Recently i had to replace my digital freeview box … prices on PVR’s (personal video recorder) were good, so i thought … spend a little more and kill two birds with one stone. Being able to record two digital channels and watch a third at the same time was clearly an advantage and of course like most PVR owners i could now fast forward through the ad breaks … sweet!

The Thompson (topuptv) box performs ok, but the biggest let down was the on screen menu. A little clunky and missing some obvious features it needed an update. The good news was like a lot of these units the firmware or operating system can be updated in the same way the device recieves digital tv.

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One of the things i really like about Google is that they’re always trying out new stuff. Check … Google Experimental Search … five new ways to improve their search features. Choose one you like the look of and join in the experiment.

Doc Rogers

Lots of chatter this week about this article from Fast Company, debunking the notion of a bunch of ‘Influentials’ - a theory by Ed Keller and Jon Berry that there is a set of people (the 10% of us who are super connectors) who allegedly set the tone for how the rest of us get information about how to live and what to buy.

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Often considered to be the Oscars of the blog world … the 2008 Weblog Awards are with us right now. Your vote is important so please take some time to take a look. If anything you’ll find some great blogs.

Eight Annual Weblog Awards.

Doc Rogers

I was thinking about a phrase that US general Colin Powell used in his autobiography. He called it the “P40/70″ rule. It’s a formula to help leaders in battle determine when there’s enough evidence to take action but I think it absolutely applies to digital decision-making too.

The thinking being that if you have less than 40% probability of making the right decision with the amount of information you currently have, then you should seek more information. But how much more? Powell’s theory is that if military leaders decide to wait until they have enough information to give them a greater than 70% probability of making the right decision, they are likely to make the wrong decision *because that decision will be too late*. The battlefield conditions will have changed.

And so it is in digital.

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Today I heard someone say that before the Web all communication was one-way, top down: from media producer to passive audience. I know what he meant but it prompted me to start a list of pre-Web forms of conversational folk-media. Please let me know if you can think of other examples and I’ll add them to the list.

So, to kick off:

• Graffiti
• Speaker’s corner in Hyde Park
• Telephone phone-ins and talk radio
• The Soap-Opera Press
• Letters to the Editor
• The Jeremy Beadle platform
• Citizen’s Band radio
• Public noticeboards

The Telegraph continues to re-invent itself with bleeding-edge web technology by announcing yesterday that it plans to become an OpenID provider by the end of February. The newspaper will be the first in the world - and the first British media company - to provide OpenID logins and the news came on the same day as Yahoo! announced their plans to do the same.

What this means for the Telegraph’s users is that they will have to remember fewer passwords in future and find it easier to move seamlessly between other OpenID sites (other sites include the well-known conservative hang-outs Digg and Blogger). OpenID provides users with a sort of passport (not be confused with Microsoft Password, which was an earlier, proprietary and therefore evil attempt to do this).

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I was sure it was going to happen, but my previous predictions of a surge in technology buyouts for the second half of 2008 came way earlier than expected. But i’m not talking about any of these little web2.0 technology snap ups with money Google found down the back of their software, this is old-school big software company consolidation

For those that don’t digest the tech news on ZDNet or get a regular dose of Digging you might have missed these two big stories:

Sun Microsystems buys MySQL. A cool 1 billion dollars.

Oracle buys BEA Systems. A whopping 8.5 billion dollars.

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Does anyone agree that there is something gauche about LinkedIn? I think its the way they spread the fear of terminal unemployment lest you expand your network. Messages like ”Harvard Business School graduates average 58 connections” and ”Adding 5 connections makes you 3.7x more likely to receive a job offer” make you feel there is some sort of great wild west connections rush on and you better get stuck in boy - or end up destitute in the great depression. read full post »

Someone just pointed out Apple’s great new advert on the home page of non-other than The NY Times (go right now, quick while it’s still showing). It’s the second Apple ad I’ve seen that plays around with the concept of multiple ad units on a single page to create ad content which is, well, better than the content of the page it is sitting on.

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