Proof that iTunes’ Podcast Recommendations Are Meaningless

So, if you know me or follow either of my podcasts, you know that I do a fantasy football podcast called Extra Points. My good friend Scott and I have done it for two full years (entering our third season), before any of the major FF sites were doing podcasts. We’ve got a decent sized audience and we’ve actually won a Podcast Peer Award for best sports podcast back in ‘06. I know we’ve got a good show. So, naturally, I was hopeful, when I saw that iTunes decided to feature fantasy football podcasts, that we’d be featured. No dice. Oh, well, that’s the way things go, no biggie.

Or, it was no biggie until I saw who they did decide to feature:

Now, I’m not going to knock anyone else’s podcast. That’s not my style. And, to be honest, I don’t listen to any other FF podcasts because I’ve OD’ed on information by the time I release my show. But one particular show really surprised me, mostly because it only has two episodes, neither of which has anything to do with fantasy football:

Now, again, nothing against the people who did this podcast; there’s no shame in podfading, and it’s not their fault that they’re still listed. But wouldn’t you think that someone at Apple would, I don’t know, go through their recommendations before they posted them and make sure they’re actually relevant? Basically, what you say to me with this choice are two things. One, you don’t give a damn about who you feature and just picked thirteen podcasts that had the words “fantasy football” in their titles without even looking at the podcasts in question. And two, my podcast (and every other fantasy football podcast that wasn’t featured) is apparently less worthy than a show that has no episodes. Plus, you invalidate all the other recommendations in the process, since you’ve just killed your credibility by deciding to feature a dead podcast. Those other podcasts could be great (and I’m not saying they’re not), but how can I trust any of those recommendations now?

Great job, Apple. Way to be a responsible and influential partner in promoting podcasting. I’ll stick to Google from now on.

Why People Don’t Get Twitter

Yeah, more Twitter ramblings, I know. But hey, it was down this morning, so I had a lot of extra free time.

It occurred to me, after reading an interesting post about the Opaque Value Problem in social media, that maybe one of the reasons that people think that Twitter is a waste of time is because this is the first thing that they’re greeted with when they visit the site:

I’d think that’s a waste of time too, if I read about it on a blog and decided to check it out. The problem is that the public timeline is interesting in a curiosity type of way, but it’s effectively gibberish. It’s like tuning into Lost midseason. The people on the screen are clearly speaking English, but the stuff they’re saying doesn’t make any sense because you have no context and no connection to them, nor should you.

The public timeline doesn’t convey that I can keep in touch with people who I don’t always get to speak to, and do it without being tethered to the computer when they’re online. The public timeline doesn’t convey that I was able to research and decide on a digital camera with help from Twitter friends in the course of a morning, when I had been fruitlessly researching on my own for three months and kept coming up empty. And the public timeline certainly doesn’t convey that I was able to announce the birth of my daughter to a good portion of my friends all at once with a single text message.

I think, if you want to make Twitter more accessible, get the public timeline off the front page and explain better how people use Twitter. Get testimonials if you have to. But the public timeline is the last thing you want to show to a prospective user, in my opinion. It’s like trying to demonstrate television with a test pattern.

Want Me To Watch Internet TV? Get It Where I Want To Watch.

So I’m reading yet another one of Chris Penn’s thought-provoking posts, this time about the Long Tail, in response to a question about why more people aren’t watching Internet TV. And that got me to thinking why I’m not watching more video online. I’ve got more audio podcast subscriptions than you can shake a stick at, but I’m only subscribed to two video podcasts: Ask a Ninja and the Best of YouTube feed. I have Joost installed and I’ve used it for maybe 15 minutes. I clearly know that there’s tons of great video content out there and I know how to get at it, so why aren’t I?

Simple. Internet TV isn’t yet where I want to watch it.

I know the studies say that a majority of people consume podcasts on their computers, but I really think that goes for audio podcasts, where you can have something playing in the background while you’re working or surfing the web. Personally, I consume the majority of my podcasts while I’m driving. In fact, if I couldn’t listen to my iPod through my car stereo, I’d probably not be consuming as many (if any) podcasts today. Since my car stereo doesn’t have a line in jack, I use an FM transmitter, which cost me around $30, to listen in my car. Voila: Easy podcast consumption.

Similarly, I (and, I suspect, many other folks) like to watch video on my television. We have two TVs in our house. One is in the living room in front of a very comfy couch. The other is in the bedroom, where Maureen and I can curl up and enjoy some TV before bed. My computer is in a small room off to the side, with a chair that’s comfortable enough if you’re working at the computer but not for sitting back and watching video. I can’t really watch anything longer than your average YouTube video without getting antsy and uncomfortable. And the iPod is also good for short bursts, but the screen is small and there are rarely moments where it’s convenient for me to watch video, especially for a long period of time. And even when there are, I’m more likely to play a round or two of Zuma than watch a video.

True story: Several months ago, what I would consider the “killer app” for Internet TV for me appeared: Google Video started offering NHL games for download. I’m a big Devils fan, but unless I want to pay my cable company what I consider a wholly unreasonable amount of money, I get to see maybe three or four games a season. So being able to watch Devils games online should have gotten me to jump in. But I’m stuck watching either a grainy, pixelated version on a web browser at my computer, or a decent quality file sized for my iPod screen. Plus, Google Video (at least at the time) had no RSS capabilities, so for each game I wanted to watch, I needed to manually go to their web site, download the iPod-formatted file, import it into iTunes and sync my iPod. And then I could spend an hour and a half going blind staring at my iPod. Needless to say, that lasted maybe a day.

So, for me, the solution is to get the video onto my television. But that’s not a simple proposition yet, and I’m fairly technically savvy and willing to work through roadblocks for this kind of stuff, whereas most people aren’t. But there’s no good solution that doesn’t cost a ton of money. You can set up a media center PC, but that’s painful and expensive. You can buy an Apple TV, but that’s still $300 and you still have to get everything into iTunes first, which means no streaming content like Joost or Ustream.tv. And even then, there are format conversions and all that other yucky stuff that I just don’t have the time for.

What there needs to be is some sort of a seamless way to either use one of the devices I already have attached to my televisions to watch Internet TV, or else create some sort of an inexpensive hardware solution that lets me do that easily. To that end, Nintendo has already sold 8 million Wiis worldwide, and they’re still selling as soon as they hit store shelves. All of those Wiis have Wifi built in and a free browser available for download. Why isn’t there an internet TV site that’s optimized for the Wii? Really, why is this not the biggest no-brainer in the history of Earth? Granted, the browser isn’t the friendliest to Flash apps, but, for goodness sake, you can run web servers off your PC to emulate a media center or stream your entire iTunes library. You mean to tell me that someone can’t get an internet TV site (or better yet, a video podcast directory) that works with the Wii? I’d gladly boot up the Wii and watch some vidcasts over a Red Sox post-game show on any given night. (Especially lately, but that’s another topic altogether.)

In the end, I really don’t care about the implementation, but the bottom line is that, until I can get internet TV on my non-internet television set without buying expensive hardware, running complicated software or spending all my time downloading and converting files, I’m not going to be a big internet video consumer. And if it’s too difficult for me, it’s certainly too difficult to pass the Grandma Test.

I Could Be a Video Game Stock Analyst

Seriously, I’m in the wrong profession. I can make educated guesses with the best of them, especially when there’s no accountability for being wrong. I mean, really, look at this quote today from a Wedbush Morgan analyst:

“It is possible that Sony’s cost of production for the PS3 has declined to the point that the company may consider a hardware price cut some time this summer, and we may see a price cut for the PS2 before the holidays.”

Seriously, could you have any less conviction? Sure, it’s possible that their production costs have dropped significantly. It’s also possible that I’m actually an astronaut and I’m going to the International Space Station tomorrow. I’m not, but hey, it’s possible, right?

I mean, really, these guys come up with guesses (let’s not glorify it by calling it analysis) based on reading the same gaming blogs that you and I read, and they get paid for it. I could come up with a rationale for why the PS3 could or could not get a price cut this summer, and it would probably have a lot more behind it than that. (My opinion is that we won’t see one this summer, especially now that MS has come out with the Xbox 360 Elite; if price was that much of an issue, they wouldn’t have discontinued the 20 GB model.) So why are they paying these guys big bucks to come up with opinions that are either obvious or crack-headed?

This is why I don’t play the stock market, by the way. Because these are the same guys who determine if I make or lose money on a daily basis, and that scares the hell out of me…

Definitive Proof That There’s a Wii Drought

If there wasn’t a drought of Wii games, then there wouldn’t be enough time for someone to build and program a Lego robot that bowls a perfect game in Wii Bowling:

Nintendo, honestly, we need Super Smash Bros. Brawl, stat! I don’t think Super Paper Mario is going to cut it…

23 Months From Now…

…I expect this scene to be replaying itself in our living room, else I will have failed as a geek dad:

[Via Gizmodo]

TMI: Twittering Much Information

So I had a brief panic attack this afternoon. I was checking out my RSS feeds, and Download Squad had a post about Twittermap, which is a mash-up of Twitter and Google Maps, as one would expect. Essentially, it scrapes the last X number of posts from the public timeline and puts markers in a map around a user-specified zip code. It’s cute, and not entirely unexpected; pretty much everything on the internet eventually results in a Google Maps mash-up sooner or later.

So here’s where the panic attack comes in: I see someone identified not just by city, which I expected, but by an actual street address. So then I start to wonder how the hell they’re figuring out where to put the pins, and if they’re scraping stuff from the incoming web requests or whatever. (Yeah, I know, kind of irrational, but despite everything I do online, I value my privacy, and anything that appears to violate it beyond what I understood going in really sends my brain spinning.) Turns out, Twittermap’s not doing anything near that fancy; this person actually put in his Twitter message (I refuse to use the word “tweet”, I’m sorry),”L: My address”, except that it was actually the address where he was posting from. So Twitter was pulling that, and, failing that, it was just scraping the location from the user’s profile and picking somewhere within that city at random. Since I list my location pretty much everywhere as “Red Sox Nation”, I don’t show up on Twittermap at all. Score one for the Sox!

But seriously, I start to wonder if some people don’t realize how public the stuff they post on Twitter is, or if they just don’t care. I mean, honestly, why would you post your exact location in a public place for all to see? Worse, if you make a habit if that, you’re making it really easy for someone to track your movements, especially because they can subscribe to your Twitter feed via RSS and have all your recent locations conveniently delivered to their feed reader with timestamps. Am I paranoid? Sure, maybe. But just ’cause you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

All I’m asking, dear reader, is think before you post personal information about yourself online, whether it be Twitter or elsewhere. It’s already really easy to get more information about you than you might realize, and once it’s up, it’s nearly impossible to take down. There’s no reason to give away more of your privacy than you need to.

EDIT: Apparently I was mistaken. My posts do appear on Twittermap. In Thailand. And that’s perfectly fine with me.

Gotta Build the Geek Cred Early

As soon as the baby’s born, I think I need to order one of these immediately:

If you’ve ever coded, you’ll get that instantly. Too freaking funny…

No Unified Wii Friends List Confirmed

So Eurogamer’s confirmed with Nintendo UK yesterday’s report that there will be no unified friends list on the Wii, which I’m still having trouble coming to grips with.

We asked Nintendo UK whether we were missing something; whether there was some obvious reason for going down this route rather than adopting the unified approach that has become a console gaming standard, but were simply told, “Nintendo has taken this step as we believe it’s the right thing to do.”

C’mon, that’s the best explanation you can give? That’s the tech equivalent of, “Eat your broccoli because it’s good for you.” Which I don’t, because that’s not a good enough reason to force something down my throat that I can’t stand.

That’s great that Nintendo thinks it’s the right thing to do, but that statement needs further explanation. Is there something wrong with having one convenient friends list that covers all games as opposed to having to look individual people up in-game? Given that their opinion seems to vastly differ from that of all of their customers, they have some ’splainin’ to do in order to get their customers (and customers to be; remember, not everyone who wants a Wii can get one yet, and some could still change their minds) on board with this and accept that it is actually a good thing.

You Know You’re Lazy When…

…You need a service to post to Twitter for you:

Presenting AutoTwit.

I know there are probably legitimate scenarios for something like this, but really, if you can’t be bothered to type 140 characters into an IM client, maybe you should reconsider why you’re using Twitter in the first place. Go take a jog or play DDR or something, seriously.