Content and services

Competition is a wonderful thing. As NetFlix and Blockbuster battle each other over customers for mail-based DVD movies, Blockbuster has purchased a company called MovieLink to compete with the NetFlix movie download service. The acquisition is particularly interesting because MovieLink has license agreements with several major movie studios, which are worth a lot more than any technology and systems the company might have in place.

This article suggests that Microsoft may be planning to build adware right into the Windows operating system. The software giant has filed a patent that would use the kinds of files you have stored on your hard drive to determine what kind of ads are displayed in your Web browser.

Privacy online is the same kind of oxymoron as "jumbo shrimp," meaning you should take the phrase with a grain of salt. The recent Miss America flap is a perfect illustration of the perils of taking online privacy for granted. Miss America had marked some photos on her Facebook page "private," but some people were able to access them anyway. The embarrassing pictures almost caused her to lose her crown.

ebay pulled all its ads from Google because Google is trying to compete with eBay's PayPal with a Google-branded payment system. However, that is not the story. The story is what happened after the ads were pulled: Nothing. Traffic to eBay dropped only a tiny amount, and eBay probably had a net gain because they saved money by not paying for Google ads.

I have long wished there was some easy way to watch YouTube on TV at home. I just don't have time to waste at work looking at clips people send me, and I rarely feel like spending more time in front of the computer in the evenings. But there is a lot of interesting stuff on YouTube, ranging from current political clips and commentary to how-to videos and of course, some pretty funny stuff. And no annoying commercials (yet).

The New York Times (registration required, links disappear) has an article about the plunging fortunes of the music industry. Sales of CDs have fallen more than 20% in the past year. While the article does acknowledge that a lack of good music may have something to do with it, no mention is made of the possible effect price also has on buying decisions. Most new CDs cost $18 and up.

Anyone who worries about government snooping has not been paying much attention to Google and it's long term goal of "total information" about every single person on the planet. The Google founders are becoming wierdly creepy with their happy talk discussions of wanting to tell people "what job to take" and "what to do tomorrow."

Digital Rights Management (DRM) may be on its way out. Amazon has announced it intends to get into the music business and will offer only digital tunes that do not have DRM, which limits what buyers can do with the music.

The Web has been a good place to do product research for the past four or five years, but a couple of recent experiences trying to check on a couple of consumer products has me wondering. What I noticed is that the first couple of pages of Google search results were almost all link farms and link aggregators, meaning there was not really any content on any of the pages, but just links to other pages, and most of them also turned out to be just lists of links.

Stuart Mease of the City of Roanoke and Roanoke Biz2Biz organized a terrific workshop on bloggers and blogging yesterday. I was invited to speak there, along with folks like Pat Matthews, Tom Markiewicz, and Keith Clinton.

I was at a regional bloggers conference yesterday, where several bloggers spoke about blogging and the value of bloggers to the community as well as the value of business-oriented blogs. One of the invited speakers was a local TV newsperson who has a fairly lightweight blog, and while this person started off talking about blogging, they quickly veered into a fingerpointing lecture about how "real" journalists have gone to journalism school and are trained in the ethics of reporting the news. It went downhill from there.

Viacom is suing Google over unauthorized video clips on Google's recently acquired YouTube. YouTube fans record clips from their favorite shows (including many shows owned and produced by Viacom), and post them on YouTube for other people to watch. Part of what is going on is the fact that Viacom just bought into Joost, a YouTube competitor that will carry all of Viacom's content. So the lawsuit has two purposes: protect Viacom's intellectual property but also drive people to Joost.

Jimmy Wales, the guy behind Wikipedia, is developing an open source search engine that will be ready for testing later this year. It would be nice to see some competition to the commercial engines, some of which have a bit too much advertising. An open source search engine might still need ads to survive, as the cost of indexing a portion of the Web and then dishing out results without bogging down requires a lot of hardware and even more electricity, to say nothing of a massive connection to the Internet.

I recently installed an 'ebook' reader on my Palm Treo. I went to the Palm Web site where they have lots of ebooks for sale, but the prices are quite silly. Recent releases--the books you are most likely to want to read on an airplane--are priced at about what you would pay for a paper copy on Amazon or some other big box book store. Some books are as little as five dollars, and many others are ten dollars or more. "Classic" books have even more baffling prices. Daniel Defoe's "A Journal of the Plague Year" cost ten dollars, while a much more recent book, H.

Joost, a video streaming start up long the lines of YouTube, may be poised for rapid growth. Frustrated with YouTube's lack of attention to copyright, media giant Viacom has signed a deal with Joost to host Viacom's extensive catalogue of music and TV shows (including MTV, among others). It is not so much the redistribution of copyrighted material that has been bugging Viacom--instead, the company just wants its fair share of the ad revenue.

Second Life is an online virtual game/social networking environment--think multi-player Sims. As a Second Life player, you can buy real estate and open a business, among all sorts of other things to do. Some people have made a little money selling virtual "things" (an oxymoron of sorts) to other players. You can create your own stuff, but some people prefer to avoid the effort and sometimes substantial technical knowledge needed to do that and just buy stuff from other players.

Someone has finally found something good about playing video games for hours on end. Engadget reports that surgeons who relax by playing video games are better at what they do in the operating room. The improvement, unsurprisingly, is most noticeable when performong laproscopic surgery, where they manipulate tiny tools while watching a video screen. It is hardly worth getting excited about it though.

The Wall Street Journal had a brief note about Google's new search engine, called SearchMash. It does what a lot of other search engines have been doing for a while, which is to provide more targeted results, with links to images, video, blogs, and even Wikipedia articles. A few cursory searches seems produced better results with less junk than I usually see in the first few pages of a Google search. SearchMash is also ad-free for now, which is a nice benefit. It is about time Google started to defend its home turf.

Arguably, there are way too many college football bowl games. If you just don't have time to watch them all over the next three or four days, don't worry. You can watch them via the Internet. All of the bowl games are going to be available on the iTunes Store and other online media stores within 24 hours of each game's finish. It is one more sign that cable and satellite TV as we know it are nearly dead. It also indicates that we are going to need a whole lot more bandwidth than we have right now.

As I visit communities around the country and work with local economic developers and elected officials, I find great skepticism focused on my insistence that we need minimum acceptable bandwidth of 100 megabits per second to every home and business. These officials often scoff at the notion that their citizens will ever need that kind of bandwidth, and the example they often cite is elderly people in their community, who "will never need that kind of bandwidth."