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Completely unsolicited, here are two thumbs-up shout-outs related to Mac-related products and services — that have nothing to do with Apple Inc.
MacAuthority: I hope you have an independent Apple retailer in your area. Apple has steamrolled through the consumer retail store category with its massively successful chain of Apple Stores. In so doing, many independent mom and pop Mac retailers were forced out of business. Some, however, have survived and thrived by serving niche corporate markets (design, publishing or music businesses, for example) or doing certain things — like repair and service — that the Apple Stores ship off. Recently, the top of my daughter’s MacBook Pro came loose. Tired of my duct tape repair of the machine, she visited two different Apple Stores and was told by Mac “geniuses” that the entire top (sceen) of the machine would have to be replaced — an out of warranty expense of up to $700, she was told. And oh, it would take 5-7 days and she was heading to college in two days. A visit to MacAuthority — where they actually have technicians you can talk with — let her know that all that was needed was a replacement hinge, a part they had in stock. A $125 repair vs. a $700 repair. And she had it in hand well before leaving for school. There are two MacAuthority locations in Nashville and one in Louisville. I’ve found that everyone I talk to there is a genius, not just the folks who stand behind a bar.
ScreenFlow: There are several “screencast” capture software programs developed for the Mac from independent software developers, ranging from free to $99 (and more, probably). I’ve used most of them. Recently, after reading some positive reviews, I bit the bullet and purchased the $99 ScreenFlow Screencasting Studio product. Worth every cent. The program is a combination screencast recorder (a video screen grab) and a light-weight video editing program. The recorder captures the entire screen during the session, but during the editing process you can highlight or zoom in on any part of the screen. I haven’t mastered all of the effects, but in using it the first time, it cut down dramatically on the time I spent putting together a short video.
With the new Hot Trends feature on Google, you can see what people are searching for at any one-time. I thought the Hot Trends screen grab above reveals a bit of insight into what is on the minds of Google users this first big afternoon of the college football season. Forget politics or approaching hurricanes. College football accounts for about 80% of the top 100 search terms (larger view of screen grab).
Doing a little blog maintenance that requires a post. Sorry for all of the echos this post will generate.
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Quote - If Time and other publishers are looking to thwart Mygazines and its more than 16,000 users, it may have to go after VeriSign, which maintains the master .com database.
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Each Business Exchange topic page links to articles and blog posts from myriad other sources, including BusinessWeek’s competitors, with the contents updated automatically by a Web crawler.
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As image-editing software grows in sophistication and ubiquity, alterations go far beyond removing red-eye and whitening teeth. Revisionist history, it seems, can be practiced by just about anyone.
Note from Rex: For some reason unbeknownst to me, Delicious has started posting my daily links again. I have no idea why they chose this time in the afternoon to start back, but whatever. I know two or three of you noticed they were absent as you e-mailed me thanking me for dropping them.
Simon Dumenco Laments Coming Day When Bloggers Can't Rip-off Pro Photos | Advertising Age
Pardon me, but I don't really get the point of this article. I think it's yet another paint-by-numbers slam against bloggers using statistics he makes up. P.S. Simon needs to bookmark this: http://search.creativecommons.org.
(tags: search copyright blogging)
Pirating the Olympics, Then and Now | Waxy.org
Quote - Because of IOC regulations forbidding international distribution, NBC won't allow you to download, embed, or transcode any videos for your iPod or phone. Is this availability enough to satiate the pirates, and what does the quality look like compared to 2004? Is this availability enough to satiate the pirates, and what does the quality look like compared to 2004?
(tags: vide bittorrent olympics2008)
I’m not “live-blogging” the Olympics, but whenever the games are on and I have a computer or iPhone nearby, I’m always quick to post 140 character snippets of snark on Twitter. If you hung out at my house, you’d recognize those barbs as the way I watch TV — except usually I don’t make them public via Twitter. Last night, for example, I was chattering about the trash-talking French swimmers who apparently have never learned what motivates American athletes. Anyway, I was asleep by the time the actual race occurred so I didn’t get to enjoy the French swim team celebrating their well-deserved silver medal.
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Remember the site I linked to a week ago with the comment, “Countdown to Takedown”? (http://www.rexblog.com/2008/07/22/17761) - Well, the countdown has commenced.
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According to this analysis of my browsing history, the liklihood of me being male is 100%. I think it was fark.com that gave me away.
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Google is adding a link to its SERP (search engine results page) that will allow you to see how they’ve tried to customize the results to you. It’s all a part of their efforts to be transparent — and to dominate the planet. It’s working.
Philipp Lenssen has a post that displays some hilarious image results that are occurring on Cuil.com, the heavily financed new search engine that all those mean bloggers are ganging up on.
Philipp’s results are so amusing, I thought I’d do another ego search on my name to see what happens. And whoa, the screen-grab below is what I found. While not me, the guy on the left is my friend, Joi Ito. He’s taken my photo a few times, and I his. So, other than him living in Japan and me in Tennessee, I guess I see the relation. As for that photo on the right that accompanies a Nick Bradbury post that mentions me, if it looks like a pregnant man, well, it is. Huh? Oddly, the pregnant man image shows up on a Google Image search for me, as well — thanks to this post related to my annual warning before April Fool’s Day. I guess the April Fool’s joke was one me.
Earlier today, I out-sourced to Danny Sullivan a review of the new search engine, Cuil.com. In a comment on that post, Bob Sacks (BoSacks) observed that he uses an ego search to decide if a search engine is any good. That makes sense to me. If I want to find out about someone, chances are the first thing I do is Google them. So I did as Bob suggested and ego-googled “Rex Hammock” — and this is what I got on the first search engine results page (SERP):
1. My Blog (RexBlog.com)
2. My Personal Tumble Log (RexHammock.com)
3. My Flickr account (Flickr.com/rexblog)
4. A photo of me at a BBQ restaurant taken by Dave Winer
5. My Company (Hammock.com)
6 My FriendFeed account (friendfeed.com/rexhammock)
7. My MyBlogLog Profile Page
8. My Twitter Page (twitter.com/r)
Pretty good job, Google, except perhaps, I’d kick that Dave photo to page 2 or 3. From that SERP, you can one-click to about anything you’d ever want to know about me — and way more.
Compare that to the results you’ll get on Cuil.com:
My Jaiku account — that I forgot I had
Several links to Techmeme posts that are two years old
A 2004 interview Steve Ruble posted on his old blog
Some posts on Dave Winer’s & Nick Bradbury’s blogs
Some other even more random links
Bottomline: Cuil is not going to be a go-to source for people who want to find information about other people — or themselves.
Bonus link: Rafe Neddleman writes how Cuil shows how not to launch a search engine. I couldn’t agree more.
Later: I just saw that Chris Brogan did the same thing with his name and discovered the same results. Says Chris, “Call me egotistical, but if you can’t find yourself in a search engine after a decade of littering the web with your presence, I’m thinking it’s not much of a search engine.” Okay, you’re egotistical. And you’re right.
Bonus video: Ouch! The WSJ’s Digital Daily puts Cuil through the meat-grinder. Title of video: How do you spell Cuil? F-A-I-L.
This will be my last comment about Cuil. I think the response is looking like “piling on.”
[Later: I posted this early Monday morning. Now, it's mid-afternoon. After using Cuil a little, I've decided they should shut it down and give any money left over back to the investors. All it has done for me is make me realize how wonderful Google is.]
When I see a new online service announced, say, Cuil, a new search “challenger” to Google, I typically go to the site and click around. Seeing what it is, I seek the insight of someone I know follows closely the developments in that category. For instance with anything related to search, I look for what Danny Sullivan has written. Sure enough, sometime in the middle of the night, Danny has posted his quick review of the Google killer.
Because Danny is a professional guru of how search works, he has a battery of tests he can immediately run a new search tool through. From reading Danny’s, I have learned that having benchmarks can help someone compare any “new” thing with some valid comparisons, rather than some knee-jerk opinion.
Read Danny’s review for a real review. As for my personal review of Cuil, I’ll say this: I have five words and phrases in my benchmark tests that I know get the results I have learned will appear on page one of Google’s SERP (search engine results page). These five searches involve words and phrases related to my work, so I track them very closely. The results I expect to see don’t show up on Cuil — they look more like Microsoft’s results. I know the information found on the sites I expect to see will be more helpful to someone searching for information about the topic. So, at least for this morning and for me personally, Cuil is not doing well against my benchmarks.
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I started using the service on December 31, 2004.Additionally I (and some others) bookmark on the account del.icio.us/smallbusiness, which now has 4,147 items bookmarked.
There is a tiny percentage of Americans who feel about their Sunday New York Times the way Charlton Heston used to feel about his guns. Those people love nothing more than to spend a Sunday morning sipping coffee and getting their fingers ink-stained. I used to be that way. It was about as wonderful an experience as you can imagine. All that great writing. All that coffee. All that feeling of superiority over the vast percentage of the world who wasn’t as smart as I was for reading all these articles. All that caffeine.
Of course, I no longer read the Sunday morning New York Times that way. By late Saturday night, I’ve typically had headlines from the next morning’s Times — and a vast array of other dailies — delivered to me via an RSS-powered newsreader called NetNewsWire. It delivers headlines to both my computer and my iPhone and syncs the two, so that if I read a story on my iPhone, it won’t show up on my computer later. For the past week, I’ve also been using a new iPhone “app” provided free to me (advertisers pay for me to get it free) by the New York Times that delivers headlines, photos and full stories to my iPhone. (So does Bloomberg and other news organizations).
Since I now have my early Sunday mornings free to read stories from, potentially, hundreds of papers, I find another way to enjoy my coffee. But for the small slice of the total population who still luxuriate in the print New York Times Sunday morning experience, there is nothing more delightful that reading a long article about reading.
And so, the New York Times is running a series of articles, that’s right, a series exploring the topic of whether or not reading online is actually reading. The first article is titled (at least the online version is) Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading? and is filled with “on-the-other-hands” — as in, “This expert says one thing, but on the other hand, this research says another.”
Of course, it makes no sense to me, as I’m reading the news story story online, so I already know the answer to the question, “RU really reading this?” It also makes no sense to me as I average reading about a book a week — using a Kindle — including literary novels I learn about reading the New York Times Review of Books online. Of course, it also makes no sense to me as I don’t need the New York Times to tell me: Reading is reading.
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Quote - The tragic mistake of demographics and media planning is that they overlook the single most important issue: is the person you’re talking to ready to listen?
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Direction option that gives you directions that ignore one-way streets and makes use of pathways.
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Quote - “Understanding that the Web is still in its infancy, nobody has figured out yet how to make any money there, at least any substantial money.” [Why does someone as seemingly smart as Bob Garfield believe this?]
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