Wonder if there aren’t enough butts in the chairs for this Blog Business Summit conference or if this is just a very smart marketing idea because now a “limited number” of bloggers can save $400 off this two-day event:

If you’re a blogger and want to attend the conference, we have a limited number of seats available for just $395.00. All you have to do is post a mention of the conference on your site, (with a link or the BBS 05 badges) … During checkout, just enter the URI for your post when prompted.

I was reminded of this conference from reading Scoble’s blog this morning as it was already in my bookmarks under: seriously consider. I don’t have time at the moment (today’s our radio show day) to get into this blogging conference like I did for the AMA, but I do have some detailed thoughts about this conference, the scheduled speakers, and the proposed subject matter. 

I have to review my schedule because I know that I already had to turn down one Ziff Davis business meeting in January because of schedule conflicts and being this event is on a Monday/Tuesday it will be particularly difficult because our office is closed on the weekends and Monday is typically our busiest work day, but if I am able to swing this, then I would like to be at this conference – especially at the discounted price. However, with being gone for a week for Internext and CES January 2005 it is going to be an exceedingly busy month. Oh, and BTW, I like the fact that Blog Business Summit actually has a blog. Sort of makes sense, doesn’t it?

Sir Seeker stopped by to let me know that his new search engine also has artificial intelligence just like newcomer Accoona that former President Bill Clinton was out promoting recently. Unfortunately, my response after seeing and trying to actually, realistically use SirSeek is that it’s much too raw in its current form to be compared to any other search engine, including Accoona. So if you really want to know what I discovered about this raw project than keep reading but otherwise, forget it and move on. Accordingly, I’ve put the rest of my commentary in the body section so readers through the RSS feed or seeing this via the front page will need to click through if they are really, really curious about this one (don’t be yet).

Sir Seeker’s comments:

I have created a artificial intelligence search engine too (it thinks for you and offers keyword suggestion that you may never have thought of, choices from related synonyms, antonyms, homonyms and thesaurus)! Check out http://www.SirSeek.com where you see the working beta. See some sample searches. Unfortunately no expresidents or famous people are getting on TV to talk about my search engine (YET).

I checked out SirSeek and ran similar queries that I ran with Accoona (and the same queries I run with other new SEs when I come across them, in fact). I wanted to find where or if our sites rank, but not for ego reasons (ok, well maybe a little bit), but to know if we are showing up for the keywords we should show up for; I know our sites better than others so for testing there are no better examples.

When I ran my first query on my name “TDavid” it returned no results (see screenshot above). This is in contrast to Accoona that reacted like pretty much every other SE out there when confronted with my name: they want to offer it as a misspelling and say that it’s “David” instead of “TDavid” — which, I noticed that Accoona has fixed this in their search engine after my commentary (I don’t know if they saw my comments and fixed it or they just realized that in fact there is a person named “TDavid” on the web). Anyway, no hit for “TDavid” so then I ran my primary business website: “tdscripts” — still, no results from Sir Seek. TD Scripts has been on the web since 1999 and I can find this site in any other SE I’ve ever tried (including Accoona). I added the dot com and still no results. Huh? I did notice lots and lots of advertisements and that the search results are put in a frame (yech!). Please, please get rid of the frames, Sir Seeker, those are just annoying.

Almost ready to give up on Sir Seek, I decided first to go back and try out the sample search for “NewYears” and here’s what was returned:

**This is a just a temp page (using ODP’s search database for now) as we are still developing our Artificial Intelligence Web Search Engine (will use your keywords to find similar keywords from a thesaurus database to find more relevant results you may not have though of). If no results are found, we will send out web spiders to find the data on the fly for us to display results and also index the relevant web pages. Once a search is performed you will also be given a broken up list of related selectable keywords to add to your next search… Wait and see, we will be the next BIG THING!

Sir Seek does have some bold claims (”wait and see …”), but where are the freaking search results??? What is a search engine without search results? My final test was trying out  the new whiz bang thesaurus option. thesaurus option:

This is the World’s first implementation of an artificial intelligent programmed search tool for www.SirSeek.com that gives suggestions for synonyms (like a thesaurus lookup) for search phrases and keywords! This idea is now copyrighted by us @ 3:24 AM 12/8/2004 (date/time perfected). You can not steal (or borrow) our artificial inteligence keyword suggestor idea!

So SirSeek sought (and got?) a patent on this idea? This was it for me. If this is true why is the patent office allowing patents for stuff like this? It is a neat concept but I’d rather see somebody like Google do it, which BTW is misspelled on the site (or was “Goolge” misspelling intentional?). Sir Seeker, if you are reading this, come back when the following has changed:

• no frames for search results
• there actually are search results
• the AI can be tested beyond seeing keywords, seeing actual search results related to those keywords
• the ads are way toned down (Google didn’t need to start with so many ads and neither should you if you’ve only had a quarter million searches over four months — that’s hardly any bandwidth used)

I do like the fact that he has some interesting widgets like the talking time clock and that he plans to add RSS feeds for search results but again, this project is just way too raw at this point to provide any meaningful overview or testing. I do see some promising ideas here. I would be curious to see this later after there has been significantly more developement time put into it. Good luck to you, Sir Seeker, thank you for stopping by and please check back when … well, when it actually works.

I think having a small, sexy and inexpensive Mac to compete with lowend PCs is a smart move. There’s a target market there and this could very well gain additional market share for Apple.

The Apple rumor site claims that Steve Jobs & Co. are planning to announce a sub-$500 G4-based iMac at the Macworld Expo in January. Code named “Q88,” the new Mac is rumored to be small, portable and “headless,” that is, it comes solo, with no display. ThinkSecret says the 1.75-inch-tall device will be targeted at Windows users looking for a second PC and who may have a new affection for the company after using its iPod music player.

Alas, it is only a rumour at this point, so all you fellow Applelites (yeah, I guess I’m sort of one myself) anybody get too excited yet.

Saw this story about eBay no longer using Microsoft Passport earlier and wanted to add some comments on it.

Microsoft Corp. said on Thursday that eBay Inc. will soon drop support for its Passport service, originally intended to make the world’s biggest software maker the gatekeeper of Web identities. But Microsoft said it will keep Passport up and running, despite the loss of one of its earliest and most important partners.

This might surprise some folks but I actually like Microsoft’s idea of trying to centralize and make it simpler and easier to manage passwords. I have taken to using a Pocket PC for maintaining the growing database of logins. One neat thing about the Tablet PC I bought recently is that by using a biometric fingerprint scan I can store logins and authenticate that way. It’s too bad more companies haven’t played ball with Microsoft on this one.

Something fascinating about blogging is the network aspect is folks doing keyword matches to follow up on what others are saying online about their products and services. This makes the effort of reviewing products and services seem even more meaningful. Case in point, I posted earlier today that we returned our new Gateway Windows Media Center Edition 2005 (MCE 2005) to the store yesterday and a little later Matt Goyer stops by and writes:

Hi. Sorry to hear you’re returning your Media Center. I’m a program manager on the Media Center team and would be interested in discussing further why you returned the box. If you have time please send me an email.

After visiting Matt’s blog and seeing earlier where he commented on Thomas Hawke’s blog comments, the Investor Business Daily article and Slashdot post he must not have seen my prior MCE 2005 feedback and I pointed that out to him via email. Just for him taking the time to dance with my CAPTCHA and leave a comment, I wanted to provide even more detailed information why we returned this product after not even a week’s worth of usage. So, why, why did we ultimately take MCE 2005 back? I can think of several reasons that involved not just my own opinion but our family of five. Here they are in no particular order:

• The kids, nor my wife, didn’t like how you search for information using the cell phone like keypad system. TiVO’s system of picking the letter or digit from a menu and pressing one button is more friendly and intuitive.
• It took an embarassing amount of time to figure out how to exit MCE 2005 mode to go back to Windows. Maybe a Windows exit button should be on the remote? (was it there and we just didn’t figure it out or what?) Yeah, you can cursor up to the upper left corner and click that and then you have to confirm. That’s too many steps! It should be fast, fun and simple to switch back and forth. TiVO took great care in making things simple, but the MCE 2005 menus are too often asking for confirmation or expecting an extra click on the more options to get to the real information that’s important. Yes, if I’m about to switch from a channel that I’m recording ask me to confirm, but why do I need to confirm changes or go to submenu upon submenu for almost every menu? Users shouldn’t need to have too many confirmation or submenu screens for regularly used functions.
• No auto recording feature based upon user ratings like TiVO that tries to guess what programs our family would like and automatically records them when nothing else is happening. Though the accuracy can be called into question this feature provides some fun serendipity to the TV viewing situation. Is there a third party program perhaps which provides this functionality?
• Inability to watch a different program while recording. I am guessing with dual capture cards this could be accomplished, yes/no? I have WinTV card on another machine and though I didn’t try I’m guessing it would be possible to route the signal from the coax to this card and watch at least channels 1-99 this way. Still no premium channels, though We do have another cable box in the master bedroom. TiVO has the same downside, BTW, but for the extra money spent it would sure be nice to get around this issue.
• DVD playback as mentioned in my other post was better through our $79 progressive scan DVD player directly into TV as opposed to using the DVD player in the MCE 2005. No way to output better than through the digital cable or S-Video out of the card to the HDTV. I bet the picture on an LCD monitor would be good but a family of five watches TV on a TV not a 17″ LCD monitor. Yeah, I realize for like two or three grand bigger LCD or plasma TVs can be purchased but even so it isn’t outputting true HDTV which is a bummer.
• To extend the media capabilities into another room would require the addition of another $300 Media Extender device? Something about this just seems wrong. Here we just spent nearly two grand and in order to pipe the info to another room we need more hardware? We can buy five 80 hour TiVos with media option for less money and power consumption (more on this shortly). So why is it when we buy the Media Center does it not come with at least one of these devices so people can share their info across multiple rooms? I mean, really, what family doesn’t have more than one television? In our house, there’s a TV in every room … so if I understand this correctly, I’d need an extender in each room to share the files? For another $100 or so I could buy an entire other computer and add to our LAN. I don’t see the desirability of this device?
• What’s up with the power consumption? This thing devoured power and required at least a 400 watt UPS to run. That’s more a hardware issue I realize our TiVO can run on a small fraction of what it takes to power this badboy. This has to be factored into a bill in that no, there’s no TiVO subscription with MCE 2005, but what about the increase in electricity? That extra wattage and the UPS isn’t going to be exactly free.
• Multitasking as computer with TV watching option (not!). I thought about using this as my home office computer since it was pretty powerful alongside it being the family device but when the kids want to watch Starz they have to either go into our Master Bedroom (which we don’t want them in there) or come into the family room and I didn’t see without buying additional hardware how I could work on the computer while they watched premium cable channels. It was an either/or scenario.

It just seemed to us that everything we might actually want to do was going to require us to spend more and more money on hardware. To outfit three additional rooms with Media Extenders, and buy an additional HDTV ready card (when it became available) we’d need to drop another $1000-1500. That’s not targeting any family’s budget when you start running into $4000-5000 for a home entertainment system not counting the televisions; MCE 2005 seems to be targeting the gizmo geeks (which I am one of them, but I couldn’t sell the rest of the family or really even myself that the end would justify the means on this one) and the gizmo geeks would probably rather put a computer in every room and/or run the files across their LAN — where does the Media Center fit into this scenario? Somebody help me out here.

Sure, you can listen to your music through the TV, but how many families actually do that? We have a couple hundred CDs ripped and burned and I was a subscriber of Rhapsody and then Napster but ultimately gave them up because of the inability to move the rented music across to my PDA. Convoluted DRM schemes for music that I’m paying to rent or have bought as downloads (which I’ve bought very few downloads because frankly it’s a PITA dealing with all that DRM stuff … if I like music I’ll go buy the CD and rip it so that I can use it in my car, in my portable device or on my computer with equal freedom). I hold three fingers up and ask the RIAA to read between the lines, because Microsoft isn’t at fault for this one.

Anyway, in my opinion the biggest problem with MCE 2005 besides the price tag is that it seems to try to make a niche all its own; it’s not really a PVR when compared to TiVO in functions or features, it’s not a great DVD player when playing through an HDTV (through an LCD monitor it’s good quality), it’s not something people will likely use as a computer in their family room because it can’t be shared with the TV (without purchasing additional hardware?), it’s not an HDTV PVR (unavailable at this point) … so what is it and where exactly does it fit? Who is the MCE 2005 for? 

Matt Goyer said in his blog: ”Consumers are just starting to get excited about higher end multimedia experiences.” My question is what type of consumers? If people like me who gladly spend thousands of dollars on consumer electronics and gadgetry can’t get excited and see this fit then how is the average consumer who spends less on consumer electronics going to gravitate towards MCE 2005 as a viable solution for a home entertainment system?

Unless Microsoft answers these relatively easy questions from a marketing standpoint then they are going to have more families who buy it like we did and become ultimately disenchanted and confused about how and/or where it will fit into their entertainment world and just return it and pay the 5-15% store restocking fees. An expensive trial purchase that ultimately doesn’t convert. Overall MCE 2005 grade: C-

Update 1/2/04: While updating the review menus along the front page column, I just realized that in my initial review I gave MCE 2005 a B+ rating, so how can I rate it a C- less than a week later in this entry? I guess the answer is that we didn’t use MCE 2005 enough and see how it actually fit into our family situation before coming to the final conclusion that it just didn’t work for us at the present time. Or we just didn’t have enough time to discover the nuances. Anyway, I’m going to average those ratings and make it a C+ overall which will go in the review section along the right permanently. Sorry about this discrepency, it’s the first time (please correct me if I’m wrong) that I’ve ever graded something twice. It wasn’t meant to be a re-review.

Took our Gateway Windows Media Center Edition (MCE 2005) back to the store yesterday. For a fleeting moment in time we actually considered replacing TiVO with it. We decided that maybe we’ll come back to MCE another place, another time perhaps when HDTV is more tightly integrated. TiVo is still in the master bedroom and I’ll be moving that back into the family room soon. Couldn’t keep our friend away that long, sorry Microsoft. Ironically, some are predicting that MCE 2005 is going to be the biggest flop of 2005 …

Been using our new Windows Media Center 2005 Gateway computer and I have a few things that I like, but a few things I do not like at all:

• No HDTV support yet (more on this shortly). I knew this with the purchase going in, but I had hoped the playback quality would be better than it has turned out to be through our HDTV.
• DVD playback on HDTV through Media Center is subpar. Our $79 DVD player with progressive scan plays DVDs cleaner and clearer through my HDTV than the $1500 Media Center playing through the same TV!

Apparently, I’m not the only one with HDTV disappointment, check out what Ed Bott has to say:

As for HDTV, I agree with Thomas that this is a stumbling block for adoption of MCE. After all, the same early adopters who are drawn to Media Center are also going to lust after HDTV performance and resolution. But the cable and satellite companies really hold all the cards on this issue. If I want anything other than over-the-air HD, I have to use a PVR from my cable company or buy DirecTV with Tivo. There is no other way to get the HD signal from the cable box or satellite decoder to a third-party PVR. And that’s the way the cable and satellite companies want it, because it means they have lock-in.

It is just a matter of somebody making and selling a graphics card with with HD inputs and outputs and our existing Media Center will be HD enabled and ready (but add a $200-400 graphics card and it drives the price up near two grand for an HDTV PVR solution) … in the meantime I sort of feel currently like I have an overly expensive TiVO wannabe — without the monthly subscription fee, yes — and lowend DVD player. Honestly, I’m thinking about boxing the sucker up and taking it back and paying the 15% restocking fee (200 bones) … buyer’s remorse is clearly setting in and we haven’t even owned the machine a week. In Ed Bott’s comment section I read Thomas Hawke talking about how fantastic his DirecTV with HDTV TiVO is:

I own the HDTV TiVo and despite the cost, it is simply fantastic. I should receive a commission check from DirecTV as I’ve had many friends buy a unit after watching me demo mine. With 4 tuners, 250 gig drive, etc. etc. the unit is a triumph for home media. Once again I couldn’t believe how beautiful CSI Miami looked last night (the episode from 3 weeks ago that I’m just getting to now). This unit is less expensive than the MCE machine.

Starting to think that this might be the option I would like to go instead as I was very fond of DirecTV when we had them for years and it’s less expensive monthly than HD cable. I will give my Media Center purchase a little more time to stick.

Netcraft has released a new toolbar (free, IE only at the moment) that has a couple innovative, useful features that are worth checking out:

• Displays which hosting company a site uses, including country flag to help avoid fraudulent sites
• Will block access to known phishing sites reported by users (non toolbar users can report sites through web too)
• Enforces display of browser navigational controls (toolbar & address bar) in all windows, to defend against pop up windows which attempt to hide the navigational controls.

The toolbar is currently only available for Internet Explorer but according to the Netcraft news (blog) they are hard at work at a version for Firefox.Netcraft Toolbar FAQ.

… encourage friends and relatives that you think might be vulnerable to phishing attacks to use the Toolbar, so that that maximum number of people receive the benefit of these timely reports. If your preferred desktop operating system can’t run the Toolbar until a Firefox version is available, you can report phishing sites directly http://toolbar.netcraft.com/report_url  

I like that I can see what hosting companies that regularly visited websites use. Also it shows some other hosting-related data like last time the server was rebooted. This toolbar isn’t just another well known company with a “me too” toolbar.

It does makes sense thinking that the iPod’s days are numbered. I was reading (sorry, don’t have the links) that iPod Photo sales have not been as good as expected, though the standard iPods are selling like hotcakes. Apple should be thanking in a financial way Adam Curry, Dave Winer and the rest of the podcasting clan. I just came across this from mobilewhack:

With micro hard drives like the one in the iPod mini making their way into phones, Apple’s fantastic product — which has single-handedly turned the company into a darling on Wall Street — will soon be as obsolete as a QWERTY keyboard in South Korea. Given the choice between carrying two devices or just one, consumers will choose one, and it won’t be the iPod.

I chose to carry fewer devices and took my Apple iPod Photo 60 GB back to the store, unopened. Some people are going to say, are you crazy?!?! but I started thinking about how little I’d actually use it and decided that it wasn’t worth the $710 (bought it with the Apple Care Plan too). I’d rather have that money in the bank working for me than sitting on a shelf collecting dust (most of the time) in the form of an iPod. None of this takes away from my feeling that the iPods are cool. Just not $710 for me cool.

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