DISQUS

> It’s an old story, actually. Culture critics have always bemoaned the fact that people would rather be entertained than informed. But that’s life, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it.

I agree with everything else you wrote, but this I have to argue with.

Is it okay to prefer being entertained over being informed? Absolutely.

Is it okay to indulge in mindless entertainment now and then? Sure - we all need a break from thinking on occasion.

Is it okay to indulge in countless hours of mindless entertainment, to the near total exclusion of everything substantive and informative? I don't think so, and therein lies the criticism of our culture - when someone has the time to watch American Idol but can't seem to find the same hour a week to learn about candidates and issues, in order to exercise their duties and obligations as a citizen responsibly.

I'd be much less worried about the prevalence of "just for fun" applications and entertainment were it not for the fact that the average voter is astonishingly ignorant of very basic facts that they should be basing their vote on.

I love MS Office 2007 (and 2008 on my Mac). It's one product that I think MS has done exceptionally right.

But my workflow these days starts with Google Docs. It's simply the easiest way to keep something synchronized between my many computers. The versioning is dead simple to use, and the collaboration is nice for when someone else is doing the editing. It's only when I've finished writing it that I copy it into MS Word for formatting.

In a general sense, I'm always surprised these kind of comparisons get made, since the two offerings offer almost completely different feature sets. One is designed for collaborative editing of a glorified HTML document. The other is designed for formatting and ultimately printing.

It'll be interesting when/if Microsoft offers these kind of collaborative features (and if they'll be free to use - ie, not require Sharepoint or Exchange), and what Google will do to stay competitive.

I think everyone realizes Google Docs is far from ideal, but it does fill a niche and if you're someone that can use the features it offers, then it's a pretty great product.

Apple is stupid for not positioning the Mac Mini as their media center solution (speaking as someone who hooked up a Mac Mini this way over a year before Jobs released Apple TV). Seriously, the only thing it really needs is an HDMI port so I don't have to go through a converter.

But I'll say this too: I also have a Nintendo Wii, and guess which one I do most of my web surfing with?

The problem is that a Mac Mini still requires a keyboard and mouse to do anything other than use FrontRow. You just can't do that comfortably from a couch - you really can't do it in your lap, and leaning forward to use it on a coffee table just isn't comfortable.

Nintendo gave me a controller that functions as a mouse, that I can use while leaning back. For casual surfing, that makes all the difference. Apple needs to do the same thing, maybe offer up the iPhone/iPod Touch as a remote control?

I'm still confused as to this wonderful "competition" you keep talking about.

When I look for a "Competitor to Comcast", I'm looking for "Another cable operator I can switch to".

Verizon and AT&T; both sell DSL services which barely qualify as broadband. Sufficient for web surfing and email checking perhaps, but it's really not an option for those of us who need to connect to the company VPN and actually get stuff done.

And as noted by a commenter above me - Verizon and AT&T; aren't exactly shining examples of socially responsible corporations either.

Where's the *real* competition - the guy I can switch to who offers a comparable service and is competing on quality, price, or customer service - who can advertise "net neutrality" and "privacy protection"?

Um, there are a lot of us who have a choice between Comcast, shitty DSL, or shittier dial-up.

I too, eagerly anticipate the day I can get Fios so I can drop them like a rock, but in the meantime they have an effective monopoly on broadband in a great many areas.

Either regulate the hell out of them until they're delivering the most open, best possible service to their customers at the cheapest possible price, or do something to promote actual competition and consumer choice. Because lacking either, we're at Comcast's mercy - and the lesson from this is that they're not above abusing that.

I've gotten (relatively) huge traffic spikes - 3,000 to 10,000 hits in a day, up from what's normally ~100-200

What I've found is that when that happens, it makes little difference. In a couple of days, traffic returns to normal, and almost none of those people leave comments, click ads, or so much as bother to explore the site. They read the linked article and then go.

Search traffic seems to bring the most activity. People who find the site through Google tend to click around a bit before leaving. RSS subscribers seem to be the best metric for an engaged audience.

The storage thing should make Google red in the face with embarrassment, and that's the one thing that they've definitely dropped the ball on.

But I don't know how you can call Google Reader "clunky" or possibly compare it to the spartan one built into Yahoo mail. The search feature is underwhelming, but it's still better than anything Yahoo offers.

Many of the points for Yahoo are pretty meaningless - Drag and drop is also little more than a lame attempt to emulate desktop applications when it's unwarranted - keyboard navigation is vastly superior and something Google does far better - I have no need to touch the mouse when I'm in Gmail. As for support of the iPhone... it's one mobile device locked into one carrier, big whoop. I guess if I don't mind utilizing my email only in the way that Yahoo, Apple, and AT&T; can agree that I should, that's a good feature. Otherwise I'll pass.

And as a final note - Google offers free forwarding and POP downloading. Yahoo makes you pay for that feature. So Google wins, hands down, by not holding my data hostage.

I also have a big caveat with your case... if you look at the numbers, Yahoo Mail has 200 million users compared to Google's 50 million, the last I saw. Yahoo's been playing catch up in terms of features ever since Gmail lost, but it's Google who's always been playing catch up in terms of adoption.

Well, I'll grant that as a pragmatic matter censorship is a real possibility - I'd just love to live in a world where it wasn't. It's sad that we have to worry about it in a country that explicitly protects free speech. The fact that the movie industry feels it needs a ratings system to avoid government censorship is pretty troubling in its own right.

On the ratings itself, I just think that there's enough *other* information about movies out there that the 5 tier rating system is pretty marginalized in terms of utility. It might have been necessary in the 60's given the relative sparsity of information out there. But today, there are untold numbers of professional movie reviewers and bloggers that cover movies. We have entire newsprograms dedicated to entertainment news and movie reviews. Newspapers features a movie section. Movie trailers are available online and on TV. We have IMDB. And Google pretty much puts anything else you could possibly want to know about a movie at your fingertips. What's an "R" rating according to that?

Try as I might, I just can't construct a scenario where those ratings are useful. You'd have to assume that some family managed to make it to a movie theater, knowing *nothing* about any of the movies playing, and deciding to take their kids based entirely on a movie having a "G" rating. Which seems kind of ridiculous to me.

For a more plausible scenario, I know that there are a bunch of "Christian movie" sites out there that rate and rank new releases based upon Christian evangelical values. I would imagine that the authority of those sites weighs a lot more heavily on an evangelical than the MPAA rating. And even if that site that family uses for reference doesn't review every single movie, so what? I'm sure it more than suffices for that family's purposes.

Meanwhile, someone like me pretty much ignores the ratings altogether anyway and sees movies based on buzz without worrying about their content - I just want to know if it's good or not, and MPAA ratings don't tell me that.

Were I a parent, the MPAA ratings wouldn't even serve as a "rough proxy" for me, because they're so ludicrously skewed towards the aforementioned conservative christian values anyway. Your typical "G" rated movie is jam packed with violence and consumerism, and a host of other things I'd rather not have my kids exposed to. I could care less if my kid hears "dirty words". So the utility of those ratings to me? Still pretty much nill.

Which highlights the real error with "one ratings system to rule them all" - it presumes a common set of values which just doesn't exist. Eliminating that and letting multiple independent bodies come to fill the vacuum would cure it. The conservative christians can have their own raters and I can have mine, and meanwhile the free market is the thing deciding what goes into movies and what gets shown.

I think you're being a little disingenuous here. You present it as a choice between "private ratings" and "government censorship" - but why do we need either?

As you point out, there are innumerable other sources of ratings, as well as movie reviews, movie news, etc. I don't think anyone can really argue that there isn't enough information about movies out there that a five-tiered letter rating is useful. So if it simply disappeared... would anyone really miss it?

In either case though, the only real issue in my mind is that movie theaters are often contractually barred from showing NC-17 movies, and thus there's a chilling effect on movie producers - an NC-17 film just isn't commercially viable. Get rid of that rule, and let producers and theaters show whatever's commercially viable, irrespective of the rating.

"What you want, when you want" isn't the panacea many people make it out to be.

It's funny - no matter how many tracks I put on an iPod (right now, around 10,000) I still feel like they get old pretty quick. And perhaps oddly, I also feel the paradox of choice with that many tracks - deciding what to listen to becomes a chore.

My XM radio, by contrast, I never get that feeling with. I just turn it on and see what's playing, and "channel surf" between the different formats I like. It works for me.

It might be helpful to consider just why some liberals (emphasis on the some, I really think it's a vocal minority here) are interested in resurrecting the Fairness Doctrine. It can be summarized by two words: Fox News

Personally speaking, I look at the media landscape today and I cringe. Far from the "vibrant and diverse media marketplace" you cite, I see one filled with propaganda and talking heads. I see commentary being passed off as news, pundits as journalists, sound bytes as coverage, and outright falsehoods as truth. I see dearth of anything that resembles real information, facts, or analysis. And while Fox News is the worst offender, CNN and its other competitors are no better. The fourth estate has completely abrogated it's responsibility to inform the public and serve as a check on government.

The fairness doctrine is a terrible idea, but I can at least understand the motivation behind it. The "free market" isn't going to solve this problem, since that's largely what got us to this point - the newsroom is now expected to turn a profit, which means attracting viewers and advertisers. Which means that Michael Jackson gets hours and hours of painstaking coverage, and (for example) proposals to bring back the fairness doctrine get almost none at all. The "market" does a hideous job of selecting for what's important and relevant.

As I said, I don't like the fairness doctrine, or any solution where the government dictates what's on the airwaves. But at the same time we can't ignore the fact that television is the 800 lb gorilla when it comes to shaping the public discourse, and the current state of television news is incredibly damaging to our republic.* That, rather than the fairness doctrine, is the real issue here.

*For a specific example, see the 2004 election. More than half of the people who went to the polls on that day did so with the belief that WMD's had been found in Iraq; around 40% believed Saddam had a hand in 9/11 - both demonstrably untrue as a factual matter. That's not something that's supposed to happen in a country with a free press.

I agree. Google kind of sucks when it comes to verticals. (And personally, I like what Technorati is doing better, but it's obvious that they need a better server infrastructure).

I think that as time goes on this is going to become a pretty big deal - searching "the web" won't be nearly as important as searching a subset of it. Code. Blogs. Science. News. Government Publications. The list is endless. A really well done resource for any of these (which would include a search function) could chip away at Google.

Or take a big pet peeve of mine. This passed Christmas season, I was shopping for a HDTV. For any given search, I was interested in:

1. Information about HDTV technology.
2. Comparative reviews on different models.
3. Price shopping.
4. Technical support for the TV I just bought.

Every search on Google I did turned up mostly retail sites with near-identical manufacturer blurbs on the things. If someone were to build a search engine that segregated the kind of information listed above, I'd probably start going to that over Google.

Digg has systemic problems with the way it's set up. Techmeme actually does a better job of leveraging the "Wisdom of the Crowds" because (my understanding is that) the way it works revolves around bloggers, who more or less choose stories independently and blind to what anyone else is doing.

Digg, on the other hand, encourages much more of a groupthink or herd mentality - the number of Diggs is displayed prominently, encouraging you to Digg stories that already have a lot of them, you're encouraged to subscribe to the top Diggers, you're encouraged to subscribe to your friends, etc. As such, individual stories are elevated much more because of network effects than group wisdom.

Other issues include the fact that the front page doesn't even try to ascribe importance to stories - the top headline is just the one that's most recently been promoted, not necessarily the top story of the day. And if you subscribe to the feed, forget it - your RSS reader just gets flooded with junk.

There's usually some interesting links on the front page, and I'll check it out when I'm bored. I like the concept of social news, but honestly that's what I regard "The Blogosphere" as. Technorati, Techmeme, Google News, and Google Reader are all much more useful to me than sites like Digg.

Wow, I can't believe you just seriously suggested that people go into debt for a game console... I think you missed your calling as a financial adviser.

On the topic at hand though, it's not about being able to afford it, it's perceived value for your money that matters. For really hardcore gamers, $800 (console+game+HDMI cable) might be worth it. For the less than hardcore gamer though? I doubt it.

Every console in history that's been released into this price range (and there have been quite a few, inflation adjusted) failed dismally in the market. I expect the PS3 to do better than the 3DO, Jaguar, Neo Geo, and Sega Saturn. But it won't be nearly the success that the PS2 was, and that's what really matters. If Sony falls to second or third place this generation, they're sunk.

The "shared items" thing is kind of pointless IMHO, as it assumes everything you'd want to share is in your feeds. I prefer a more del.icio.us like approach, where I can share anything I find on the web. Now, if Google would build out it's bookmarks into a real service and combine the two, then they might have something.

As far as Google Blog Search - I think maybe that's another product that just isn't there. I don't get the "Search failed!" errors I get in Technorati, but Google's Blog Search is spammier and I don't feel like I get the same quality of results. (Hint to Google: Buy Technorati)

I agree that Feed Reading+Blog/News Search+Social Bookmarking would be a killer combination though - maybe we'll yet see that level of integration.

Ironically, in the example you mention, "Google Maps" was changed to "Google Local Search" for a while (at the url local.google.com IIRC)

After a while, they seemed to figure out that most users preferred "maps" (by typing maps.google.com into the address bar, which forwarded to "local"), so they changed it back.

Google isn't immune to branding mistakes.

I agree "Windows Live" is better than "MSN", but I still think it's not the best brand they could have come up with. Two words is kind of bleh, and Windows itself doesn't exactly have the best brand in the minds of consumers these days. If I was MS I'd have gone with "start.com" (which I presume MS still owns?) and made it the "start menu for the web" or something like that.

And FWIW, I think bloggers are more fair minded than you give them credit for. Windows Live Writer got a fair bit of attention when it was released... because it's actually a good product, not a "me too". The MS Office ribbon has gotten attention as well. I think bloggers simply like innovation; the attention is reflective of which company they see the most innovation coming out of.

I actually find myself using Technorati more and more and spending time reading "the long tail" of blogs; I just search for the story-of-the-day and see what people have to say about it. There's a lot of junk but there's a surprising number of gems you'll miss if you're only reading the "A List". Their blog finder isn't too bad either, if you're looking for good blogs on a particular niche hobby.

Actually, I find myself subscribing more and more to the long tail blogs and just getting my fix of A list blogs through Memeorandum/Techmeme. I don't think I'm missing much.

On the usability issue, I think the following things are critical (all IMHO, of course)

1. An about me/about this blog link or blurb; someone landing via a search engine should instantly know what the blog is about.
2. A standard RSS icon (or minimally, an orange RSS icon) and a word that says "subscribe" - people get subscriptions, many are clueless about what RSS is. Personally I link it to my feedburner page; a raw XML page wouldn't make much sense to a noob.
3. A search box.
4. Post permalinks should also be pretty prominent, as well as where to leave a comment (if you want them to leave comments, anyway).

I agree with Karim. The key to great software is adding features without adding complexity. GTalk does exactly that; it just added a bunch of new features without adding complexity. It's the sort of thing that Apple builds its reputation on and Google (usually) gets right to, at least most of the time.

I think Microsoft got it with Office 2007 (and Windows Live Writer, for that matter), but it's usually something MS is way off the mark with. MSN/YIM/AIM turned me off years ago as these programs demanded more and more screen space and system resources, got ever more bloated interfaces, and incorporated more and more annoying pop up messages.

Bloggers aren't some bastion of journalistic objectivity, and I don't know any sane person that's suggested as much. It's not any big secret that Google is perceived a lot better than Microsoft, so I'd blame fanboyism before I imagined any great big conflict of interest conspiracy. The excitement over Gmail for domains most likely extends from a love of Gmail, love that in general MSN just doesn't have, whether that's fair or not.