understand why it doesn’t exist.

Technorati tags: my yahoo, netvibes

The New York Times and the Twitter as a Business Thing

The New York Times has an article about Twitter. Before I dive into the substance of the article, let me note that the article is in the Your Money section of the paper. Once again, folks are trying to divine business from cool. This is a problem for two reasons. One, it won’t work. Two, it insults cool. Cool is cool.

The best thing about the article is that it almost explained to me the difference between a friend and a follower. I’m not a read the manual kind of guy, so I still don’t really know the fine points of that distinction.

Scoble gets some much needed coverage, since it’s been at least 15 seconds since we last read about the Michael Jordan of the blogosphere. I mean that in a good way (Scoble is good at the blogging thing, video camera notwithstanding) and a bad way (Jordan so dominated the NBA during his career than lots of fans got bored with it).

I also learned that Twitter was founded by Evan Williams. I suppose George Dickel founded Jaiku. Just kidding.

In the article, Evan sums up what he thinks Twitter should be thustly: “Twitter is best understood as a highly flexible messaging system that swiftly routes messages, composed on a variety of devices, to the people who have elected to receive them in the medium the recipients prefer. It is a technology that encourages a new mode of communication.”

Doesn’t that sound better than a billboard for A-Listers to broadcast a link to their latest blog post? Don’t we have RSS feeds for that?

It also sounds pretty businessly. I agree about the new mode of communication part, but let’s not forget about the cool part.

As we know, some folks don’t like Twitter. Some cat named Bruce Sterling channeled Emily Bronte and came up with this nugget:

Using Twitter for literate communication is about as likely as firing up a CB radio and hearing some guy recite “The Iliad.”

Note to Bruce: I suspect most people who fire up a CB are more into Homer Simpson than Homer the Greek. I suspect most people who fire up Twitter feel the same way. I also think that’s a funny statement coming from a science fiction writer. Twitter doesn’t have to be all PBS to be fun and useful.

It also doesn’t have to be a business, since Evan is a “serial entrepreneur who made his fortune by selling Pyra Labs, the creator of Blogger, a popular blog publishing tool, to Google in 2003.” I didn’t know that, but I’m glad. Since he doesn’t need the money, maybe Twitter will survive the migration of the herd.

Unfortunately, the Web 2.0 stakeholders are still trying to figure out how to make all these hobbies into businesses. The article ends by wondering “whether the service can be made into a sustainable business.”

Who cares. It doesn’t matter.

Technorati tags: twitter

Jimmy Wales on MySpace

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, says that MySpace will fail in a few years, though he does appreciate the momentum behind online communities.

He agrees with me that MySpace pages are ugly, saying that they hurt his eyes. He goes on to say “there’s way too much advertising and they’re not really respecting their own community.” Once again, that sounds a lot like Geocities.

I don’t know if MySpace will die, but I absolutely believe its relevance will diminish over time. It has huge relevance now because it has so much of the young mindshare in this country- mindshare that advertisers covet. Mindshare is ferae naturae, however, and no one can lay claim to it. Just ask AOL.

His comments about MySpace come at the end of an interview about the history of Wikipedia and his new open source search engine project.

Technorati tags: myspace, wikipedia, jimmy wales