Martin Gordon's Blog

Being back home in Miami Beach has kind of put a damper on my blogging. The change of environment has me preoccupied with other things and I've only been skimming my RSS feeds and skipping over a bunch of my daily reads.

Another thing I feel has kept me from writing is the fact that there's a ton of stuff going on. Google released a couple of new apps and E3 has brought a ton of new gaming news. I feel that if I do blog, I'll miss something and I'd rather not worry about that. Instead, I prefer to know that I've missed everything :-)

I have been keeping up with Joystiq's Nintendo Wii coverage and I think there is an underlying theme that can be summed up by two sentences: "The controls are cool, but too sensitive and the developer should be able to fix this. The graphics are okay, but not great."

Microsoft seems to be siding with Nintendo, having stated something to the effect of: "For the price of a PS3, one could buy both a Wii and a 360." I think it's good for the industry that all three companies are taking different stances in the market. Nintendo is going for the the casual gamer looking for cheap, innovative fun; Sony is going for the hardcore gamer looking for the high-end, "ultimate" experience; and Microsoft is going after a little of both (good games with next-gen graphics and casual games via XBox Live Arcade).

Strangely enough, it's Sony that appears the most stereotypically Microsoft-ish in this industry: They're creating a long list of features (with a price to match) that users may or may not want in hopes that the gaming industry equivalent of the Megahertz myth (i.e., that better graphics = better games) still applies.

In other news, AOL has launched its competitor to MySpace called AIMpages. I haven't had a chance to really check it out, but a quick look at the configuration for the friends shows that none of the people on my buddy list are eligible anyway.

There is a Philadelphia Bloggers meetup a week from this Saturday, two days after I get back in. I'll probably make it out to this one since I won't have much to do then, unless of course my self-diagnosed Social Anxiety Disorder kicks in and I become deathly afraid of meeting even geeks in person.

That's all for now.

Technorati Tags: Miami Beach, vacation, Google, E3, Joystiq, blogging, Sony, Playstation 3, XBox 360, XBox Live Arcade, Nintendo, Wii, AOL, AIM, AIMpages, MySpace, social networking

Dave Winer's Share Your OPML has opened up to the public last night/today. I've posted my OPML file with all 70 of my RSS feeds there. A quick count shows that only 19 or so of my feeds are in the top 100, so I'm getting a broad view of the blogosphere and not just reading the A-listers. Also, I thought 70 was a relatively large number, but the most prolific subscribers on the site subscribe to 269-2549 feeds (eliminating the #1 podfeed.net, which I don't think is a real person).

I'd be interested to know how the "Subscriptions Like Mine" algorithm works. My top match is Pete Gilbert with a strength of 14.025. It then jumps to 5 points and lower.

I had to export my OPML from NetNewsWire a couple of times before I got it right. For those using NNW, if you're going to export a selection, don't select folders and feeds in those folders or you'll get duplicate feeds in your file. You need to select one or the other. Also, you're going to want to export the file as "OPML (flat)" instead of "OPML (with groups)".

Technorati Tags: Share Your OPML, SYO, OPML, feeds, RSS, XML, Dave Winer, Scripting News, NetNewsWire, sharing, Web 2.0

My friend and housemate, Brian Keller, took up the hobby of firedancing a few weeks ago and he put on his first semi-public performance on for us last night. I was able to get some pretty spectacular long exposure shots of him and they're up on Flickr. The photoset is available here.

Technorati Tags: firedancing, fire, dancing, firedance, dance, performance, hobby, philadelphia, upenn, penn, philly, University of Pennsylvania

From the LyricWiki site:

LyricWiki is a free site which is a single source where anyone can go to get reliable lyrics for any song from any artist without being hammered by invasive ads.

This is a great alternative to having to visit those bulky sites riddled with ads, popups and flash when you want to know the lyrics to a song you're listening to. Best of all, anyone can contribute lyrics so even if you do have to visit one of those awful sites, you can add the lyrics to the Wiki so no one else has to go through the same trouble.

They have a Firefox search plug in, but I hope that in time their Google Juice gets high enough so that anytime you search "'song name' lyrics" in Google, you get them instead of the bad guys as the top result.

Technorati Tags: LyricWiki, lyrics, Wiki, song, music, Google, Google Juice, Firefox, search, plugin

Steve Rubel declared that today would be RSS Appreciation Day and he's got a handy tutorial for using RSS with Google Personalized Home Page. While it may not be much use to the technophiles, it's a great thing to share with your friends and family who may not be as tech savvy.

On a side note, my biggest complaint about Google Personalized Home Page (aside from the ridiculously long name) and what's kept My Yahoo as my home page for far too long, is that the three columns are the same width. I much prefer My Yahoo's approach with the main column taking up twice as much space as the two side columns. Still, My Yahoo can't touch GPHP's cleanliness; boy is My Yahoo ugly.

Technorati Tags: Google, Yahoo, Google Personalized Home Page, Steve Rubel, RSS, RSS Appreciation Day, tutorial, feeds, syndication

Behold the power of blogs…

As I wrote last month, Stefan Lessard of DMB started a blog on his site and began engaging fans in conversation via his MySpace page.

JTR (link to mp3), a song that previously thought to have been shelved forever, made a comeback after not having been played for almost 5 years last Saturday at the New Orleans JazzFest. The reason? Fans requested it and Fonzi delivered.

A lot of people have been coming to me saying "I thought that you hated JTR". I'm not really sure where this comes from but I don't hate any of our songs. I don't remember telling Cali that we would never bring JTR back but if I did say that exactly then I apoligize, I must have been being sarcastic and it was probably taken out of context like so many things that are said from the band members.

OMG The Edge!!! This Jazz festival was so amazing and the crowd rocked so hard! We loved playing JTR for everyone and you all can give yourself pats on the back because of the messages that I read informed me how much the fans love that song.

Emphasis mine.

Technorati Tags: music, blogs, conversation, myspace, stefan lessard, DMB, Dave Matthews Band, live, concert, JazzFest, New Orleans