Cable television that has enjoyed being fairly regulation-free compared to over the air TV is in the crosshairs of the FCC regarding lowering the price of what they cable operators charge smaller television programmers for leasing space on spare cable channels. Also, the FCC wants a limit placed on overall ownership to no more than 30 percent of total cable subscribers.

Predictably the cable companies are crying foul, saying this will “cripple the industry” according the WSJ article below. The FCC points to history which says otherwise.

“In every other industry regulated by the FCC, there have been significant decreases in the price of services, such as in long-distance rates and wireless rates,” [FCC Chairman Kevin J.] Martin said in an interview last night. “But the one exception to that is cable rates, which have gone up almost 100 percent” over the past decade.

510 days ago, our family of five dropped TV, so I don’t have a dog in this fight, but that doesn’t stop me for rooting for the little guys. I’d rather the government wasn’t involved and the cable companies did this freely.

While we’re at it, let’s see a la carte pricing for channels. Instead of jamming hundreds of channels in packages at people, most of which have nothing worth watching, let people pick and choose the ones they want. Or has TV changed in the last 510 days that there is now a bunch of stuff worth watching on these package channels?

I don’t understand people who register to vote and then don’t. Ok, maybe it makes a little sense if mail-in ballots aren’t allowed, but that’s not the case in Washington state. Time is on the voters side.

And I can also understand, although I strongly disagree, with people like my wife who doesn’t register and doesn’t vote. At least these people are being consistent. I’ve been working on the voting thing with my wife to try and convince her of the importance of voting, how one vote can make a difference. It’s an uphill climb. You’d think it would be a lot harder convincing people who aren’t registered to vote to get registered and then start voting than to get the people already registered to vote.

You’d think.

And the day after the election I’m combing through the Washington state 2007 General Results and seeing that an abysmal 28.43% of the registered voters turned out to vote yesterday. That’s roughly 1 in 4 people who are registered to vote that aren’t doing it.

I don’t get it. Here’s a picture of the state’s results in case you didn’t follow the link above:

I’m starting to wonder what, if anything, I can do to encourage more of the registered voters in this state to vote? In our county alone there was less than the state average.

As readers following this blog closely know, I’m becoming more interested in politics in expectation of the 2008 Presidential election. I’m trying to become more educated about the issues and the candidates. At least in our area and state it appears voter turnout is another issue that needs focus. Should I be out with picket in hand on election day reminding folks to vote? I’ve never done any picketing, but wonder if that would work?

How was voter turnout in your area?

You know, I’ll probably never understand calling the lawyers out to go after fansites.

Prince is a great guitarist but he needs to remember who’s butts are in the seats and buying his albums if he’s sending the lawyers after his fans.

via Grooveshark:

Prince and an army of lawyers are working to disband several large web communities dedicated to the pop star. Several Web sites have received cease and desist notices to discontinue use of all photographs, images, lyrics, album covers and anything else Prince wants.

All images? Are you kidding me? Prince better get his lawyers over to Google — wait, no, Perfect 10 already tried that in court and lost.

What if you were a celebrity?
I’m certainly not a celebrity, but let’s assume for a moment I did something that made me one.

The content of this blog, including the pictures unless otherwise noted are all copyrighted, but I wouldn’t try to prevent anybody from setting up a Hmm fan site and I’d find it reasonable that some portion of content was referenced and used. Nobody needs my permission for Fair Use and with a fansite especially I’d be willing to provide additional latitude, wouldn’t you?

I might politely and personally ask a site that was using too much of the content to be cool about it, but would I call up the lawyers and start sending C&Ds? No way. I know, I know, easy to say when you aren’t in the almighty shower of the great Purple Rain One, but let’s be real. It’s one thing to go after splogs which suck the life out of your content and make money from your efforts without giving anything back. It’s another thing to break out the lawyers on your freaking fans who are helping to promote and support you.

Didn’t Prince learn anything from Metallica? Is there another side to this that makes sense?

The Crunchies? Please tell me they aren’t going to do this.

I’d say no offense before launching into this rant, but I’m still laughing as I type. It’s so crazy, I can’t stop laughing. The Crunchies? The Crunchies!

Om Malik could be the nicest guy in Sillicon Valley for all I know, haven’t met him but will take Mark Evans word. I have met Richard MacManus and Michael Arrington who both seemed like pleasant chaps in person, but the idea of these three along with Venturebeat teaming up and comparing the small start-up world awards to the GRAMMYs is laughable. The combined readership of TechCrunch, Read/WriteWeb, Gigaom and Venturebeat barely dents the number of albums James Blunt’s first CD sold.

Gotta love the comment from cweeb: “Come on Om, don’t bend over to techcrunch everyday.”

Malik contends that “the community will have a lot to say here.” Now this is something I have to see. Voting on the internet can so easily be gamed that I’m extremely cynical of any web system ever being fair and I’m a programmer.

The real reason sites offer awards
I understand the giving out awards at a site — or in this case from multiple sites. This has been happening for many years on the web and they usually mean one thing: more exposure for the site running the awards.

A lot of award sites require or strongly encourage entrants to link back to them and promote to their audience — vote for me, vote for me. It’s a guaranteed proven way to manipulate traffic to the website(s) behind the award. On the eve of Google penalizing sites for selling text links, contributing to link farms and link schemes, The Crunchies team needs to be very careful about how they promote their awards.

And let’s not forget that even a worthless program can get a five star award out there. The Crunchies team has a lot of swashbuckling to do in those chilly awards infested waters, arrr!

Will the Crunchies be the Crappies? We’ll have to wait and see when the details of the awards system are published, but they’ll at least be worth a laugh. Imagine what the award will look like? A bowl of Captain Crunch, maybe? Priceless! Thanks for the morning laugh guys.

Some bad news for startups looking for VC financing and latching onto the uber trendy Web 2.0 label.

A partner at a leading Sillicon Valley firm has stopped investing in Web 2.0 startups, says Randy Komisar a partner with Kleiner Perkins:

He said he had recently told John Battelle, one of the organizers of the rapidly growing Web 2.0 Summit conference, that the term no longer had the same positive cachet it once had. In the VC community it clearly has a negative one.

It’s good to hear at least some VCs are burned out on gimmicks masquerading as businesses. I’ve not been a fan of the term Web 2.0, deriding it as web pooh point oh from the beginning. Startups who can’t be bothered to find a real business model for their projects and instead latch onto the latest, greatest trends don’t deserve financing.

I’m not saying that all startups that are being labeled as web 2.0 don’t deserve financing, so please don’t anybody put words in my mouth. I’m all for small businesses being able to grow and thrive in this country and beyond. Heck, I’ve been part of the small business culture since 1994. Only those who intentionally position and market themselves as web 2.0 and are dressing up ideas that were original years ago should be left empty-handed at the loan desk. “We’ll make money later” is not a realistic business plan.

This isn’t saying mashups aren’t fun. It’s all about perspective and realism, isn’t it? Most mashups are gimmicks, games and parlor tricks, not serious businesses. I’ve rolled a few mashups myself and am a huge gamer, so I’m there. More power to the mash generation! However, the whole notion that something as diverse as the web can be described with a version number is absurd. In case I’m wrong, I have the domain for web version 113 already reserved and running. Woot, 230 visits since November 16, 2006!

Onto web 3.0 now? Why not, I’ll iterate it right now: ++$version;

According to research from NPD and hat tip to Tech.co.uk, the Xbox 360 console sells the most games per console. I’m sure this has been greatly helped along by Halo 3 which set the single day sales record of $170 million.

Now if only they would make consoles which actually stand the test of time, we just had our fifth Xbox 360 go bad (”unreadable discs”), not covered under the new extended warranty. Your hardware sucks, Microsoft, but it still doesn’t matter (gamer crack, I tell you). Fortunately the Elite pictured above is still running ok, BTW, and my gamertag is XboxTDavid in case anybody reading wants to add me. I’m no challenge at most games any more but enjoy when there’s time to play.

One of the best games for the Wii already comes with the system, Wii Sports, which must be hurting the game to console ratio for Nintendo. Don’t feel too badly for them as they are quickly catching up with Microsoft and have a number of promising titles coming including Super Mario Galaxy (yes!!) and for the overweight and underexercised gamer population: Wii Fit.

Meanwhile, the PS3 library is showing some promise with online titles like Warhawk and the creative card game Eye of Judgment (drats, still haven’t beaten the computer on ‘Normal’ difficulty). The Playstation 3 still has the most games in full 1080p, but that hasn’t tipped the scales. Maybe the release of a cheaper PS3 will help.

The Blu-ray Spider-man package (all three movies) could be worth buying, although I’m not sure how many have or will buy a PS3 as a Blu-ray player. The Wii doesn’t have this as a selling point and it hasn’t mattered. Anecdotal: CNET users are looking more forward to Zune 2 than the Wii (#2) or PS3 (#3). The Xbox 360 didn’t make the top 20 but guess what did? Yup, Halo 3 at #14. On the handheld side, the PSP ranked #11.

I’m still holding to the real console war will take place in holiday season 2008. It’s impressive and at the same time a bit sad that Nintendo still can’t keep up with demand for the Wii console. As long as demand is there, it won’t be long before there are more Wiis in homes than Xbox 360 or PS3. Nintendo will be able to meet demand by next holiday season.

It’s encouraging to see the Wii sell so well without the emphasis on superior graphics. Maybe we’ll get back to simpler but more fun games to play. Games that don’t cost more than making some Hollywood movies. As a longtime gamer I could care less about beautiful cinematic video unless it’s somehow interactive.

Congratulations to all the people around the world who have contributed to make the Sony PS3 Folding@home project the most powerful distributed computing network in the world! Back in March, I pointed out that the PS3 may have been selling poorly but was doing very well with distributed computing.

The Sony Press release has more details:

The record was initially set on September 16, 2007 as Folding@home surpassed one petaflop(*1), a computing milestone that has never been reached before by a distributed computing network. In addition to this, the collective efforts of our users have enabled PS3 alone to reach the petaflops mark on September 23, 2007.

The record is a testament to the widespread participation of PS3 users from around the world—currently more than 670,000 unique PS3 users have registered to the Folding@home network, bringing the overall computing power of the program to more than a petaflop.

Another exclamation mark for petaflop! So what is all this computing power being used for? This enables scientists to make greater progress studying diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and some forms of cancer. Great cause, I need to join one of these teams and let our PS3 do more folding@home work.

Any readers with PS3 not involved with the Folding@home project?

On Halloween 2007 the Google (disclaimer: I own GOOG stock) juggernaut has pushed past $700 for the first time ($703.93 as of this writing). Tomorrow they will be launching an OpenSocial API at http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial which they hope will provide developers the ability to create applications that will run on multiple social networks.

Except for Facebook and MySpace. Facebook employs their own markup language while Google will use Javascript and HTML, similar to what they did with Google gadgets. If you know Javascript and HTML, you’ll only need to learn what API calls to make. It’s a juicy proposal and one that has my mind clicking and whirring with the possibilities. Looking forward to tomorrow to see and start playing around with the OPenSocial API.

As for the stock price? When will Google slow down? I’m not going to even try to guess, but remain curious what others think. The movement from $600-$700 was fast. Yahoo (YHOO) and Apple (AAPL), two other stocks I own, are also doing well. Gotta love how Q4 has begun and hopefully will forget the misery of Q3.

Some thoughts on the $240 million investment deal in Facebook that Microsoft is reportedly making. They will get to load Facebook down with Adcenter ads or, perhaps, sell items via micropayment or — and this is probably the most obvious reason: blocking another web pooh point oh deal going to Google. This sentiment is shared by Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster.

How about sending virtual beer to your friends? You do know that this costs $real money$ on Facebook, right?

I’ll get back to virtual gifts in a moment.

Google still has the advantage, hence the score in the title (original title was changed before publishing), but this does give Microsoft a win. It puts them on the board. That’s an important difference in the cool crowds. If Facebook tanks, Microsoft can write off whatever they didn’t make back in an advertising deal. Google on the other hand could be locked out of one platform I’m sure they very much wanted to get into.

I’m speculating here, so please keep that in mind, but this also gives Microsoft a golden opportunity to spread their micropayment network. They could also build a new MMO version of the Xbox Live Dashboard to counter Sony HOME. Don’t laugh. I know Sony is in third place, but HOME + some good games could put the PS3 back on the map.

Some people enjoy buying virtual stuff via micropayments on Facebook (back to the virtual beer) and who has the network already setup to do that? Microsoft. Zune about to go social … thru Facebook? There are many, many possibilities here.

The good ship Google has sprung a few more leaks today.

A fascinating move by Google (disclaimer: I own GOOG stock) that appears punitive for blog networks excessively crosslinking (B5Media and AOL/Weblogs) as well as some of the bloggers and, get this, mainstream media sites, who sell text links and don’t use rel=nofollow or JavaScript. Some are speculating that this is also being extended to paid reviews and paid to blog sites.

Just check out a couple of well-known sites that had their page rank downgraded:

(AOL/WIN) Engadget - PR7 to PR5
(AOL/WIN) Joystiq - PR6 to PR4
(AOL/WIN) AutoBlog - PR6 to PR4
(B5) Problogger - PR6 to PR4
Search Engine Journal - PR7 to PR4

And I’m sure you’ve heard of these sites:

Seattle Times - PR6 to PR4
Forbes - PR7 to PR5
Washington Times - PR6 to PR4

Notes: daily blog tips has more. Andy Beard who founded the NoNofollow group at Bumpzee has a nice write-up on the topic with a few more listed. Andy’s Page Rank was slashed awhile back and is a PayPerPost blogger.

Curious if former frontman of Weblogs, Inc, Jason Calacanis, has weighed in on this situation? Nothing on his blog as of this writing, nothing in his Twitter stream. He’s not on Skype at the moment or I’d ping him there. I’d like to know how he feels about this since he was a direct beneficiary in the sale to AOL of network crosslinking. Check the comments below. Maybe he’ll leave an answer there.

Acquistion by AOL not the case for the B5Media network, they have to weather the storm. Except for Duncan Riley who managed to get through a post at his TechCrunch writing gig entitled “Google Declares Jihad On Blog Link Farms” without mentioning he used to be one of the partners at B5Media and departed somewhat suddenly.

Lately B5Media CEO Jeremy Wright’s personal blog (PR4 now, don’t know what it was formerly) is filled with daily unrelated Twitter updates (offtopic: lame, can’t people just follow these on Twitter, Jeremy?), no word on the B5Media blog about this Google situation either. B5Media company line is silence? I doubt that. When I interviewed Jeremy about B5Media last year it struck me that they had some good things planned over there. Is this a noteworthy setback?

Darren Rowse puzzledly addresses the issue in the comments section of his Problogger blog:

At b5 we link to other blogs in a channel in our sidebars - so that people can find more content on similar topics - it’s about giving readers more content that they can use and showing them what else we do. If it helps with SEO I guess I could see why they might disallow the power of such links - but to penalize for them is a little bizarre as they are a legit part of our business of showing people where they can read more content that we produce.

Is Darren legitimately confused or naive? Nepotism links on blog networks are essentially crosslink spam in the eyes of search engines. These links have been touted as a benefit for buildinig and running a blog network. It’s how crappy blogs like the ironically titled spam blog at Weblogs, Inc made the original CNET top 100 list, but were later replaced when CNET readers complained.

Fewer, higher quality blogs in blog network seems like better strategy
The Gawker blog network (Lifehacker, Gawker, Valleywag and others) seems to have a philosophy of fewer, higher quality blogs make a better overall network, but even they’ve had to shutter some blogs (Sploid, Screenhead) in the past.

B5Media is boasting over 290 blogs and 10 million unique visitors a month. Gawker does a lot more traffic than that with a dozen or so blogs. AOL has more traffic too, but with a number of blogs somewhere in the middle. Different blog network strategies.

Is it right for Google to punish sites that sell links passing PR?
I’m going to do something unusual in this post. Instead of giving you my opinion on this question, I’m going to request yours and carefully digest the answers. Long time readers know I’m not a big fan of blog networks and how writers work is treated (undervalued like most of the publishing industry), but this issue goes beyond blog networks.

I’m going to talk to other webmasters and bloggers in further depth on the issue. Let’s discuss this in the comments below, on Twitter, in your blogs, your place or mine, whatever.

Obviously these PR penalties are having no financial impact on Google. And some people are saying that the Page Rank isn’t that important any longer. Several of the sites having their PR reduced are fans of Google and follow their every move. Hmm, indeed!