The StateStats mashup displays Google query results by popularity in U.S states self describing as:

It then compares this ranking with other ways of ranking states, like average income or population density, using Spearman’s rank correlation. The middle column shows the results of these comparisons, with the strongest correlations listed first.

Google Insight For Search provides the raw search activity from 2004-present, the Google Chart API for the state heatmap and runs under the Google App Engine.

The service points out in its description in bold that one must be careful drawing conclusions from this data. With that in mind I put this post and you should the title of this post tongue-in-cheek in the humor category.

Comparing the console gaming systems: Nintendo Wii, Xbox 360 and PS3

Couldn’t resist running some comparative queries across the various game consoles in order of sales: Nintendo Wii, Xbox 360 and finally the Sony PS3.  Why video games? In Google’s 2008 most popular product search queries 4 of 10 involved videogames (#1 Nintendo Wii, #2 Wii Fit, #4 Xbox 360 and #5 Nintendo DS). This is a big win for attention for Nintendo.

Nintendo Wii

The top five states for the Wii: New Jersey, Utah, Kentucky, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Unemployment, violent crime and density are positive weak or stronger.  Negative weak or stronger would be Percent elderly, age, frost, energy consumption and suicide.

Unemployment - I guess it’s understandable that the least expensive game console would be searched for more from states with the highest unemployment rate, although states with high unemployment and videogames showed up for all three consoles.

Percent elderly and age surprises me more as we’ve seen several articles about how popular the Wii has been with all ages, particularly senior citizens due to the often physical games the Wii provides.

Xbox 360

The top five states for the Xbox 360: Washington State (Microsoft home), Kentucky, Ohio, Florida and Michigan. Unemployment, obesity, violent crime and density are positive weak or stronger.  Negative weak or stronger would be latitude, age and frost.

Obesity - It’s curious that states with higher obesity rate are searching for the Xbox 360 and yet not the PS3. It makes sense not for the Wii because that console promotes more activity, but what is the difference from a physical standpoint between the Xbox 360 and PS3? I can’t think of any.

Sony Playstation 3

The top five states for the Sony PS3: California, New York, Florida, New Jersey and Texas. Density, violent crime, unemployment, same sex couples, income and illiteracy are positive weak.  Negative weak or stronger would be percent elderly, age, energy consumption, suicide, latitude and frost.

Same sex couples - interesting to note correlation of states with higher same sex are searching more for the PS3. You cannot draw the correlation — although I’m sure somebody will bemusedly — that same sex couples prefer the PS3 over the Wii and Xbox 360.

Violent crime states for all gaming consoles

I’m not in the crowd who believes videogames lead to violent crime (see: Video games don’t cause violence, people do), but it’s interesting to note that besides states with high density and unemployment, violent crime is the only other positive indicator in these search queries for all three gaming consoles. This could be that where there is high density there is also more violent crime or that where there are less dense states like Montana, they don’t do much videogaming.

I’ll leave this to the comment section. This could be a fun one to discuss.

The Black Friday Wal-Mart trampling incident of security guard Jdimytai Damour has predictably led to a wrongful death lawsuit filed by the victim’s sister. Police indicate in this AP video (embed below) that they are still scanning the Wal-Mart security videos looking if they can find people in the crowd criminally responsible.

Geek sidenote: YouTube has started prominently pushing their search as 10% of the size of their video window placed at the top. It’s too bad they aren’t using some of that space to show me related videos.

I can’t be the only one impatient that six days have passed by and the police are still scanning security video? How long does it take to say "we scanned the video and we have suspects in our sights?" Get some CSI types to analyze that footage frame by frame and get the still pictures out America’s Most Wanted style so these people tramplers can be brought in and charged accordingly.

Where are these people anyway?

If you were in the front of the line of a crowd that went crazy when the doors opened what would you have done? Tried to help the security guards maintain order or rushed in for some stupid thing that will never come close to measure human life? A switch would have gone off in my brain that went quickly from personal satisfaction (getting a good deal) to preserving human life (helping) in a nanosecond. I know that there were some people helping, but where are these people who didn’t? Where are these people who mashed through, stomping this helpless security guard to death?

I’m all about getting a good deal but as this horrible incident shows how scary big crowds can be. It’s one thing to be part of a big crowd at say a rock concert or peaceful demonstration but seeing this happen especially at a time when we’re supposed to be thinking about others is mind-boggling.

President of Wal-Mart Northeast Division Hank Mullany gave a statement that didn’t directly address the lawsuit or allegations made (emphasis mine):

"We consider Mr. Damour part of the Wal-Mart family, and are saddened by his death," Mullany said. "We have been in communication with members of his family to do what we can to help them through this difficult time. Our associates know that when incidents like this occur, we take care of our own."

If Wal-Mart takes care of its own then there should be no need to ever see this lawsuit end up in a courtroom.

While I have no idea if Mr. Damour’s sister was contacted and/or coerced into this by friends, other family members or lawyers sniffing an obvious lawsuit, I hope a fair settlement is provided that isn’t forced by the courts. Wal-Mart should give the family whatever they want as long as it isn’t something equally insane like hundreds of millions of dollars.

After the last post on automated related links in posts I mentioned liking the relevancy provided by the Zemanta service and promised to check into the service in greater detail. Bonus: Andraz the Zemanta CTO stopped by in the comment section and answered a few questions which piqued my curiosity further. I like seeing company executives and reps out responding to blog posts, being transparent about their service. Andraz promised more features were on the way as backed up by the active Zemanta GetSatisfaction page. I’m guessing he’ll dig the info in this post for his team which is loaded with wish list items to make Zemanta a killer application.

Important note: the spam category placement is not intended to imply that I think Zemanta in any way spams anybody, rather I’ve noticed their service is being used by some spam blogs and splogs. There are lots of legitimate tools that are being abused/used by spammers, this is not meant to be nor should it be construed as condemnation of the Zemanta service.

I downloaded the Zemanta Windows Live Writer plugin and have been experimenting with using on a few posts at our group blog, VTOReality.com (e.g Anarchy Online 30 day free offer expires December 31, 2008). There are Zemanta plugins available for self-hosted WordPress, wordpress.com, Blogger and more, but I won’t be covering those here.

What Zemanta does

Think of Zemanta as an almost real time blogging research assistant. On GetSatisfaction they self-describe as:

Contextually relevant suggestions of links, pictures, related content and tags will make your blogging fun again.

Imagine having somebody — or something — that sits beside you while you write posts and presents you with ongoing number of choices for adding external content to your blog posts like: pictures from Flickr, Wikipedia entries, homepage links, links to related stories around the web, company info, map locations and more. 

Above you’ll see a picture of what it’s like working in Windows Live Writer with the Zemanta pane in Windows Live Writer active in the middle. Along the right is a full-size screenshot of only the Zemanta pane. 

Wish list #1: Allow width resizing of Zemanta pane in Windows Live Writer.

The Zemanta pane is either open or closed by clicking on the two right arrows (<< and >> respectively). When writing I tend to want as much space as possible, but found that I liked the idea of having this pane open a little bit. This brings me to my next wishlist item.

Wish list #2: let users customize what sources and types show in the Zemanta pane

For example, maybe I only want to see pictures from Flickr. And maybe only pictures licensed for commercial use. There is a Zemanta filter option but it’s not clear how to use that to only retrieve commercial licensed ok pictures. If that is possible, then please somebody tell me how? Most of the plugins I’ve seen for showing related pictures don’t include this very important option. This blog has advertisements, turns a profit, and thus is considered commercial use by many TOS so a tool that shows me non-commercial licensed images is useless here.

Also maybe I don’t ever want to see links by Wikipedia or links to posts made by resources I already use or feel are too common. Then there are certain times I want to see only related content from sources in my OPML list. 

Wish list #3: increase number of sources from 160 to 500+ and include feature to allow to only draw from these sources

Lightbulb flashes went off in my head when I learned you could add your own list of sources, but was quickly disappointed to learn only a maximum of 160 sources are currently allowed. This comes up short for the number of individual sources used at VTOR and the number of current sources which I pull for this blog is over 600 RSS feeds alone, not counting my network of Twitter and Friendfeed contacts. We haven’t even gotten into StumbleUpon, digg or the many other places one can find stuff that encourages them to write a blog post.

I’m not expecting Zemanta to cater to users like Scoble who pulls from tens of thousands sources, but there lies a middle road between that extreme and 160. That’s where I’m at anyway and hazard a guess that plenty of other blog writers fit this demographic. Please let me know otherwise in the comments if you have less than 160 sources including Twitter, Friendfeed. I doubt many do that are blogging regularly these days.

As I’m writing this it occurred to me one could create a plugin mashup using the Y! context checker and provide those results from their own sources checked say once every few minutes or so. This would give the ability to draw from a specific source list much greater than 160. A toggle could be used for pictures or external articles giving very similar functionality to Zemanta. I wonder if some enterprising developer has already done the lifting here?

Wish list #4: Fix Windows Live Writer (WLW) plugin stability issues and allow easy disabling/removing of WLW plugin

If this wishlist were in order of importance, this would be #1. During the writing of this post with the Zemanta plugin activated, WLW crashed multiple times. Before activating the Zemanta plugin, I rarely encountered WLW crashes like this so I’m led to believe Zemanta was the culprit. Indeed, I exited the Zemanta plugin and finished the rest of this post and it never crashed again. Here are the errors received:

Obviously the worst kind of blog helper imaginable would be one that came and shut you down in the middle of writing something.

Fortunately during each crash I could save before the application needed to be restarted and my work-in-progress was safe. This is where Zemanta as my blog assistant got fired. I tried to disable the plugin in WLW. When restarting after the plugin being disabled it still starts up in the middle pane. Huh? This needs to be fixed ASAP. When something is marked as disabled it should not fire upon application restart. I exited again and uninstalled from add/remove programs in Windows. I saw a complaint on GetSatisfaction that another user had to use RevoUninstaller (freeware) to purge the Zemanta installation files completely. This type of once we’re installed we don’t leave on uninstall behavior is totally unacceptable and borderline adware tactic. Fix this now.

Wish list #5: scrap the Terms of Service requirement to use the Zemanta reblog image service link and allow something more (better) customized

I don’t see myself using Zemanta on this blog for the other wishlist items mentioned but the Zemanta TOS requiring me to use their button in every post that I use anything showing in their interface is a big reason to say thanks but no thanks. I wonder how many are using Zemanta to find related content and get angles are skipping fulfilling the TOS requirement which clearly says this is not optional.

Here’s the Terms of Service quote, Zemanta users:

• Service Description. When deploying or utilizing Zemanta derived content on your site or within your application, you agree to display the Zemanta Icon logo.
• Service Icon/Logo Display. When deploying or utilizing Zemanta derived content, you agree not to make any changes to the shape and size of the Zemanta logo, or other Zemanta created content
• Service User Interface Display. When a reader clicks on the Zemanta icon logo you agree to hyperlink that logo directly to our home page at http://www.zemanta.com, or other appropriate page within our site.

NOTE: even though Zemanta screenshots are shown in this post and the review is about the service absolutely no links or content was used from the interface, so you won’t see that image link here as required by the TOS. In fact during the writing of this post I uninstalled the plugin as mentioned above.

Zemanta, just get rid of the TOS requirement altogether. Credit link in a blog post like this should be more than sufficient as a site-wide mention of the service. This post will be spidered by Google and will remain as long as this site — or your service — is live. There is no reason for me to promote Zemanta in every single post where Zemanta was somewhat helpful. That would be the equivalent of mentioning a human blog assistant’s name in every post even when it’s not relevant. It starts to feel kind of spammy to me, which leads to another concern I had about Zemanta. And one that I voiced to their CTO in the comments about my familiarity with their service to date.

I’ve noticed a considerable number of sites using posts from this blog as related links on very spammy/sploggy blogs and trackbacking in from those posts. This just sullies the Zemanta brand. It also could lead to search engines punishing these unrelated, forced Zemanta links someday. The lines between paying somebody to put up a link without rel=nofollow and bartering for the link (which is what Zemanta is doing) are fuzzy, IMO.  I’m not saying that Zemanta is spamming anybody or is a haven for spammers nor that they can control whether or not spammers are using their services, but it’s an issue worth mentioning.

Andraz pointed out in the comments that these brand name companies are using Zemanta: Real Networks official blog, HP Marketing Blogs, Chris Brogan, some start-up CEOs, Geekdad blog at Wired.com, etc.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I want to deprive Zemanta any credit for being a blog helper — links here and there where relevant are fine, just not in every single post. Adding to that I strongly dislike where these links point to: the Zemanta reblogging web interface.

This thing is an eyesore from a design and usability standpoint.

Not sure if it’s the hard to read text (writers need their eyes!) or the fact that we’re being sandwiched into a dual pane and then being asked to give Zemanta our blog login credentials. It’s all around fail to me from a blog owner perspective. Why should I send other bloggers off to use that? Most bloggers already have their own blog interface they are happy using. At the very least give me the ability to customize what that link does and/or provide the interface directly on this blog at least. It would be awesome if Zemanta would allow Zemanta registered users to redirect that link to their blog interface of choice: e.g launch windows live writer with that text highlighted or Firefox plugin and so on.

Zemanta still the most useful that I’ve seen in this class of tools

Despite Zemanta’s shortcomings mentioned in this Hmm Review, it is the best I’ve seen/used to date at what it does. Much better and contextually related than Sphere. If Zemanta fills the wishlist items mentioned here, I’d strongly recommend this tool to blogging friends and probably use more myself. As it stands now, the Windows Live Writer plugin needs too much work to be added to my workflow. Might be worth reviewing the other plugin options to see if they are better. As always, I invite you to agree or disagree below. Grade: C+

This morning Jason Falls shared his thoughts about linking effectively and where to find good sources to link (emphasis mine):

That said, while you’ll get more blog exposure and promotion by linking to other blogs, you’d be foolish not to link to traditional websites or news outlets that also contain good content. Some bloggers are unnecessarily self-righteous when it comes to traditional news outlets and think there’s better content to be had in the blogosphere. Frankly, they’re short-sighted. Some blogs offer great insight and context. Most traditional media outlets do.

Jason closes an insightful post asking for link habits and tricks learned from others but then, as (too many?) other bloggers are doing out there, uses the automated Zemanta related external links plugin and closes with a link to Sphere related links (machine 2X).

I’m curious, did he choose any of these links or let the machine choose all for him? If he didn’t vet these links, I’m wondering why he uses these services?  He writes a post about the importance of finding good links and then ends the post by letting some third party software choose what links on other websites are related to his post for his readers?

Or is the message: follow what’s in the post body and ignore what follows? If so, too many blogs are like that these days.

The good news

The related links under the heading of "Related articles by Zemanta and Jason Falls" are all on topic and related. So good in fact that I added Zemanta to my to-do list to learn more.

The first Zemanta/Falls link is a Google webmaster blog link: Linking out, often it’s just applying common sense keys on a couple things not to do which include:

1. allowing unmonitored linkage, especially user-generated links
2. undisclosed advertising links (not using rel=nofollow) can reduce site credibility
3. too many links on a page. Suggestion has always been keeping number of links on any page under 100.

Second up is a post cleverly titled Self-linking could make you go blind which goes through the pros and cons of self-linking. The author, Mark Dykeman, doesn’t really answer if self-linking is good or bad from his own point of view in the post and hopes his comment area will help. Fortunately, it does. This is a great blog post technique, post an article with research results and then flesh out those results in the comment area.

As of this writing Mark made eight comments, some of which that would have been nice to see opined in the post body like:

It certainly makes sense to me to link to relevant content. However, it also makes sense to me to link to the outside world on occasion to recognized pillar posts or other authoritative pieces of information. That’s only fair and you’re doing your reader a service by linking out to the best stuff. And when your stuff is the best stuff, then it’s just sweet.

And:

Ultimately it’s the blogger’s choice. I’m just saying that people look at the practice of self-linking in different ways.

Bingo! Check that out, three links for Mark with two of them for his comment area. It continues to be my opinion that a smart comment section is worth its weight in goal many times over.

The third external link from Jason leads to a Search Engine Land blog post about link building that starts by talking about review spam and then moves into Google personalized search, where author Eric Ward writes:

From a linking perspective, the common thread through all three of these news items is that at the end of the day, when the dust clears, when the results are toggled and tweaked and reshuffled, trust reigns.

The fourth link covers how and why you should link internally on your website as well as targeting keywords. The majority of what this post describes I never do intentionally. I don’t set out to build pages to link to past pages, in fact, I try not to do that (even though there are links in this post to past posts).

If I’ve already written about something before I usually pass unless something new/additional of substance can be added or I’ve changed my position on something (consistency). If you change your opinion on something you felt strongly about in a past post you owe it to yourself and readers to explain why the change.

I look more at this blog’s individual posts as pages in a book moving the story of life forward. Editors would frown on hashing and rehashing the same topic and inconsistency. Some bloggers rewrite their content every week and that gets old for me as a reader fast. I try not do that here. Won’t say I’m always successful, but readers should know the effort is there.

In the case of linkrot, this is a subject I care passionately about and don’t mind revisiting. I want my friends, some of you reading this now, if you are thinking of starting your own blog or making your existing blog better to take what you link to seriously.

In the fifth and final link a post by Mitch Joel highlights a lot of how I feel about linking too:

I think links are what makes reading content online so interesting, engaging, exciting and fresh. I choose to link in hopes that others do as well. I choose to link in hopes that it becomes standard operating procedure and a best practice for online content. I choose to link so that you can choose where you want to go now or next. Linking has become way too much about what it can do for the content creator. I think it’s time to go back to the beginning and start linking because it’s about what it can do for the reader and their online experience.

Again, these collection of Zemanta/Falls links are a very good example of using a machine. Even so, it’s too bad though that Jason didn’t find some way to weave these links into the post body. Sticking at the end as automated external results is a high risk play.

The bad news

Don’t think so? Now take a look at what mess turned up when I clicked the Sphere: Related Content link in his post (and no, not going to link any of that here), which is the very last link before the linked post tags:

Please tell me what Electronic Investor or an ad for Bank of America has to do with link tips and tricks? Blogger’s talking about "This Topic" = Flexibility? Seattle Celebrate Local and Save Green This Holiday Season? Videos for Blogging 2.0 and finding a blog in a haystack?

Unrelated external link nightmare

Sure, there appear to be a couple related posts in there like "Blogging is about linking, 5 reasons to link" or (maybe?) "Seven sizzling ways to turn targeted traffic towards your blog." I don’t know, didn’t follow. And if I don’t follow, I don’t link. Something tells me that Jason wouldn’t have linked to most of this either.

That’s the problem in a screenshot. I don’t trust machines to figure out what is related on external sites. I barely trust them on first party content. Once upon a time I tried Sphere and despite thinking it was "promising" it didn’t last long here. The concept is great when it works but when it doesn’t, it looks like the garbage in the screenshot above and isn’t useful to readers at all.

We’ve been using a plugin (machine) for related posts from this site and sometimes links will be duplicated in the post body as I’m suggesting above. Beyond the number of links being displayed none of these ‘related posts’ links are human vetted. It’s something about this blog that I’d like to improve someday. I’d like for those links to be vetted with some sort of short commentary about why it’s related, why it fits, why a follow-up was written, etc. It’s possible with the new footnotes feature that might be one way this is fleshed out over time.

It’s too much like a crapshoot using a machine only. Not bagging on the plugin, it’s one of the best out there at what it does, but sometimes the results are as unrelated as the Sphere example above.

Machine or (wo)man

Let me throw Jason’s post a better bone to end on than the Sphere link. The wise linkers of the web today are mindful of what happens to the source of those links tomorrow and beyond. That is, if they want to continue to receive search traffic tomorrow and build reader confidence in the links found on their sites.

There’s a very good reason that top search engine Google rewards related linkage in its algorithm and it’s my belief that they will lean even more extreme on this algorithm going forward. Blogs that refuse to manage linkrot in their backyard are as they get older in for a search engine beating.

Google already promotes a lot of blog posts when they are fresh but as time goes on, the blog post is treated less favorably. I see this every day with blog posts made here. In the beginning they rank high, but as time goes on the rankings fade — and so does the resulting traffic.

Some posts this doesn’t happen though, which suggests a strategy one could employ to help more of their blog posts stay relevant.

These non-fading blog posts are often the ones that continue to receive updates and links in from external sites. The latter is out of the blogger’s control, but the former can be controlled. An update to an archived post can come in the form of a comment made, update to the bottom of the original post, basically anything that alters the text on the page. There are good search engine related reasons to revisit archived posts.

Please note that I’m not suggesting changing history. The way updates are handled here are in the form of dates and/or footnotes so that readers can clearly determine what is old and what is new.

If you are a blogger who cares about continuing to receive quality search engine traffic, then watch how many of your links point to nowhere (404) and/or have been redirected somewhere besides what you intended to link. Google offers webmasters a list of links on their sites that lead to 404 and encourages webmasters to fix these broken links. From experience the absolute worst offenders of linkrot are mainstream news sites. Yes, the very sites Jason’s post is suggesting you’d be foolish not to link to that I emphasized in his quote at the top of this post.

Hmm.

So which is it: link to news sites or not?

The answer is both. Wait, how can that be? I’ve been thinking a lot about this question lately and have a few suggestions.

Jason is correct that linking to news sites is important, especially when they are the best source of what you are writing about. You should strive to add links when and where they are necessary.

The problem is that (too) many of these news sites often use page links that expire. Even Google with their own AP articles are expiring news stories. This means if you link to them today in a blog post in a couple months those links will turn 404.

From related to dead

What is needed is a way to link to pages until that link goes 404 and then linking to a cache copy or removing the link when no cache is available. This way people that visit your page will continue to be able to understand the full context. As much as I’d love to point to this solution right now or offer it as a download, I’m empty-handed.

The third party Wordpress plugin I shared recently in How To Manage Dead Links In WordPress goes part way toward fixing the problem. It identifies which of the links in posts are problematic and gives you an option to edit/remove the link. It needs to be automated one step further to link up the cache page when the link goes 404 so you don’t have to manually fix the link. Maybe I should drop the plugin author a suggestion to add this or maybe even work out the code myself and share that back with the world at large.

Wish I could report that the anti-linkrot process is anything but time consuming, but that would be a lie. This blog still has over 1,800 links to go through and edit/remove here in posts made over the last 5+ years.

Where do we go now? Links are web children-like

A Guns N’ Roses Sweet Child O’ Mine reference to swoop for the close. Maybe it’s worth thinking of your links as web children of sorts? No, not in an overprotective parental sense, but in a cautious and responsible way. Linking out to other sites is an important part of the web and having some plan to deal with inevitable linkrot is an important part of any link discussion.

Guess that’s what got me started on this post. Jason’s post doesn’t discuss linkrot. So many articles and posts I read out there skip discussing what happens to links in your posts tomorrow and beyond.

Blogs or any medium that is focused too much on today will become yesterday tomorrow. Not trying to be profound there, it’s common sense. Some people I’ve spoken to say they don’t care what happens to links in archive posts or mistakes or updating/correctly any archived post. That it wasn’t worth the time to fix.

But how important is this post to a first time visitor five years from now?

So for the record, unless you can vet related posts from external sites, it’s more useful to readers to just end your posts. We don’t need or want links to unrelated external sites and ads. This is the kind of thing that drives people to filtering RSS feeds and ignoring websites altogether.

Thought it would be useful for other music game fans to create a collection of the various music videogames available already or soon. If you’re shopping for a music game fan, this collection might come in handy as well. This post is dynamic and should be considered a work in progress as new titles get added and additional details are provided (probably should have made it a page instead of a post, but oh well). If you want to add titles this collection is missing feel free to use the comments area below.

Xbox 360  [14 games]

1. Lips [Xbox.com] - buy from Amazon 
   Suggested retail: $69.99 with two wireless microphones
   Features: sing along with songs in MP3 format on your Zune (no lyrics)

   Release date: available now

2. Guitar Hero World Tour [Xbox.com] - buy from Amazon
   Suggested retail: $59.99 game only
   $99.99 with guitar
   $189.99 with drums, guitar and microphone (wired)
   Features: studio that allows creating original music and sharing with other GH players
   - All original songs, no cover versions

   Release date: 10/27/2008

3. Rock Revolution - buy from Amazon

   Suggested retail: $49.99 game only
   $129.99 with 7 button drum kit
   Features: can use special 7-button drum kit or Rock Band drums
   - all songs are covers, not the original masters
   - studio mode allows original music creation

   Release date: game now, package with drum kit 11/10/2008

4. Rock Band 2 [Xbox.com] - buy from Amazon
   Suggested retail: $59.99 game only
   $189.99 with drums, guitar and microphone
   Features:

5. Release date: available

6. Rock Band [Xbox.com] - buy from Amazon
   Suggested retail: $59.99 game only
   $129.99 with drums, guitar and microphone
   Features: first game to offer play as band mode
   - good line-up of music to play through
   - plays all DLC content for Rock Band 2
   - can transfer RB songs to Rock Band 2 for $5
   Release date: available
7. Guitar Hero II [Xbox.com] - buy from Amazon
   Xbox.com] - Suggested retail: $59.99 with guitar

   Release date: available

8. Guitar Hero III Legends of Rock [Xbox.com] - buy from Amazon
   Suggested retail: $59.99 game only
   $99.99 with wireless guitar 

   Release date: available

9. Guitar Hero Aerosmith [Xbox.com] - buy from Amazon
   Suggested retail: $59.99 game only
   $99.99 with wireless guitar

   Release date: available

10. Karaoke Revolution Presents American Idol Encore [Xbox.com]
    Suggested retail: $69.99 with wired microphone
    Features: vocals only
    Release date: available
11. Disney Sing It [Xbox.com]
    Suggested retail: $59.99
    Features: vocals only
    - 35 songs from Disney Channel Original Series and Movies
    Release date: 10/21/2008
12. High School Musical 3 Dance [Xbox.com]
    Suggested retail: $69.99
    Features: dance to music only
    Release date: 10/28/2008
13. Dance Dance Revolution Universe 2 [Xbox.com]
    Suggested retail: $69.99
    Features: dance to music only
    Release date: available
14. Dance Dance Revolution Universe [Xbox.com]
    Suggested retail: $59.99
    Features: dance to music only
    Release date: available

Playstation 3

1. Rock Band 2 [Playstation.com]
2. Rock Band [Playstation.com]
3. Guitar Hero World Tour [Playstation.com]
4. Guitar Hero Aerosmith [Playstation.com]
5. Guitar Hero III Legends of Rock [Playstation.com]
6. Disney Sing It! [Playstation.com]

Playstation 2

1. Popstar Guitar
2. Rock Band [Playstation.com]
3. Guitar Hero World Tour [Playstation.com]
4. Guitar Hero Encore Rock The 80s [Playstation.com]
5. Guitar Hero Aerosmith [Playstation.com]
6. Guitar Hero III [Playstation.com]
7. Guitar Hero II [Playstation.com]
8. Guitar Hero [Playstation.com]
9. Dance Dance Revolution X [Playstation.com]
10. High School Musical 3: Senior Year Dance [Playstation.com]

PSP

1. Beats [Playstation.com]

Nintendo Wii [15 / 327 games]

1. Wii Music [Wiimusic.com] - buy from Amazon
2. Popstar Guitar [popstar.com]
3. Rock Band 2 [Nintendo.com]
4. Rock Band [Nintendo.com]
5. Guitar Hero World Tour [Nintendo.com]
6. Guitar Hero III Legends of Rock [Nintendo.com]
7. Guitar Hero Aerosmith [Nintendo.com]
8. Rock Revolution [Nintendo.com]
9. Battle of the Bands [Nintendo.com]
10. Dance Dance Revolution Hottest Party 2 [Nintendo.com]
11. Samba De Amigo [Nintendo.com]
12. Karaoke Revolution Presents American Idol Encore [Nintendo.com]
13. Boogie Superstar [Nintendo.com]
14. Boogie [Nintendo.com]
15. Disney Sing It [Nintendo.com]
16. High School Musical Sing It [Nintendo.com]

Nintendo DS [3 / 392 games]

1. Guitar Hero On Tour [Nintendo.com]
2. Jam Sessions [Nintendo.com]
3. Rock Revolution [Nintendo.com]

PC

1. Guitar Praise [guitarpraise.com]
2. JamLegend [jamlegend.com]
3. Guitar Rising [guitarrising.com]
   Features: will use real guitar plugging in through supplied USB adapter (source: Gamespot). Will debut with 30 songs across several difficulty levels (easy to expert). Notes will scroll from right to left and look similar to guitar tablature.
   Release date: 2009, date not yet announced

Mac

1. Guitar Praise [guitarpraise.com]
2. JamLegend [jamlegend.com]

Linux

1. JamLegend [jamlegend.com]

Download Hmmcast #185 (mp3) Running Time: 62:43

Broadcast live Friday November 28, 2008 2pm PST / 5pm EST / 10pm GMT

What happened on Hmmcast #185

• Walmart temporary employee trampled to death by Black Friday crowd
• Recalling the Ozzy Osbourne / King Kobra in the eighties concert in Green Bay, WI bomb threat story
• The Barney Miller sidetrack
• What happened in Mumbai, India
• Blu-ray quality
• *Live original music by tabites (full band live in studio: drums, bass, guitar, vocals): “Economic Ruin”, “Stay Out of Danger”, “Goodbye To Appleton”, “It’s Over”

Some blog naval gazing in this post. Probably of most interest to other blog owners rather than non-blogging readers, so eject now if this isn’t your thing.

The plugin being using for the MySQL queries provided in this post is Gamerz Wordpress Post Rating plugin. This plugin provides most, if not all, of this data without the need to query the database directly as I’m showing here. Those who want the queries to do it directly will find them below. The lifting is done.

Using data from votes made on Hmm posts, I’ve been going through the data looking at trends and trying to figure out what kinds of posts readers do and don’t like. The ratings, although they can be easily manipulated, provide some information.

Breakdown of the current ratings received

5 (grade A) - 1023 / 1870 = 54.7%
4 (grade B) - 239 / 1870 = 23.3%
3 (grade C) - 142 / 1870 = 7.6%
————— = 1404 / 1870 = 75%
2 (grade D) - 100 / 1870 = 5.3%
1 (grade F) -  366 / 1870 = 19.6%
—————- = 466 / 1870 = 24.9%

Other than to thank readers for their votes in the first section of the (1, 2, 3) A, B, and C grades I’m not going to focus very much on that area in this post. Instead I’m focusing on are the readers who voted the lowest two: (2 & 1) or D and F respectively. Looking for areas of improvement.

About 1 in 5 votes received to date have said the following about the post:

1 star - "F = please no more posts like these"

I was curious what posts these were, particularly what types, that had the most number of ‘1′ votes. MySQL query to the rescue:

The first thing I did was check each of these 10 posts to make sure that linkrot hadn’t set in:

• The M&M post had a redirect in place, but people could still get there.
• The "See how you will look…" post link was removed awhile back because the service was removed. I hunted around for another link/service that would do the same thing, found one and updated the post with a footnote. Maybe that will draw less fire going forward. Otherwise, the post is bare bones and agree that I could have written more. I may bulk this one up with the new service link.
• In "Nintendogs don’t grow old, die or poop?" my tone is dismissive to younger gamers and it makes sense why they give me so much flack in the comment area and presumably they voted this down.
• "Mice on drugs" link was broken. I’m guessing some (most?) of these votes are for the lack of substance with the broken link and thus not being able to get the joke. Fixed.
• People strongly disagree with my new Journey album review grade of D+ and it’s reflected in both the comments and votes in the review. The album sold fairly well and Pineda has a fan following. I will always wish Journey my best, regardless of who is singing for them, but there is nothing in my review I’d change, including the grade. I’ve tried to get into this album several times and can’t.
• The five 1/5 ratings for "Create your own street and other signs online" post don’t seem right to me. I think this is one of the more useful posts at Hmm. Despite several links being broken, there are dozens of generators one can use to make cool signs and buttons. I refer to this post myself. The traffic to this post suggests that these 5 voters are wrong. The average rating is 3.25 out of 5, which still seems low to me, but hey it is what it is.
• The Icon Buffet thing still strikes me as being funny and ironic. Josh Williams and the people who left comments — all paying VIPs interestingly — disagree. I think my favorite part might be where they call it ‘my’ blog and then shut down comments on a post criticizing their service. Wouldn’t change anything with this post either. I understand why it got a few negative votes, but I think the post itself and resulting comments are gold.
• I don’t get why people would vote down the "1000+ free audiobooks post" so maybe somebody can help me with this one in the comments area. Feedback on this one was positive but avg rating is 2.9 out of 5. Don’t get it.
• The "Get hypnotized" post is another skinny on the bones type post. I don’t care for these type of posts either, but avg rating is 3.33 out of 5 which isn’t as bad as one might think.

Let’s compare this to list of the other extreme: most posts with a rating of ‘5′ out of 5:

Interesting that the top 2 posts in each list are for the same two posts.

1. "Create yourself as an M&M" post has had 42 of 366 total votes (1/1) and 152 of 1023 total votes (5/5). That’s 11.5% vs 14.9%. Voting in extremes very close from a percentage basis.
2. "See how you will look in 10-40 years" post had 27 out of 366 total votes (1/1) and 28 out of 1023 total votes (5/5). In this case 7.4% vs. 2.7%. A higher percentage of votes disliked this post.

The "Nintendogs don’t grow old, die or poop?" post — #3 in the most disliked post at Hmm to date (avg 2.78 out of 5 rating) — has had 175 comments made on it, most of which were very negative toward me for daring to question a game that has dogs that are quasi-real.

Conversely, the post with the most comments of any post at Hmm (close to breaking the 1,000 comments mark) is on the same subject, "First Look at Nintendogs: Daschund and Friends" is #7 on the most liked posts to date at Hmm list receiving 17 extreme like votes.

I’ve only written about this Nintendogs game directly in five posts, all in 2005 and the two shown above have had staying power that continues to this day. Maybe I should write more posts about Nintendogs? Probably not, as it was a game which I didn’t much care for and only played a couple times. This makes me go hmm big time.

Most votes are made *anonymously

I wasn’t that surprised that most votes to date have been made are by readers who are not logged in.

This could mean that they are at a different computer where they’ve left a comment in the past, didn’t accept the cookie, or they have never made comments before. The cookie is harmless, folks, it just remembers the info you used in the comment form so you don’t have to type it again. Check it out, if you like.

Oh, and no, I’m not stuffing the ballot box:

Only 13 of the 1870 votes were made by me and yes that’s all the posts I’ve rated and no they weren’t all ‘5′. Why would I rate something I’ve written? When I felt a post was really good or really bad — the extremes — I’ve made a vote. It might be a bit cheesy to rate your own work, but as you can see I haven’t abused the privilege. I rated an old post a ‘1′ earlier today in fact.

Voting the extremes

This got me thinking how many others are like me with their voting online. Do you rate the extremes or nothing at all? If I think something is just middle of the road, I probably didn’t stick around long enough to rate it, much less leave a comment.

If you are logged in and rate a post your name will be attributed to your vote and I’ll know how you voted on the post. If this wasn’t clear before now, then it should be now.  I have no plans to make the individual rating information publically available to others at this time, but would like to explore the option of giving readers the ability to access their own rating information and again, optionally share it publically if they wanted to do so. It might be a good way for folks to mark their favorite (or least favorite) posts around the site and share them with other readers.

I am, however, considering releasing more global data like is in this post when there is enough data to make it worthwhile. While I think nearly 2,000 votes is a good start and several new votes are coming in every day when it’s compared to the overall number of posts (almost 5,000 as of this writing) it’s not even an average of one vote every other post.

Please vote on Hmm posts after you read them including this one

Here’s how you can help shape the types of post published at Hmm. Please take a second after reading and vote on the quality of post. The rating used to be at the top of the post and wasn’t very UI friendly. Why would somebody scroll back up to rate? My bad there, it’s been moved to the bottom of the post to the right and looks like this:

What makes a post good quality is subjective and up to you. For me a good quality post is something that does the following:

• fresh content, perspective and/or voice
• keeps me engaged and interested throughout the whole post
• has working source links. If I have to go digging around for links to verify context, the post author dropped the ball.
• would like to read more posts like this

The star rating works as follows, just to recap:

• 5 stars - A grade = great post, please post more like this
• 4 stars - B grade = good post, I like it
• 3 stars - C grade = average post
• 2 stars - D grade = not among your best stuff
• 1 star — F grade = please no more posts like this

When you hover over the stars you’ll see these ratings re-explained.

Now don’t worry, I’m not going to be mad/hurt/insert ___ emotion at an reader for voting ‘1′ on posts that they truly don’t think are good quality. I’m also not expecting people to give me the mad props ‘5′ grade if the post isn’t good quality. I would respectfully ask that you be honest. Please don’t sully the ratings up with bogus ratings because that would just make the data worthless.

It’s one of those honor bar type things. Just read it and go with your gut as to if it’s the type of post you like to read.

For those curious if I were to rate this post, I’d give it a 4. I think there is some useful info here for blog owners to compare among their own reading rating data. However, if I didn’t have a blog and ignored the warning in the opening paragraph, I might rate it a 1 or 2. Not planning to rate this though, leaving the rating score fate up to you.

Staying the course 

Overall I’m pleased that 3/4th of the ratings on posts being made here so far have been rated at least 3/5. There are some areas for improvement, particularly in delivering posts with more meat on them. I’m paying attention.

If you’ve watched posts over 2008 you’ll note the quantity of posts has dropped off noticeably because it takes longer to write meatier posts than quick, fluffy posts that don’t have much longevity.

As always thank you for reading and if you voted on this post or others, thank you for that too.

The day before Thanksgiving we’re being brutally reminded that there are still some very bad, bad people in the world. Times of India is reporting that 80 people have been killed and over 250 injured in attacks made at seven different locations in Mumbai, India.

The targets included two five star hotels: Oberoi and Taj where two different hostage situations are still underway as of this writing:

Armed with AK-47 rifles and grenades, a couple of terrorists entered the passenger hall of CST and opened fire and threw grenades, Mumbai General Railway Police Commissioner A K Sharma said.

"City under siege" is the description being used on CNN. No terrorist organization has taken credit for this scary scenario as of this writing.

Creepy irony perhaps, CNN is showing holiday travel information in a separate panel (pictured above). Told a friend in chat that I would not want to travel abroad in these times. I feel for those who have to do so for their work. For vacation? Forget about it.

Updated 12:34pm PST: this chilling photo below, credit CNN, is from one of the hotel lobbies in Mumbai:

While in the process of updating archive posts and fixing dead/expired/changed links reported by the broken link checker, I needed something that would quickly insert the timestamp of my changes without me having to type it into the forms. I chose the Firefox plugin Timestamp which allows user defined formats.

If you are perusing the archive posts and seeing these newly added footnotes, you might note that I’m also coding the dead links by domain name. This is so that I can query the database in the future and see what domains are the worst offenders of expiring/changing their links.

Something interesting happened the other day.

I was talking to a friend and the subject of whether to buy Blu-ray or DVD came up. We’ll get to my answer shortly, but this got me thinking: will that be on the minds of casual technology shoppers this holiday? The friend I’m thinking of isn’t what very geeky, so I’m sure there are people like that.

This holiday season there are some killer DVD deals out there. If you want to build on your DVD collection or buy DVDs as gifts for friends, family and fellow workers it’s an exciting time to be shopping. Yes, even with these troubling economic times:

But studios are facing a scarier fact: perhaps consumers are losing interest in buying DVDs. One particularly bleak spot is the sales of Blu-ray, which was intended to spur consumers to buy expensive DVD players to match their new HDTVs, then replace their libraries with expensive new Blu-ray discs so they could get better picture quality than from standard DVDs. But sales of players have been slow, and sales of the discs haven’t been much better.

While we have a library of over 600 movies, very few are in Blu-ray or the now-defunct HD-DVD format. I’m not and have never been as optimistic about Blu-ray. Let’s face it, DVD will be here for awhile.

Don’t get me wrong, from a quality standpoint, there is no better at home video fix than Blu-ray, but with compelling services like Vudu available offering more HD titles in 1080p than even on Blu-ray, you have to wonder how long the format is going to last.

Blu-ray as a holiday gift? Tread carefully

Back to my friend asking me about buying Blu-ray as a gift for a family member. I suggested to buy the DVD version instead. Here are the reasons I outlined to choose DVD over Blu-ray this holiday season:

1. Blu-ray is best at 1080p TV and despite prices plummeting, most people still don’t own 1080p-capable TVs. You might as well buy the DVD version if it won’t be watched at 1080p. Buying Blu-ray for TV sets that are at lower resolutions is a waste.
2. Blu-ray selection is still too anemic compared to DVD, particularly if you enjoy watching old TV shows. Take the complete series of Get Smart for example which I recently bought for $109 at Best Buy. The other day I saw a Blu-ray 4-set of movies selling for $90! Let’s see, 66 hours of content vs. 8 for close to the same price?
3. Too expensive. Every time I think about buying a Blu-ray movie, I have a hard time justifying the prices. $25-35 for one movie?  Sure, you get it at the best quality ever, but unless it’s a movie you’re going to watch many, many times over, you might as well get 2 or 3 DVD movies for the same price.
4. Too risky. The chance of the Blu-ray format making it another couple years is not very good. If you want to build a library in Blu-ray it better be with a collector’s mindset.

If the person you’re shopping for has a 1080p-capable TV — and if you don’t know, just ask them (if they don’t know chances are very good they don’t) — and IF the person has a PS3 or standalone Blu-ray player. If they don’t have the equipment already and/or don’t plan to upgrade, buy the DVD version instead. If they are 1080p equipped, Talk to them about the type of movies they like and how they feel about their Blu-ray player.

If you asked me what I’d rather have: one Blu-ray disc or a TV season on DVD, I’d choose the latter 9 times out of 10. Again, it’s not that I don’t like Blu-ray, because I think the quality is awesome, but I’d rather watch 65 hours of Get Smart than 8 hours of movies I’ll probably only watch once or twice at a higher resolution.

My last Blu-ray purchase is pictured atop this post. Space Ace (paid same price: $29.99 at Best Buy) is a cool interactive game (Don Bluth along the lines of Dragon’s Lair), digitally remastered in HD. It’s a better version than what was in the arcades. These are the kind of great Blu-ray gifts.