Category: Websites

Staying Home on a Friday Night

I had another Geek Squad blog entry posted today, based on the growing number of people who are spending more on their HDTVs and home theater systems in order to save money otherwise spent at the movie theater.

Doing some quick calculations in the back of my mind, I could easily see the claims from my friends about how a night out at the movies could easily cost a family of 4 nearly $75, and that’s not including the cost of industrial strength solvent you always end up needing to remove your shoes from the theater floor at the end of the movie.

You can read more about the The Geekonomics of Staying Home to Watch a Movie on the Geek Squad Blog.

Hulu a Better Deal for Advertisers?

There’s some talk in online communities about the state of Hulu and whether they’re limited number of advertisers is a bad sign for the company.

My personal opinion is that advertising on Hulu has some serious advantages over regular broadcast television, at least if you discount the difference in the number of viewers.

As a viewer, I’m far more likely to sit through the shorter commercials on Hulu, even if they’re unskippable, simply because the interruptions aren’t long and frequent. Also, I’m noticing that I’m paying far more attention to the commercials simply because there’s less of them. There isn’t a “wall of advertising” that ends up blurring the messages into noise.

I don’t think Hulu will entirely kill broadcast or even cable television, at least not for the current generation of viewers who have grown used to it, but it’s certainly another sign that digital distribution channels like iTunes, Xbox Marketplace and Netflix streaming video are here for the duration.

US Presidential Communication Milestones

New entry posted on the Geek Squad blog:

Since the first Presidential election in 1789, we’ve seen 220 years of progress in how our appointed leaders talk to us. Our nation’s highest office has seen the advent of radio, television and the World Wide Web. In honor of President’s Day, we’ve put together a timeline of our favorite communication milestones, and the Presidents who’ve ushered them in.

(read more)

Gmail Tasks and the iPhone

The Official Gmail Blog has an entry up talking about their new Gmail Tasks web application.

The nice part is that not only can you use this application via the web on your computer, but on mobile devices such as the iPhone via the mobile browser. Google even went as far as posting a quick how-to video on getting the app to show up on your home page:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/AbiMbmq3JG4" width="450" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

The Local News Channel Discovers Twitter

It’s interesting watching the progression of new communication technology into the local Cleveland news channels. Video streams on their websites are already old-hat, so now they’ve started taking baby steps into the Twitter world.

I ran across Cleveland’s Fox 8 News Twitter account this morning, which highlights how the microblog sphere is slowly making its way into the mainstream.

At this rate, how long until grandma is posting about her bridge club?