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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.