Rafe's Blog

An iPod under the tree

My wife got me a 60GB Video iPod for Christmas. It's a fantastic machine. My entire music collection (35GB) fits on it, and I've also loaded it up with podcasts, videocasts, and even the first few eps of Lost, which I missed when it premiered. Of course, the day after Christmas, I started to wonder how to extend on what the iPod does.

The first thing I wanted to do was plug it into my living room A/V system, so I could watch the iPod's recorded TV shows and videocasts on a bigger screen. Apple charges $19 for its special AV cable, which is robbery.  The connectors are identical to a standard 1/8" video camera cable, which you can find on eBay for $4.99. You just have to remember that Apple shuffled the connectors. See this page for the mappings. I went out looking for a cheap non-Apple cable, but even at my local Radio Shack the cable was $17 (there was an absurd Monster version for $39). I bit the bullet and got the cheaper one. If I lived closer to Fry's I would have shopped for one there.

The other thing I wanted to do with my iPod is listen to new (to me) music, and I didn't want to spend $1.99 on iTunes for each new track. So I'm using the trial version of Griffin's iFill instead. This is a very cool desktop app that tunes into multiple Internet radio stations of your choice and saves the tracks (with artist/title info) directly to your iPod. You can leave it running overnight while you recharge your iPod, and it will fill up your player with fresh content.

My next project revolves around iTunes, which I do not like. I find the interface to be slow and inflexible. There's an alternate iPod manager called Anapod that I'm beginning to experiment with. I prefer it to iTunes, although it doesn't have built-in support for subscribing to podcasts or buying videos. So for the moment I'm still using iTunes, but once I get tired of paying for iTunes videos (won't be long) and once I lock in to a good alternate podcast manager, I plan to move over to Anapod.

Tivo: Features vs. Quality

Most of the geeks I know in San Francisco have Comcast digital cable television, and Comcast's own digital video recorder. The advantages of this DVR are that the service fee is bundled in with the cable bill, and that it displays and records high definition TV. I, however, do not have an HD television, nor am I likely to buy one soon, so to feed my old 27" tube TV, I recently got a new standalone Tivo box.

I've had an old Tivo for a very long time, but I wanted the new Series 2 features (network access, DVD recording, upgradeability, and so on). I picked up the latest Humax DRT800 and set it up in my system.

It's very disappointing.

Like  a lot of technology products, the features are all great -- in theory. But the implementation just isn't quite there yet. The user interface is Tivo-simple, for example, but it responds more slowly to the remote control than my old Series 1 Tivo, so navigating the features is a chore.  Also, the Tivo/PC integration is not as smooth, or complete, as it should be. I had to dig into my PC's firewall settings to get it to work, and even then, the Tivo Server app that runs on my PC occasionally gobbles up all my computer's processing resources, slowing everything to a crawl. Also, the Tivo music player and photo viewier applications are so basic they're a joke. Say you want to play a track by Yo-yo Ma: You have to navigate through all the artists in the alphabet, page by page (with the new, slower interface), to get to the Y's. There's no shortcut.

It's little things like this that really bug me, and make me want to go back to Tivo Series 1. It only does one thing, but it does it so well.

There is a saving grace to Tivo Series 2: the open-source application called Galleon. It does everything the new Tivo PC and Web apps do, but it does it better. The music organizer works better than Tivo's own; the podcast module is much easier to use; and the PC-side software doesn't kill your PC. I recommend this app to all Series 2 Tivo users that have their Tivo on a home network.

The future of media in 25 words or less

I moderated a panel today at an event put on by Walden Ventures. The topic: What is the future of digital media? Big question! But I had a great panel: Alex Blum, VP of the Audience Business for AOL; Toby Coppel, SVP of Corporate Development for Yahoo; Larry Kramer, Founder of CBS MarketWatch & President of CBS Digital Media; and Shawn Fanning, founder of SnoCap (and formerly Napster).

The most gratifying thing I heard was when I asked the panel how they value digital media companies when they are considering acquisitions. Expecting to hear an argument about eyeballs vs. revenues, instead the focus was on taking risks with companies that have potential for viral audience growth. And that's not a metric, that's a gut feel. I'm glad to see these guys evaluating companies this way -- it makes things interesting.

Also at this event, several digital media startups pitched to the audience of VCs. I'll probably write soon about SnoCap (aka Shawn Fanning's repentance), and maybe one other after that.

CNET is 10!

I haven't been blogging much lately because my day job at CNET has been keeping me fully occupied. But I just got back from the 10th birthday party we had for the site, and it's worth a few words. CNET launched on this day in 1995, running on two Sparc servers. The site got 63,334 visitors, had zero advertisers, and became famous because the CNET television show ran a creepy computer animation of the Nicole Brown Simpson murder… over and over again.

I started at CNET in 1996, and left in 1998 to work at Red Herring, which folded during the dotcom collapse. I came back to CNET in 2004. When I started at CNET the first time, my byline was always my full name, "Raphael Needleman." I began to also use "Rafe Needleman" (which everybody has always called me anyway) later in the year. Here's why: Back in 1996, as a CNET columnist, my name was in the navigation bar. After a redesign that narrowed the nav bar a few pixels, "Raphael Needleman" was too big to fit. The designers didn't want to wrap me to two lines or change the font size, so after an appropriate period of whining, I relented and changed my nav bar name to Rafe, which I've gone by ever since.

Even though CNET made me change my name, I still think it's a great place to work. Here's me on the site then and now.

If it works for Nascar, why not car thieves?

I flew down to the LA last night today for some meetings today. Got to the hotel room, flipped on the TV, and found that all the local news stations were running live video of a high-speed car chase. The news helicopter had a clear view of some busted-up Acura (I think) tearing through city streets.  For a solid twenty minutes the screen was filled with a live picture of this car, and its plain, unadorned roof.  There should have been an advertisement on it -- Champion spark plugs; Billy's Bail Bonds; something like that. I mean, you can't buy programming like that.  All I'm saying is that the bad guys are missing out on a nice revenue stream.

How to make news

I'm moderating a panel discussion on June 22: How Technology is Revolutionizing News Distribution and Corporate Reputation. Paul Argenti of the Tuck School of Business at Darthmouth is giving the keynote, which will be followed by my panel with analyst Charline Li and journalists Joel Dreyfuss, Tom Foremski, and Wade Rousch, most of whom I've known since way back when we got news tips from stablemasters and footboys and chiseled our stories directly into the printing press each night. The event is sponsored by Tuck and by TheNewsMarket, a company that's, not surprisingly, in the business of employing technology to help companies get their message out to journos like me. Basicaly, it's an online distribution system for "B-roll," the video clips companies send to broadcasters.

The panel topic is fascinating and I'm looking forward to a lively debate.

Rules? Pfft.

A clarification in reaction to Scoble's latest.

I hope I don't get typecast as the guy who believed in a rigid code of blogging.

It’s hard enough to come up with a code that works for professional journalists (for example, CNET.com and News.com have different codes regarding NDAs, even though both sites are part of the same company). Coming up with something for the universe of bloggers, which is or soon will be larger and more diverse than the world of traditional journalism, would be impossible. My fallback, then, is to push for transparency, as I said in a previous comment on Scoble's site. Also, educating people on the ethical issues of  publishing (in any form).

Side note: This two-blog dialog I'm having with Robert is awkward. There should be a way for us to link our sites together for the course of this discussion so readers don't have to bounce back and forth between blogs. I am still a relative newbie when it comes to blogging and I don't know how to do that. If anybody has insight into this issue, feel free to email me. I wrote a column on multi-posting, but this is a slightly different issue.

Rules for bloggers?

Scoble reacted to a CNET column I wrote about blogging in business. It's an interesting discussion we're having and I think it comes down to a code of ethics for bloggers. It's fantastic that the gates to journalism are opening, but who's going to define and then carry the standard for blogs? Or should we expect standards at all? Can bloggers self-regulate? Will readers be able to tell the difference? 

VOIP as a broadcast platform

Some music junkies have begun using the PC VOIP product, Skype, as a broadcasting platform. It's like podcasting in some ways, so it's being called, "Skypecasting."  Did anybody forsee Skype, a telephony app, being used as a media distribution platform? Not really. But it's a great illustration of what can happen when you release a new platform and don't get in its way. Skype is taking a hands-off approach to the development of apps like this. Good for them.

Update 4/1/05: Per feedback post, Bill Campbell of SkypeJournal claims dibs on the concept, and published instructions for Skypecasting with Stuart Henshall in December of 2004. 

From my "Business Buzz" on CNET.com - work.cnet.com.

Location-independent media

I have been looking for a good way to use my laptop to play the music files and view the photos I store on my desktop machine. I used SoftSqueeze for a while, but the user interface isn't right. Today, I tried Orb, a free (for now) service that works very well. The service is supposed to be able to stream a PC's media to a cellphone, too, although I haven't tried that yet.

I wrote about this company last July. I'm happy to give this progress report: The software really does deliver on what was promised.