pointing out the obvious

Headphones should know when they are in use, meaning, when they are on someones head (full headphones) or in someones ear (earbuds). I don’t know of any headphones with this ability now, but it seems like a fairly straightforward concept.

If headphones knew when they were ‘in use’… my ipod would be smart enough to stop playing when my headphones were ‘not in use’, thus not burn through my playlist while I am not listening, or burn through my pathetic 4hrs of battery life (2nd generation ipod - yikes).

There are obviously edge cases - when the ipod is hooked into a stereo, computer or other connection, but that can be dealt with.

Wouldn’t smart headphones be great? Apple could produce and package them with the ipod, others would follow.

While not everyone reads blogs through a tool like bloglines, I think a lot of us do. While reading the other day, I realized that I spent less time on the blog posts that were just text than I did with the posts that incorporated a picture.

Sites like blogto.com have great feeds, pictures and all. They are really hitting their demographic by ensuring they have a rich feed. I’ve noticed others have started incorporating pictures as well.

It probably just slows the reader down enough to actually get into the meat of the post.

I’ve seen other feeds take those images to the next level, by incorporating advertising within the images. Although annoying, it’s a great idea.. if you’re reading feeds through a rss/atom reader like bloglines, you miss the opportunity to pay for your site through advertisements, so why not include the ad in the feed?

I find it interesting (but not suprising) that the big players cannot get personalized advertising right. As noted in a recent Three Minds post, it shouldn’t be a challenge to use their existing search engine knowledge to put “wine and cheese” together with something other than “power drill”. Meanwhile, Google seems to do this well, and it’s subtle, so you don’t feel like you’re overrun with advertising.

What’s interesting is whether you feel Google’s smaller, subtle advertising has more credibility than the skyscraper ad displayed by AOL. Or does the relevance of the advertising lend credibility to the portal? hmm…

With regard to subtle vs in-your-face advertising, there is likely a context for each. If I get an email including a note about “king kong”, a skyscraper ad or video for the upcoming Transformers movie makes sense. If I get an email about blogging, it makes sense to display a list of blog hosts - google style.

I decided to make the move from netfirms.com to superwebhost.ca.  The main reason for the change is that they are local, and I’d rather support a local company.  The other reason is that mod_rewrites work as advertised - Netfirms.com seems not to be able to support wordpress permalinks.  Permalinks now work without the index.php in the url, so life is good.

It never really occurred to me until I read bbum’s what the dell? post about dell’s totally ridiculous website.� It’s true.� I can never really find anything, though I feel like I’m finding things.

It looks like they have recently re-engineered their search engine - it now returns somewhat useful results instead of nonsense.� Though, if you search for POS, it’s still next to impossible to find their “small business POS” landing page that is filled with good and relevant information.� Instead, you’re directed to many smaller nonsense pages with fancy images - which reinforces the feeling of finding something when I haven’t.

It also reminded me of how dell creates some pretty crazy hardware.� I’d rather have an iMac.