I’ve been super busy this week with the four kids at home, the day job, a big charity event that I’m working on, the geek dinner last night and running the Media Center blogger interview series this week. That being said, there have been a bunch of great stories out there that I haven’t had time to comment on but that are definitely worth checking out.
The most significant of all the recent links I’ve seen is a fantastic comparison by Ed Bott between TiVo, Media Center and a HDTV cable offering. Ed is in the “enviable position of owning a Series 1 TiVo, two PCs running Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, and a high-definition Explorer 8300HD digital video recorder from Scientific Atlanta,” and thought it might be instructive to compare all three. Wow, a great read. Check it out. Update: Ed’s review got Slashdotted.
Ed also did a great post on The Grateful Dead’s policy regarding online music sales. Guess what folks? No DRM. You gotta love those guys. As Jerry use to sing, “Get in the groove and let the good times roll. We’re gonna stay here till we soothe our soul.” Reminds me of Mark Cuban’s stance not to use the broadcast flag even if everyone else does. The Dead, like Mark Cuban, realize that the best approach just may be to trust your fans and make the technology easy to use and use the technology to help build the fan base.
Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown is now blogging which is really, really cool. Talk about participatory democracy. Crime in Oakland is a big deal and Jerry blogs about a controversial new curfew program for convicted felons. I had an opportunity to hear Jerry speak last year at the Family Club in San Francisco and was really impressed — Jerry gets it. I think Jerry is going to be running for California Attorney General when his term as Mayor of Oakland is up.
Mark Policani had a couple of good posts. One on iTunes store passing 300 million downloads and one on the music labels wanting to increase the price of music downloads.
John Battelle is out with a post on another music search play.
Chris Lanier is out with something on dCut for Media Center (although his blog seems to be down right now).
TiVo’s fourth quarter analyst conference call is next week. eHomeupgrade has a write up on mHome MCE 2005. More on MCE home automation.
Sean Alexander had a few nice posts that I really do need to explore in terms of autosyncing podcasts in WMP10 and DopplerRadio 2.0.
Whew! A lot of interesting things going on right now!