presidentialmatch.com

DirecTV is in the middle of a long-planned upgrade to new satellite broadcast technology. The company has launched new satellites that use MPEG-4 video compression to carry an ever-increasing number of HDTV stations, both local and national.

I’ve been a DirecTV subscriber for many years. In fact, I signed up in 2000 because I wanted to take a look at the then-new RCA DTC100 HD receiver. I didn’t even have an HDTV, but I did have a high-quality 21″ CRT computer monitor that the DTC100 could drive. It wasn’t good for large audiences, but for one or two people at a time, it was a real eye-opener. Eventually I got a real HDTV and the Hughes HR10-250 TiVo DVR (digital video recorder) for DirecTV. That was a great combination, one of the best high-tech purchases I’ve ever made.

Late last year, DirecTV started calling me, inviting me to upgrade my equipment so that I could start receiving the new MPEG-4 channels. The representatives explained that the MPEG-2 HD channels I was watching on the DTC100 and HR10-250 would be phased out, and I would need to get new receivers eventually anyway.

But I really didn’t want to upgrade. See, DirecTV and TiVo don’t get along any more. DirecTV sells its own DVRs, and all the reports I read online said these non-TiVo models were pretty bad. I wanted to hang onto my HR10-250 as long as possible, hoping there’d be a new TiVo-branded DirecTV DVR before the old MPEG-2 channels were cut off.

But eventually I forced myself to accept that wasn’t going to happen, so when DirecTV called again last month and offered to give me a new receiver to replace the DTC100, a new DVR to replace the HR10-250, and free installation of a new dish antenna, I gave in and scheduled the appointment.

I should have held out longer. I had problems getting the appointment set up, big problems with the work done by the installer, more problems with DirecTV customer service, and now I’m stuck with a mediocre DVR, DirecTV’s HR21-700, that doesn’t do all the things my HR10-250 did.

I’ll explain what happened and provide a detailed review of the HR21-700 over the next few days.

Six Apart is releasing a new plugin for Movable Type this morning called Activity Streams that let MT users create a news feed and add it to their blog. Similar to the FriendFeed, which I checked out back in October, MT users can plugin their various affiliations with other social services and present all the information in one place where they are already publishing content–their blog.

MT’s creators said the plugin is different from services, such as Plaxo Pulse, because you host it, not a third party company. Hosting it yourself keeps your login information in your hands. MT also added privacy options, similar to Facebook’s news feed, letting you hide stories you don’t want to share entirely, or on an ad hoc basis.

If you do want to share, the service is designed to work with other MT users contributing to the same blog. It’ll break up each action by user, and by each set of actions by day. You can see an example of it in action over on Movable Type’s team blog.

Activity Streams works with 75 services now, and MT’s creators said they have plans to add more services. MT users need to be running version 4.1, and have the plugin installed. There are already a handful of examples of Activity Streams in action on MT blogs, ranging from an entire page to a blog’s sidebar. You can check out the examples here, here, and here.

Add a news feed to your blog, now a standard feature on Movable Type.

(Credit:
CNET Networks / davidrecordon.com)

An AirPort Express allows up to 10 Wi-Fi users to share a single broadband connection, access a printer wirelessly through a USB, and wirelessly stream media from Apple’s iTunes software through its “AirTunes” feature. Always a proponent of small size, Apple touts the weight of the little guy as just 6.7 ounces; it costs $99.

Apple’s current lineup of laptops, iMac desktops, Apple TV set-top boxes, and Time Capsule backup devices already come with 802.11n.

Apple has updated its AirPort Express portable wireless base station to make it compatible with the speedy 802.11n wireless standard, the company announced Monday.

802.11n, the latest iteration of the wireless networking standard, more than quadruples wireless-data rates to 248 megabits per second from the current 54 megabits per second offered by the 802.11g wireless standard; there are also some security improvements over 802.11g.

(Credit:
Apple)

Dear Person Who Constantly Tweets About What He Or She Is Eating For Breakfast,

“We’re eager to see if encouraging a sense of wonder and discovery leads to a better first impression of Twitter,” Stone concluded in his blog post. So let me get this straight: Twitter has evolved into a 140-character magical mystery tour with a pretty cartoon bird to lead the way. Insert your favorite Harold and Kumar joke here!

Indeed, the microblogging service unveiled Tuesday its revamped home page, which doesn’t change anything for people who are already using Twitter–it’s just a different look and feel for twitter.com if you haven’t logged in.

Deep.

And when you click the “Sign up now” button? You’re invited to “join the conversation.” Yeah, that’s right. Now think about whether “the conversation” really wants to hear about that pint of Ben & Jerry’s you’re about to dig into.

So what’s new? Well, the interface is cleaned up and is a little more aesthetically pleasing, with Twitter’s bird mascot now fluttering around a Twitter logo vaguely set up to be a sunburst emerging from some fluffy clouds. (They sure do think highly of themselves over there!) There’s a big Twitter Search button to “see what people are saying about” a given topic, putting the service’s utility front and center. Then there is a roster of trending topics by the hour, day, and week.

“Helping people access Twitter in more relevant and useful ways upon first introduction lowers the barrier to accessing the value Twitter has to offer and presents the service more consistently with how it has evolved,” co-founder Biz Stone wrote on the company blog. “Twitter began as a rudimentary social tool based on the concept of status messages but together with those who use it every day, the service has taught us what it wants to be.”

Twitter is not all about you anymore. Now go drown your sorrows in a bottle of delicious maple syrup that you’re about to pour on that giant stack of blueberry pancakes.

Twitter’s mantra has changed from “What are you doing?” to “Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world.” Chances are, new visitors to Twitter.com are checking it out because they’ve heard about it in the news–or even integrated into news coverage, as the likes of CNN and MSNBC have started doing. The new language reflects that.

Here are three companies that apply some form of ranking to Twitter search results.

First, you get a menu of related words and hashtags at the top of the results page. There’s also an expandable “Popular Tweets” sidebar item that has the tweets on your keyword that are the most retweeted or linked to. There’s also a list of “Trendmakers,” people actively tweeting your keyword. And there are photos and popular links.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Tweefind ranks results using a Google-like algorithm.

Tweefind gives you what looks like a standard Twitter Search (albeit in My Little Pony colors), but it layers a ranking algorithm into the display order.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

My preview of this product showed some performance hiccups, but the concept and presentation are very strong.

Finally, there’s Twitalyzer Search. It shows you raw, time-ordered Twitter results but adds two relevancy numbers to each tweet in the results list: The Influence (I don’t understand exactly how this is calculated) and the number of followers the tweet’s author has. It helps you find the items from the people to which other Twitter users are paying attention, and since the search order isn’t modified, you don’t feel like you might be missing other items.

Twitter Search itself is going to get some sort of ranking technology eventually–possibly from one of these companies, possibly from Google or Microsoft–leaving the others stranded. Until then, try Twazzup.

This isn’t so easy. The challenge for anyone trying to fix Twitter Search is that the service is extremely good at showing you what’s happening on Twitter at any moment. If you add a ranking algorithm to Twitter search results, you risk burying that value. On the other hand, without some form of relevancy indicator or ranking, Twitter Search can get so noisy as to be unusable.

The newest–scheduled to launch at noon on Monday–is Twazzup. It solves the relevancy problem first by not messing with raw time-sorted Twitter search results. Those go to the main column. What shows up around them makes this tool great.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Twitalyzer Search adds Influence and Followers data to standard Twitter Search results.

I like Twazzup the most of these three products, since it presents a lot of useful information while maintaining the value of the raw Twitter search results. I do worry about the viability of all these experiments.

Twazzup doesn't mess with Twitter's time-sorted results. But the related links and lists around the main display add a lot of utility.

Currently, it factors the number of followers and the number of retweets on an item in the ranking. Its results are better than the unfiltered Twitter Search, but I have the feeling, when looking at Tweefind results, that I might be missing items I’d like to see. That’s the paradox with which all these tools have to deal. More on Mashable: Tweefind Applies Google Magic to Twitter Search.

New companies are emerging to address the deficiencies in Twitter Search I covered last week.

For example, Fandango.com, the largest online movie ticket seller, is likely to mark January as one the most–if not the most–trafficked month in its eight-year history. “Most of the traffic is due to Hannah Montana,” said Fandango spokesman Harry Medved, who added that it’s the site’s “biggest concert film ever” in terms of sales.

And that says something, especially because the film is only playing in about 700 already 3D-equipped theaters nationwide and is only screening for seven days.

Many people think the movie is a response to the concert–an attempt to give those who couldn’t get tickets to the show a chance to see it. That, a Disney representative said, is a misconception. The film was planned long before the concert tour, which wraps up Thursday, the representative said. The unusually short one-week theater run, she added, is meant to make it more like a concert event.

“James Cameron and I set out to change entertainment as we know it by designing the tools necessary to shoot a new form of 3D, one that is based more on experience than effect,” he said.

Having already sold out during popular show times in certain markets, Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: The Best of Both Worlds Concert, is no doubt making online ticket sellers happy, too.

For those readers (who, unlike me, as a mom) aren’t privy to fads among Disney-controlled prepubescent girls, Hannah Montana is a pop sensation fueled by her TV persona a la Donny and Marie, The Partridge Family, The Monkees, or, my personal favorite, Shaun Cassidy (of Hardy Boys fame). The Hannah Montana hype, however, has hit modern-day levels of rabid consumerism, with merchandise ranging from video games to a clothing line.

Montana is actually Miley Cyrus, daughter of country star Billy Ray Cyrus. Her rise to fame began with the launch two years ago of Disney’s Hannah Montana TV show, in which she hides her pop star identity in order to live a so-called normal teenage life in Malibu, Calif.

U2 3D, of course, beat Hannah Montana to the punch. But in my 8-year-old daughter’s eyes, Bono’s got nothing on the Jonas Brothers, who are special guests in the Hannah Montana film.

The wildly successful show led to the release of two Hannah Montana albums and a sold-out concert tour that set attendance records and triggered parents to reportedly pay some $500 per ticket.

The film was made using a custom-made 3D camera system developed by James Cameron and Vince Pace. In production notes, Pace described the system as having two eyes, in the form of two high-definition cameras, and a very powerful brain, in the form of a computer.

A still from the 3D film, Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: The Best of Both Worlds Concert, which opens Friday for a one-week theater run.

It’s not just screaming little tweens who are buzzing about Disney’s Hannah Montana 3D concert film, which open in theaters Friday for a one-week run.

(Credit:
Disney)

Motorola has reportedly reorganized its struggling mobile-phone business in anticipation of plans to spin it off into a separate publicly traded entity.

Rob Shaddock

(Credit:
Motorola)

Motorola has seen its handset market share plummet, mostly due to a lack of compelling new products. In January, amid pressure from activist investor Carl Icahn, the company said it would consider separating its handset business from the rest of the company in an effort to increase shareholder value and revive the struggling business. Late last month it officially announced the plan and has since announced a round of layoffs.

Although Motorola, at press time, had not yet put out a statement on the changes, they appear aimed at developing products more quickly in response to consumer demands, according to reports by Chicago Tribune, The Wall Street Journal, and Reuters.

Motorola has reportedly combined two categories of phones, mid/high-tier feature phones and multimedia phones, into a single segment, according to the Tribune.
And among a group of executives named, Rob Shaddock, a senior vice president of mobile devices, was named head of consumer products, according to the Journal and Reuters. The Journal added that John Cipolla was promoted to senior vice president for mid- to high-tier products; Steve Lalla will oversee teams focused on mass-market phones; and Todd DeYoung “was given responsibility for ensuring the company’s cell phones match its overarching strategy and are being directed at the right market.”

Geotagging most commonly refers to photos with geographic data stored within the file, but there are plenty of other cases, too. Many Wikipedia entries have geographic information encoded, and YouTube users also can geotag their videos.

There also are plenty of cases in which Web sites have geographic information such as a business address that’s not formally encoded as geographic data. The gradual arrival of the semantic Web, in which descriptive elements help computers understand the data on a Web site, could expand that significantly.

The quintessential tools that make the geographic Web useful today are online maps. Those applications are getting more useful as mobile phones–especially GPS-enabled mobile phones–incorporate their use.

Mozilla Labs plans to announce a plug-in called Geode on Tuesday that gives the
Firefox Web browser a better ability to understand and use geographic information on the Web.

Geode details at this stage remain sketchy, but here’s the example used in the alert about the project: “With Geode, a user who is looking for restaurants while they are out of town will be able load up their favorite review site and find suggestions a couple blocks away and plot directions there.”

“Their worry is that this would discourage people from picking up the DVD at Wal-Mart,” McQuivey said. “The DVD market is $23 billion a year, twice as big as the annual box office revenue. The studios don’t want to mess with that if they can help it. At least for now.”

This means that Apple has won a major advantage in the Web movie-rental business. One of the biggest complaints customers have with online movie services is that none offer first-run features. The same is true with some of the video-on-demand services operated by the cable companies.

Still, the Web rental business as a whole has many shortcomings. Some are technological and some are the annoying restrictions imposed by the studios.

But the future of movie rentals is supposed to be providing customers access to any film with a push of a button. Nobody offers that–yet. But in the race to deliver instant gratification, Apple just zoomed past Netflix.

One thing that is bound to annoy them is the viewing deadline. That isn’t Apple’s fault, according to McQuivey.

Quickly filling up Netflix’s rearview mirror is a sight that no tech company wants to see: Apple.

Moreover, Netflix offerings don’t work on anything but computers running Microsoft’s operating system.

Among Apple’s competitors is Microsoft’s
Xbox. The company launched a movie and TV download store for Net-connected Xbox 360s in November and some users have complained about hours-long delays in getting their films. What Apple fans will be interested to see is what kind of viewing experience Apple can deliver.

Apple will charge $3.99 for newer releases and $2.99 for older titles. Customers can pay $1 extra to obtain movies in HD. The company expects to offer 1,000 films by the end of February.

Transmitting movies over the Web, especially in massive HD-quality files, is known for taking multiple hours. The viewing experience, meanwhile, is often marked by stalling and jerky video.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs told the audience during his Macworld 2008 keynote address on Tuesday that movies offered by the service, iTunes Movie Rentals, will play on PCs, Macs, iPods, and iPhones.

Apple also one-upped most competitors by offering films in high definition (HD). Jobs told the Macworld audience that customers can watch the streaming movies instantly. They will have 30 days to start watching the moves and once they begin streaming the film and will then be allowed 24 hours to finish viewing.

“The big surprise is that they’re doing HD,” said James McQuivey, an analyst with Forrester Research. “Apple nailed this because HD is what consumers want.”

Apple’s new rental service isn’t likely to threaten Netflix’s core mail-order business, according to McQuivey. Apple is charging on a per-film basis while Netflix business allows users to watch what they want for a monthly fee.

The reason for the deadline, he said, is that the studios insist on it because they don’t want movies sitting on people’s hard drives for too long.

Apple announced on Tuesday that the company has cut licensing deals with every top film studio–deals that will enable iTunes to offer first-run movies a month after they are released on DVD.

There are two main audiences for the SearchMonkey Guide:
SearchMonkey developers are front end engineers who build presentation applications, small PHP applications that enhance search results. Most presentation applications are fairly simple and do not necessarily require deep working knowledge of PHP.

This functionality will likely be glossed over by Yahoo’s ongoing shareholder ordeal, but the innovation here proves that Yahoo has a lot more going on than we generally give them credit for. They also did a really nice job of documenting everything–which is a general engineering nightmare.

Site owners are responsible for data, while developers are responsible for presentation. Smaller projects might assign the developer and site owner roles to the same person, but larger projects tend to have more specialized roles.

Monkey around with Yahoo!

SearchMonkey site owners are site owners who are responsible for delivering data about their site’s pages for SearchMonkey developers to build upon.

(Credit: Yahoo SearchMonkey)
I was just monkeying around with Yahoo’s new SearchMonkey Developer Tool and it seems to be the closest thing to helping users build a “blog-wiki-mashup-with-video-share” application so far. It also has the simplest interface I have seen to create data services and publish them for broad (or narrow) consumption. They even give you the PHP code if you want to run the service on a non-Yahoo site.