Infoblog on vacation.

If you’ve noticed a slowdown here in the last few days that is because Infoblog is on vacation.  We will return on March 24th, rested and ready to go.

Robert Scoble bites the hand that used to feed him.

Robert Scoble wrote a scathing entry in his blog attacking Microsoft’s focus (or lack of) in its “we’re in it to win” campaign.

I don’t think Microsoft is. The words are empty. Microsoft’s Internet execution sucks (on whole). Its search sucks. Its advertising sucks (look at that last post again). If that’s “in it to win” then I don’t get it. I saw a bunch of posts similar to the one on LiveSide coming out of the MVP Summit. I didn’t post any of them to my link blog for a reason: All were air, no real demonstrations of how Microsoft is going to lead.

Microsoft isn’t going away. Don’t get me wrong. They have record profits, record sales, all that. But on the Internet? Come on. This isn’t winning. Microsoft: stop the talk. Ship a better search, a better advertising system than Google, a better hosting service than Amazon, a better cross-platform Web development ecosystem than Adobe, and get some services out there that are innovative (where’s the video RSS reader? Blog search? Something like Yahoo’s Pipes? A real blog service? A way to look up people?) That’s how you win.

He’s got a point. When was the last time Microsoft catered to the user instead of the business. When was the last time they innovated?

Microsoft has two problems really. 1. They don’t develop, they takeover/buy (although Google seems to be heading in that direction). 2. When they do develop, they do it for the lowest common denominator (Reminds me of AOL).

Its all about the bottom dollar and not innovation for them. If it’s not pre-installed it doesn’t do well. Give anyone a choice and 9/10 times they will use a competitors product.

With all their problems with One Care… is now the time for Microsoft to be beating thier chest about how great they are?

VideoTube of the Day – A Thriller of a Wedding

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPmYbP0F4Zw]

Need To Shorten Those Long URLs?

Scoble posted this link on Twitter today and I thought I’d pass it on to you.

Ruby URL is a lot like TinyUrl except created with Ruby on Rails. It shortens your long urls into shorter ones and counts how many letters you are saving. They also provide you with a bookmarklet that automatically shortens any url you are at.

Quick Hits – Google Talk, Facebook

Google has made available a new widget for its personalized homepage: The Google Talk Gadget. You also can embed the widget into your webpage or blog.

Facebook had added some new fuctionality into its photo section. You can now organize your photos within albums using drag and drop.

VideoTube of the Day – Remove Logos From Your Cell Phone With Sugar

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOSVmvsSNR8]

VideoTube of the Day – Robotic Beer Launching Refrigerator

Democracy Player Undergoes Name Change

 

It’s still a little early to speculate what will or won’t happen with the product but the Democracy Player seems to be getting a name change to Miro. I’ll reserve comment until the first release with the Miro name because, well basically, they don’t seem too sure of it themselves. Until then this is their blog post on the subject.

 

This is some big news for us. We are planning to change the name of Democracy Player.

We chose the name ‘Democracy’ almost two years ago when we were first setting up PCF. We knew it was an ambitious name, but we thought that it made a clear statement about how important it is that an open internet TV platform is for our culture.

Our early Mac beta versions of Democracy Player were called ‘DTV’– we didn’t think that we could be ‘Democracy’ until we had something substantial to offer. When we released version 0.8 for Mac and Windows one year ago, we called it Democracy Player. In the weeks before that release, we agonized over the name. It was risky and unusual and we were both excited about it and worried. Cory Doctorow, who’s on our Board of Directors, tried to talk us out of it. And we take his advice very seriously. But we still felt compelled by the name and we decided to go for it.

And, even though I’m about to explain why we need to change it, I’m glad we’ve had this name for the past year. It’s funny that a name like ‘Democracy’ can become a name for software– I think it turned out to be less odd than we expected. When people hear a name, they tend to accept it. And it helped us assert our mission clearly: free, open, and dedicated to democratizing video online. I think conveying that mission so strongly was crucial for us.

But the name also confused a huge number of potential users. In all our debates about whether you could call something ‘Democracy’ and how people would react to the name, we hadn’t realized that so many people would simply assume that the software was for politicians and videos about politics. We hear this response over and over, and it’s a real limitation to our user base.

So we’re changing the name to Miro.

We’ll working on a new icon / logo and a new website, which will be at getmiro.com.

The name change will happen over the next month or two (now would be a good time to let us know if the word ‘miro’ means something bad in any languages). Our next release will probably still be called Democracy Player, but the one after that will be Miro. And the release after that will likely be Miro 1.0.

VideoTube of the Day – The Facebook Song

8-Core Mac Pro Leaked

We’ve heard rumors about this for about a year now but it seems it is now a reality.   The 8-core Mac Pro was listed on the Apple UK website and was taken down as soon as they realized the mistake.  I don’t know when the announcement will be, tommorow or a month from now, but you can be sure it will be met with a bit of a snicker.  After all once the cat’s out of the bag…