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.