The rumor game can mislead a lot of people. All day long I was hearing about MyBlogLog being acquired by Yahoo. Turns out it’s not true (the original TechCrunch article has now been updated).

Lately I’ve been telling people that I start out very skeptical about what I read in blogs and my skepticism goes down after 24-hours. I find that if something untrue is reported on blogs that the company usually lets the blogosphere know (and they should!)

But, if something is true? They stay quiet.

One other thing? Never expect bloggers to do fact checking or original reporting. Even me. But if a blog survives 24-hours without anyone refuting the facts? That’s when rumors turn to belief.

Brad Baldwin of Rocky Mountain Voices was hanging out with me today and told me about this story. Actually, you can check it out for yourself on PodTech, or over on the Rocky Mountain Voices blog. (They got interviews with the people involved).

But, here’s the short version of the story.

There was a company that made industrial blenders. One day the CEO was trying to find new ways to test the blender. That gave another employee an idea “video the tests and put them on You Tube.”

Five days later their little video series (they blend things like marbles, full cans of Coke, rake handles, and other weird stuff) was viewed five million times and had 10,000 comments.

That was a month ago. Cost $50. Crazy. But I want one of those blenders. Imagine the margaritas!

Two years ago I was over talking with the Xbox team and some of the folks over there explained the facts of life to me, which came back to me after reading that Bill Gates is very happy where he is right now. They were explaining why they were in a race with Sony to get the Xbox 360 done before Sony could ship its unit. At that time they expected Sony to ship at the same time as the 360.

They told me how console business works and why you need a console on the market for four years to make money.

Why?

1) Cost for the unit declines over time and you need that fourth year for Moore’s law to really kick in.
2) Attach rate (er, games sold per console) goes way up in fourth year.

They told me that’s why Xbox 1 lost so many billions of dollars.

The two graphs:

First year, you’ll lose $200 per machine (Sony is supposedly losing $300 on PlayStation 3).
Second year, you’ll lose $150.
Third year, you’ll lose $100 (although price will probably drop too).
Fourth year, you’ll lose $25 to $50, or if market conditions are good, you might even break even.

That’ll be offset by what the industry calls attach rate.

First year attach rate? Xbox is seeing something around eight games, if I remember right, and a pretty good run rate on Xbox Live, too (I’ve bought eight Live games, for instance, in addition to the seven games I have sitting at home).
Second year will see an additional three to four games. Each game is worth somewhere around $10 to $20 worth of revenue (out of a $60 game, I’d guess $20 goes to retailer, $4 goes to distributor, $20 goes to game manufacturer, and rest goes to Microsoft for licensing fees). So, to recoup that $200 lost on each console Microsoft needs to sell something like 15 games.
Third year, another three to four games (maybe more, cause by then there’ll be a huge market of consoles and game manufacturers will have built efficiencies so can kick out new games faster.)

So, if you have your console for three years, you’ve probably bought the 15 games that Microsoft needed to sell to break even. What happens in the fourth year? You buy games #16, #17, #18 and Microsoft (or Sony) starts making huge profits.

The Sony Playstation 2 is on its fourth/fifth year right now, which is why that’s a cash-generating machine. Xbox 1 never got more than three years, which is why that lost billions.

It’ll be interesting to see whether Sony can break this cycle and get more games sold per box (if Sony really is losing $300 per box it sells, it needs to see an attach rate that’s higher than Xbox to have any chance of breaking even).

So, why did Microsoft make this bet? To keep Microsoft’s foot in your livingroom. As more and more people get HDTVs that foot is going to be mighty important.

What do you think?

Hugh Macleod’s cartoons get me to smile.

I was just over at Robyn Tippins blog. She blogs for B5 Media and reports that Duncan Riley, vice president of development for B5 Media has left B5.

Amazing that there’s nothing about this on Jeremy Wright’s blog (he’s one of the founders of B5). Nor is there anything over on B5’s site itself. Nor is there anything about this over on Rick Segal’s blog (he’s one of the VC’s who funded B5, although he has an interesting piece about entrepreneurs who start acting like employees, which might be giving some hints about what happened here). UPDATE 3: Jeremy Wright tells me that Rick’s post was not connected with Duncan leaving.

Calling Nick Denton. Calling Nick Denton.

UPDATE: I’m not the only one asking this. Munir Umrani, AKA the Blogging Journalist, is asking similar questions.

UPDATE 2: The B5 Media blog does have a mention of Duncan’s leaving. Comments are interesting there too.

My thoughts? I enjoyed Duncan’s work through the years. Hey, Duncan, you any good with a video camera?

What do you think of my link blog? Should I keep doing it? I’ve found it fun to do. It forces me to read my feeds (and I’ve been subscribing to more lately) but wonder if you get any utility from it?

How many pages do you read on it? Every day I probably post about 50 items or so. Yesterday alone, for instance, I posted 60 items. That means you gotta click on six “more shared items” links.

Speaking of all this TechMeme horsey business today I’m taking my camcorder over to chat with Kevin Burton, founder of TechMeme competitor TailRank.

What would you like to ask Kevin?

Then, after that, we head over to the SF airport to pick up Chris and Ponzi, who are spending the weekend at the ScobleHaus. I hear we’re going to some bar on Saturday that would have gotten on Valleywag before it gave up its sex focus (which I don’t really believe cause they had pictures of Naked Jen on there).

Yes, it’s the Pirillo bridal party. Or, as Maryam puts it, this is the “pre-plunge party.”

Reports that we’re going to the Laughing Squid party on Saturday night are total unsubstantiated rumors. If we do get there it’ll almost certainly be on Valleywag (Chris has already been on there totally naked, I hope we can convince him to keep his clothes on, but if he takes them off I’m definitely writing something on his chest).

Damn, there’s so much going on this weekend. PodCamp West is in San Francisco too.

Personally, I’m a fan of Mad Mojitos. See ya at the Half Moon Bay Ritz. We’ll be the geeks. If you can’t pick us out of the crowd you just aren’t trying hard enough.

Geesh.

You’d think that getting on TechMeme improves your sex life or makes you money or something the way a small group of bloggers are bleating on and on about how TechMeme is unfair or how it’s a travesty that you can get added to TechMeme’s set of algorithm’s just by linking to TechMeme and proving you have enough traffic.

Me? I’ve been on TechMeme dozens of times. All it’s earned me is grief.

Are you worried about the elitism of A list jerks like me?

Then FREAKING LINK TO NEW BLOGGERS THAT WE HAVEN’T HEARD ABOUT YET!!!

That’s how you take down the A list. Link, baby, link!

What I find ironic is everyone who complains about TechMeme does nothing but link to TechMeme. They don’t link to a single new and unknown blogger.

Here’s an example. Today Ross Mayfield told me about this cool new site where you can share your PowerPoint slides: SlideShare.net.

Oh, sorry, I’m not playing the game right, am I?

Turns out if you attack the power structures of the Web you’ll get more links than if you just share cool new sites and link to them.

Sigh.

What do I know, I’m just a tired old A-list jerk…

Thanks to Hugh Macleod for the cartoon.

What would it take to land Jason Calacanis, GM of AOL? Valleywag called here today, I hear, and tried to find out if he’d be coming to PodTech.

Oh, that’d be fun, but come on, why would Jason want to play in someone else’s pond? If I were in his position I’d start something new.

If the rumors of Jason leaving AOL are true, AOL just got a lot more uninteresting.

UPDATE: Jason confirmed he is leaving AOL. Beet.TV reports that Egadget’s Peter Rojas is staying at AOL.

Got a few cool videos up today on ScobleShow. First, a couple from my tour through Zillow. There’s the dev team (sorry the audio was a bit bad at first, but it gets better after the first few minutes) where we talk about what development trends inside the Web 2.0 business and then we meet the CFO and talk about a range of things about Zillow’s business. That dude is smart. Zillow was just named to Ad Age’s “Marketing 50″ too.

In a separate video we hang out with SayNow’s CEO, Nikhyl Singhal, who tells us about some new community-building features that SayNow has shipped for MySpace users.

I’m sitting on a sidewalk with the first 30 people who’ve been waiting in line since yesterday (PlayStation 3’s go on sale at midnight). There are about 700 people in line at San Francisco’s Metreon. The lines are longer than most of the Xbox events I remember. Supposedly they have 500 for sale, but no one is releasing the real number.

They are closing four streets for a concert in front of the Metreon at 6 p.m. tonight. They aren’t releasing the names of the bands, but it’s pretty clear this won’t be a high school band playing.

The Sony marketing machine is here in force. It’s all out mania.

If anyone tells me HDTV doesn’t have economic power all they have to do is come to the Metreon. $600 a piece. You are already too late to buy one.

I’m not in line. I’m going to interview Ross Mayfield, wiki pioneer.

So, the secret is out, I was the mystery blogger over on the Intel blogger challenge. They offered me a really nice Sony laptop, but I turned it down and did this for free. Call me a sucker but I thought the project was fun enough to participate in without compensation. It is a nice laptop, though. I’ll write more about that later — our deal was that it’s a demo loaner for a month. We’re covering several questions like “why do you blog, what’s your favorite blog, etc.”

Heheh, this is scary. A whole videowall widget of nothing but folks who like to talk a lot — as shared over on Beet.TV. Hey, I’m on there! Yak. Yak. Yak. Cool widget!

Tomorrow night I’ll be on the radio with GoDaddy’s CEO. You can listen in.

Here’s the details:

7pm Pacific Time
Listen live at 7pm Pacific Time on the Web site at lifeonline.com AND on Sirius 102
OR at 10pm Pacific on XM 171.
Call in Number: Ask us Questions - 888-880-4004.

Leo Laporte gets a little hungry. Heheh.

Cool photos over on the Channel 9 forum of tonight’s UndoTV party in Toronto. Taken by the famous Jamie who draws the very funny GooglePark cartoons. Hey, Jamie, when we gonna get another one?

And, no, Leo, it doesn’t go in your ear either!

I just learned about this recently. Did you know you can go to:

http://www.wordpress.com/tag/xxxxx

Replace xxxxx with a tag you’re interested in, say, “tech” and you’ll get everyone on Wordpress.com (out of more than 400,000 blogs, with tens of thousands of posts per day) who just used the tech tag on a post.

Yes, in case you’re wondering, you can use “sex” as a tag.

What is your favorite tag?

Make Magazine uses Instructables to teach its readers how to do something. You can see Instructables on LunchMeet, which was filmed last week at the Web 2.0 conference.

And in my previous post I have a bad URL. I’m getting that fixed (it’s for the Windows crash team). So, don’t try to watch that video. Sorry about that.

Having Christopher Coulter is paying dividends already. I have four videos up today:

An interview/tour with Trulia’s CEO (that’s a real-estate Web 2.0 site).
A demo of Trulia done by its CEO.
A Channel 9 style meeting with the Microsoft team that handles all the crash data from Windows. If you’re an ISV you’ll want to watch this one.
An interview with “tech momma” Sue Polinsky.

It’s the ScobleShow. Us Scobles have been busy! Doing our best to fill up your hard drives with interesting stuff. Oh, now I understand why Seagate sponsored my show.

We had such a great time at the Converge South conference. Sue Polinsky, one of the organizers, had us stay in her home and we learned she’s a pretty interesting lady who’s had her fingers in all sorts of stuff in Greensboro (walking around town with her made us realize just how respected she is). Maryam had a fun interview with her.

So, what should I do with the two Zunes today to test them out? Well, I didn’t open them last night. This morning I came in and brought them to an interview at Retrevo where we opened them for the first time and then spent more than an hour playing with them and passing them around the engineering team and talking about the first impressions of the Zune. Retrevo is a gadget search engine that’s pretty interesting. They say it’s the ultimate consumer electronics search engine.

Here’s their engine’s result set for Zune.

There’s eight guys from the Retrevo team including engineers, marketers, and the CEO, Vipin Jain.

First off disaster. The one Microsoft loaded had an error on it and needed to be rebooted, which deleted all the content on it. (One was opened and loaded by Microsoft with more content, that one arrived with an error on its screen. The other one, unopened by Microsoft, worked perfectly).

We fixed that and then started playing. The install took more than 15 minutes.

What do the geeks at Retrevo think?

Andrew Eisner (who used to be in charge of testing for ZDLabs and also ran MacUser labs) says that the radio wasn’t very good. Needed to walk over by the window to use it. But, that’s unscientific.

The entire team has iPods. So, this is an experienced music player group. The team says they are all gadget freaks, which is why they work at a gadget search engine.

Other reactions?

Box? The external box is great, Charles Wilson says.

The feel of the Zune? Great. “Brown is the new black,” Matthew Stotts says. We have one brown and one black. It feels a lot nicer than it looks on the Web. Nice anti-scratch design. “I like the translucence,” Charles says.

Interface? Scroll wheel? Matthew says he instantly tried to use it like an iPod. Was disappointed that it didn’t work.

Volume? Andrew says that the volume didn’t go loud enough.

Music sharing? They are playing with it right now. Figuring out how to send it took a few minutes. Actually sending a song took less than a minute. “It’s quick,” Charles says.

Screen quality? “Pretty good,” says Kirk Chen. “Nice looking,” Andrew says. “Better than the iPod,” says Jiang Wu. “For cartoons this screen is great,” Jiang says.
Smudging (we’re eating pizza). “No smudging,” Andrew says.

Overall feature set? “Doesn’t seem like there’s much to it,” Andrew says, which starts a discussion of what else the team would want. Games.

Video? “Not bad.” Being able to spin the screen is a nice touch Vipin says. They note that my videos that I’m filming won’t be able to be played (I record in Quicktime). On the other hand, my videos don’t currently work on iPod either (I need to re-compress them for the smaller size and format that the iPod needs.

Case? “Sensual feel,” Charles says. It’s a soft bag.

Sharing of video? Doesn’t work yet.

Andrew notes that you can’t record from radio. “Other MP3 players let you do that,” he says.

“How zune will it be hacked?” Andrew says. “If people can write third-party applications for it then you’d see people writing open-source browsers and other applications.”

Battery? Can’t be replaced and the case isn’t designed to be opened (at least that we could figure out).

We couldn’t test whether or not a ripped MP3 could be shared.

Andrew wonders how it works with podcasts (he listens to TWiT and NPR, among others).

Ruggedness? It seems more rugged, Vipin says.

Overall impression? “I don’t like the bulkiness,” Vipin says. “If I were a pre-teen or teen and I didn’t have an iPod, I’d buy this. Mostly for the sharing features,” Matthew says. Overall, though, the team gave it thumbs down compared to the iPod. But, not a strong thumbs down. It did — at minimum — intrigue them.

If you don’t know what OOBE stands for, that’s “Out Of Box Experience.”