Content and services

If this story is true, Netflix may be getting closer to living up to its name. The company, which is doing quite well just sending DVDs through the mail, may be working on a set top box that you plug into your broadband connection. The box will download the movies you want to watch during the night and store them on a hard drive in the box. You can then watch the movies whenever you want.

I'm using Google less and less these days. Ask.com and Clusty usually return fewer results and better results. As I've written in the past, I think Google has taken its eye off its core business while it tries to suck up every bit of data you have on your desktop. Google search results are frequently inferior to these other search engines. Clusty is particularly interesting because it automatically tries to cluster results into groups.

Google has announced it will offer an online spreadsheet application, which sounds terrific in theory. How many times have you wished you could have several people on a phone call all look at the same spreadsheet at the same time, and even make live updates while talking. And a spreadsheet stored online means you don't have to keep emailing copy after copy of the same spreadsheet to people just because you updated a single cell.

So what's not to like about the Google app?

This is just one of several stories I have seen recently about K12 students who have their own blogs and get censured by K12 school officials. Student blogs are now common, and school systems have failed to adapt to the new reality. It clearly unnerves some school administrators that students now have a public forum completely independent of the school system. In the old days, students with a bent for writing worked on the school paper, which was monitored by a faculty member.

In what has to be one of the worst advertising concepts ever, an apparently blind drunk group of French ad execs came up with the idea that billboards should be able to call you on your mobile phone. As you pass by a billboard, the billboard will send your phone a video ad that you can watch later. It is designed for urban environments where people are traveling on foot and on public transit.

According to USA Today, XM Radio is being sued by the music industry for its new satellite radio, which has a record feature. XM's iPod-like recording functionality is actually pretty limited. Although it can store up to 50 hours of music, the service is essentially subscription-based. If you discontinue your XM radio subscription, your music disappears. The songs are also stored in a proprietary format, so there is no easy way to copy them to other devices, like your computer or to a CD.

USA Today has an article today on the front page of the Life section about Microsoft's bid to sink its tentacles into every kind of digital entertainment. There is a quote in the article from an analyst at at Morgan Wedbush Securities, and he said:

"Microsoft...recognize[s] their software needs to be the gatekeeper to that kind of commerce."

The search wars continue to heat up. Just days after Google complained that it wasn't fair that Microsoft wanted to use its own search engine in the next version of IE (imagine that), Amazon's A9 search engine has dumped Google as the backend and switched to Microsoft's MSN Search. This article notes that Google has already "complained informally" about how unfair that is.

According to Jeff Jarvis, the TV industry has already dropped the notion of TV as a "broadcast" medium, and now sees TV as an entertainment category that spans several distribution mechanisms, including broadband.

ABC/Disney announced last week that it will begin distributing several of its major "TV" shows via broadband, complete with embedded commercials that won't be easy to skip over. Fair enough...someone has to pay for Desperate Housewives.

The entertainment industry, according to Jeff Jarvis, has dumped the notion of thinking about TV as primarily broadcast and cable. Jarvis says TV execs are redefining TV to include a variety of distribution mechanisms that includes broadband as another way to package and deliver content. And IP TV is going to spawn a whole new kind of ad-supported television programs.

Disney announced this week that they are going to begin distributing many of their television shows via broadband, with ads built in.

A new study confirms what most people already know intuitively, but it is always nice to have data to back it up: Most people stop looking at search results at page three, and many expect to find what they want on page one.

It only takes a small crack to break the dam. Universal Pictures and Lovefilm, an online movie rental company, have struck a deal to sell movies as downloads.

And unlike some previous trials where the movie had time limits on it or DRM (Digital Rights Management), these will be free of restrictions--you own it outright. Which is the way it is supposed to work.

Jakob Nielsen, in his monthly AlertBox column, talks about what businesses need to do to have an effective Web site that helps customers find what they want. Nielsen is arguably the most knowledgeable Web usability expert on the planet, and this column is worth a careful read. Economic developers, businesspeople, and in fact, anyone with a Web site can pick up some useful tips.

There is so much news about Google, I probably ought to add a category just for the company. Google's latest acquisition is a small firm that sells a relatively pricey 3D drawing and CAD package called >Sketch Up. It sells for $500.

It may seem like an odd choice, but apparently Google is going to find a way to incorporate the 3D drawing and visualization tools into Google Earth. You could sketch a new building and drop it into a Google Earth visualization of the actual site where it would be built.

Just weeks after news that Google "respects" the Chinese government's efforts to censor free speech, the Chinese have rolled out their own search engine, meaning that Google's efforts to suck up to the communists was all for naught.

Apple has signed a contract with Comedy Central to sell a whole month's worth of The Daily Show (16 episodes) for $9.99. That works out to sixty-two cents per show. That's not a bad price, but I think that long term, we need to see the cost per half hour go below ten cents for things that you are not likely to watch more than once.

Google has chosen to pay advertisers a settlement of $90 million in return from protection from future lawsuits. Numerous advertisers have found competitors paying people to click on ads and/or using software 'bots to click through ads. Doing so brings more revenue to Google and can dramatically increase costs for advertisers.

AOL struggles mightily with spam email. It has millions of subscribers who receive hundreds of millions of spam emails per week. At enormous cost, AOL (and every other provider of email service) has to try to filter out this dreck.

A core problem is that the cost of sending email is very low. It's easy to buy a server that can pump out millions of emails per day, and the service providers have to receive that email and deliver it to their users. It uses a significant percentage of the available bandwidth on the Internet.

If you are interested in how the ability to make and publish your own video programming is going to change the media landscape, take 5 minutes to watch this video made by some young people in Atlanta.

If you have ever driven on Atlanta highways, you know that the traffic on the ring roads circling the city are some of the worst in the country. Despite a posted speed limit of 55 mph, traffic routinely moves at speeds up to 80 mph.

Cory Doctorow, writing in the Canadian Globe and Mail, says that some of the more than 4.5 million World of Warcraft players are taking aim at Chinese communist censors. The popular multiplayer online game has a worldwide audience of participants, including many in China.