I give credit to News.com for incorporating trackbacks almost a year ago into their news articles as a way of extending discussions. There has been ongoing discussion about the etiquette as was as the long term viability of trackbacks.

Personally, I think they are an integral part of user-generated content and in some cases support for them should be extended. The arena of product reviews is the first that comes to mind:

Why don’t amazon.com and cnet.com support trackbacks in their product review sections? There are a lot of bloggers who meticulously assemble their personal experiences with products and this information would be great for consumers during the shopping process. The blogger gets easy syndication, credit, and a link back. The big company’s get more info and a page rank boost, seems like a no brainer. Heck, amazon could even offer a custom trackback and tie the post to your amazon account for you!

I get highly irritated when people speculate without sanity checks.

Google somehow manages to draw press (388 articles on Google Desktop 2) and rampant blog posts that continue to unjustifiably accord significance and import to what is a fairly weak record of desktop software and ancillary web products.

Don’t get me wrong, I use Google all the time but people seem to have lost track of the fact that Google has had success in two areas — building a scalable index and rapidly rolling out the infrastructure to support an ad network.

Hegemony in web search is just that, it doesn’t necessarily translate into anything else: Gmail is currently #6860 on the Alexa rankings, not exactly nipping at the heels of Yahoo!Mail or Hotmail. Hello.com (coupled with an excellent piece of software — Picasa) is steady at #8596, far behind industry leaders and Yahoo! rising star Flickr.

Let’s talk a bit about desktop software. This is something that I have some experience with as one who has overseen the Webshots Desktop, one of the most downloaded software programs of all time (in the hundreds of millions). Google Desktop 2 will have about as much tactical impact in competition with Microsoft as Eudora 6.2 will against Outlook.

For software to be mainstream successful, there are two critical requirements: people must need it and there must be a distribution network. GD2 fails on both accounts and you can open up all the APIs and let people build the neatest widgets in the world and in the end you’ll have a great alternative to Firefox.

If you want to know what people want, just keep your eye on download.com’s most popular list. No surprise, spyware protection, p2p file sharing, and long established brands (e.g. winzip, ICQ, Webshots).

It appears, Google is poised to launch an IM client. How fast are all the teenagers out there going to bail from AIM to download and run some new software? Consumers don’t need another webmail provider and they definitely don’t need a new IM client.

[ Update: Google Talk is out and now has 520 press articles! ]

Bill Gates must have a good laugh at the press Google garners from its software initiatives. For better or for worse, Microsoft will have to make the huddled masses’ computers safe from exploits and easy to search, and will do so on its own time.

If Google wants to conquer the desktop, they need to use their cash and buy Ad-Aware, Spybot, iMesh, LimeWire, Morpheus, et. al. and grow into a true software company. At the same time they will need to beef up their legal budget as they defend the rights of p2pers.

The other option would be to buy Apple and see if they can crack 10% in the PC market.

Some articles on GD2: news.com, John Battelle, Greg Sterling, SF Chronicle

Just a bit of nostalgia as Webshots turns 10. Among many achievements by the hard work of many people is a place on a very very short list of surviving Internet brands. This unofficial list is culled from the top 250 global Alexa sites and all are in the 9-10 year-old range and ordered by current rank (fyi, Google was born in 1998).

• Yahoo!
• MSN
• ebay
• amazon.com
• imdb
• Webshots
• Netscape
• Monster
• Lycos
• cnet.com
• excite.com
• infospace.com
• superpages.com (I actually owned this domain in 1995 and sold it for $200!)
• Earthlink

Before I get to a longer post, just an amusing moment. I am experimenting with the slick slimserver from slimdevices as a way of controlling the main stereo from my desktop computer.

By chance I had a single song in the playlist which defaults to repeat.

Crimson and Clover (Tommy James and the Shondells) whose primary refrain is “over and over.”

Down the left column of espn.com, Poker is now listed. You have to chose “Olympic Sports” or “More Sports > Other Sports” to find news of the small Track and Field event known as the World Championships.

I see a new business in the making. Exercise balls for poker players so they can strengthen their lower abdominals during long tournaments. Maybe there can be side bets on the athletic abilities of players. Perhaps even a “hi-lo” for Best Abs or Best Rat Gut.

A nano-debate has developed between Mark Cuban and Chris Anderson around the future of broadcast TV as predicted by George Gilder. Why would anyone chose TV as entertainment when a newsreader provides dynamic instapundrity (can I coin that?!)

Sarcasm aside, there are major issues with unmoderated controversies, the most significant being terms. It appears that Cuban has not read either of Gilder’s works but was commenting about this quote from a cable trade site:

“Does it still die?” He [Gilder] said, “TV is still dying. Followed by Hollywood. It fed a scarcity of a few channels. Advertising has collapsed. TV is living on fumes. TV’s strategy with ads on the Internet will also fail. You can’t push an ad on a consumer. In the future, no one will watch what he doesn’t want to see. The user becomes the producer.”

There is no time frame mentioned. This debate strikes a chord with Cuban because it centers around the R&D of his former company broadcast.com and (my hunch) his passion for sports which is a lynchpin in an argument for “live” events broadcast to millions of people (not currently possible via the internet). True to competitive form, Cuban has drawn a line in the sand with “Broadcast TV will never die.”

Anderson brings his own biases, most notably his longtail model enamored of infinite choice.

What is amusing is that when you get someone blunt arguing with someone subtle there are communication issues and a lot of what is being said is either not up for debate or truism.

My own two cents:

It looks to me that traditional tv is, in fact, on the decline. There has been a massive migration to cable and satellite and today’s most acclaimed shows are not coming from the traditional networks. In fifty years, we have seen the steady migration away from “live” television and with PVRs a new migration to time shifting from channel programming to personal programming and further erosion of “live” events as people record sporting events.

If we look to younger demographics, broadcast tv is simply one of many many entertainment choices (music, dvd, video games, web, instant messaging). The splintering of content has ripped apart the cultural bonds of what past generations held in common (e.g. the theme song to Giligan’s Island). We only hear the faint echoes of that unity in Hollywood remakes who see the quick hit of market share akin to Madison avenue co-opting the music of their target demo for a commercial.

The remarks by Gilder (above), he appears to be speaking about the traditional tv business model (with advertising) and not specifically about a delivery medium. If that is the case, I agree with him. I also think that the “Super Bowl Scenario” has a compelling allure as a socialized behavior, but when people are watching what they want to watch, 80mm people aren’t going to watch the Super Bowl and the ones that do will pay for it.

No Need to Click Here – I’m just claiming my feed at Feedster

So, how did Jason do it? He went from unable to hit minor league pitching to 14 home runs in July. He is visibly 20-30 pounds heavier. Did his depression over being outed for steroids in the spring cause him to binge on consolation foods?

I think he has found some great new supplements and has concocted a formula that could be a life changer for all the other cheaters out there. It’s Jiambi Juice. Drink it up before they start testing for it!!

The Palmeiro story just adds to the pathetic state of professional sports.

There is a first step toward a remedy. Make the risk intolerable. Busted for drugs, you are out of the game or out 90% of your salary (generously donated to drug awareness programs). This 10 game crap is nonsense and all this plausible deniability makes me ill. Giambi has nothing to lose, he has no respect, and has all his money, why wouldn’t he take every drug he could get his hands on to play better at least until he is caught again.