I missed this at the time, but apparently LG made a custom version of the Shine to promote Iron Man. Jishman, you need one… cut back a little on the wedding and splurge!

I’ve been waiting for an ultraportable from you for over a year. I’ve been holding my breath (figuratively) for days before your Keynotes, hoping I’ll be able to trade you my money for a new laptop. All I want is a small laptop, like my 12 inch Powerbook (although preferably it would be smaller).

Steve…this isn’t it. Not even close. There are three dimensions of size. You made the MacBook Air thinner and lighter, but the damned thing has exactly the same foot print as the 13 inch Macbook. In fact, it is a more expensive, fewer USB ports, no Firewire, non-replaceable battery, no optical drive, slower chip, same foot print as the 13 inch Macbook.

This does not replace my nicely compact 12 inch Powerbook. Not by a long shot.

I haven’t read what other people are saying about it Steve, but unless something magic happens in the next two weeks and suddenly I can’t lift 5 pounds, but can still lift 3, I don’t think the Macbook Air will be on my shopping list.

That’s basically my reaction to today’s announcement of Amazon Kindle. Hmmm…. There’s a lot of potential here, and I can’t help but thinking of a few iPod parallels.

For those that haven’t heard, Kindle is Amazon’s new E-Book reader. No, not a software service, but an honest-to-goodness hardware device. The device boasts Wi-Fi, built-in EVDO (cellular internet) access, and over 90,000 titles and newspapers and blogs available. The wireless data plan for EVDO access is included in the cost of the device. Yes, really. The device sells for $399. And yes, I want one even though I don’t have a subway commute anymore.

The link above has video, so you can listen to the sales pitch.

Now… as for what I think. This is a game changer in that they’re sucking up the wireless access costs. That means that in most cities and in most airports, more importantly, you’ll be able to download and/or buy new content wherever, whenever. No trips to a kiosk or store and no PC to dock with. That’s a shift.

Will it matter? Not sure… when the iPod came out, I had a similar reaction, although the iPod was a sexier device. Kindle is, well, plain, to put it kindly. Anyway, my reaction to the iPod and iPhone was the same: “man, it’s expensive. Is it worth it?”, and “man, will I actually care about the new interface?”

Obviously, the answer to both questions was yes once I got my hands on the device. Apparently, reporters with early access to Kindle have said yes to both as well.

So, I’m not willing to write it off, because I know that a few years ago, living in Boston and having a subway commute, I would’ve considered a device like this. The price would’ve weighed on me, including the safety issues of having a large, $399 device out on an evening subway ride, but people carry iPods out. At the same time, books don’t have the same broad appeal as music. If nothing else, that’s a strike against the device being game changing right there.

One last thought: this does make the whole e-paper thing kind of pointless (in the near term) if it works, doesn’t it?

More on the announcement at CrunchGear and Engadget (which seems more stable than CrunchGear right now).

I got another rich ad from Google Adsense on FatMixx. These are clearly widgets, not just plain old rich ads.

Why is it a widget? Because you can embed it. Check the “Share” tab out:

In fact, I’ll embed it here:

Hopefully that works. That’s a great advertising model.

Update: Hmmm, the embed tag doesn’t work… wtf? I’ve checked the code again and I don’t think I embedded it incorrectly… anyone have any ideas?

Update 2: I see what might be wrong. Should be fixed in a sec.

Update 3: OK, so Wordpress bit me in the butt again… this time, the dynamic_replaces in the wptexturize function replaces the x in 300×250 (see the different x?). That value was in the URL, so that broke the URL and kept the embed from working. I hate these fancy replaces WordPress has, and may finally just give up and turn it off. I do like the extra typographical flourishes, though… Just wish it would detect whether it was in an HTML element or attribute or script block. I fixed this by replacing the x in the URL with %78, the urlencoded value for a lowercase x in utf-8.

You may or may not know that yesterday was “A Day without Google,” a simple campaign started by AltSearchEngines.com to get people to try one of the alternative search engines not built or run by the big players (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.). I didn’t participate, honestly, but I’m struck by a couple of common themes coming up in the various reviews by folks who did.

There seems to be a shift or a surge in prevalence, if not popularity, of search engines that want to be “experts” rather than curators or guides of the Internet. For example, take the experiences of Josh Catone yesterday with two natural language engines, Lexxe (lek-si) and PowerSet. Both of these engines prefer that users ask normal, English questions that the search engine will answer. Ask.com is probably the most popular of this breed of engine, though they probably don’t match Lexxe or Powerset feature-for-feature.

Here’s what Josh, who writes for Read/WriteWeb, said about his experiences with the alt engines:

As an example, last night I caught part of a fascinating documentary about Israel’s 1967 war with Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. Later, I couldn’t remember the name of Israel’s prime minister at the time, so I fired up Lexxe and asked: Who was Israel’s prime minister during the 1967 war? Lexxe suggested that it was Yitzhak Rabin — I knew that wasn’t right. The second result, however, mentioned Levi Eshkol — which is, it turns out, the correct answer.

…

When I tried my first query in Google this morning, the first result I got was Wikipedia’s Six-Day War entry, which would lead me to Eshkol. And the fourth result highlighted text on the search results page mentioning Eshkol as prime minister.

This is a trend that’s a lot of investors and entrepreneurs are moving toward. While we focus on the power of natural language as a usability step, it’s making a couple of other leaps that I think are much more significant. These search engines are taking the next step of actually being the repository for knowledge from the Internet rather than a guide to the knowledge on the Internet. In other words, Google will do it’s best to help you find a site that can answer your question. Lexxe and Powerset will attempt to answer your question.

That’s a pretty profound difference, in my mind. A couple of things come to mind here. First, my gut instinct is that a site that tries to be an expert on everything, which answering any question implies, will likely be an expert at nothing. While I know that enough people and enough special algorithms could replace us, the fact of the matter is that there’s an enormous amount of knowledge and facts out in the world. It’s unclear to me (and, really, beyond my imagination) to believe that one search engine will be able to actually answer questions in the near future. I’m not the first to think of this, obviously, as smarter folks like Jakob Nielsen have been talking about Answer Search Engines since 2004.

Second, the tour guide-like functionality that Google and Yahoo and things like DMOZ provide is different and in certain cases better than getting instant answers. Google does a particularly good job at bridging the answer/guide gap by using special treatment in their OneBox area. It’s a smarter guide, but one that’s not trying to answer every query, just the ones that they’re particularly good at.

The third thought that comes to mind flows from Google’s OneBox. Jason Calacanis, the entrepreneur who brought you Weblogs, Inc, publisher of blogs like Engadget and TUAW, just launched his next big venture, Mahalo. Mahalo is a “human-powered search” engine, which has “guides” that create search engine result pages (SeRPs) by hand. Here’s his description:

Jason McCabe Calacanis today launched Mahalo.com, a human-powered search engine, at the Wall Street Journal’s D Conference. The site is currently being launched in Alpha with the Internet’s 4,000 most popular search terms completed. The Santa Monica-based company hopes to reach 10,000 search terms by the end of the year. At that point it will enter Beta, and launch shortly thereafter.

In other words, they are manually creating the search results pages for the top 10,000 keywords. At some point, I believed that this was an open, wiki-style project, with direct compensation, but it looks like the first set of guides are employees. They just launched their Greenhouse project, which aims to allow anyone to try creating a SeRP to earn a small fee.

The interesting thing here is that Mahalo is explicitly targeting the curator function, to create a reviewed list of results, including a fact box. Here’s the SeRP for iPhone, for example. While it’s not what you’re used to from Google, it provides a decent mix of guide-like results (here are the top sites that talk about the iPhone) and answers (when will the iPhone ship, etc.). While you can’t ask your question as a question, I actually like that because it avoids all the annoying extra typing. I suspect given another generation of net savvy users, a majority will soon get the index approach.

This was just on my mind today after reading about the Day without Google. I personally think the curator function is the most important, but I know how much people love Wikipedia and getting answers from the Internet. I guess we’ll see how it all plays out.

I meant to highlight this last week, but if you looked closely at two of the three videos in the previous post, they’re actually directly from NBC. NBC is releasing videos from their shows directly onto YouTube. They’re doing this in addition to allowing viewers to watch episodes online. So, now you can get NBC content from their web site, from iTunes, and also in embeddable form from YouTube. That’s a pretty clever and simple marketing move, and it probably costs them very little to have someone edit these together.

We do similar things here at ESPN, but we haven’t partnered with any of the YouTube’s of the world. It would be nice to be able to blog about SportsCenter clips or Outside the Lines or the Sports Reporters and have the video in context with the post.

Brace yourselves. As the Democrats get closer to taking Congress, the Republicans are rearming and reactivating their 90’s attack machine. There will be attacks and smears often created whole cloth from nothing. Thankfully, Congress won’t spend millions investigating these rumors, but it’s going to be annoying and ugly. Left-wing blogs call this the “Clinton rules of journalism.” Republicans and their operatives spent years just throwing imagined misdeeds and overblown garbage at the wall. Eventually, they got one to stick, and it gave them a shot at the 2000 election.

Nancy Pelosi gets the pleasure of being the next Bill Clinton, it seems. So far, I count three imagined storylines and scandals that Republicans have tried to push. They’re clearly trying to build a storyline around Pelosi, attempting to undermine her ability to govern before she’s even taken the job. So far nothing is sticking, but then nothing has involved sex or money. First, there was the whole Hoyer/Murtha silliness. Then we’ve had the fun and slowly ending Hastings/Harman faux controversy. Neither story was sexy, but were part of this story building: can Pelosi lead? They’ve tried silly traditional political attacks, but so far they’ve been easily debunked.

It is ridiculous that this is what we spend so much time on these days. Fake scandals and personal attacks instead of meaningful reporting and debate. We should want more. We need more. We also can ask for more. Local news offered less than 2 minutes worth of coverage to election news each night. That’s awful.

I wish I could think of a way to bring together the best political reporting around the web and put it together in a compelling and consumable format. Aggregation is what people need, the filter to help them find the stories they should focus on. None of the automated solutions seem to work all that well. Memeorandum is the closest I’ve seen and even that isn’t really right.

I was working on some tweaks to a small research project here and made this handy little chart of blog posts that link to content at ESPN.com. It’s not a perfect tool, as it only captures links to stories on our major properties, but it gives a rough idea of the size of the sports blog universe as captured by Technorati. The data was captured using their developer API.

As you can see, there was a gap in data processing recently (hence the fact that I’m looking at this). I’m planning on exposing some of this data on the site. I think it’s a curiosity, more than anything else, but I’ve found some good blogs this way.

I’m sure there is lots of speculation: Clinton. Obama. I’ve even heard a few people say Russ Feingold.

I figure Senator Clinton is a bit too controversal. Senator Obama is “hot” but he wouldn’t have even been a Senator for a full term. Feingold wouldn’t be bad, but I’m not sure he has the name recognition.

This morning Howard Dean was on FOXNews Suday. I had forgetten how dynamic and frankly how moderate Former Governor Dean is. He truly seems like the right person for the times. He was painted as “Superliberal” for his opposition to the Iraq war, however his positions are quite moderate and he would he would be able to govern from the center. Can someone be “superliberal” when he was endorsed by the NRA?

I know he might be “damaged” goods from the last election and he is probably enjoying his job as DNC chair, but he may have just been 4 years too early. Dean ‘08!

If anyone hasn’t noticed, I’m a fan of the new Galactica series on Scifi. I love the ability to download the episodes from iTunes. As I said once before, this may be the new method of distribution for lesser known programs that won’t make it to DVD.

That being said, between seasons, The Scifi Channel had a series of “Webisodes;” ten 3-4 minute web only episodes which explained some of the goings on which occurred between the season two finale and the season three premiere. In addition to fleshing out the story, the webisodes gave fans a bit to chew on in the interim and helped build hype for the premiere.

This isn’t the first time something like this has happened. Between Star Wars: Attack of the Clones and Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, The Cartoon Network had a series of short cartoons about the Clone Wars.

It seems that Galactica’s webisodes have created a civil war of its own. It seems that NBC/Universal declared the webisodes “promotional” and thus the writers were not eligible for residuals or credit. Needless to say, the writers were not too thrilled with that. A battle broke out and it seems that, at least marginally, NBC/Universal won. Of course, after the first 10, no new webisodes were made.

Needless to say, these are the obstacles that are going to be faced as the internet starts taking over more of our entertainment content delivery. Parallel content seems like a natural extension to me but I can see why it might be considered “promotional,” even if the work going into the content is the same as for the actual show. It is likely non-revenue generating and may not be economically viable if subjected to the standard practices of the Writer’s Guild. Then again, why not get the same pay for the same work. I suspect that this is going to become a huge fight. And, as usual, we, the consumers, are the ones who are going to lose, as there will be less content available.

Has anyone seen the new ads for the Hummer H3?  As described elsewhere, there are two ads in the campaign – one for women and one for men.  The one for women:

Woman and kid at the playground. Another kid cuts in line for the slide. First Mom complains to second kids Mom, “My kid was first.” Second Mom, “well now My kid is first.” First Mom backs down.

First Mom goes out and buys a Hummer. Straps kid in. Slogan says “Get your girl on.”

The one for men:

The man is in the grocery store, emasculated by buying tofu when the guy behind him is buying ribs. So he goes, buys a Hummer, and the tag line is “Restore your manhood.”

I must say, I don’t get it.  Of course the running joke is that anyone who buys a gargantuan tank like a Hummer is trying too hard to prove something, but why would you reinforce that perception with your commercials? What’s next, “Hummer, for the less endowed”?  

I saw Charlie Brooker’s Guardian piece, Supposing … I’m too old for MySpace, on both digg and on techmeme so I had to go read it.

As a fellow 30+ geek who doesn’t use MySpace, I feel the need to chime in. Especially since I’m building a social networking site at work. More on that in a minute.

The reason Brooker feels like he’s “a fumbling old colonel struggling to comprehend his nephew’s digital watch” is that he keeps thinking there’s a hook there, something that ought to appeal to him that doesn’t. The underlying implication is that as a good geek, he should see the draw of MySpace.

There are a couple of fundamental mistakes here. The first is that MySpace has something to do with geekdom and, by extension, technology. It has absolutely nothing to do with either. It has to do with the age group of those that use it and where they are in life. The New Yorker (Me Media, 5/15/06 issue) had one of the best explanations. They talked to a sociologist who believes being on MySpace is the modern alternative to hanging out at the mall for kids. Whatever the manifestation, kids and young adults need to see and be seen and to socialize. MySpace is about how younger people socialize and make friends.

For those of us past this stage of life, whatever our age, MySpace isn’t for us. A 30-year-old would probably feel as out-of-place just hanging out at the mall. Not that you can’t go to MySpace, see bands, get tickets, or whatever. You can still go to the mall. You just don’t hang out there.

The way to build a MySpace for older Internet users is to figure out what types of things adults are interested in having aggregated about them. If you have kids, for example, you might take more pictures of the kids than you do of yourself or your spouse. It might be a subtle difference, but it requires a few different features. I think a lot of different sites have a lot of the pieces, but the grown-up’s social networking site will have all of this functionality in one place.

The second misconception is that MySpace is the “be all, end all” for social networking. Because he doesn’t get MySpace, he must not get the whole social networking “thing.” That seems too simplistic. Sure, the core functionality is fairly common. Friendster, Facebook, Flickr, or LinkedIn all provide the same basic functionality. Adding friends, self-expression, and sharing are really all these sites are about. It’s a personal aggregator of things about you, and in that way, it’s pretty simple. It’s not the technology that sets them apart but the features and the product. “What do you share?” and “Why do you share it?” make all the difference. MySpace has done some smart things on that front which is why they’re so popular. Danah Boyd’s essay examines some of this, by the way, and is a great set of guiding principles for those of us building competitors.

I mentioned above that we’re building a social networking platform at ESPN.com. There is a team of folks here at ESPN.com including a number of folks in senior management who get this stuff. We see some things that we know we can do better than anyone else, so in September, we will launch our new social networking platform. Our plan is to bring out the basics then. Over the following months, you’ll see new features roll out that will make the ESPN.com offering even better.

This is one of the major projects my team is working on right now. I can’t really talk about the features in more detail, but here’s the summary of the September feature set from the Ad Age article:

ESPN is hoping to become the MySpace of the sports world. In September, it will unveil as part of ESPN’s Sports Nation property the tools for fans to create profiles, contribute to sports blogs, post opinions and link to favorite articles.

John Zaccario, VP-digital media sales and marketing at ESPN, revealed the plans to advertisers at a pre-NBA Draft party in Chelsea that also featured an appearance by NBA great (and ESPN basketball analyst) Bill Walton. “We want to make the sports fan the center of ESPN’s universe,” Mr. Zaccari said. ESPN will allow users to personalize their home pages and participate in blogs and discussions around favorite teams and sports.

There are some more features, but this is the general idea for the September launch. Even more features will roll out over the following months. I’m really excited to see how people use the site, and it should be fun to see where the fans take us.

I actually think the headline of the Ad Age article is wrong, by the way. The only way my team wants to be “MySpace for fans” is in our overall audience. Can’t complain about having 50-60+ million uniques, after all. Beyond the basics, though, we’re going to be very different and, I believe, a lot better. We’re very aware that people of all ages are sports fans whether they’re in the heavily courted 18-35 demo or not. We’re doing what we can to appeal to sports fans of all ages whether you’re in the MySpace crowd or not.

I don’t think Brooker will have trouble getting ESPN’s offering, especially if he’s a sports fan.

Want a job?

We still have some openings on this team, by the way, and if you get MySpace and you get sports and you’re a web developer either on the front end (DHTML, JS, PHP/JSP/ASP, AJAX, etc.) or the back end (SQL, Java, C#, etc.), send us your resume. The job description I linked to is for a particular position, but you can find the other open technology positions on our jobs web site. ESPN is an awesome place to work if you love sports.

(Note: Standard disclaimer applies. I work for ESPN, but I’m writing here on my own. Nothing has been approved or sanctioned by anyone at ESPN.com or Disney.)

Technology Liberation Front has a good article up about how eMusic might represent “The Future of Music.” I found this article via Kareem’s blog, and normally it would just be a headline link here, as it was on reemer.com.

It’s not a headline post because, coincidently, Atrios has been plugging eMusic for a few days and I went ahead and gave it a try because of the 50 free MP3 trial offer. So far, I’ve found some cool Indian-influenced music that I wouldn’t have found otherwise. On the whole, though, I’ve found the whole thing quite daunting. It’s a very big catalog of less-than-well-known music and, because of that, it’s very, very hard to navigate it all. I use the same approach as I do with iTunes, relying on top sales lists, but previewing clips is too complicated on the Mac.

That’s probably the biggest problem I have. The site offers .m3u files (MP3 playlists) for previews. It’s all nicely standards based, but the default behavior on the Mac is to play the .m3u file in iTunes. That means that I have a clutter of random streaming MP3 clips stuck in iTunes that I don’t really want. I tried switching to just using Quicktime for .m3u files, but then it downloads the file to my disk, where I have to double-click it (or the icon in he download center) to play the file. In the end, I stayed with this system, previewing entire albums so I would only have to do it once per album.

I’m open to any suggestions people have with using eMusic on the Mac.

The article is a good read, by the way. You should check it out.

If you’ve been following the news at all, you know that Iran is the next, great threat to our nation. You might argue that it was a greater threat in 2002 than Iraq, but we can leave that aside for now. The Bush administration has one response to any identified threat (real or imaginary): military force. Since they’ve pretty much screwed up diplomacy at every level, I’m not really sure what else they’re really able to do. Since our military is taxed right now occupying a country, the administration is considering various military strikes. According to Sy Hersh and later confirmed by the Washington Post, those plans include a large scale bombing effort that could include nuclear tactical weapons (bunker buster nukes).

While Bush has been categorically denying plans for airstrikes in Iran, remember that he was doing the same about Iraq in late 2002. We’ve since found out that planning started in earnest before diplomacy had been given a chance, and that the diplomacy was shaped around a military timeline first. In other words, the administration never really tried to consider another solution to the problem of Iraq. Military first, military last. Diplomacy is really just about getting basing and airspace rights.

Our prestige has suffered internationally. More nations are skeptical of claims by the Administration on any front. The latest Pew survey of global opinion (6/2005) shows that U.S. image is still negative, though it is up from the recent lows. From another report (3/2004), people in other countries view Iraq as a mistake:

These notions are not shared elsewhere. Majorities in Germany, Turkey and France – and half of the British and Russians – believe the conflict in Iraq undermined the war on terrorism. At least half the respondents in the eight other countries view the U.S. as less trustworthy as a consequence of the war. For the most part, even U.S. military prowess is not seen in a better light as a result of the war in Iraq.

On the domestic front, we’re not doing much to improve that image. An editorial in the NYTimes, How to Lose the Brain Race, expresses concern about the immigration debate hurting our long term economic growth. Looking at the current proposals on the table, the op-ed makes a case for maintaining foreign student inflows:

Senator Feinstein insisted that the bill call for some fees for foreign students applying to study at American colleges and universities to be doubled, and also demanded that agribusiness get the right to 1.5 million low-wage foreign guest workers over five years. Combined, the two proposals sent a message to the rest of the world: send us your brawn, not your brains.

…

In making immigration laws, Congress caters to cheap-labor industries like agribusiness and sweatshop manufacturing while shortchanging the high-tech, high-wage industries on which the future of the American economy depends.

Both of these things are related because they influence each other. One simply needs to take a look at Indians to understand this. A February report about world opinion shows that Indians are the only foreign populace to view Bush favorably. Their explanation of why is telling:

America remains a land of opportunity for many Indians. Asked where they would recommend that a young person move in order to lead a good life, a 38% plurality of Indians choose the United States. This finding may seem a weak endorsement, given America’s longstanding image as a hopeful new world for immigrants; however, in no other country does even a plurality recommend the U.S. to the hypothetical young person searching for a better life. In other countries, Australia, Canada, Great Britain, and Germany are all more popular choices. After India, Poland has the second largest share of respondents recommending the United States – and only one-in-five Poles (19%) suggests America as a destination.

What we choose to do with Iran and what we choose to do with immigration will define this country for the next century. With Iran, if we go the nuclear route and attack yet another country, that will hurt our image abroad even more. Billmon has an excellent piece exploring what the world might look like if the U.S. uses tactical nukes. It’s not nuclear winter or mutually assured destruction, but the annihilation of our image abroad.

With immigration, we could change one of the hallmarks of this country. We need bright people, no matter where they hail from, to create businesses and bring ideas here. The more research that happens at American universities, the stronger our nation becomes. Fanning the flames of xenophobia will only hurt our country in the long run. Pandering to low wage industries will do the same.

We stand at a crossroads. This administration wins support by playing to peoples’ fears on globalization, terrorism, and immigration. It’s no wonder that folks are responding. When your leaders tell you, “Look how scary this is. Thank God you have us to protect you,” of course people will begin to give in to that fear. Every time they have taken a principled stand (the rare times they do), they’ve quickly folded the moment their polls start heading south on Iraq or on corruption issues.

Where is the f’ing “Blue America” blog? Do we really need mainstream media institutionalization of partisanship? This is so wrong on so many levels, I can’t even begin to address it. It’s literally making me sputter at my desk. Stupid Washington Post doing even more stupid things. I can’t believe this.

Apparently, Apple’s market cap has surpassed Dell’s recently. The occasion has reminded a few folks about some choice Michael Dell comments. First, in 1997 he claimed that Apple should close up shop. One wonders where his firm would’ve gotten their design cues from, but whatever. In the comments over at MacSlash, we find an even a better set of quotes in this BusinessWeek article:

Q: What is the future of Apple Computer?
A: Silicon Graphics.

Q: That bad?
A: Maybe it’s a little bit different. But if you look at proprietary computer companies, whether it’s Digital or Silicon Graphics (SGI ) or Apple (AAPL ), I think the fates are all relatively similar. We know how the movie ends. It’s just a question of what happens in the middle. Apple has a very little customer base. If you look at the economics, it has been extremely hard for Apple to get a return on its R&D with a shrinking volume base. It’s not to say that Apple’s products aren’t innovative or cool, but the economic factors here are so overwhelming, it’s very hard for them to swim against that tide.

Q: If you were running Apple, is there anything you could do to change that?
A: I would never take that job.

Prescient, that guy.

Since I’ve had a few days off, instead of being productive, I decided to catch up on Scifi’s Battlestar Galactica. By catch up, I mean watch the miniseries and first season. I’m hoping to catch the the first half of the second season next thursday before they launch the second half.

So, in order to catch up, I either had to buy the DVD or try iTunes video. Being lazy, I went for iTunes. So, my first thought: Sure is cheaper on iTunes. Amazon sells Season 1.0 for $39 with free super saver shipping and iTunes sells it for $26 + tax and I get it now. So far, I’m liking this iTunes thing. The con is that a season sucks up 2 gb, which is 5% of my laptop’s hard disk. So a bit of a minus there. Plus, when you realize that I just purchased a 6 MP digital camera, I’m suddenly seeing visions of a full hard drive.

But all that is really secondary. The question is how does it look? Not bad but not fantastic. There are some clear pixelations at points, especially during the credits. To be fair, I’ve seen some of the same issues with DVDs so it may be more of a TV resolution on a computer screen issue, rather than a weakness in iTunes video format. The sound, coming out of computer speakers, was fine. I’d love to get the DVD, just to compare, but even if the video isn’t quite as good, the price and convenience certainly make it viable.

The real question is still unanswered though: How does iTunes compare to Tivo? That is harder to say. I can’t compare picture quality, but I would assume they are similar. If I had Tivo, I certainly wouldn’t need to buy episodes of Battlestar Galactica…Tivo would take care of them for me. Of course, if I miss the episode, Tivo can’t help, but right now iTunes selection is so limited, that much of the time it can’t help me either. On one hand, I can buy 75 TV shows for the yearly subscription price of Tivo. But on the other hand, with Tivo, I can burn DVDs of shows I record. Frankly, I don’t think there are 75 shows a year that I want so badly I’d pay for them, but I can see a lot that I might record and burn if I had Tivo.

Frankly, for those with a DVR, I can’t imagine them using iTunes video all that often, except maybe to get very old programs that aren’t broadcast any longer. For those without, it is a nifty service, but I’d still be tempted to break out the VCR if I know I am going to miss an episode of a current show. Digital cable with “On Demand” style services throw another monkey wrench into the whole thing. I’d like to think that eventually people will use a combination of all these services, however I suspect that with DVRs and On Demand available, iTunes video is going to be relegated to service for finding older video with low demand or as an independant type distribution house. While it is cool that iTunes is slowly moving to becoming a complete multimedia distribution system, I am pessimistic as to its future success. Music worked as means of driving iPod sales. I just don’t think that video is going to translate.

All that being said, second season Battlestar Galactica repeats on Thursday Jan 5 starting at 8 am until 5pm. The second half of season two starts at 10pm on Friday the 6th. I just hope that I am home in time for the 1 am repeat…but you can bet the VCR will programmed to record it.