Oh Brian!

If you haven't had a chance to look at it yet you should probably take a look at Google Video. I also found the Google Video of the Day blog which aims to distill the best out of Google video. There is also an official Google Video of the Day site. Let me warn you in advance that looking at these sites could turn into a huge expenditure of your time and not all of what's posted there is safe for work or even safe for home for that matter. I particularly like these videos "Fat Ass + Thin Glass of Copy Machine + Security Camera = You're Fired" and "When Videoconferencing Goes Bad".

I've been using this servce for a while now: BugMeNot.com. It's especially great for those sites that I don't look at very often or don't care to share my personal information with.

I don't know how many people saw this article by Arne Alsin over at TheStreet dot com - Apple's Scraping the Bottom of the Barrel. Arne's ranting on about how investors should dump or avoid Apple. Most of the article is an attempt at justifying his own analysis. I think he is way off.

Arne says "Don't tell me about the dazzling products that Apple introduces from time to time. Because I'll agree with you -- they can be impressive." and "Successful investors don't invest in cool products, though -- they invest in profits.". O.K. But Apple seems to be not only leading but defining the portable music player market with the iPod. While it may be far from perfect iTunes seems to be the premier site for downloading music. I don't know what circles Arne travels in but I see more and more Apple computers (many running OS X) in the hands of young people at colleges and universities, and in airports. It looks to me like Apple is shaping what the next couple of generations of consumers are going to consider buying.

He goes on to rant about the business model over at Apple. "It's safe to say that the business model at Apple is terminally flawed. ". I think he's wrong again in that Apple isn't Windows. You can't (shouldn't) directly compare the Windows PC and the Apple computer market. They are not the same.

As to the balance sheet Arne seems to be saying that Apple's sales are lower now than three, five or ten years ago. The problem I've got with this is that 5 and ten years ago Apple didn't make iPods. The revenue model (specifically what products that Apple sold) was totally different. It would seem given Arne's logic that Microsoft will have to sell ever more expensive software in order to have a positive balance sheet. Hey, wait a minute...

The article closes by blasting Apple's retail stores. O.K. In the grand scheme of things the Apple stores are a kind of oddity. But Aren, have you been to an Apple store? They are different. They do totally showcase the Apple product line and in addition show just about every add on product and book. The stores are helping Apple tell their corporate story.

I saw this post over at digg the other day about how to find free music. I noticed that the link referenced Lifehacker.com, a site that I've found a lot of interesting material on in the past. Lifehacker covers technology and productivity with what I find a great balance; concentrating on the practical rather that the gee whiz. I noticed that many of the articles I like in "Geek to Live" written by Gina Trapani. Good stuff.

This is a great application of Google maps. This site tracks gas prices and puts them on a Google map. When you slect a station it shows you the last reported price for a gallon of regular and lets you enter a new price.

Looking at digg this morning I saw a reference to an article at Forbes.com about leaving yourself an email message to be delivered in the future. This sounded sort of interesting so I clicked over to take a look. While the email time capsule idea is best effort at best I saw another interesting article while I was there. Published a couple of weeks ago (10/24/2005) was an article on "Ten Things You Communicate Unintentionally"by Leah Hoffmann; an interesting article with technical and non technical components. The article is set up as a slide show but I found the selection of items and their presentation was really interesting. Both articles were part of a special report on "Communicating" which I'd recommend as a worthy read.

As time goes by we always seem to improve our tools. For years I've looked almost daily at slashdot (or slash). I can recall talking to friends and co-workers about dozens of times about references to stories that appear there and pointing out comments and stories that I had posted there. But over the past several months I've started hearing and reading more about digg. Looking at both today I think I figured out what's going on here.

From the first glance digg comes across a lot cleaner than slashdot. These days about a third of the screen space at slashdot is dedicated to advertising. digg runs a leader board type ad from Google right across the front of the page. Both sites feature a frame down the right side of the page. slashdot completely fills this with ads and content from other sites. slash also has a menu down the right side of the screen that displays the various categories that your user profile says you are interested in. The problem I have with slash is that the categories they have defined seem to all still be there. Categories that made sense 4 or 5 years ago are still there.

Look at the differences in content. digg and slash both covered a recent story about "safe cigarettes" based on a story that appeared in the UK Times Online. digg had the story submitted very late on Saturday night. It was categorized at digg under "science" and gathered 26 "diggs" and 2 comments as of this writing (on 6 PM Sunday evening). slash posted the story on Sunday afternoon just after 2:30, about 14 hours later. At slashdot there were a total of 357 comments to this article. Based on my profile setting a little over a hundred were under the threshold of being displayed.

What's the difference? At digg I didn't even see this story because given it's rating not many people "dugg" it (found it interesting enough to read). At digg the comments were simple and to the point; one was "I'm glad I quit" while the other one could be summarized as "we all know that smoking is bad". At slash the comments were all over the place. And the ratings of the comments was in my opinion just stupid. One comment was titled "We need deadlier cigarettes" and suggested that cigarettes be 100 times more lethal. That comment was scored a 5 (highest rating) and deemed "funny". And there were another 24 comments listed in this same "We need deadlier cigarettes" thread.

Am I going to stop reading slash? Probably not. I will be looking at digg more often.

Today I did something I have not done before. I looked up my own name in Google or "Googled" myself. While it was interesting to see that there are several other characters sharing the name "Brian Ford" with me on the Internet; Google displayed a single advertisement on the right side of the display. It read : "Great Deals on Brian Ford". OK. So I must check this link.

The funny thing is that moments later when eBay popped up on my display there actually were a number of items that matched "Brian Ford" on eBay. The item that appeared several times was "Brian Redman's Ford GT 40", a 1:32 scale slot car. The other item that appeared was the movie "Presumed Innocent" starring Harrison Ford and Brian Dennehy. The best though was "GERMAN SECRET WEAPON BLUEPRINT FOR MARS - BRIAN FORD", a book offered by a North Dakota based auction house. Nope. I didn't write that.