Overclocked

I wrote a piece about Al Gore on the political blog over the weekend that was actually largely favorable. There was one more thing about Gore and his documentary I found impressive: his slide show. Agree or disagree, it’s proof of Matt Lewis’s point: those of us on the other side of Gore politically need to think about more about framing our ideas.

I found this Business Week link from December that’s worth del.icio.using. It talks about the secrets behind Al Gore’s presentation style: set aside PowerPoint’s stilted title and bullet format, and go with straight images, quotes, graphs, and video. Unstated in this piece is that because Gore is no master communicator, he relies on slides more and does so effectively.

Googling around some more I found that Gore got some help in designing the slide show, from Duarte Design. The movie shows the ex-Veep noodling around in Keynote, rearranging slides, one assumes to convey his hands-on role in creating it. So, is this another Gore exaggeration? (I couldn’t resist…)

Never mind my kvetching earlier. I am sold.

I don’t know if the iPhone is The One Device — but it comes pretty darn close. Scoble is impressed despite being underwhelmed by Apple TV. Engadget has the full keynote where I was following along. And it’s demoed over at Apple (though it would have been cool to let us press the buttons as we would on the phone and explore).

What I love:

• Websites as they were meant to be seen. None of this .mobi and mobile stylesheet crap. Up until now, uber-simple Web layouts for cell phones were how we needed to do it, not how we wanted to do it. iPhone combined with true broadband changes everything.
• Graphic voicemail — that solves a big annoyance. Thank you, Apple!
• Google Maps & Widgets — hopefully these will be just as accessible for widget and mashup creation as their progenitors.
• The sensor for detecting portrait or landscape mode just rocks.

What I don’t love:

• 4GB and 8GB??? This fact alone doesn’t make it a true iPod replacement, and the phone will be crammed with other data to boot. Paying $100 for an extra 4 gigs just seems wrong.

• The screen. How easily does it scratch and smudge? That to me is the key question. My 30GB iPod is virtually unusable for video because of the scratches, and that after putting it in my pocket a handful of times without the sleeve. That is for a device I use occasionally. This is a phone/PDA/browser that will see heavy use and for which screen quality is not incidental. If this isn’t a sea-change from the iPod Video, the backlash could make the Wii strap issues look like a walk in the park (or maybe like the Wii they’re counting on the coolness factor overwhelming a serious usability issue — it’s not like it slowed down sales).

What I want to see:

• Why just SMS? Can I have IM too? Or is just a semantic issue now with smartphones? You’d think with the focus on bringing the Web to your pocket we could take SMS out back and shoot it.

• Given that it runs on Safari, will it run the full bevy of Ajax, Flash, etc.? If so, VCast and whatever deal YouTube has with the carriers has just been remaindered. This is important. A truly Web-enabled phone kills the walled gardens of broadcast SMS, VCast, etc. and eliminates the carriers’ stranglehold on content delivery to phones.
• A video camera.

I noticed that a new Web 2.0 analytics service has risen up to compete with Alexa. It’s called (…drumroll…) Compete.

Compete says it relies on a panel of 2 million users and is more reliable than Alexa toolbar downloads. They’re probably right. Alexa, despite its addictiveness, is easily gamed. Their interface is clean and they demystify the numbers by giving you total number of uniques in a month on a site.

This is where they go wrong. By almost any measure, their total uniques number for any given site is low, like 2 and 3 times low. That’s looking at Nielsen data, internal numbers, Google Analytics, Sitemeter — for numerous sites. Does anyone really believe TechCrunch, which gets an average of 86,923 visits a day had just 52,025 unique visitors in November? Even the most viral blogs do no less than 2 to 3 times their daily uniques in a month.

Compete may be lowballing it, but I will say this: at least they lowball consistently. Their traffic curves seem to be dead on, and less herky-jerky than even Nielsen for smaller sites.

Nobody could ever accuse Microsoft of embellishment.

Because when I first heard the term Windows Home Server, I was thinking it was something I could use to host a Fortune 500 site from an ugly box in my closet. Well, ugly it ain’t. The design is positively iPodesqe, including a Jobsian lack of things to press. CrunchGear sums it up:

This cylindrical, glowing piece of machinery is basically an easy to use, plug ‘n play server for the family. You can share all your movies, pictures, music, files, etc. with up to 10 users wirelessly and can access your files anywhere in the world via a free personalized domain.

A rep tells us that the device has internal drives, but the storage capacity differs. Microsoft is actually using these as OEM devices and customizing them to different manufacturers needs. HP is releasing their version in Q2 this year with a storage capacity between 500GB and 1TB. There’s also four USB ports and three extra drive bays in case you pirate you run out of storage. Price? Rumors are that it’ll be in the $500-ish zone.

Ouch. 1TB of storage is what makes the price point palatable, but the basic problem of storing documents across your home and work machines (which has existed since time immemorial) calls for a solution that’s a good deal cheaper than $500. Lately I’ve taken to using Google Docs & Spreadsheets to edit basic documents I work on heavily both at work and home but really this is limited to Word docs. The Google suite is not a good substitute for Excel and no substitute at all for PowerPoint.

If OpenOffice really wanted to play against Redmond, they’d enable a direct save to Web. Unlike Google Docs, it is ready for prime time, and users have been more than willing to adopt non-browser apps for Web-based work.

The official Yahoo blog confirms it: they’re buying MyBlogLog, makers of the cool widget that shows you your readers’ faces in real time. It looks like the first step towards the type of interoperable community based around visits/traffic to a site, not a third-party behemoth like Flickr. I haven’t tried putting it up yet, but I love the concept. TechCrunch has more.

Via Rex comes the new-look Time magazine site. It’s a hybrid of CNN and the New York Times and treads only tastefully in Web 2.0 without getting lost in la-la land.

It also looks like Time’s stable of blogs, including RCP, was a precursor to this design.

With Macworld kicking off in San Francisco and CES opening up in Vegas, intrigue surrounds what exactly Steve Jobs has up his sleeve. The Apple homepage boldly proclaims “The first 30 years were just the beginning. Welcome to 2007.” Scoble has bloggers speculating on the aspect ratio of that graphic (it’s darn close to 16:9). Mike Davidson says that Jobs will live up to the hype and more, adding that with all the speculation about a new phone he thinks Apple’s big play will be iTheater, effectively iTunes for your TV.

Tomorrow’s NYT says, no, it’s a phone:

That shift may well be underscored tomorrow when Steven P. Jobs, the chief executive of Apple Computer, is expected to unveil an Apple phone representing his company’s new mobile communications strategy — highlighted by a device that may include Jobsian refinements such as a sleek ceramic case and a transparent touch screen.

Industry executives and competitors believe that Apple has developed the first of a new generation of devices that are closer to personal computers in pocket form, meaning that they will easily handle music, entertainment, productivity tasks and communications on cellular and other wireless networks.

After all the rumors of an iPhone, Apple may be a day late and a dollar short. Heck, even the name was swiped out from under them. I’m sure the Apple phone will be a thing to behold, but what will it be able to do that nothing else will? The iPod was revolutionary for its design and the iTunes interface. Blackberry was revolutionary because you could send actual emails and for the keyboard (hence leapfrogging SMS). Will the Apple phone be just as revolutionary or just have more bells and whistles? Add-on services to existing cell phones (be it cameras or MP3 players) just don’t seem that compelling.

I think the single most revolutionary thing that could be done in the mobile space is to make the phones themselves location aware, so I can tell if someone on my buddy list is just around the corner or find all Xbox inventory, Mexican restaurants, or flower shops within a mile or two of my precise location, or have the phone alert me if I come within a mile of any services on my watchlist. Doubtless we’d have to see advances in the arena of RFID here.

If it’s just a phone with the standard set of features that exist today, it will not live up to the hype. If it’s something truly new on the mobile front, or something that makes the process of big screen convergence radically simpler, watch out.

From a Census Bureau release:

According to projections from a communications industry forecast (Table 1110), people will spend 65 days in front of the TV, 41 days listening to radio and a little over a week on the Internet in 2007. Adults will spend about a week reading a daily newspaper and teens and adults will spend another week listening to recorded music. Consumer spending for media is forecasted to be $936.75 per person.

The Internet total seems low. Maybe convergence between TV and the net in a few years time will be the Big Bang we’ve been waiting for.

P.S. Why didn’t they include gaming in this study, particularly among males 18-34?

By now, we all know why tags are a better way of categorizing a site than, well, categories. But I didn’t quite expect my own reaction to be this strong two days into relaunching this site with Ultimate Tag Warrior.

Now that I have tags, I have virtually no appetite to use, much less set up, Wordpress’s categories. So, expect to see the rather limited categories now to be replaced by a tag cloud just as soon as there is valuable enough data to support it.

A VC reports that FeedBurner has introduced a Site Stats service as a direct competitor to SiteMeter and Google Analytics. I’ve turned it on, and if you already have FeedBurner code on your site, you can to. The big takeaway I’m hoping for: How many unique people total am I reaching, both through the site and RSS?

This got me thinking about something else. SiteMeter has been the incumbent in this space for a while. It’s ok, but nothing spectacular. Why is it still on top? It was social software before social software was cool. Everyone has it (and you can make it public if you choose) so it’s become the lingua franca of blogosphere traffic rankings. But Google (and now maybe FeedBurner) can run rings around its functionality.

I think if someone could take a tool like Google Analytics and make it social, that would be very powerful. How many people who visit this site also visit Scoble? What is the aggregate, unduplicated size of the blog audience — of tech blogs, of political blogs, of celebrity blogs, or blogs tagged with any subject? I can tell you a lot of marketers would kill for this data, because even tools like Nielsen or ComScore are limited in this respect. Google stumbled upon the idea of assembling an ecosystem like this around links. This could be built around an even stronger dataset — people.

Monetization? Probably some mix of advertising (unlike Sitemeter, it could be a destination site) and premium features like site overlay (which sucks in Google). This idea is only 15 minutes old, so it bears fleshing out, but the end product would be crack for a numbers geek like me. How many more numbers geeks are there out there?