SlingMedia has new wireless competition

I love my Sling Media box. It lets me watch my TV anywhere in the world. So, when Monsoon Multimedia’s Mark Rouchonik, director of IT, called me up and said that I had to see their new HAVA box.

So, I’m sitting here with Mark and Colin Stiles and this thing is very cool.

First, unlike Sling, it doesn’t need to be hooked directly up to your access point via Ethernet. You just need an 802.11g wireless network.

Second, if you’re on your home network the quality is a lot better than my Sling is. A large percentage of the time I’m using Sling I’m just sitting on the couch watching something different than Maryam is watching (hey, sometimes we don’t agree on the shows that we should watch. For instance, I can watch football while she watches old versions of Lost).

Third, it plugs into Microsoft’s Media Center. Which really rocks. Basically it fakes a tuner to Media Center (a large percentage of Media Center machines sold don’t have any tuners, if they have a HAVA box it will extend TV into those machines anywhere in the home that wifi reaches). I’m going to use this on my new Media Center that’ll be in my office upstairs while my satellite TV tuners will be downstairs.

Cost? $249 (there’s a $50 rebate right now until the end of the month). Only available on the Web right now, in retail in US in September, elsewhere around the world like Asia and Europe by the end of the year.

You hook your settop box (TV system) or, really, any video source like a DVD player, into the back. As long as you have an 802.11g network (must be “G”, not just the older “B”) it’ll work fine. You load some software on each client to view the video. Windows only today, but they are working on Macintosh versions. They are also working on mobile versions for Windows Mobile and Symbian (due around September).

Anyway, very cool device. I’m going to get one to compare more fully to my SlingMedia box, but the comparisons I’m seeing here look pretty damn good!

Second Life corporate training with John Hartman

Over the weekend there were several hundred Second Life enthusiasts in San Francisco. John Hartman (he blogs about Second Life and virtual worlds on his Thought Plasma blog) attended the conference and is sitting in PodTech’s offices now showing me some of the cool stuff he’s learned and some of the things he’s working on.

What caught my eye about John’s work is that he’s using machinima (which is a recording of Second Life’s environment and avatars) to do corporate training.

What’s unique about this is you can create virtual sets and presenters very inexpensively.

I remember visiting the set at TechTV (which was a real set that cost millions to design, build, and house). John could build a virtual copy for 1/1000th the real cost.

Some things he showed me was a singer who played a virtual concert. Her avatar was holding a guitar in Second Life. She was singing into a microphone thousands of miles away from the data center that houses Second Life’s computers (at parent company Linden Labs).

He recorded that singer and made a little movie out of it (uses Camtasia). Sorry, the movie isn’t yet up on the Web, he says he’ll try to get it up within the next week or so.

Another thing he does is use a program called CrazyTalk, which lets him animate the mouth of his avatar. He can give a speech and his avatar delivers it. He uses that to do corporate training to dispersed groups of programmers.

Other things he uses? Fraps, which lets you record machinima videos. Used to do Red vs. Blue, he thinks. But he says Camtasia is better for most of his screen-recording needs.

As to the Second Life conference he said the weirdest thing was being in a presence done by NOAA and right next to it was people selling sex toys. Ahh, the joys of a virtual world where the red light district is right next to the science lab. Heheh.

Rivers run Red caught his eye (they are an advertising agency) that are going to let you create your own video game using Second Life.

Oh, Eddie and Irina just got in and handed me a real newspaper all about virtual worlds. OK, that’s just so weird. I’ll get a photo up on Flickr in a few seconds.

Oh, Irina, nice video of the Zombies that attacked San Francisco on Saturday! No, that really has nothing to do with virtual worlds, I just included it cause it shows that real life is sometimes very strange, even stranger than what happens in virtual worlds.

I wonder if Zombies could do corporate training?

OK, OK, I was wrong about blogging

I’m taking a lot of heat for trying to hold bloggers to five rules.

I was wrong.

Stowe Boyd, who writes a bunch of words on a thing that DOES comply with my five rules, has the best rebuttal so far. Basically says “let it all hang out.”

Anyway, I’m all about inclusion. Being nice. Not being judgmental. Yesterday was when the egotistical elitist bbbaaahhhsssttttaaarrrrddd in me came out.

Onward.

E-Frontier, where is your tech support?

I’m now tech support for when people are in pain world-wide. Just got woken up by a friend (who I won’t name here, cause it doesn’t matter) who introduced me to a guy who is in pain cause his software isn’t working that he paid for and he can’t get through to tech support for another hour.

The guy is Ed Ingold, editor of Primative Archer.com, a magazine headquartered in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

E-Frontier is the company. Application is Poser Artist Application.

What’s wrong? He bought the application. Ran setup. Then he tried to run the application. Says enter your name and serial number. Keeps rejecting his serial number.

He called tech support, got a new serial number, but that didn’t work. But now support isn’t open (they only are available 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Pacific Time, which means he has to wait until almost lunchtime his time before he can get his app up and running).

Basically this guy is super frustrated, and is trying to get E-Frontier’s attention.

Anyone out there?

Contrast this to the customer support you’ll hear about from Printing for Less.

Cool Windows XP downloads

OK, sorry for the turn down a less-than-professional series of posts yesterday.

Let’s get back on track for the week with a great site (on Live Spaces, no less) that tracked 150 cool downloads for Windows XP.

The elephant in the kitchen

Dare Obasanjo, of Microsoft, just pulled the ad hominem card. In debate class in high school the teacher would instantly award the other side a win if you ever pulled that card. Why? Because it demonstrated you lost your cool and couldn’t win through sheer logic or through a rational demonstration the other side was wrong. And, at minimum it just draws attention to your debating tactics rather than what we were supposed to be debating about anyway.

Hey, maybe that’s why Dare pulled the card out here and slapped it on my kitchen table.

To keep us from looking at the elephant in the kitchen! Brilliantly played sir Dare!

But, since I’m childish, narrowminded, and egotistical or whatever else Dare tried sticking me with, let’s just get back to the elephant in the room, shall we?

What does Microsoft do when it says “we have the most blogs?” Or, when it says really ANYTHING about its Internet services?

It takes them to advertisers and says “pony up, we know you paid MySpace ‘XXX’ and we have the most now, so we want ‘XXX+y’.” See, the little game we’re all playing in this Web 2.0 world is advertising.

The other little dirty secret of advertising? Not all readers are the same. Unfortunately if you’re an A List blogger it’s egotistical (and elitist) to point that out. Since Dare pulled out the ad hominem card already might as well slap this elephant in the ass and make it sing!

Quick. Is Jeff Jarvis worth more or less to an advertiser than this guy? Or this? Or this?

I’ll tell you what executives from big companies (like Kraft, Procter and Gamble, GM, and others) who were at MSN’s OWN ADVERTISING CONFERENCE told me. An influencer is worth THOUSANDS of times more than a non-influencer (influencer is someone who tells other people stuff, which is why blogging is getting so much advertising attention lately). That’s why Google is charging more per click than MSN is (Google has more influential users). That’s why Federated Media is closing advertising deals left and right.

And, why Microsoft’s shareholders are totally uninterested in the fact that Live Spaces has 70 million spaces (you’d think that with such rapid growth that shareholders would be cheering and would be preparing for an advertising profit windfall and that they wouldn’t have balked with Ballmer told them “I’m spending $2 billion of your cash.”

You’re right Dare. Maybe I’m childish. But I’m tired of being told that bloggers don’t matter. Which is what the Live employee told me yesterday. And it’s what you and Mike are saying today. Mike even repeated it just today on his blog. Read his post very carefully. He is saying that bloggers don’t matter. Why did he do that? Well, he’s trying to take the high road and trying to tell people that his service is hip and for them, not like that lamo “MySpace” thing, which is for kids and musicians with weird hair. Not like that “blogging” thing, which is for those elitist “A listers.” He’s positioning Spaces for normal, everyday people.

Which would be great if his marketing department didn’t run counter to his positioning by showing up at BlogHer (totally explains why Live Spaces’ presentation was totally derided by people who were there) and by his executives who try to position Live Spaces to advertisers as “blogs” so that they can get the high CPM ($$$ per thousands of viewers) that bloggers are getting right now.

This is why I’m being called childish, narrow minded, and petty right now. I dared to not let them have it both ways. Either they have most of their inventory done by “normal, everyday people” that’s empty, like every single blog on their service I found today, or they have a “hip, cool, influential” service, like Wordpress, SixApart, Flickr, Technorati, and Blogger have.

You can’t have it both ways. Well, actually, Six Apart is getting it both ways. They have Moveable Type and TypePad and they have Vox, which is aimed at “normal, everyday people.”

Well, this childish, narrowminded, egotistical blogger is heading off to bed. It’ll be a fun day tomorrow when I get more ad hominem attacks hurled my way.

Why my ego never gets out of control…

Cause if it does get out of control everyone jumps on it and kicks it in the groin. Like this:

Jeff Sandquist: “Seriously Robert, get over yourself already. A blog that is private is still a blog.” Well, that might be true, but then every Web page out there is a blog cause we can’t define what a blog means. Most people I hang around know what you mean when you say “I just blogged.” And, no, most people don’t think that you put a page up for your mom only to read after she types in a password.

Jeff, is an intranet page the same as an Internet page? So, why shouldn’t there be a different word for a blog that lives inside a corporate or personal firewall?

And, OK, I’ll grant you that my ego is out of control. Blogging is something I’m a weeeeee bit of an expert on. Do you listen to anonymous jerks who come in your office and try to tell you what a good community is or what good software looks like? So, why do you quote such when trying to argue against me?

You wouldn’t THINK of using such a wishywashy quote to convince Bill Gates of something (and you would have kicked me out of your office if I said “this anonymous guy over there said you’re wrong”). Why do you allow such on your blog but not in your office?

UPDATE: Maryam just said “I think you’re full of it. I think you’re picking on the Spaces team because they are easy to pick on. Why don’t you go pick on someone who is hard to pick on?” (She was just screaming because her Mac didn’t display her blog properly).

“Where’s the blog?” in Windows Live Spaces?

Remember those old Wendy’s commercials where an old lady yelled “where’s the beef?”

Well, let’s play “where’s the blog?”

First, let’s pull up a list of the most recently posted Windows Live Spaces. I did at 8:29 p.m., which is where this list came from. It didn’t really matter, though. I’ve been watching for the past few hours and the results are pretty much the same.

Aside: as a “blog service” Live Spaces is DAMN SLOW.

http://amerinriocranival.spaces.live.com/blog/ SAYS “there are no entries in this blog.”
http://brandenbrandenpilot.spaces.live.com/blog/ has one entry for August. None for July.
http://ebad1978.spaces.live.com/blog/ has only one entry.
http://attractive55.spaces.live.com/blog/ SAYS “there are no entries in this blog.”
http://tukisasmith.spaces.live.com/blog/ SAYS “there are no entries in this blog.”
http://fangxiaozheng.spaces.live.com/blog/ SAYS “there are no entries in this blog.”
http://bebe-1407.spaces.live.com/blog/ SAYS “there are no entries in this blog.”
http://xacskater.spaces.live.com/blog/ SAYS “there are no entries in this blog.”
http://irishyankeegirl75.spaces.live.com/blog/ has only one entry, not narrative, though.
http://wwwsu357wut.spaces.live.com/blog/ SAYS “there are no entries in this blog.”
http://kazkazy.spaces.live.com/blog/ has only one entry (an eighth grader).
http://alejandrajara2000.spaces.live.com/blog/ SAYS “there are no entries in this blog.”
http://jasminefarfar.spaces.live.com/blog/ has only one entry, a photostory with no text.
http://guozhichina.spaces.live.com/blog/ has only one entry, a single line of Chinese text.
http://msstarryeyes.spaces.live.com/blog/ FIRST TWO POST BLOG! But one is about how much the poster loves her cats.
http://ingridcita281.spaces.live.com/blog/ has only one entry, but it’s a grouping of photos, no text.
http://dukezh.spaces.live.com/blog/ SAYS “There are no entries in this blog.”
http://givemeheal.spaces.live.com/blog/ SAYS “There are no entries in this blog.”
http://zuki21sr.spaces.live.com/blog/ SAYS “There are no entries in this blog.”
http://ccnaples.spaces.live.com/blog/ has only one post saying he’s not going to keep going if Microsoft’s terms of service say that Microsoft owns his content.
http://stbrcks.spaces.live.com/blog/ has two entries, both photo groups. No text.
http://pebblesstone.spaces.live.com/blog/ has one entry, but first thing that actually looks like a blog. But, low octane post all about her kids.
http://joanajusto.spaces.live.com/blog/ has one entry with nothing in it but a comment in Spanish.
http://soccerluver7.spaces.live.com/blog/ has one entry with one line of text which cracked me up: “I’m bored” it says. Tell me about it! Nice soccer background, though.
http://elchekojando.spaces.live.com/blog/ SAYS “There are no entries in this blog.”
http://jay-braaks.spaces.live.com/blog/ SAYS “There are no entries in this blog.”
http://brisoncar.spaces.live.com/blog/ SAYS “no friends have been added yet.”
http://7debora.spaces.live.com/blog/ SAYS “There are no entries in this blog.”
http://yjiang20.spaces.live.com/blog/ SAYS “There are no entries in this blog.”
http://hmsgurl.spaces.live.com/blog/ has one entry that says “Hey!” Hey yourself and write a post.
http://alwayswiggles4u.spaces.live.com/blog/ has one entry that says “two brats are better than one.” No, you got that wrong. Two posts are better than one!
http://kakakakakkfheg.spaces.live.com/blog/ has one entry that says “I love Cortnie.” Why, did she post to her blog?
http://muayad86.spaces.live.com/blog/ SAYS “There are no entries in this blog.”
http://montoyita16.spaces.live.com/blog/ SAYS “There are no entries in this blog.”
http://sarah0720.spaces.live.com/blog/ has three posts, but none originally done, just reprints of “this day is your birthday” kind of stuff.
http://nancynuke.spaces.live.com/blog/ SAYS “There are no entries in this blog.”
http://psyct-up-space.spaces.live.com/blog/ SAYS “There are no entries in this blog.”
http://delreepy.spaces.live.com/blog/ SAYS “There are no entries in this blog.”
http://lilsuntych07basketball.spaces.live.com/blog/ SAYS “There are no entries in this blog.”
http://ten2downtown.spaces.live.com/blog/ has two friends, but no blog. Isn’t that special?
http://yhosvelito.spaces.live.com/blog/ SAYS “There are no entries in this blog.”
http://whoisyourdaddy0.spaces.live.com/blog/AccessDenied.aspx?space=whoisyourdaddy0 access denied!
http://09151989.spaces.live.com/blog/ has one post that says “this blog is intentionally left blank.” Oh, thank you! I might have gotten confused about that and thought it was blank by accident.
http://bibliofly.spaces.live.com/blog/ has one post, just a repost of something on MSNBC.
http://rasiya.spaces.live.com/blog/ has one post, just a group of photos.
http://emythepiggy.spaces.live.com/blog/ has one post, just says “first day of school was stupid.” Yes, apparently.
http://tf-live.spaces.live.com/blog/ has one post with some naughty words.
http://carbendink.spaces.live.com/blog/ has one post with one word: “hey.” Is this code for “Scoble is stupid for trying this.”
http://anandthakker.spaces.live.com/blog/ SAYS “There are no entries in this blog.”
http://campbell1959.spaces.live.com/blog/ has two posts about summer vacation and the poster’s dog.

So, that’s 50 posts. None of which have anthing like a blog that I usually read, but let’s assume I’m an elitist toad and that I should read any blog with two posts or more. That leaves one blog out of the past hour’s worth of posts! That, for those doing the math at home would come out to 2%.

I’m tired. These things took more than an hour to do because the service is so slow. Gotta do other work. I’ll try to do the same for the other blog services (will need to take the posts off of weblogs.com cause they don’t expose their most recently posted the way Live Spaces does).

The blog counting game

Question: do these count as blogs?

http://isbeliamoorehead.spaces.live.com/
http://loveableleonamae.spaces.live.com/
http://lno-nd.spaces.live.com/
http://rocoko0525.spaces.live.com/

Question: if you’re an advertiser what kind of person do you want to reach? People who publish empty spaces like those? Or folks who publish real content and have real audiences?

So, when Microsoft says “we have the most blogs” does that even matter to ANYONE?

No. Advertisers see through that smoke screen. That’s why more and more money is pouring into real blog networks like B5 Media and Federated Media Publishing and AdBrite.

Just wondering how Microsoft defines “blogs” if they get on stage and say “we have more of them than anyone else?”

Are all blogs the same? Even ones that have no content in them? (By the way, a very high percentage of the “most recently published Live Spaces” are empty like this — I’ll give you a better count in a few).

Scoble says half of all Live Spaces aren’t blogs*

Update: Mike, in my comments, thinks my headline is sensationalistic and says he didn’t say they aren’t blogs. We disagree on what a blog is, which is what this whole post is about so I changed it to say that I said that half of all Live Spaces aren’t blogs.

Mike Torres of the Live Spaces team just said that more than half of all Live Spaces are private. Um, Mike, you DO realize that private Web spaces are NOT blogs, right?

In a ThinkWeek paper, accepted by Bill Gates, and discussed with him before MSN even started publishing Spaces (more than two years ago), we (not just me, but MS researchers too) defined blogging as having five things:

1) Easy to do reverse-chronilogical content display. Type in a box and hit publish. New stuff goes at the top of the page. Old stuff moves down.
2) Discoverable. Through search engines (I listed Google, Technorati, MSN, Yahoo, and a few others). I specifically mentioned a ping server as infrastructure too, ala Technorati or Weblogs.com. IE, blogs are public. I would go as far as saying that a site that does not ping a pingserver, like weblogs.com, is NOT a blog (private Web sites don’t ping weblogs.com and are NOT discoverable by search engines).
3) Social. I can track when you link to me from another domain, either through search engines, through trackbacks, or through my referer logs. (I can’t be social with private cross-domain spaces).
4) Permalinkable. I can send you a link directly to a post. (I can’t do that with private spaces).
5) Syndicatable. I can use a news aggregator to read your content, which lets me read a lot more blogs. (I can’t do that with private spaces).

So, half of all Live Spaces are NOT blogs. They are something else. How about we make up a name for them? “Plogs.” Not to mention but “blogs” got their name from Pyra’s Blogger, which complies with all these things.

I feel so strongly about this stuff that we put this into our book as a common definition of why Blogging is hot. If your tool or service doesn’t comply with all five of these things it might be very cool (and there might be a LOT of them) but you shouldn’t be able to claim that they are blogs.

Oh, geez, Marc Canter show remix

Hi Marc Canter! Yeah, I see you posting weird videos to blip.tv. Trying to distract me from exposing Live Spaces’ lack of real blogs. Getting in the way of real journalism. Can’t have THAT here on the blogs.

Yeah, you can distract me by writing “Scoble” on your blog. Technorati is an evil thing. If you link then you distract me twice. Once in my ego search in Technorati (Maryam watches there too) and once in my referer log which shows up everytime I go to Wordpress.com’s Dashboard.

It’s Sunday evening, though. Hope you’re similarly distracted!

Hmmm, who do I want to distract? Bhuvana Sundaramoorthy. He wrote an awesome post on common interview questions and went straight from the “Z list” to the “A list.” How do you do that? He caught a ride on the Digg express!

Oh, why not pander to the A list? I saw Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, at TechCrunch on Friday night. Distracted Kevin?

How about Doc Searls? I was just reading his blog and Seth Finkelstein and Dave Rogers are saying he’s some kind of gatekeeper of the “A list.” Wait a second, Doc didn’t link to Bhuvana?!? I guess that gatekeeper job isn’t as good a deal as Seth and Dave make it out to be.

I need Excel help, off to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

Update: I already got the cleaned file, thanks to several of my readers! Appreciate the help!

OK, I downloaded the latest change.xml file from weblogs.com. If you don’t know what weblogs.com is, this is a service that most weblog tools will “ping,” or let know that someone has just published.

In the early days of blogging Dave Winer and other bloggers would watch this page like a hawk since it would display when new people had just posted. Remember, when I started blogging there were only a couple of hundred bloggers with only a few dozen posts a day. You could read this page just like many of us read TechMeme or TailRank now.

Anyway, I just downloaded the last hour and there were more than 60,000 entries in that file. Whew! OK, I went through brute force and cleaned up just the “As.” Brute force means I just went through and deleted them by hand, not using any macro or scripts.

It’s taking too long to do it by hand (60,000 URLs is too many) and, anyway, it’d be fun to redo this test over and over to see if the numbers of blogs done from each service change depending on the day of week and time of day.

Anyway, here’s what I need done. This is a perfect job for Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. That service lets you spec out a small job, and get someone who has a little extra time to do it to do it for you for a reasonable fee.

On the other hand, I’ll also ask here. Here’s what I need:

1) Take my Excel .XLS file (I’ll clean it up and put it into a column for you) and delete all the URLs that don’t come from blogspot.com; wordpress.com; livejournal.com; spaces.live.com; typepad.com.

That’s it. Easy, huh? Should take one of the programmer types here a few minutes to write an Excel macro to do that. If you’d rather me just hand you a comma-delimited text file, I can do that too. Or, you can just go get the file yourself from weblogs.com (it’s an XML file) and clean it up yourself. I just need the URLs, I don’t care about anything else.

Is Microsoft really the largest blog vendor?

Microsofties take it on face value that they host the most blogs. They even love shoving it in your face. Yesterday someone who works on the Windows Live team was taunting me with “influentials don’t matter, we got to be #1 and we don’t care that there aren’t any influential bloggers using our stuff.”

I was asking them why so few bloggers at BlogHer or Gnomedex use Windows Live Spaces, which is Microsoft’s blog and photo sharing service.

Today I see that George Moore, General Manager of Windows Live, just told a crowd in New Zealand that Windows Live is “now the largest blogging service on the planet.” At least according to Richard MacManus, who I’ve found to accurately report past events, and who is at TechED in New Zealand.

So, that made me itch and when I have an itch I want to scratch it.

Here’s my what’s itching me:

1) Is Windows Live Spaces really used as a blog service very often?
2) Is Microsoft only counting when it’s used as a blog service, or is it counting all uses of Windows Live Spaces?
3) Do other services actually have more “real” blogs? At least percentagewise?

Now, I know that Wordpress.com (currently the service that most of the “in crowd” is recommending) only has about 300,000 blogs. Microsoft is claiming 72 million blogs.

So, over the next few hours I’m gonna do some analysis and see if I can find out how much overcounting there’s going on (there is SOME overcounting, based on my initial looks at http://spaces.live.com and http://www.weblogs.com — I see a whole bunch of things there that don’t look like blogs at all).

First, let’s define what a blog is, at least enough to count for this purpose.

1) Have original content. Spam blogs that are copied off of somewhere else don’t count.
2) Have at least 500 words of new text-based content every month. Things that look like Flickr streams aren’t blogs, sorry.
3) Have at least two posts in at least the past 30 days. If you aren’t posting, you’re not blogging.
4) I don’t care if you have comments, have trackbacks, have blogrolls, or any of that.

Here’s my methodology.
1) I’m going to pull the last hour’s worth of content that was published to each of the services, as reported to weblogs.com as of 3:52 p.m. today (before I post this so no one has time to monkey with the results).
2) I’m going to also visit the home pages of http://spaces.live.com and www.blogger.com and www.wordpress.com and www.typepad.com and report on the percentage of blogs that I find that have been published to their “most recently published” pages are actually blogs.

Add all those percentages together and find an average. Then take that average to the reported number of blogs on each service and see if Microsoft is still #1.

Does that sound like a good methodology? Any changes you’d make?

One thing that’ll be interesting is to compare the percentages today with percentages on, say, Wednesday since I’d expect more “everyday people” to be blogging today, while on Wednesday I’d expect to see more corporate bloggers, which, my thesis is, will skew more away from Windows Live Spaces.

What do you think?

What results do you expect to see from such an exercise?

Disclaimers, Maryam, my wife, uses Windows Live Spaces. I use Wordpress.com. Our book blog, Naked Conversations, is on Typepad. My son used to be on Google Blogger, but he is now on Wordpress.com too.

Google Writelys home new version of online word processor

Steve Newson talked about Boing Boing’s discussion of a new Google Writely (word processor for the Web) and then said something I found interesting cause I was thinking it too: “For now I’m going to stick with Live Writer…”

Why?

Cause I don’t use Wordprocessors much anymore and when I do (to print out a fax cover page, or something like that) then I just fire up my copy of Word 2003. Now, would I write a book in Writely? Maybe, it sure would have made collaborating with Shel Israel easier. But, really, what I wanted to do was just stay in my blog tool anyway.

The only reason we used Word was cause our publisher told us to. Hey, they were paying us money so we weren’t gonna argue with them.

One little aside: did you notice that Newsome didn’t link to Boing Boing? Damn, how did I find it? Easy, I subscribe to Boing Boing, by his talking about Boing Boing I just made sure to check out the Boing Boing feed and away we go. No link necessary.

Oh, there are some of you who don’t subscribe to Boing Boing? What kind of freaks are you? Heheh.

Anyway, back to Writely, why do I like offline editors better? They just feel better for editing blogs. Plus you get a separate icon on the Taskbar, so you can switch between browsing and editing without making a mistake (how many of us have stupidly clicked on something to watch our blog post disappear as the browser refreshes?)

I also like being offline incase Internet connectivity goes away. I’ve had it happen more than once that something goes wrong and my Web browser decides to refresh for some reason, wiping out a post.

It’s why offline is so good.

James says PodTech site sucks: I agree

We’re in the middle of a site redesign. PodTech’s site sucks, James Robertson says. I agree.

You’ll note I have been linking to everything BUT PodTech lately. Why? Cause PodTech will need to earn links just like everyone else.

The home page is a disaster. I can’t figure it out either. Funny enough, even inside a startup there are “portal vs blog” disagreements and just last week I’ve been involved in some meetings that reminded me a lot of executive review meetings at Microsoft — even in a startup you have to convince people that your way is the best. It’s why at Google and at Microsoft they measure measure measure everything. If you wanna go into Marissa Mayer’s office and tell her she’s wrong you BETTER have the proof to back up your theories.

I want a simple aggregator view on the home page. Something like the one on Share Your OPML. It’s ugly, yes (that can be fixed with the help of a good designer like Bryan Bell) but it works and it lets me fish through tons of posts.

Ugh, I just noticed the aggregator is busted there, gotta give Dave a call. But, you can see the format anyway.

It’s my thesis that people will scroll almost infinitely. Just give them high-quality stuff. At Microsoft they did research and found most people won’t click on the “next” button. But, they will scroll. You’ll notice that the search engine at live.com doesn’t ever end. If I remember the research right they are finding that people look at something like five times more information if it just keeps scrolling than if they have to click next.

But some of the team believe that everything needs to fit into one screenful. They want a portal model.

“But won’t people have trouble finding our other pages if there isn’t a link to everything we do?”

“Um, no, what do you think Google does?”

Google doesn’t use graphics. Doesn’t have long columns of text next to each other (Google goes vertical when it needs to present more information than fits in one screen — at least most of the time, Google News breaks that mold a little bit, but not really — even there it goes on to scroll baby scroll). Doesn’t do much of anything other than six simple text links.

How boring! Especially when compared to Yahoo’s home page, right? That uses graphics, tons of links, more graphics. More links.

Intuition would tell you that Yahoo’s page works better, right? Well, let’s examine some of the facts.

Compare Yahoo to Google’s stock chart. NOT BORING!!!

I’m gonna win this argument cause of that chart. Simple is better. Text links are better than graphic color crap (my eye filters out such as advertising, doesn’t yours?) People link more on simple blue-underlined text than on color crap. That’s why Google accidentally found its AdSense business model: they stopped to WATCH what the users actually DO, not what they WANTED the users to do.

One place a little bit of color does help, though, is the top news flag on MSNBC. I love that site. Why? Cause every few hours some editor in Redmond sits down, picks a story, then designs a photo flag for it with a headline and several links.

So, let’s compromise, I told the team. Do an MSNBC-style flag, with an aggregator underneath it. That way they get their editorial old-school style control and portal instincts fed, and I get my river of text and links, which makes users happy (anyone notice DIGG? Text and links baby! Oh, and with the usual rounded corner graphics. I’ll bet we have to pay some design house tens of thousands of dollars to come up with some rounded corner graphics. Heheh.

DIGG is growing faster percentagewise than any other site I know of. If you argue against Digg, you BETTER have those measurements to back up your claim. And saying “Yahoo has more viewers” is NOT a good argument. That’s like listening to DEC back in 1977 when the CEO there said the world doesn’t need personal computers.

Growth is more important, especially to a startup, because that’s where the opportunity to kick the old school in the groin exists.

Anyway, until we make the home page much more Google-like James will continue to be right: our home page sucks.

I’ll let you know when the redesign comes up. Until then, go watch Ze Frank or Rocketboom.

We still have the scars… (Jeremy wins award for killer business card)

Donna Bogatin, over on ZDNet asks what’s wrong with a little party? Or even a big one?

It’s cause we still have the scars from when we all partied in 1999 and then got laid off in 2000-02. So, we deal with those scars by being snarky about the 2006 series of parties.

It’s a defense mechanism so that if we get laid off again we can say “well, at least we saw it coming this time.” Of course, we’re working our behinds off trying to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.

Greg goes further and asks why are party mentions on top of TechMeme and isn’t there something more important to cover? He, too, makes it sound like TechMeme is done by human beings. It’s not. It’s done by the linking behavior of bloggers. If bloggers link to something it gets on TechMeme. It’s that simple.

And, of course when you have a party with 700 of the world’s best-known geeks it’s going to cause discussion on blogs. Duh.

I did want to point out that Jeremy Wright’s business card was custom done just for the TechCrunch party. That’s killer. He ordered them from Printing for Less (the ePrinting company we visited in Livingston, MT — I predict that PFL will be in BusinessWeek within six months, it’s a remarkable business, but I’m holding out what I learned from its CEO for my first show — Andrew is now my business hero, you’ll find out why on that show). I’ll have to add that tip from Jeremy onto my business card best practices. I’ll never forget where I got this card from Jeremy. He says it only costs $20 to do a set of cards for a big event. I also like that on the back he has some attitude and puts “kickass bloggers” to describe B5’s network. I’m gonna get some of my own cards done (hey, Hugh, wanna do me a PodTech card?)

Thanks to Irina Slutsky for keeping the Flickr stream for me so that I know what she’s doing without having to bug her — hey, I wonder if she will get hazard pay for dealing with Zombies? Can’t wait to see the interview with Linden Labs’ founder!

The Mojito Show (Saturday at 2 p.m. is next taping)

OK, I discovered a new interviewing technique.

You take VIPs to the very swanky Half Moon Bay Ritz (walking distance from our new house) and buy them Peach Mojitos. Not cheap for the expense budget (they cost $14 each, but are worth every dollar in the top secret information you get from business leaders). Then you take them out onto the back lawn, let them soak up the real estate (it’s stunning) and then you turn the camera on.

I’m gonna call it the Mojito Show. We don’t really care how it comes out cause we’re having too much fun.

Anyway, Jeremy Wright, president and co-founder of B5 Media (pictured above), just spent the day here at the Ritz and then at the house (which is in total disarray, hopefully Valleywag won’t get a picture of the house when it’s so messy).

What was fun was Don MacAskill, CEO and Chief Geek (can I get a title like that?) of SmugMug was vacationing at the Ritz with his wife (it’s their sixth anniversary, congratulations!) and saw my Google hat and wandered over. Later she took a nap and he snuck out to talk geek with us. I got that part on tape for my new show, hopefully it’ll come out (the mojitos might have affected the quality too much, but like I said, who cares, it’s Saturday and the mojitos were good!)

Anyway, I was trying to get Jeremy to tell me a bit about the secrets behind his B5 Media network. He wasn’t giving up the good stuff (at least on camera), but the stuff he gave up after his mojito was pretty interesting. He has about 100 bloggers in his network. Everyone from a gold medal swimmer to a group of scientists to a celebrity blog about Lindsay Lohan to someone who writes about RSS (who would read THAT? Heheh.)

He’s proudest of a couple of blogs that write about autism and diabetes.

OK, notice they all link to each other (look at the blog roll on the right side)? That’s the advantage to joining a blogging network: that gets them all more traffic. They get better Google rank that way, and they also share traffic. Jeremy told me that a good percentage of people who’ll visit one blog will visit other blogs.

Anyway, I learned that the celebrity blogs that B5 does are the most popular and are easy ways to earn traffic. I remember meeting Adriana Foley, the blogger who keeps 17 blogs, including the one on Linday Lohan. She actually says she hates doing the Lohan blog, but that’s what pays the bills so she does that to fund her other blogging.

Other things Wright shared after having his mojito? That Google Adsense advertising doesn’t pay bloggers as well as other advertising networks do. He says that most of the time Google only pays about $.50 per CPM (thousand page views). He says that B5 network is getting paid somewhere between $10 and $15 per CPM on most blogs. Has sponsors like Speedo.

He says his top bloggers are just now starting to earn enough to quit their day jobs ($1,000 to $4,000 per month) but that he hopes to be able to pay them a lot more soon.

Another advantage to joining a blogging network like Jeremy’s? The private chat rooms (hey, do you get to get blogging help from both a scientist and a gold-medal swimmer? Didn’t think so). He says the community that comes along with such a network is what keeps him excited working on behalf of the network.

As to Smugmug, Don told us both about how he has about 150,000 subscribers paying $40 a year to host photos on Smugmug. He raved about a bunch of features that Smugmug has over the other photo sharing services, but what caught my ear is the Google Map support that Smugmug has. That alone might get me to pay $40 a year.

Anyway, next Saturday we’re getting together at 2 p.m. at the firering at the Ritz. Several people have already RSVP’d. Bring $7 for parking and bring a jacket (it gets chilly outside). Anyone is invited although I might get you to drink an alcoholic drink and then turn on the camera and see what I can learn.

Oh, and, yes, there’s wifi at the Ritz. Next Saturday I’ll be the geek drinking the Mojitos. Oh, and we found out tonight that there’s a guy who plays bagpipes an hour before the sunset.

Hope your weekend is filled with Mojitos. See ya next Saturday! Disclaimer, I can’t buy everyone Mojitos, sorry.

Who else will be there? Oh, and Nick Douglas, you’re invited, we won’t have any security trying to keep you out. Just beware, I might hand you a mojito and put you on camera!

TechCrunched!

I’m still recovering from last night’s shindig. You know, what’s the deal with these parties? They are getting to be media events, that’s all. Be seen, and see. Take photos or videos, get videoed or photoed. Talk about tech? I tried. But it was just too noisy to have a decent conversation on video.

Don’t worry about missing these. They are just great ways to collect business cards and meet the hot geeks. The bubble is back!

Thanks to Scott Beale who was the official photographer and Thomas Hawk and Dan Farber and Gabe Rivera and the other people who put up photos. Here’s the photos that have been uploaded to Flickr with the TechCrunch7 tag.

Eddie says I have a cooler tripod than he does, mouse over this photo to see why.

First, stare into my lens and say hi!

This is me begging Nick Douglas, of Valleywag, to blog some dirt about my book co-author Shel Israel. Really, no. I was just asking him how he snuck into the party and what the story would be. He didn’t have a good answer to either. In between us is Gabe Rivera, founder of TechMeme. He explained a little bit about how TechMeme works. Lots of people think he does that site by hand I learned. Not true. It’s all algorithms baby!

Guy Kawasaki is always the life of the party. Whenever he’s around you feel good.

Thomas Hawk captures me with the man of the evening: Mike Arrington, founder of TechCrunch. Lots of people were asking me about the “Oakridge” Apple shirt. Oh, that’s from the Apple store opening at Oakridge Mall in Silicon Valley. It was my way of saying “I don’t go for the status stores like Palo Alto or San Francisco but go for the ghetto Valley Apple stores. Of course Oakridge isn’t too ghetto anymore (I once worked at a camera store in that mall and my dad lives a mile or so away). I wore the Apple shirt so my son, Patrick, would think I was “cool” cause he thinks everything from Apple is cool. I’m such a sell out. I can just hear Patrick saying “dad, a shirt won’t make you cool.”

And another one from Flickr:

Speaking of Mike, he was having a good time posing for pictures.

What happens when you open a laptop at a party like this? Funding event!

Hi boss! Damn you, use both hands like I showed you. Otherwise you get too much camera shake on those little Samsung Sanyo Xacti cameras. (They are fun, cause they record straight to SD cards which makes your workflow a lot nicer, just drag onto Blip.TV and you have a video blog).

The music was cool, thanks to Tom Conrad, this guy, of Pandora.

TechCrunch 7 food was better and more plentiful than earlier Crunch parties, but nothing spectacular so don’t feel jealous. The wine, though, was great and I got a poster designed by Hugh Macleod, marketing genius.

Why conferences don’t allow kids…

I’m hearing from a bunch of conference planners that most conferences don’t allow kids cause it costs extra to hire more security guards if you allow them (that’s Moscone’s policy, one conference planner just told me, which matches other feedback I’ve heard). Microsoft’s PDC had the same policy. Turns out the conference venues are afraid of being sued so they ban kids unless you take additional measures, which cost money, so most conference planners don’t do it.

Funny aside: one year a 12-year-old showed up at our VBITS (Visual Basic Insiders’ Technical Summit) with his dad. Turned out he had already scored a perfect 1600 on the SAT, had already been accepted to college, and had been programming since he was four years old. I wonder what he’s doing today?

Sorry for picking on LinuxWorld, but they could have made a funnier sign and demonstrated some humor. Expect such things to get on Flickr in the future.

Richard tells me to explain my view on Google Calendar

Richard Brownell had a good point in my comments a few minutes ago:

“Robert. Maybe I’m being greedy, but could you let us loyal readers know what is missing from Google Calendar? I don’t use it (though I have toyed with it), but I’d like to know what Outlook does better. If I just wanted to hear somebody say they “hate hate hate” something, I’d read a livejournal or a myspace blog

Someone on the Google Calendar team just wrote me and asked the same thing.

Sometimes I forget that people are actually reading my ranting and expect more than just “I hate it.”

So, let’s dig in. First, I have to explain my biases. I’ve been using Microsoft Outlook since it was Microsoft Mail and Schedule Plus. Funny story, if you work inside Microsoft and you want to schedule someone for a meeting you say “I’ll S+ you” not “I’ll Outlook you.” Now you know where the “S+” lingo came from.

That, alone, demonstrates the problem that the Google Calendar team is up against: human behavior. We hate changing, particularly something that is used so often as a calendar app (I use it CONSTANTLY).

That’s another bias. My calendar has to be available and trustworthy. Everywhere. Not just when I’m hooked up to the Internet. Outlook is. If my computer stops working my SmartPhone still has my calendar. If my computer isn’t on wifi or I’m too lazy to plug in my Verizon card Outlook still has my calendar.

So, I’m biased against Google from the start. Sorry, but I am. And most normal non-geek people will be too. I watch how people use computers in airports and Outlook is the most used app that I see.

OK, now that you know my bias, there’s a few other things I’ve found.

1) In Outlook my email and my calendar are integrated. Here’s something I learned long ago. If you send me an email saying “can we meet for breakfast tomorrow at 9 a.m. at the Ritz in Half Moon Bay” I can just drag that email to my calendar button in Outlook and it’ll add a calendar item automatically. In Google’s system? I haven’t figured out how to do something like that, so I’ll need to copy the email from Gmail or from Outlook and then paste it into Google Calendar. Outlook is simpler.

2) Enterprise Contact management. When I got to Microsoft every single employee was autoloaded into Outlook thanks to Exchange. I just typed “Bill Gates” into Outlook, hit Alt-K to parse it into an email address (if he no longer worked there it wouldn’t parse, so I’d know whether or not it’d work), and away we went.

3) Scheduling coworkers for a meeting. OK, I want to meet with John Furrier on Monday at 10 a.m. So, I add john@podtech.net into Google Calendar’s “create event” page (I clicked on “create event” to get there). But where the hell is his calendar? Oh, I have to click on a separate “manage calendar” and look up his calendar separately. In Outlook it just shows me under scheduling tab whether or not he’s available for a meeting or not (again, need Exchange for this to work, but most companies have that, all three of my prior companies had it).

4) Google tries to be too smart. I accidentaly click on the calendar somewhere and it assumes I want to create an event so it pops up a dialog. Aarrgghh. On the other hand, when you get used to this it makes it easier to create an event than the Outlook model of click, drag, right-click and choose “New Appointment.”

I’ll do some more thinking about this as I use it more over the next weeks (this was really my first full-time week using it) and see how my opinion changes.

One thing that’ll dramatically change it? When my Mac arrives (I’ve bought it, but it hasn’t arrived yet). Working cross-platform will probably frustrate me greatly which will swing me back to Google since that should work the same on both Mac and Windows.

Another thing that is great about Google Calendar? It’s free and usable by anyone. Outlook and Exchange are not things you get for free.

What about you? What do you like or hate about Google Calendar?

What would you like to see in future Google Calendars?