Well tonight I took about 45min to cruise through JOOST. Overall I have to say I enjoyed it. The programming is quite a bit larger than I expected although some may consider still a tad limited in relation to today’s world of 900+ cable channels.

Now for the interface and quality. The JOOST interface was fairly intuitive although I did have trouble finding where to shut it off when I was done watching and at one point during a viewing of some Hawaii Big Surf program I got a small popup menu opened inadvertently that took me quite a while to get rid of as it didn’t have an easily identifiable ‘x’ in the top right corner.

The quality of video overall, in full screen on my system, was not that great but it also wasn’t horrible. Keep in mind my box, although roughly a year old, is by no means a high end video/gaming box. I’m sure my video card is ’so so.’ I have a gig of ram on this PC & the other regular jazz that comes with a HP box…I’ll dig up the actual video card for any techies that care. Later this week I’ll provide some screen caps of my adventure in the belly of JOOST if their TOS allows it.

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Thought I’d make a quick post before I go on a road trip to LA for a few days.

Here’s an interesting video that provides an interesting narrative, so to speak, on what the web & this 2.0 thing is about.

Enjoy

type-atcha-later,

Sean

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I got a beta account for JOOST today and will be reporting back on how the experience goes over the next few weeks. What is JOOST you’re probably asking yourself?

Here’s the definition directly from the horses mouth:

“Joost is a new way of watching TV on the internet. With Joost, you get all the things you love about TV, including a high-quality full-screen picture, hundreds of full-length shows and easy channel-flipping.”

I find this concept fascinating how the web is meshing with traditional media.

type-atcha-later,

Sean

PS: If you want an invite to JOOST drop me an email - listed on the contact.html page

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This post is for the SEOs, word geeks and other webrepreneurs that find their way here.

http://www.ldc.upenn.edu

” This data set, contributed by Google Inc., contains English word n-grams and their observed frequency counts. The length of the n-grams ranges from unigrams (single words) to five-grams. We expect this data will be useful for statistical language modeling, e.g., for machine translation or speech recognition, as well as for other uses.“

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Apparently Youtube has made the move to bring some of it’s content producers up to the level of partner by way of revenue sharing. The concept of sharing revenue with content producers online in the video realm is not new. Revver has been doing this for some time now.

Now that the 500lb gorilla has jumped into the mix, what other areas online might feel the vibration?

1) Will Google have to start paying it’s other content contributors? (Sam Zell and others think so.)

2) Will Digg need to consider paying it’s top diggers?

and

3) What’s going to happen to the “information wants to be free” vibe of the internet?

4) As revenue models become more predominant will the costs eventually be passed onto the end user?

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So, in the news yesterday you may have heard, Microsoft is in talks with Yahoo regarding a potential purchase. What is it, something in the water!? Seems as if there’s a rash of attempted or considered buy-outs going on lately.

Anyways here’s my take on it…

First off, we all know that Google has become the monster on the block. So the other top 2 search competitors are clearly Yahoo and MSN. Would combining forces help them take on The Big G? Well that depends on a few things in my opinion.

If they retain the portal vibe that has done so well for Yahoo and put some more quality focus back on their directory and bring back the chatters via a social network or specialized forums (yes sounds simple but that stuff works) then I think they have a fighting chance.

Yahoo + MS money + “I’m bringing sexy (quality) back” + community = competition worthy of The Big G

If they plan to do anything else…

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I can hear the scraper/spammer’s cheering now.

Although it has potential to be used for evil purposes it sure will be nice to have ready access to this data if you are in certain professions. I remember my father taking me down to the LA courthouse back in the 70s and showing me how to dig around on microfiche for certain data. It’ll be nice to know when my little heathen is ready for those type of lessons we can simple hop on The Google and lookup whatever we need.

type-atcha-later,
Sean

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I heard some news about this several weeks ago and today someone pointed me to a link I thought I’d share with you.

SaveNetRadio.org

“The future of Internet radio is in immediate danger. The Copyright Royalty Board in Washington, DC has more than tripled the royalty rates for webcasters and left unchanged they will kill Internet radio. These exorbitant rates go into effect on May 15 (retroactive to Jan 1, 2006!). Without Congressional action the majority of webcasters will go bankrupt and silent on this date. We need your help. Please take a moment to send a letter to your member of Congress to keep Net radio from being silenced.”

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There are two upcoming domain auctions that will be put on by Moniker that I thought will be interesting to watch. I’ve submitted one of my old gaming domains for possibly entry into the one in Amsterdam but I’m not holding my breath. After having spoke to my account rep, apparently there is a very very very small % of domains that are submitted for entry that make the final cut. The domain I submitted, although imo a great domain for the market, may not make the cut. If it does I’ll be sure to post about it again…hell if it doesn’t make the cut I’m sure I’ll post about it as well.

Here are the 2 upcoming domain auctions:

Casino Affiliate Convention
Theme: Casino & Gaming
Venue: Silent Auction Only
May 3-5 * Amsterdam

Note: Submissions for this auction have closed.

Register * Sign up for Absentee Bidding

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So it’s Friday and I felt like posting something interesting on the Domain biz, so while wandering around the internets I found a pretty good read over at Rick’s Blog on big companies that are ‘getting it.’ His rant was generally how significant it is for companies to own their relevant web properties. Here’s a short list of who’s he mentions is getting it:

“Bank of America owns Loans.com. THEY GET IT!
Barnes and Noble own Books.com. THEY GET IT!
Kraft owns CreamCheese.com. THEY GET IT!
JC Penny owns Gift.com. THEY GET IT!
Calvin Klein owns Underwear.com. THEY GET IT!”

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