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With the news about microchip maker’s price wars, I can’t seem to miss the fact that a number of the new Intel chips are codenamed some very unique names: Conroe, Woodcrest, Montecito, Kentsfield, etc. Am I on a hiking trail or is this a function of the naming montage we see in planned communities?

To prove my point, see if you can add the word for a road to it. Examples: Kentsfield Street. Yep. Montecito Avenue. Yep. Woodcrest Trail. Woodcrest Drive. Double yep.

It doesn’t make much sense for Intel to use such nomenclature. A simple demarcation of a letter and number is enough for people to comprehend. Such a name can explain how powerful a chip is and of what rank it is within the company.

It is not like I am saying a company should not have a name for its product, but the Pentium chip only had a number with each new phase of its evolution. All in all, as the phrase goes “What’s in a name?” If new chips can prove themselves to be good it won’t matter what they are called.

The best video blog I’ve seen is The Show, which is produced every weekday by Ze Frank, a designer/performance artist who gained Internet fame a few years back with the Flash piece, How to Dance Properly. The Show is a weird blend of news commentary, personal observations and bathroom humor. I think it’s pretty fantastic and hilarious.

The Show also has some lessons to teach in how to use technology to build a community of users:

• A few episodes of The Show have been written entirely by viewers using a wiki, and then faithfully performed by Ze.
• Ze plays an ongoing chess match with viewers during his shows. Viewers use a wiki to discuss and reach consensus on their next move in the match.
• Ze launched an earth sandwich challenge and an ugly MySpace design contest to encourage participation by viewers (not going to try to explain here).

Anyway, The Show is worth checking out and is a great example of the kind of cool things people are doing with video blogs these days.

I think I belong to nearly every social network out there now: Friendster, MySpace, LinkedIn, Orkut and, as of last Wednesday, Facebook. The network I used the most was Friendster, because most of my friends already had profiles on there. No one I know uses Orkut and my colleagues and I are listed on LinkedIn. But a fair number of people I know use MySpace, and given the kind of publicity it’s garnered lately, its userbase is growing by the day.

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For the tens of people that are interested, we put together a podcast about the findings of our recent campaign study. In the podcast, Ajit Verghese interviews myself and Erin Teeling (who actually wrote the thing) about how 2006 Senate campaigns are using the Internet. We talk about which sites are good/bad, how candidates are using blogs and podcasts and what we expect to see from political campaigns in the future, among other things. Give it a listen if you’re interested or just a glutton for punishment.

 

 Campaign Study [27:34m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Yesterday, the Herald Tribune out of Florida published an article on the use of blogs and podcasts by FL gubernatorial candidates. I was interviewed for the piece and it includes a mention of our study on the use of the Internet by 2006 Senate candidates.

Not being from Florida, I haven’t looked at any of the gubernatorial websites from down there specifically. But the story identifies an amusing tendency by folks to congratulate themselves for blogging or producing podcasts. Folks seem to think they’ve accomplished something simply by going through the simple process of setting up a blog. I understand the compulsion.

But it’s important to know that anyone can have a blog or record a podcast. Just like anyone can buy a guitar or a set of drums. The real question to ask is can they actually play the damn thing?

We talk a lot on this blog about the “best of” things….the best of blogs, the best campaign websites, the best uses for Google…but what we rarely talk about is the worst of things.

CNET did a piece last month about the worst tech of the second quarter of 2006. This review hits all the major categories of popular technology, and even talks about the “worst new sport”, Segwey Polo. The commentary is definitely worth reading. My favorite part is CNET’s description of the feeling you get when you take pictures with a Kodak Easy Share Camera: “Hey, Mom, check out these pics I took of Blobby McSmear. Oh wait, that’s my newborn baby. And I almost caught a UFO on camera, but I missed it because it took eight seconds for my camera to start up. And here’s a picture of me crying uncontrollably while rocking back and forth in the fetal position because of this camera.”

And while you’re on CNET, check out the Top 10 Tech-Related YouTube Videos.  Here you can find Senator Ted Stevens’ speech to the Senate Commerce Committee on his “The Internet is a Series of Tubes” theory, a pair of kids who are a little overly excited when they get a Nintendo-64 from Santa Claus one Christmas morning, and yes, even a flashback from 1981 about the possibility of computers “the size of a book” developing by 1990…go figure.

If you use Google Maps a lot, every once in a while you’ll see something large and unusual in the “Satellite” view. Next time, instead of trying to decide what it is, head over to the Wikimapia mashup.

Wikimapia allows visitors to highlight any place on the map with a retangular outline and enter a short description of the place.

According to a recent article in Online Media Daily, DoubleClick has introduced a new ad serving platform that integrates ads directly into Flash-based websites.  The new system enables the ad to interact directly with the content, coordinating the rich media elements of the ads with the rest of the content so that they are not competing with one another for attention.

The platform, which is called DART Motif for Flash-in-Flash, has been in beta since January, running with four DoubleClick clients, including iVillage and Napster.  The system represents a slightly new direction as previous products focused on pages created within an HTML environment.

Nicholas Negroponte’s vision to give every child in the developing nations a laptop is closer than ever to becoming reality. The Bangkok Post reported last week that testing of the $100 Laptop (part of the One Laptop Per Child program) is set to begin in Egypt, Nigeria, India, China, Thailand, Brazil and Argentina. The plan is to eventually sell the laptop to governments who will issue it to needy schoolchildren.

The One Laptop Per Child initiative was announced by Negroponte at last year’s World Economic Forum in Davos. The laptop has been designed to be Linux-based with a dual-mode display with four USB ports built into it. It is said to have a 500 MHz processor, 128MB of DRAM and 500 MB of Flash memory. The machine is cased in virtually indestructible hard plastic and has been redesigned to be pull string-powered generator rather than the hand-cranked generator which was a feature of the original prototype. Below is the first video demonstration of the working laptop.

The project has been criticized by Bill Gates, who was reported to have mocked the design of the laptop (specifically the size and the hand crank feature) at a Microsoft Government Leaders Forum earlier this year.

The recent tragedy of war in Lebanon has spurred Americans, as well as people from Israel and Lebanon, to turn to the Internet for support.  Groups of bloggers are publishing their struggles online.  These posts serve many purposes: providing a point of contact with family and friends, keeping others informed about what exactly is going on in daily life in the Middle East, and giving people from all over the world an accurate picture of the daily struggle faced by those in Lebanon and Israel.

The Lebanese Blogger Forum aggregates many individual blogs written both from and about Lebanon.  The blog From Fort Wayne to Beirut brings the war in Lebanon close to home, as it is written by an American University student who, in the middle of a study abroad program in Lebanon, found herself stranded with many other students in the violence of Beirut. The author of this blog has since made it back home to the US safely, and has dedicated her blog to spreading word about how the public can get involved and help the cause for peace.

CNN also did a short piece on July 22, called “Lebanon Blogger” about a Canadian-raised Lebanese young man living near Beiruit who is currently blogging about his take on the war in Lebanon.  Described by CNN as the “war in Lebanon, unfiltered”, Bassem Mazloum’s blog, “Lebanon Israeli Crisis”, provides a brutally honest view of the war from someone faced with the daily struggle of surviving in a war-torn country.

The war in Lebanon has also made it to YouTube.  Just by doing a quick search of “Lebanon war”, some 500 results came up, many of which are homemade videos created by people living through the war.

These blogs and videos provide personal insight to the war in Lebanon that is unusual to find among the jumble of propagandized stories published by the mainstream press.  It is quite remarkable how these bloggers and others have the frame of mind to write about and publish articles about their experiences even in such a chaotic time.  Despite the somber topic of these blogs and videos, this provides yet another example of how the Internet has changed the way people get news and the way they communicate with one another, even in a time of war.

In an attempt to provide a “portrait” of American bloggers, the Pew Internet and American Life Center put out yet another study on the weblog phenomenon. Key takeaways are as follows:

• 12 million Americans keep a blog
• 57 million Americans read blogs
• 37% of Americans who blog use their lives and experiences as inspiration for entries
• 11% of American bloggers say they focus mainly on writing about politics and government (more…)

The New York Times reported yesterday that in the wake of the bombings in Mumbai, the Indian government has effectively ordered ISPs to block a number of domains, including ”*.blogspot.com” (Blogger),”*.typepad.com”(Typepad) and ”geocities.com/*” (Yahoo! Geocities), citing that terrorists might use blogs to coordinate attacks. Yahoo! Groups has also been blocked.

Outraged Indian bloggers have resorted to using a wiki and Google groups in order to communicate with each other and track new developments.

Techcrunch has a report today on MoveDigital, a site that gives organization a quick and easy way to distribute their videos in a variety of digital formats. I gave it a go and the site is very simple to use. The first step is to create an account and upload your video to the MoveDigital site. Copies of the video are then created in a variety of different formats, meaning end users can simply download the video to their computer in its original format (say wmv), acquire the video using bit torrent or download a version that plays on mobile video devices. Below is a screenshot of a widget you can put your website to distribute your video:

Organizations will be charged based on the amount of bandwidth they use (video size * number of users who download the video). So the pricing is based entirely on how much you use the tool. In addition, users who have accounts can choose to donate their own bandwidth to download the video.

Interestingly, according to TechCrunch, John Edward (D-NC) has already signed up for the service. You can view the torrent version of his videos here and the mobile versions here.

I think this is great technology but don’t think there are wide ranging political applications for MoveDigital during the 2006 cycle. Maybe 2008. I’m a pretty big tech nerd and I only occasionally use bit torrent and don’t really have much interest in downloading and watching videos on my phone. I’m pretty happy just watching videos on Youtube or other websites and its the rare video that I actually want to save on my computer for eternity. If I don’t do these things, I find it hard to believe that others are clamoring to at this point. Particularly to acquire campaign videos.

It’ll be interesting to watch though. And folks that are interested can monitor the Edwards page to see how he is doing - the site shows how many times each video has been downloaded.

Yesterday, the New York Times profiled an implantable neuromotor prosthetic that allowed a young man suffering from a spinal cord injury “to control a computer, a television set and a robot using only his thoughts,” offering hope to many who are in similar situations. The broader term for the connection of man and machine is brain-computer interface, which implies that the technological connection makes motor output unnecessary.

The device described in the article, the BrainGate Neural Interface System, was developed by Cyberkinetics Neurotechnology Systems, Inc. While the company is still in the testing phase, it is likely that BrainGate will be approved for marketing within the next two or three years. (more…)

Here are some quick takes on a few items I’ve come across in the news the last few days:

(1) The average online news story receives half of its page views within the first 36 hours of being posted, according to a new study by the University of Notre Dame. I think this short lifespan is a result of many stories being disposable by nature - they simply aren’t relevant after the first day or two. I think it also has a bit to do with the nature of newspaper websites, which rarely organize archived content in a logical way (using tagging as an example) and have atrocious search engines that make it impossible to easily find old content.

(2) There is a shortage of quality venues on which to advertise online, according to a report McKinsey & Company. Rough Type has a good summary of the report. The results of this study jibes completely with what I’ve found working on advertising plans. Lots of growing sites attracting a lot of page views (like MySpace as an example) simply aren’t a good advertising fit for many clients. And much of the space that is available on high quality sites is junk. Do people really think that a 120*90 banner ad buried at the bottom of the homepage of a site like the New York Times is worth the effort and money?

(3) Political consulting rock stars Joe Lockhat, Carter Eskew, Mathew Dowd and Mark McKinnon are developing a new, bi-partisan social networking site called Hotsoup.com. The idea here is to improve the political discourse online by providing a venue where rationale folks can have reasoned, less charged discussions about the issues of the day. Sounds great in theory, but it’s not going to work. Why? First, I have no idea how they plan on keeping the partisan flame throwers out of the mix. Seems impossible. These folks are committed. Second, if they do keep the partisans out, isn’t the site going to be dreadfully boring to most people? Seems to me that Americans have pretty much spoken on this issue and, for better of worse, they like their political sites partisan and highly charged. Kung Fu Quip has a good breakdown on the problems with this concept.