Artificial Hype
June 8th, 2007 at 6:34 PM by Matt FreedmanYou see it all the time, and almost everywhere. It’s on TV, the Internet and even in stores. Hype. Something that seems almost critical to whether a product launch date is a success or a flop. But, most Hype is Artificial. It’s simply created by companies who want to make their product seem really good. It’s often done when the product is announced, on the Product’s site and when the product is marketed. In today’s world, where news travels fast, this Hype is magnified many times by the news of the products gets posted about, all over the Internet. Of course, Hype isn’t a bad thing, but it needs to be real Hype, not just over-exaggerated “cool” features.
Let’s take the iPhone for example. It’s has huge amounts of Hype. Most of it being Artificial Hype. Yes, the iPhone looks cool, but if you really think about all it is, you’ll get it. It is simply a SmartPhone with a touch-sensitive screen, a few GigaBytes of Memory, a Music/Video player, a modern-looking GUI (Graphical User Interface) and a sleek looking shell. It’s not like any of this is new technology. The Palm Treo has always had a touch-screen, you can buy memory cards with like 8GBs of memory on them, most new phones have a Music player built in (Video’s a little less common, because of battery life), a GUI is a GUI, it can be made however cool, or however lame the company wants it to be and the Shell is also a Shell, it can (and has been this way for a long time) be made however the company wants. So, really, the only Hype should be about a Phone coming with a couple Gigs of Memory and a Video player. Why should there be Hype about the GUI? It’s not like it’s something new. Anyone could’ve made a GUI that looks and works like that, Apple just did it first.
Okay, so I didn’t mean to pick on Apple, or the iPhone. It just happened to be a really good example on Artificial Hype.
Yes, Hype is already defined as excessive publicity, but, Artificial Hype is extremely excessive publicity, which isn’t always truthful.
So, the next time you’re thinking about a buying something that sounds really cool, really think about it, and see if all the Hype about it is actually real, or if it’s Artificial.
Ms. Danielle’s Giving Away a Microsoft Zune
June 8th, 2007 at 5:57 PM by Matt FreedmanMs. Danielle is giving away a 30 GigaByte Microsoft Zune! Her very pink blog site is fairly new (newer than my Blog) and she talks about a variety of topics.
If you remember (or, if you read this Blog back then 😛 ), I entered a similar contest over at John Chow’s Blog. Well, it’s the same Zune! Ms. Danielle won John’s contest and decided it to “contest-it-off” on her Blog. In fact, John himself won the Zune. Quite a cycle that’s going on with this Zune!
The Zune in question is brown and is the 30GB model. If you’ve never heard of the Zune (have you been living under that rock again? 😛 ), it’s a Music/Video player that has WI-Fi built-in which allows you to share songs with friends that also have a Zune (only for 3 days or 3 listens, whichever comes first). It’s a competitor to the iPod. It retails for about $250 USD.
It’d be pretty sweet to win, since you can’t buy Zune’s in Canada, yet…
Okay, I promise, the next post I Publish on this Blog will not be a Contest Entry. 😛
Win a USB TV Tuner at Beyond the Rhetoric
June 5th, 2007 at 9:18 PM by Matt FreedmanCurrently, you can win a USB TV Tuner over at Michael Kwan’s Blog, “Beyond the Rhetoric”. He’s giving you a chance to get up to 5 entries into the contest (or is it 4… hmm…). All of which are fairly simple. You can read the specifics on the Post.
The USB TV Tuner is from ADSTech and is worth about $80 USD. It has time-shifting and PVR capabilities. It even allows you to record TV Shows to a CD or DVD. This thing will plug into an empty USB port and either using a TV antenna or connecting a TV cable to it you’ll be able to watch (and record!) TV on your computer! No special video card required! You can see the product page for it here. This is definitely a well worth entering into contest!
If you’ve never heard of Michael Kwan before, he’s a freelance writer. He also guest posts over at John Chow’s Blog and the BlueFur Blog. So, chances are, if you read any of those 2 Blogs, you’ve heard of him.
His Blog looks pretty interesting, but I’m not the biggest fan of the theme… Grey, white and redish-purple just don’t go together all that well. It needs some more colour in it.
So, this is my second entry, favouriting his Blog on Technorati was my first, and the following screenshot, proving that I’m subscribed to his Blog, will by my third entry:
Heck, maybe I’ll even go for a fourth entry by going for the Top Commentators spot for June! Maybe… 😀
64 and 128 GigaByte Solid State Drives, Now We’re Getting Somewhere
June 4th, 2007 at 9:00 PM by Matt FreedmanSanDisk and PNY have both announced the latest additions to their Solid State Drives (SSD) line. SanDisk with a 1.8 inch 64 GB UATA (Ultra ATA) SSD, and a 2.5 inch 64 GB SATA (Serial ATA) SSD. Then, PNY with the considerably larger 2.5 inch 128 GB SATA SSD. Now, this is progress. Finally, Solid State Drives are now being made in more “acceptable” sizes. Previously, you were only able to buy them in 32 GB sizes.
If you’re not familiar with Solid State Drives, they are basically a Hard Drive without any moving part. Elaborating even more on that, it’s basically a bunch of sticks of super-fast, non-volatile (well, sometimes volatile is used, but not for home-use) RAM, put into a standard-hard-drive-sized container. If you want the specifics on SSDs, check out the WikiPedia Page on it.
SanDisk’s SSDs are available now, and PNY’s SSDs will be available in the 3rd quarter of this year. Currently, SanDisk’s SSDs are only being shipped to OEMs. Of, course, that’s not to say you can’t buy one, of course someone is selling them to end-users.
SSDs have almost come to the point where you don’t just use them for the OS and Programs and store your files on a normal SATA Drive. Soon, you’ll be able to have enough room on it to take advantage of the super-fast access times to store all your files on (not to mention the fast boot times 😀 ).
Probably once they get to like 250 GBs and become cheaper, they’ll start to be used more. I’ll probably even buy one when they get bigger, and come down in price. 😀
Source: CrunchGear.
DisAllow Indexing for “Random Post” Links
May 31st, 2007 at 6:21 PM by Matt FreedmanFor those of you who use Matt Mullenweg‘s Random Redirect Plugin, this post will be useful for you.
If you’re not familiar with the Plugin, it will redirect you to a random post when you visit /?random.
I was searching Google with the top search terms to my Blog, and I noticed that for one of them, Google had the URL of the result as http://mattsblog.ca/
?random. Which isn’t exactly going to be helpful, since the person who clicks on that result is probably not going to get the same Post that Google had gotten when they crawled the page.
So, how do you prevent this from happening? Simple, you tell bots not to index /?random. You can just add this to your robots.txt file:
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /?random
That’ll tell all the Bots that crawl your site (or, at least, the ones that follow the robots.txt standard) not to index /?random. Or, if you don’t want to do that, you can just add the following to your link for the Random Redirect:
rel="nofollow"
Now, hopefully those links to http://mattsblog.ca/?random will disappear out of search engines fairly quickly. 😀
Oh, and by the way, you can get a Random Post by clicking here.
