If you haven’t checked out “Digg”:1 yet, head on over there soon while you can still create a nice, short userID. They recently updated the UI on the site, so it’s a lot nicer looking now. I think there are some new features too, but maybe I’ve just not seen them in the past.

Oh, for the latest “hot” stories on Digg, check out the Digg Nation pod/video-cast “here”:2.

[2(Digg Nation cast)]http://revision3.com/diggnation

[1(New Digg)]http://www.digg.com

I remember checking out “Konfabulator”:1 quite some time ago before they had a Windows version of their “widgets” application. I thought that the idea of widgets was awesome. I’m not the only one who thought it was great, since Apple fully copied them in the release of Tiger’s “Dashboard”:2 feature.

Widgets are little applications that you can “stick” to your wall paper that automagically update themselves via the web (e.g., a current weather widget) or offer a quick shortcut to services (e.g., the Flickr uploader widget).

Since downloading the application a couple of days ago, I now have widgets stuck all over the place… well, at least all over the place on my second monitor. I have to say that this is by far one of the best applications (besides Photoshop and blogging) for dual monitors. I’ve got a calculator widget, a current Digg article widget, a bunch of weather widgets, a Flickr uploader and a rotating Flickr picture display widget.

All Yahoo! has to do to be successful with this application is to just let them continue what they were already doing while giving them the “fire hose” of Yahoo! distribution.

Just please Yahoo! don’t f’ this application up.

[2(Apple's blatant widget rip-off)]http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/dashboard/

[1(Konfabulistic)]http://www.konfabulator.com/

For this year’s Tour de France I had Comcast install cable, so I was able to watch Lance win number seven… *in a row.* One thing that I struggled with before placing the Comcast order was how to a PVR working: it seems that my circa 1999 ReplayTV was not going to cooperate, since it was on the fritz.

I thought about buying a Tivo (too expense to use for just one month) or even setting up a Windows Media Center (too much trouble, and I hate IR blasters). Instead of all this trouble, I decided to sign up for Comcast’s PVR service… even though their website said that it wasn’t available in my area (it obviously was).

Here’s the nut in summary:

*The Good*

* Good picture quality
* Firewire out (that I never used)
* Can record HDTV (although I don’t have one)
* Can record two shows at once
* Only $5/month
* The installer was a big fan of PVRs, and really knew his stuff

*The Bad*

* Some evil engineers created the UI — it totally, completely sucks
* The remote sucks worse than the UI: tiny keys that make no sense
* I could never figure out how to search for a show
* Crashed many times… one time deleting a show I had recorded
* Kind of loud

In summary, it surprising that five or six years after Tivo was released that Comcast would offer a PVR that is clearly a generation behind (or several) in it’s UI and reliability. I’d recommend it to folks new to the whole PVR thing. For people in the know, I’d recommend DirecTV’s Tivo PVR. It is leagues better.

“Here’s”:1 an interesting post by Marc from the O’Reilly Radar blog on Tivo’s latest attempts to please advertisers at the expense of consumers. It seems that Tivo has lost another customer, Marc, because they continue to upgrade the advertiser’s experience at the expense of the consumer.

bq.. Tivo has already lost me for my next DVR purchase. What they’ve made clear is that they want money from people buying ads; and in the long run that means my reason for buying their product is no longer the product’s purpose. How long will it be before the 30-second skip hack goes away for good? Since Tivo can install updates to my machine’s software over the wire, without my approval or consent, what could I do about it if they decided, today or tomorrow or next year, to take away the feature that led me to buy their product in the first place? Why should I take the risk of finding out?

p. Marc goes on to argue that Tivo’s original business model was calibrated too far in the camp of the consumer, while providing no benefit to advertisers. Tivo should have better balanced its business model to provide benefits to both sides. Marc points out that successful intermediaries, Google being the paragon at this point, do balance their business models to benefit both sides of the intermediation.

That’s an important point to remember for businesses, but the best part of Marc’s post is one of the tags he uses to categorize his post. The tag? “Dumbass”:2

P.S. Speaking of dumbass moves by Tivo, remember this old print campaign?

!/img/tivo_ad.jpg!
Dumbass ad campaign

Ugh… they were the worst ads ever! Tivo’s biggest problem all along is that people don’t understand what it does. I’ve personally wasted a lot of time trying to explain the concept of Tivo to my Dad with no success, so I can attest that this is not an easy thing to do. So you’re telling me that those scary looking ads were supposed to do the trick?

[2(Businesses, don't end up a dumbass)]http://radar.oreilly.com/tag/dumbass

[1(O’Reilly Radar on Tivo)]http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/07/tivo_skips_cust.html

Why is Windows so stupid as to think that my computer is “disconnected” all the time?

!/img/microsoft_stupid.png!