Category: Internet

LG BD390 Blu-Ray Player

I woke up this morning, got the newspaper, and opened the ads to discover that the 40th Anniversary Edition of Woodstock the music documentary is to be released on Tuesday.  Hot-damn.  Not only that, but a special edition with even more un-shown acts was coming out on the Blu-Ray version.  I’ve been wanting a Blu-Ray player for years, but have been waiting for the price to come down.  I got on Amazon and found out if I ordered my copy of Woodstock from them they’d include a bonus disc with even more un-shown acts from that famous three days of love, happiness and mud, so I ended up buying my first Blu-Ray content before I actually owned a player.

I jumped on Google and started researching players.  I figured I’d want to be at Best Buy by 11am to get one, no use wasting any more time.  But which Blu-Ray player to buy?  I assumed I’d get a Samsung, since I’ve been a Samsung kind of guy for awhile now, but after reading many reviews I decided to give the LG BD390 a try.  It was $150 more than what I wanted to pay for my first Blu-Ray player, but it had wireless draft-N built in, whereas the Samsung used a USB plug-in wireless-G dongle.  The reviews and specs were more favorable to the LG.  Samsung had one thing I really wanted, Pandora streaming, but because of the funky wireless and more complaints, I was pushed to try out LG for the first time in my life.

I decided to pay the extra $150 for the nicer machine because it had wireless-N built in, so I wouldn’t have to run an Ethernet cable across my attic and down two walls.  Because the BD390 had 1gb of flash memory built in, so I didn’t have to buy a USB flash drive that stuck out the back of the player to store configuration data and other digital junk within the Blu-Ray unit.  Because it had a Netflix decoder, so I could stop wanting the $99 Roku Netflix player.  And finally, because it had media player support so I it might replace my SoundBridge 1001 and have a visual interface for looking up music to play on my stereo in the den.

I was at Best Buy by 11:07, and out by 11:27.  I grabbed the BD390 and gazed at the Blu-Ray movie selection, settling on the 10th Anniversary Edition of The Matrix as my test disc.  I got home and detached my Samsung up-converting DVD player/recorder, and attached the BD390 and put in The Matrix.  Total breeze.  Set the player to 1080p – the first time I saw media in this mode on my Samsung HDTV, which had been a buying point two years earlier.

Then I used the menu to tell the BD390 about my wireless system, which worked immediately.  I had remembered my secret security code okay, which made me feel good, since I’m forgetting so much now-a-days.  I then told the new LG player to update itself, which it did.  Again, a breeze.

After the update, I click over to the Netflix menu and the LG told me a 4 digit code to go enter at the Netflix web site.  I went back to my computer room, brought up Netflix, told them I was willing to spend $3 a month extra to add Blu-Ray discs to my queue, put in the code at /activate, added a few Blu-Ray titles to my growing queue and went back to the den to check on the BD390.  All the Play Now movies that were in my queue were now listed on my HDTV screen.  So I played the second episode from Star Trek, the original series, called “Charlie X.”  It was beautiful.  I’m thinking the Netflix streaming episode might have been from the newly re-mastered Blu-Ray episodes, but I don’t know for sure.  Netflix streamed perfectly and the video quality was excellent.

Many reviewers of the BD390 complained of having trouble setting up the media server.  I checked the menu and my Windows Media server was showing up, but it wouldn’t let me access it.  I took the computer install disc that came with the BD390 for Nero MediaHome 4 back to my computer room and installed it on my desktop with all my media files.  After a quick install the program scanned my computer for photos, videos and songs.  I went back to the den and found several folders of media, including 18,000  MP3 songs.  This was under the Nero MediaHome 4 server.  Still couldn’t get into Windows Media server that was also listed – I had two media servers in the menu now.

Went back to my computer room and installed the update to Nero MediaHome 4, which messed up the original setup.  I ran the update again and got the program running for the second time, but had to re-scan the folders for my media again.  Damn, it takes awhile.  Went back to the den.  This time I could see into both media servers, but the Windows Media files loaded far slower, and had interruptions when playing, whereas the Nero MediaHome 4 folders opened faster and played files flawlessly.

Now for my first complaints.  Nero MediaHome 4 is simple, but not elegant, although it plays the files perfectly so far.  But with 629 artists and 18,000 songs, jumping to a particular cut involves a lot of menu clicking.  I quickly discovered that I could search by artist by displaying 5 large folder icons, or 14 medium-sized folder icons, or 40 small folder icons at a time, by cycling through the Display button.  Page down, page down, page down… through 629 artists even at 40 at a time takes awhile.  LG needs to add a A-Z selector.  The media librarian is spartan, but works.  I’d like to see LG add a lot of polish to it, and I hope it can be done through firmware updates.

When you get to an artist’s folder, you’d think you’d see photos of all the albums, and the LG might eventually load them all and show them, but not while I waited.  The album covers get displayed when you open an album folder and then the album art is repeated for each song, so it looks stupid.  There are 14 tiny photos of Blonde on Blonde covers listing the songs to my favorite Dylan album.  Why not show the album covers to each album once in the artist folder?  And then just list the tracks by track number within the album folder?

Selecting music through the LG Blu-Ray menu is far nicer than looking up albums on the tiny LED readout of the SoundBridge 1001, but it’s not as fast.  Using an iPhone app on my touch is even faster managing the SoundBridge, and using a software program on my laptop is even faster still, but keeping those two machines on and charged in the den is a pain.  So is using 4 remotes to get everything turned on and ready for watching a movie or listening to a song. (Cable, TV, LG, Receiver).

The Nero MediaHome 4 also found my the movies I had bought and downloaded from Amazon Unbox, but it wouldn’t play them.  Wouldn’t it be fantastic if LG worked with Amazon like it does with Netflix?  The BD390 does show CinemaNow rental movies and free YouTube clips as part of its menu.  The is so much technical potential out there, but it all needs to work together.  One player should be able to be a front-end for many online stores.  Who wants to own a device for all the different online movie outlets, much less all the online music stores.

I’m hoping LG will add Pandora, and even Rhapsody to their firmware via an upgrade, but this is probably wishful thinking.  Maybe ten years into the future I’ll have one TV, one box and one remote, and life will be simple.  I wish my Comcast DVR/cable box had everything built into it, so I didn’t need anything extra.  I fantasize about having a DRV with 2gb of storage, a Blu-Ray player and burner, a built in Surround Sound receiver/amp, a media extender for my computer files, all working perfectly integrated and controlled by a single elegant remote.  Ha-ha, dream on kid, what a fanciful fantasy.

I suppose someday 1080p video will be streamed, and Netflix will offer absolutely everything in streaming mode.  And Rhapsody Music will also stream through the same box.  And I wouldn’t have to worry about owning movies, TV shows or songs.  Just rent everything and select it from a menu.

I decided I couldn’t wait for Netflix to ship me  more Blu-Ray movies, so I went to Target this afternoon and bought Kevin Costner’s Wyatt Earp for $15, the only movie that I’d wanted to keep that was cheap enough to consider.  Both films look beautiful at 1080p, but not stunning like I’ve seen some Blu-Ray movies look at Best Buy.  I’m used to 1080i and 720p high definition and to be honest I could probably live with that quality of video for the rest of my life.  Blu-Ray is much better than up-scaled DVDs though, and now that special content is coming out for Blu-Ray, I’m happy that I bought a player.  I’m looking forward to re-watching Battlestar Galactica on Blu-Ray, and if Netflix offers that new Neil Young retrospective box set on Blu-Ray, I’m anxious to see it, but I wouldn’t spend the money to own it.  I was happy to spend $48 for Woodstock though, or at least I hope it will live up to my expectations of having a nostalgia summer, because it’s the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, my high school graduation, and Apollo 11 landing on the Moon.  Maybe NASA will offer a Blu-Ray retrospective this summer too.

Part 2 of my review…

JWH -6/7/9

Wikipedia and Science Fiction Reference Books

I’ve been discussing with Bob Sabella, author of Who Shaped Science Fiction?, about writing a science fiction reference book together.  We wondered if would be fun to write the book I imagine in Science Fiction: 1951.  Then I got to thinking, when is it better to write a stand-alone book compared to when it’s better to add content to Wikipedia?  Many books about science fiction are really just reference books, and Wikipedia already has a great deal of content about the history of science fiction.  Why not make Wikipedia better rather than competing?

Obviously, if I wanted to write a book like The World Beyond The Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence by Alexei Panshin or Heinlein’s Children by Joseph T. Major, the book format is the best way to go.  But books like The Science of Science Fiction edited by Peter Nicholls, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction edited by John Clute and Peter Nicholls, and The New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction edited by James Gunn have the kind of content that would be perfect for Wikipedia, and Wikipedia already has similar content.   I own the latest DVD edition of The Encyclopedia Britannica, but I much prefer using Wikipedia because it’s far more extensive and has abundant hyperlinks.

For the past couple years when I search for answers on the Internet, I don’t go to Google, but Wikipedia.  Google returns so much crap now that Wikipedia is a better source of knowledge. When would an author contemplating writing a reference book or article be better off adding their research to Wikipedia.  Wikipedia has expanded beyond the traditional encyclopedia of a limited collection of short essays to one of unlimited size.  Plus its extensive use of hyperlinks makes it possible to add content in layers across many dimensions of facts.

Let’s use science fiction for example and say we want to write a book about science fiction as a general introduction to the genre.  Just by using these main Wikipedia pages as our general table of contents we can easily see the breath of research that already exists in this online encyclopedia:

These pages have hundreds of links to further articles, some of which are quit extensive, like the article on Robert A. Heinlein, which has hundreds of more branches.  How can a writer wanting to write an introductory book on any subject compete with Wikipedia?

The book I dreamed about writing in my last post would have organized events in science fiction by years and crossed referenced that listing with the evolution of themes, sort of like a pivot table.  Wikipedia already does some themes like I want:  Alternate History.  This is done quite well.  But other theme articles, like Generation Ships, still need work.  I’d love to see its list of fictional works dealing with generation ships organized by decade and year in same way alternative history stories are treated.

Wikipedia also has articles on specific years, for example, 1983, and then sub-topics for that year, like literature.  I’d like to see a sub-topic called “science fiction” where it lists the magazines and stories published that year, showing their covers, a list of major book publication, fandom events and awards, new films and television shows, plus comments about significant science fictional ideas presented that year for various themes.

Everything I want to see in my dream reference book on science fiction could be part of Wikipedia.  I don’t know if they’d like a bunch of cover art images added to the articles, but Wikipedia could expand in that direction if they wanted.  And that Table of Contents I listed above could also have section called Year.  I’d be very happy.  As long as Wikipedia doesn’t go out of print, it’s constantly being updated and refined.  The encyclopedias of science fiction in book form I mention above are several years old and very outdated.  I don’t know, but I imagine some of their editors and authors might already be working on Wikipedia entries.

At one time I wondered why fans didn’t create a separate wiki for science fiction, but what’s the point?  Why compete with Wikipedia?  If every topic had it’s own wiki there would be thousands of them to keep up with when you wanted to search on a topic.  It’s much better to have just one front end.

One you start thinking about Wikipedia this way many questions about the future of knowledge pop into mind.

JWH – 2/17/9

Random Blog Reading

A couple weeks ago I noticed that Auxiliary Memory was getting a bump in hits and discovered the reason:  AlphaInventions.com.  This site, the invention of Cheru Jackson was designed to randomly show blogs from around the world, and promote blog reading.  If you visit AlphaInventions you can sit and watch a new blog pop up about every 10 seconds, like a blog slide-show.  There’s a pause button in case you want to stop and read, and a input box and button to submit your own blog.

I’ve manually done this in the past with blog hosting sites like LiveJournal that used to have a random button, and Blogger which currently has a “Next Blog” button that takes you to a random site.  I wish all blog hosting sites offered this feature.  It’s a fun way to see the world.  Hitting the random button is like teleporting into an unknown home and asking the people, “What’s happening?”  At Blogger, over half the sites are in language that’s not English, but the pictures still tell a thousand words each.

I’ve looked at hundreds, if not thousands of sites in this random fashion and I’ve never found a person like me.  There are a few bloggers that have similar interests to mine, but we have discovered each other in non-random ways.  Most people discover other blogs through googling a topic, from social bookmarking sites, or from the links presented at a blog site they like.  This tends to hide the diversity of the blogosphere because people tend pursue more of what they already like.

Patterns do emerge, but it’s surprising how different people are around the world, or even just nearby.  All over the web people have tried to estimate how many blogs there are, with some estimates running as high as 200,000,000, which I can’t believe.  Here are some numbers from different blogging sites:

  • WordPress.com – 5,056,620
  • Blogger.com – unknown
  • LiveJournal.com – 17,600.000
  • OpenDiary.com – 566,956
  • TypePad.com – unknown
  • Vox.com – unknown
  • Windows Live Spaces – unknown
  • Famous blog hosting sites in other countries – unknown

Still, even if there are only 20,000,000 bloggers, that’s quite a cultural expression of diversity.  Evidently millions people on this planet have an inner-journalist in them.  Those sites with unknown numbers are really big ones, so we could be talking about a major cultural phenomenon.

It only took a couple of weeks to realize that AlphaInventions was failing.  The first time I looked at it a high percentage of pages caught my eye as being readable and interesting.  Now it’s overwhelmed with crap.  There are a couple kinds of blogs that turn me off, but they tend to dominate.  The first are people trying to make money in some lame-ass way.  The second, and more common, are bloggers who like to jot down a few vague lines each day.  Don’t put up a public website unless you’re going to make a serious effort to provide content.  I hate hitting the “Next Blog” button and finding a site that says, “We went to the movies and then went out to dinner.”   Don’t get me wrong, it’s okay to write about going to the movies and out to dinner, but you’ve got to make it into a story, or at least a movie review.

There could be tens of millions of bloggers, but there might only be a few hundred thousand serious ones, and if we distilled those down to just the ones you would love to read if you had the time, there could be hundreds.  Finding them is a problem, but as fascinating problem.  Think about it, there’s almost 7,000,000,000 people in the world, and blogging has the potential to connect you with the most perfect friends.

I think Cheru Jackson will need to rethink his concept.  The blog slide-show idea is great.  Letting anyone submit is bad.  I’d like to see the blog slide-show feature combined with RSS feeds and StumbleUpon like technology so the random blogs were all high quality sites with a reader rating button.  In other words, I want random great, rather than random everything.  StumbleUpon is excellent for finding great reading from all types of web sites, but Jackson’s intention was to help the little-guy bloggers, and that’s a good intention.

I think Blogger.com’s “Next Blog” button is the step in the right direction.  If they would add a rating button to their top navigation bar, allowing visitors to rate blogs on the Blogger site, then that could be used to show random sites with positive ratings.  The social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon and Technorati allows pros to compete against amateurs, and that’s good for that they do, but I’d also like to see an all amateur competition too.

For some reason I mainly read sites from WordPress and Blogger users, with a sprinkling of LiveJournal users.  There are many more blog hosting sites around the world that need to get in on the competition.  Many advanced bloggers hide their community blog hosting services with personalized domain names.  This makes their sites look more professional, but tends to hide their affiliation with their blogging community.  I love being part of the WordPress world, and wished WordPress.com had a random button like the Blogger “Next Blog” button.

Of course, for Blogger.com to offer that button requires their users to show an ugly navigation bar at the top their site.  I don’t know if WordPress users would like that or not.  I see an admin bar whenever I visit my site for administrative purposes, which by-the-way allows me to see a random post of my own.  Maybe blog hosting services could make a custom visitor bar at the top of sites an option.

Blog hosting sites do collaborate with standards like OpenID, so it might be possible they could create a random referral standard.  I like that people at Blogger or LiveJournal have a certain look and feel, because it makes me feel like I’m visiting a country of bloggers with their own shared characteristics and flavor.  I’d like to randomly visit other blogging countries.  What’s needed is a central guide like Fodor’s, or a United Nations of blog countries to start a visa process.

Of course, these suggestions would put poor Cheru Jackson out of business.  He had a good idea, but each blogging host site could easily recreate it, and in the future, with standards, the cross-border random visits could be set up too.

JWH 12/22/8

Is The Internet Bad For The Economy?

Since the earliest days of Amazon.com I have been buying shelf loads of books from this innovate Internet business every year.  Then I stopped going to record shops and bought my CDs from them too.  Later on I bought running shoes, electronic gadgets, printer ink, and anything else that was convenient.  I buy a lot more books because of Amazon.com’s heavily discounted prices, no state sales tax and free shipping on orders over $25.  Now that the economy has taken a fall, I’ve got to wonder if my buying habits helped in knocking it out?

None of my favorite bookstores have gone under, but they’re struggling.  All my old record stores are dead.  So is the place where I bought my running shoes.  And all the small computer shops I used to visit have disappeared.  My state is hurting from low revenue, mostly gotten from sales tax rather than an income tax.

I buy a lot of audio books.  Audio books used to be $25-150 on cassettes and CDs, but I get them for $9.54 each at Audible.com as a digital download.  I never would have bought many titles if I had to pay the old prices, but if retailers now sold them for $15-25 a book, and Audible.com didn’t exist, I would buy 3-4 titles a month.

I used to buy 2-4 CDs a week.  Now I buy none because I pay $120 a year for unlimited listening on Rhapsody.com.  I used to buy a lot of software, but most of the programs I use today are free.  My wife and I used to collect DVDs, but now we have Netflix.  We used to pay for photo prints to give to people, but now we email copies.

I’ve got to ask:  Is the Internet hurting our capitalistic system?  I love the Internet.  I would never want to give it up.  But survival in this world depends on economic activity.  And comfort and security depends on everyone having a job and the economy doing well.  A 2% rise in unemployment, which we’ve recently experienced, has brought fear and misery.  What will 10% do to our sense of well being?  Do you remember the early 1980s?  People are talking about this financial crisis being the worse since the Great Depression.  1932 had a peak of 25% unemployed.  I have no way of imagining that level of bad times, and I don’t think anyone under 95 can really remember what it was like either.  We really don’t want to go there, and need to consider doing almost anything not to.

We all need to be conscious of our economic impact.  Spending frugally, staying out of debt, making careful purchasing decisions, and all those lessons financial advisors taught us might not be the right thing to do right now.  Would spending a few dollars more for each book and paying the sales tax be a better choice for my local economy than ordering from Amazon?

This afternoon my wife and I wanted to watch a movie together, but there was nothing on at the theater we wanted to see.  So we thought we’d go by Target and buy Kung Fu Panda.  It was $19.99 plus almost $2 in tax.  I could get it from Amazon for $15.99, a savings of almost $6.  But we decided to wait a couple of days for when it comes in via Netflix.  The rental cost would be less than the tax, thus saving over $20.

We didn’t buy Kung Fu Panda.  We just didn’t feel like spending $22 for something so trivial in these economic times.  If Kung Fu Panda would have been on sale for $12.99 we would have come home with a new DVD.  I wanted to help the economy, and considered a 4 DVD set of Dexter Season One for $17.99 plus tax or a 6 DVD set of Northern Exposure Season 6 for $14.99, both of which seemed like excellent buys, but I’ve been spoiled by Netflix.  Why buy something to own when I only expect to watch those shows one time?

See, the Internet has turned me into a bad consumer.  It’s saved me a lot of money, plus it’s more efficient because I don’t have to maintain a physical copy of something that would clutter up my house.  But I’ve deprived a local business of income, took jobs away from the local economy, and reduced the tax revenue of Tennessee.  My gain is a loss for my community.

Either we have to design an economic system with the efficiency of the Internet in mind, or we need to go back to our old ways.  I’m reminded of an old science fiction story.  I can’t remember the title, but it was about a future where the poor had to consume on schedule, while the rich were free to consume as needed.  An example, the poor had to change their shirts several times a day to keep production up in shirt factories. 

Do we really want an economy where people need to buy DVDs rather than rent so more people will have jobs?  Or buy a new gas-guzzling SUV every three years.  I’m sure you get my drift.

Well, the answer might be yes.  If we want to keep the old economy going.  And we might until they invent a new economy.  This is all very hard.  What if you could buy a car that would last 300,000 miles, and used little or no gas, being mainly powered by solar panels on your garage’s roof.  What does that do to GM or Exxon?  If environmental technology, ET, becomes just as efficient as information technology, IT, what does that do to the economy?

What if I took the money I saved by using the Internet and spent it on renovating my house with local labor, buying from local suppliers, but with the goal of making my home more energy efficient?  Will that help the new economy, or just delay the death of the old economy?  I already bought a new SEER 16 HVAC that’s saving me hundreds of dollars a month on energy.  That’s $9300 that went into the local economy, but now my monthly nut to the utility company is smaller.  I could start spending money on insulation, better windows, better appliances, and all of that will add to the economy.

Eventually, I’ll have a very energy efficient house, and I’ll start putting much less into the economic system.  It’s like switching from buying DVDs to renting them.  At some point being efficient leads to less economic activity.

Yes, I think the Internet is bad for my old local economy, and bad for our old national economy.  What’s needed is a new economy.  It’s called a steady-state economy, one that’s not based on growth.  Is the financial crisis that has come down on us going to be the metamorphosis that we must endure before becoming butterflies in a new economic world?  Will Barack Obama return to old tricks to solve our new problems?  Or can he be Copernicus seeing the Ptolemaic economic solar system with new vision?

We can always go back to a wood-chopping, horse and buggy world.  We could turn off the Internet.  This financial crisis may force many to give up cell phones, Internet and cable TV.  Without the Internet, most people will have little need of a personal computer.  Going backwards is possible and may happen.  We may have to prop up the old economy, but is that what we want?

It’s very important that we all pay attention.  In the next few years, a lot of decisions are going to be made.  Where are you going to throw your support?  Every dollar spent is a vote.

JWH – 11/15/8

Blogging, WordPress and the Future

I’ve been blogging for awhile.  I started with LiveJournal, and then moved to WordPress on my hosted site, and finally to WordPress.com.  I like the convenience of WordPress.com maintaining everything, and I’m developing a wish-list of desired features I hope they will roll out in the near future.

First, let’s think about blogging in general.  The basic idea is to write a post and get comments.  Older posts are pushed down and stored away, and the general method used to find these older stories is either by categories, search box or calendar grouping.  It’s pretty effective for what it does, but I wonder if other methods might be developed to organize the overall site and expand the theoretically limits of what it means to blog.  WordPress is constantly adding new widgets, so their structure is built around adding features, so this post is going to suggest some features I want and imagine where I’d like blogging to evolve in the future.

Paid For Feature Modules

I don’t know if I can expect all my desired features for free, but what if each module was a paid add-on or part of a plus service?  I have no idea how WordPress makes its money.  It’s a great free service that doesn’t appear to use ads and what few add-on features they do sell don’t look like big revenue generators.

Some of the features I’m wishing for could be part of a $49.95/year plus package.  I’ve invested a lot of time in WordPress, so I don’t mind paying.  I don’t want them to go bust – I want WordPress to be around for generations to come.  I assume WordPress wants to maintain their current marketing plan of offering a free service, but I can picture my blogging needs expanding, and I imagine so do others.

Right now there are too many Web 2.0 services.  I can share my thoughts on WordPress, my photos on Picasa, computer work on Zoho.com, friendships on Facebook.com, genealogy on Ancestry.com, my book lists on LibraryThing.com, and so on. 

What I’d like is one place to present the digital me.  MySpace and Facebook want that place to be their services, but I’m not happy with those sites.  They are too restricting.  What I want is one place to combine all the features, and for now I’m thinking my blogging home at WordPress.com is the place to start.  I have no idea if the people who produce WordPress want to be such an enterprise, but I’m guessing my desires are just part of an evolutionary process on the web and somebody will offer them.

The Digital Me 

Let’s think of a blog as an analog for a person’s life.  Right now blogs model people with the diary format.  Before computers, memoirs and autobiographies were two ways to convey a person’s life.  However, those formats depend on linear progress and some random discovery.  When you meet someone at a party you don’t get to know them in a start at the beginning, end at the end, fashion.  Generally you start talking about a subject, and this is covered by blogging with categories.  But if you’ve ever been to a blog site of someone you like to read and they have a long list of categories it’s not very inviting.  And if their current three posts are all boring then you’ll get the wrong idea, even if they wrote a brilliant post just before that.

Science fiction has for years imagined artificial beings or speculated on machines recording people’s minds and converting them into computer beings in artificial worlds.  I’m thinking a blog could be something like that – a download of your personality.  But you need a face to represent the whole of your being.

Table of Contents

Magazines use their covers and table of contents to promote their top stories, hoping an eye catching headline will get you to buy a whole magazine and read the rest of the issue.  However, magazines are not good structures to model a person’s complete life, but the TOC could be a good format to use for an introduction, or your face.  Home pages on blogs take you to the latest post.  I’m wondering if WordPress could create a Table of Contents page to use as the default home page, something that would combine the features of the About page and table of contents, to welcome blog visitors and help bloggers introduce themselves, giving guests a bigger picture of what you are like.  Also, let this page have more layout options, use a 2-3 column HTML table to organize the structure, and allow the maximum customization. 

Since the word categories is already used, have an organizing unit called “Projects” to be a super-group above categories.  I like the word “projects” because I like to think of organizing my life into projects.  Marketing people might come up with a better word.  Maybe tie it in with major personality traits.   Here’s an example of what I mean.  For the Table of Contents page have several user-created Topics or Projects called Family, Friends, Work, Hobbies, Travel, and Reviews.  Under Reviews I might have category listings for Audio Books, Books, Movies, Television Shows, Music, etc.  Under Family I might have categories for Parents, Wife, Kids, Genealogy, etc.  Then allow each Topic/Project to have an icon or small photo in the layout, so visitors at a glance can see how the blog writer organizes his or her life.

TimeLine

Another fun format to add would be the TimeLine – something to help people remember when and were things happened.  Since people have imprecise memories, you’d have to have a Date field that could handle  years, months, seasons, and days.  I don’t think hours and seconds would be needed.  (Fall 1949, 12/7/82, January 1971, 1963.)  Users could enter birthdays for family, and then school years and schools.  That way people could quickly know how old they were in a during a particular school year, or what years they worked as a bag boy.  Bloggers could enter dates for when they met people, got jobs, saw concerts, had children, went on vacations, etc.  Additional fun features would be hyperlinks to web sites that show the TV schedules, top news, best selling books, big movies, etc. for each year to help prompt memories.

Lists

I like keeping a list of the books I’ve read, my favorites, the ones I own, favorite songs, my CD library, favorite movies, DVDs, movies seen, etc.  Lots of people are list makers, and so having a list making module would be awful cool.  Like the TimeLine module above, this would force WordPress to get into the database business, which moves them more into the Zoho.com type service.  WordPress could offer both custom database applications and do-it-yourself kits.

Genealogy

Blogs are about people.  I use my blog to help remember things.  One of the things I’ve always meant to get into is genealogy – but not in a big way.  What would be amusing for blogging is to enter enough information so it links to other genealogy sites and to other bloggers, so when you meet people you can glance at their ancestry and maybe check if you’re related.  If this linkage grew eventually we’d be able to say to our blogs, “show a family blogging tree.”

Who Is Your Blog For?

When you’re typing away at your blog posts do you do it for friends, strangers, or yourself?  I call my blog Auxiliary Memory because I’m getting more forgetful all the time.  I really would like to use my blog as a supplemental brain.  If WordPress had the security, I’d even like to save private information on my blog.  Not bank account numbers, but just data only I would want to see when I’m trying to remember something, maybe something personal like address books, Christmas card lists, work and home To-Do lists, etc.  I’d also like to keep my last will and testament and parting thoughts, so when I die, especially unexpected, I can leave some last messages.

Now do you see what I mean when I think of a blog as a digital analog of myself?  Right now blogs are a collection basket for thoughts, but it could collect other personal items, like photographs.

Photos and Time and Place

There are plenty of online photo galleries for people to share their pictures, but I’d like one integrated into WordPress.  Why separate thoughts from images.  I’d like to tie photographs to the TimeLine and to the Genealogy.  Currently we enter posts by today’s date and time, but I’d like to be offered a field that would let me enter posts for past dates and time, that way I could organize my photographs chronologically, and work to remember the past.

It’s quite obvious what would happen if you could link photos to genealogies.  I’d also like to link photos to streets and cities, and I would like to connect to other people to share photos linked by time and place.  I moved around a lot when I was a kid.  Imagine putting all my photos from Maine Avenue when I lived at Homestead Air Force Base from 1962-63 into the system and someday getting a message from long lost friends who went to Air Base Elementary with me?

Photo Rotation and Linking

Right now we get one photo for our header to represent our personality.  It would be great to draw from a pool, so on some pages visitors would see images from a random rotation from the pool of personal or stock photos and for other pages, specific photos to go with the content of the post.

This would be a nightmare to roll out for WordPress.  It’s much easier to manage the system when there’s a limited number of templates for users to build their sites.  For this to be practical, WordPress needs to designate certain sized photographs – so all header photos would be the same size for a particular template, as they do now, but offer you the system to switch photos on the fly.  When you create a new post you’d have the opportunity to link to a photo pool folder or link to an individual photo.  This wouldn’t require a major programming change, and WordPress would sell a lot more space.  Of course, it would be nice to link to Flash videos and animations too.

I’m Sure You Get My Point By Now

By now you should see the trend.  I supposed with XML and web services many of these features could originate on companies outside of WordPress, or allow these features to work across all blogging sites.  I love the idea of OpenID and that needs to be expanded.  Selecting a blogging service like WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal is like selecting a nationality, but we shouldn’t have language barriers to keep us from communicating across borders.

It may even be possible that various blogging services could work together so you’d have memberships on more than one service and combine the results.  I see people trying to do this now but the results are disjointed, like they have multiple personalities, or they want to have separate public identities.  I hate when I leave a reply on a Blogger site and it wants to send people to my Google identity rather than my WordPress identity.  My FaceBook page should just have a widget that displays my WordPress blog instead of trying to duplicate a blogging feature.

Has anyone thought about the ramifications for blogging for decades?  Or generations?  Permanent storage needs to be addressed for historical purposes.  I always like to ask people, “What would the world be like if Jesus had a blog and we could read it today.”  Whose blog would you want to read from history?  File and data formats are going to have to become standard if they are going to be readable in a thousand years.  And if you spend a lifetime crafting your blog so it represents who you are, do you want it to die just because your body can’t go on?

These are just some idle thoughts on my part.  Start thinking about what blogs could really become.  Just wait a few years for when WordPress rolls out its AI widget that allows you to program a talking personality to go with your blog.  All it’s personality will be based on your past blog entries.  Eventually, we’ll be able to talk to our AI and it will automatically create our posts just from interviewing us.

Jim