June 2, 2003

TiVo Plans to Sell Information on Customers’ Viewing Habits

Catherine sent me a link to this report about TiVo in the NY Times, which I’m sure is making waves with privacy advocates…

“TiVo, the maker of digital video recorders, plans today to begin selling information about the viewing patterns of its customers to advertisers and programmers. The company says the reports offer far more precise data than traditional rating methods.

Because TiVo’s are essentially computer hard drives connected to a central server, the company can monitor viewers’ second-by-second behavior. It can tell how many viewers in a certain ZIP code clicked away at what moment in a commercial, for instance, or when a particular character appeared on a show.

May 30, 2003

Nullsoft’s Waste Dumped?

This sounds like a barebones version of Groove:

“WASTE is a software product and protocol that enables secure distributed communication for small (on the order of 10-50 nodes) trusted groups of users.”

However, it looks like perhaps AOL made Nullsoft dump WASTE from their site because the link went 404 yesterday afternoon.

Of course there’s already a mirror, which I found @ blueyonder.co.uk via the Slashdot Thread:

As a fan of Groove, I’ll need to set aside some time to check this out.

May 29, 2003

WordPress b2/cafelog derivative

Congratulations to Matthew and Mike on the release of WordPress, which is the official fork in the b2/cafÃ©log blog tool.

On a test server I converted the data from my current b2-based blog to WordPress with very little trouble. Especially helpful was the handy upgrade script included with WordPress.

For the most part everything seems to be working well. I was even able to get the search-engine-friendly URLs working. I may in fact upgrade my live b2 blog with the new WordPress code. However, I want to run a few tests and see if any bugs pop-up before I take the plunge.

May 29, 2003

Xbox and Linux in car multimedia

Just in case you have too much free-time while driving, it might be nice to get in a quick game and a movie or two, with this.

May 28, 2003

Geek Test

<wink>I stopped answering these after the first page because I overloaded the check-box buffer of my browser.</wink> (link via Doc)

May 28, 2003

PlayStation 2 successor: PSX

“PSX will offer a DVD recorder, a 120GB hard drive, a TV tuner, an Ethernet port, a USB 2.0 port and a Memory Stick slot.” (via CNet)

Add in a TiVi-like service and I’m sold!

May 27, 2003

PeopleSoft CEO says .Net is IT ‘asbestos’

I can’t say that I agree with Mr. Conway of PeopleSoft in regard to his comment about .Net last week…

“PeopleSoft president and CEO Craig Conway has described Microsoft’s .Net initiative as the information technology equivalent of asbestos.”

“Conway then added that, in his opinion, Microsoft’s .Net strategy will not help business to control the costs of their enterprise applications, as it assumes code will be executed by PCs.”

Specifically, the second quote certainly seems a bit hypocritical since PeopleSoft up until version 7.02(?) was a hard-core Client/Server based application environment.

May 26, 2003

Rainy Epic Rides

I was looking forward to an epic Memorial Day ride today, but the current downpour seems to have put a damper on the plans. Perhaps I need one of these for the trails. (Thanks for the link Ed!)

May 25, 2003

Hosted Photo Blogging Service

Expressions seems to be filling an up-and-coming blogging niche and at $2.50 per month, it’s certainly reasonably priced.

More here…

“Expressions! is a hosted media blogging system that makes it easy for anyone to create and maintain their very own photo or media blog. It has been designed and developed by fellow photographers, artists and bloggers to meet your specific needs.” (via Ben)

May 24, 2003

Dynamics of a Blogosphere Story

Ok, I suppose my post is a reaction or vote to
Microdoc News Dynamics of a Blogosphere Story study, which not surprisingly is tracking on Blogdex.

Whatever the case, and the label for what I’m doing here, I do find Microdoc’s study to be quite interesting. In particular, the following quotes…

Microdoc News has developed a picture of how a blogosphere story gets started, how that story develops and then how it then comes to an end. While each blogosphere story has its own pattern of development, the similarities between one story and another is intriguingly similar. The smallest blogosphere stories can have as few as fifteen bloggers, the average story has between 40 and 60 bloggers, while the largest one to date had about 285 bloggers involved. A blogosphere story can be as small as 180 posts in total, while the largest we studied has numbered 7,540 posts in total.
[… and later …]
“Perhaps the last conclusions we came to in this study is that blogs cannot be read in isolation from each other. Blog stories are understood and appreciated in aggregate and not in isolation. On the other hand, mainstream media stories tend to be read in isolation rather than read and compared.