It seems the internet is abuzz over ThinkSecret.com’s article about Apple announcing iTunes Movie Rentals. Everyone seems to think that the idea of watching full length movies on the iPod is a good one. I however am not one of those people.
Being recently married (married in April) means I also recently honeymooned. And on my honeymoon I had one round trip plan ride. On they way to our honeymoon destination I watched Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire on the airplane via the airplanes in flight movie system. Though having already seen this movie I still opted to watch it rather than drain the batteries on both my iPod and PSP thinking they might come in handly later in the day as there was at least one car ride to reach our boat (we went on a cruise). However, on the plane ride home I opted to watch videos on my iPod. Now, I had about a three hour plan ride to get home. While my new wife slept I watched episodes of Entourage and Batman Beyond on my iPod. While I made it all the way home with some battery to spare, I wasn’t playing these videos consistently for the entire plan ride. This means the hard drive was not having to consistently spin to access the data which in turn means that the battery lasted a little longer. Watching an hour and half to three hour movie on your iPod means that your iPod needs to spin the drive every so often to load parts of the video into it’s memory cache and the more the hard drive needs to spin the more battery your iPod is going to use up in the long run. There are already reports of people getting poor battery life out of their iPods when watching full length movies they themselves have encoded so Apple knows that this is going to drain peoples batteries quite fast.
Now, the article does not explicitly say that the movie rentals will work on the iPod and instead focuses more of its discussion on the technology and reasoning behind going with rentals rather than downloads so my whole complaint could be completely nulled upon the announcement of the movie rentals, assuming of course an announcement actually happens. ThinkSecret has been known to be wrong from time to time.
[Technorati Tag: Technology]
[Technorati Tag: Apple]
[Technorati Tag: iTunes]
[Technorati Tag: iPod]
[Technorati Tag: Movies]
As far as books go, there those you read for fun, those you read to learn, and those that you read to inspire you. While 
Michael Koby 
Blogging Original Content? Anybody?
It seems that these days everyone has a blog. And everyone is using their blog to re-blog other blogs. So like the George Carlin bit about one’s stuff, you eventually end up with a bastardized version of a blog that’s probably 5-10 traceback URLs up the chain.
I am not saying that it is not ok to do this every now and then, heck I’m even guilty of it from time to time. However, people should remember that when they do this to link back to the source of the post their re-blogging. In other words, not traceback to the post you discovered it at but instead following the tracebacks to the original article, so that way at least the users reading your posts can can see what the original article is about. You can even put all the traceback links in your post so at least everyone gets the credit and no one is hindered in their ranking.
So where does this leave original content? If everyone is blogging other blogs where is the original content in the blogsphere. I will admit that I find it difficult to come up with original content on a consistant basis. I think that this is a real problem with the blogsphere. The lack of original content is just going to drown the users in multiple posts and conversations about the same old thing. And it is going to do it day after day, month after month, and so on. So, the million dollar question is how does one add original content to their blog without rehashing the same old thing a million other people are doing. I mean sure, we probably really need another blog post about everything Bush has done wrong as president or another about everything he’s done right. A political post like that is just bound to get you noticed but everyone else has already done it. Do you really want to post another blog about what skank Paris Hilton is?
Recently, I stumbled on this blog post containing “10 Killer Post Ideas”. Reading something like this really brought out some ideas and give my blog some original content. Sure I already do music, movie, and television reviews but those can only get me so far and it is only for the stuff I listen to and watch. I wanted some meat in my posts. Something that might not draw users right away, but would eventually bring people seeking information. The link above really got me to thinking about post ideas and you’ll begin to see some of those ideas take fruition over the next couple of weeks.
I encourge all bloggers to come up with some original content. Use some of the ideas from the post I linked to and try to find your own. I think in the end we’d all be better for it.
[Technorati Tag: Blogging]