richardgoodwin.com

• Definitely, Maybe - Ok, I like Ryan Reynolds and Isla Fisher (for totally different reasons )
• Persepolis
• Youth Without Youth
• Inkheart - for the kiddo (mostly)
• National Treasure: Book of Secrets - if I don’t get to it by end of year. (file under “guilty pleasures”, and it opens on my birthday)
• The Band’s Visit
• untraceable - It’s Hackers meets Enemy of the State meets The Net meets Fear.com. Figure that one out.
• Charlie Wilson’s War - also on my birthday, and it has the great P.H.S.
• Be Kind Rewind - This could go High Fidelity or it could go Pick of Destiny
• Harold and Kumar 2 - Primarily on the strength of the great N.P.H.

My Xbox one continues to serve me well, but is unable to handle the newer hi-def quality media that I want to watch. I like the “instant on” capabilities of a console, but unfortunately most of the newer systems out don’t fit the requirements:

• WIDE codec support. If you can find it, I want to be able to play it. In HiDef. With AC3 From an ISO file Unfortunately this seems to pretty much mean a Windows based PC or appliance (or one with an insanely dedicated firmware update team behind it)
• “Always on” or “instant on”: no waiting for 2 minutes to boot, and no worrying about whether it actually will “boot” or was “properly shutdown”
• Quiet: Xbox 360 I’m looking at you here <grrrr>
• Wired ethernet option: HD streams are not always reliable over even 802.11g
• 1080i output (1080p would be nice, since my tv supports it)

I’ve heard good rumblings about the SlingCatcher, which is essentially a video transmitter from the PC, which means it should support anything your backend PC can. Not sure when it even comes out, or how reliable this is.

Ideas in the comments please!!

The news broke late yesterday at Techcrunch: Google Preparing To Launch Game Changing Wikipedia Meets Squidoo Project, and on the Google blog.

By all outward appearances, Google’s intents are to:

1. Challenge Wikipedia’s #1 (and #2 sometimes) placement in most topical search rankings (try searching for prunes to see what I mean)
2. Bring ads, or the possibility of ad sales, back to the top link results sites (Wikipedia is short on ads).
3. Bring user generated content even close to the source of indexing (oh by the way that’s where the ads are)

Now, what they’ve shown is a very nicely polished, professional looking screenshot that looks almost, but not entirely, like Wikipedia (hat tip Douglas Adams):

As you can see (click the picture to get the larger image), they have added some new touches:

• - article ratings
• - common search terms
• - “community commentary” (commenting, ranking)
• - hey, ads!
• - a big honking picture of the author

I think it’s that last point that is going to cause the most trouble.

While providing incentive in the form of “publicity” never fails to draw a line of volunteer authors, it also tends to somewhat taint the pool. Throw in the fact that authors will get a “substantial portion of the ad revenues”, and you now have a very hungry line of volunteers with quite possibly less than authentic goals when producing content.

Wikipedia does a pretty good job of “anonymizing” the content authors. This serves to not only keep motives pure, but also contribute to the “wholesome” feeling of the content: “the contents of this article must be widely accepted or else it would be modified already”.

When you put the perceived power into a single person’s hands, with again possibly less than ideal goals in mind, you risk this sense of trust and comfort. Now, I’m not going to argue that every article on Wikipedia is definitive, or that there won’t be more professional or accurate articles on Knol; but I am saying the potential is definitely there.

Obviously Google is looking to the ratings and reviews/comments to try and keep the content and author honest. However, in a paid system, even these are often suspect. (Have you heard of people who game their feedback on eBay to build trust and dupe people into sales? It happens every day.)

I applaud the idea and effort that Google is putting forth; I actually do agree that a “summary” type of article is most likely the best (or one of the best) search hits you can hope to get in the first few results. However, if the trust is broken with the user community, it won’t be long before Knol pages are just considered extensions of what fuels Google’s fires: advertisements.