Juniorbird.com

Like many people who got a Treo, I was at least somewhat excited that I could sync my e-mail with Outlook using the built-in VersaMail program. While I’m far too cheap to pay for the unlimited data transmission plan that would allow me to send and receive mail over the cell network, I definitely wanted to sync mail I wanted to keep around for reference with my Treo. Unfortunately, VersaMail failed miserably, sucked completely, and, virus-like, was virturally impossible to disable or uninstall.
VersaMail must truly be one of the worst-engineered programs I’ve encountered, as the task I set for it was entirely trivial. I wanted to sync my inbox — which, since I’m an “inbox zero”:http://www.43folders.com/izero/ kind of guy, typically contains between 0 and 12 items, with a total of 2-4 attachments — as well as my outbox, and a folder in which I dropped a few key reference e-mails, say, 8, with 2 attachments. Yet, about a third of the time, VersaMail would stall during synchronization.
Now, when you sync a Treo (or any other Palm handheld), everything gets synced serially, one program after the next. VersaMail was somewhere in the middle there in syncing, so, if the sync stalled, data wouldn’t be exchanged between my laptop and my Treo. Then I’d get out away from my laptop and want to make a note or look something up and it wouldn’t be there — or have to refer to my Treo when I was sitting in front of my laptop. OK, there was no data loss, but VersaMail’s suckiness definitely inconvenienced me, and I definitely was afraid that a stall would eventually destroy data (if you’re a fan of my “moblog”:http://juniorbird.com/foto/archives.html, it hasn’t been updated because my Treo’s sync regularly failed before it got my photos off my phone).
So, frustrated, I decided to switch to another program. But VersaMail was unwilling to get out of my Treo. First, disabling sync in VersaMail didn’t stick; the next time I synced my Treo, VersaMail, virus-like, inserted itself back into the pipeline (and, conveniently enough, stalled three times in a row, including with a completely empty inbox). Even when I clicked the magic box to make VersaMail not try to sync, it still launched and threw up a splash screen saying it was doing nothing. Since I didn’t know what made VersaMail stall, I couldn’t trust this outcome. But, again like a virus, VersaMail was not kind enough to insert itself into Windows’ Add/Remove Programs Control Panel or to provide its own uninstaller.
Finally, frustrated, I dug into my computer’s innards to figure out what made this thing sync so that I could manually uninstall it. Turns out that all the sync conduits sit in Program FilesPalmOne; they’re just .dlls. I poked around and finally ended up taking out a file called VMConduit.dll, and then the sync disappeared. Who knows what invisible processes associated with VersaMail still sit around — forum posts on several sites suggest that VersaMail’s files take up 500k on my handheld and, of course, there’s no built-in way to remoe these files, or the program, even though I’ve dumped VersaMail for good.
Oh, and I decided to switch to the delightfully simple and quick-syncing “MailFolders+”:http://www.handango.com/PlatformProductDetail.jsp?siteId=1&osId=652&platformId=1&productId=146240.

USC offers one of those subscription-based music services, “Ruckus”:http://ruckus.com, for just $10/semester to its students. I’m a cheap-ass motherfucker and $10 hits that cheap-ass spot just right, so I signed up. Heck, it’s a standard “Microsoft-based music rental service”:http://www.playsforsure.com/, so I also thought it would be a fun idea to check and see if I would like renting, rather than “buying”:http://www.apple.com/itunes/ my music (at least I’d get to write a review!). The conclusion? The rental model demands an incredibly high level of execution — a level that’s absent — and is uncompelling at the moment.
So how does Ruckus stack up against iTunes and the associated music store? Let’s break it down:
h3. Selection
Ruckus has some great, less-popular music; a wide selection of the more obscure stuff, which matches the service’s focus on the college market. Not all of these artists are on iTunes, and some are also absent from most retail locations, so it’s nice to have access to this music in a digital form. iTunes’s selection appears to be several orders of magnitude larger, however.
Searching and browsing music is done through your Web browser, not the Ruckus application itself, which makes one appreciate iTunes and its variety of easy-to-use widgets and sortable columns. However, searching and browsing within the Ruckus Web site is generally fairly usable. One odd feature is the use of an expandable tree on the left-hand side of the window, containing all of the genres and then, when expanded, the artists within a genre. This makes it easy to see the whole selection but is daunting in more-popular genres.
“!/images/ruckus/ruckusweb-small.jpg!”:images/ruckus/ruckusweb-large.jpg
“!/images/ruckus/itunesstore-small.jpg!”:images/ruckus/itunesstore-large.jpg
The choice of genres is also odd; there’s a separate top-level Ska genre, but Punk is under Rock (actually, it’s New Wave/Punk, which is unlikely to make either New Wave or Punk fans happy) and Alt-Country is under Rock, not Country.
*Score this one: iTunes, for the interface, organization, and breadth of selection*
h3. Player Application
Of course, once one has selected a song, one must acquire and then play it. This is a simple one-click process in iTunes and only slightly more complicated in Ruckus. The first time you download a song in Ruckus, your Web browser asks you with what application you want to open the file with; just choose the Ruckus application and everything works well from there on. Both applications take a while to download the song to your computer but Ruckus is perceptibly slower.
That’s the end of the similarities, however. iTunes uses a completely custom player, especially designed for music, to organize and play all of your MP3s and AACs. Ruckus’s Player only works with Ruckus files, but you can play your Ruckus music with Windows Media Player, if you like. Neither has an interface that’s remotely as usable as iTunes. The Ruckus Player, in particular, is not a very polished application; it just looks sloppy.
“!/images/ruckus/ruckusplayer-small.jpg!”:images/ruckus/ruckusplayer-large.jpg
“!/images/ruckus/itunesplayer-small.jpg!”:images/ruckus/itunesplayer-large.jpg
There are too many meaningless colors in that window, and too few meaningful ones. The bright white background makes the banner ads stand out too much — and they take up so much room! The only method available for organization is the playlists on the side; there’s no way to browse by album or genre or rating or anything like that. Even the playlists look less attractive than do playlists in iTunes. The only good parts are the shading in alternate rows in the song window, which makes the whole thing easier-to-read, and the live search, which works well and the Ruckus Player even highlights the text that matches the search, useful when you’re not getting the results you expect.
Perhaps because the Ruckus Player lacks any meaningful organizational tools besides the playlists, a playlist is automatically created for every album that you download. This really clutters the interface once you get past a few albums. The one nice touch is that the next song up is shown next to the playing song.
The same lack of care has been shown with the system tray widget, which only offers play/pause and next/previous buttons. Compare this to the default iTunes widget, which includes the above plus song info, rating tools, play mode control, and more.
!/images/ruckus/ruckustray.jpg! !/images/ruckus/itunestray.jpg!
It’s tempting to think that the Ruckus service was designed to work without the Ruckus player, so that you could just use whatever PlaysForSure-compatible music player you pleased. Unfortunately, to gain and renew your license for the music, you need the Ruckus player (more on this later). Somebody assumes that you’ll use the Ruckus player, and it’s sad that said player is so mediocre. At least it’s not crash-y or slow.
*Score this one: iTunes, for the interface and usability*
h3. Features
Ruckus’s special sauce is probably its community tools; every user gets a page, and each user can post information about themselves and small statements there. Every other user can also see what each user has downloaded and played recently; a problem if you have a secret Shakira thing like I do.
“!/images/ruckus/ruckuspersonal-small.jpg!”:images/ruckus/ruckuspersonal-large.jpg
You can watch your friends and check out the music they’re listening to, but there’s not that much communication or personalization possible (probably a good thing since people who would really want to do things beyond discovering new music would probably use something like MySpace). It’s potentially a cool idea, although there’s really no way to explore and find new people who might match your musical taste and dig deeper into what they like. The old Napster was good with that; you could browse a user’s entire collection and, if you were downloading a lot from a specific person, you could try some more of their library out. Today, we have “Last.fm”:http://www.last.fm/, a Web site that tracks what you listen to in iTunes or on your iPod and suggests music that you might like, based on other similar users; you can also search for users with similar tastes. This kind of functionality seems to me to be a no-brainer for Ruckus.
iTunes lets you create iMixes, which are published playlists that others can find on the iTunes Music Store. The iTunes Music store does a good job of integrating them into the content, linking to top-rated ones from the bio of an artist. iTunes also lets you listen to the songs that people around you are listening to, a fun feature (perhaps you can meet someone this way!). To this extent, despite the lack of profiles, iTunes actually does a better job of recommending music, although no community is really created. iTunes’s real special sauce, however, is probably its “FrontRow”:http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/apple/frontrow121.html integration — Apple wants to own the living room, not the internet!
*Score this one: iTunes, because its music recommendations are the real killer app here*
h3. MP3 Players
None of my Ruckus songs will sync to my iPod. Given that the iPod has something like 78% market share, it’s kind of ridiculous that a service would be totally incompatible with that hardware. Ruckus songs will sync with anything bearing the PlaysForSure logo, it’s true, but that’s not much of the market. I’ve considered buying a player program for my cell phone, because a lot of the high-end cell phones (including my Treo) can play music off of Ruckus, but I’m not sure that I’m prepared to switch back and forth between two music players. Besides, as seen in the next section, I’m not sure that I want to worry about my Ruckus songs on a hardware player.
*Score this one: iTunes, because the iPod owns the MP3 player market now and not working with it is just disastrous*
h3. PlaysForSure
That brings us to the big catch, the real product killer, the thing that, as I mentioned in the intro, renders the product uncompelling. “PlaysForSure”:http://www.playsforsure.com/ is Microsoft’s system that supposedly ensures that you can play your rented music on any device at any time. At least that’s the idea. I only tried the whole thing with the Ruckus Player on my laptop, but the level of function wasn’t spectacular. Most of the time, my songs played. Sometimes, however, Ruckus’s key servers were unavailable, and that is a major problem.
PlaysForSure songs are rented for a certain period — typically, a month — and, every time the song is played, the player checks that the song’s rental period hasn’t yet expired, by looking at the database on the computer itself. If the database indicates that the rental period is over, then the player checks with the song’s owner (in this case, Ruckus) by talking to a server over the Internet. So long as the database is available, the song can be re-authorized. If, however, the database is not available, then you can’t listen to the song, period.
A number of times, Ruckus’s servers appeared to be down; then I lost all songs without a current license. I simply couldn’t play them and nothing could be done to re-authorize them without Ruckus’s servers coming back. Worse, when I went on vacation over Christmas, some of my songs expired while I was on the road and couldn’t be re-authorized until I got home and had Internet access again. Why weren’t the songs authorized each time I played them and had an Internet connection available? To put a nail in the coffin, by the time I got home, virtually all of my Ruckus songs had expired. What would have happened if I’d brought a PlaysForSure MP3 player with me to “Costa Rica”:http://juniorbird.com/archive/002207.php? It’s unacceptable that I could end up on vacation with my songs expried and no easy way to re-authorize them. To this extent, the rental model is broken. Until PlaysForSure deals with likely eventualities, such as a network interruption, server outage, or vacation travel, it’s a key thorn in the side of any music rental system.
In contrast, I’ve never had trouble keeping any of my FairPlay-enabled songs going on my iPod, even on trips nearly a month long.
*Score this one: iTunes, because it Just Works*
h3. The Rental Model in General
PlaysForSure is just the vehicle for delivering rented music, so it’s unfair to judge all rented music based only on how Ruckus does right now. A better question to ask would be: how did I feel about renting all of my music?
In general, I was fine with the idea. Certainly, it encouraged me to browse and try artists whose music I might otherwise not have given more than a single listen ($0.99/track is too much to take a *total* lark on). On the other hand — and this might just be the distrust of PlaysForSure talking — I feel like I want to own anything I really love. iTunes gives me this kind of ownership, more or less. I suspect the ultimate model here is “rent to try, buy to own,” and a well-designed rental service, in Ruckus’s place, would complement iTunes and encourage exploration. Rental, however, is by no means out of the question for me, were the technical execution properly worked-out.
h3. The Verdict
I was actually thinking this would end up a closer fight, but the fact is that iTunes wins, handily in most places. Ruckus also has a fatal flaw, the insufficiently reliable PlaysForSure authorization system (I realize that PlaysForSure is, most likely, performing exactly to spec; but the spec is broken). Still, $10/semester is cheap enough, and $5.99/month may well be cheap enough too — some of the other PlaysForSure services are priced at that level — so, if you’re looking to sample some with little commitment, try one out, just don’t expect the same quality of experience that you get with the insanely market dominant iTunes + Music Store + iPod combo.

I barely made it through the day today. For the past couple of weeks, my laptop had been occasionally resistant to starting up, and today it finally showed it was serious, refusing to start all morning long. Anybody who has spent time with me knows I’m practically surgically attached to my computer. Well, midterms start Monday and I have little higher brain function without my laptop, so emergency surgery was required.
Folks, “back your data up”:http://juniorbird.com/archive/000750.php. I was lucky; no matter what happened, I had data no more than a couple of weeks old saved to a separate disk, so not everything would be lost. Two weeks is still a lot to lose and I’m going to move to weekly, not monthly, backups. I was also lucky that I was able to diagnose the problem and that I knew how to fix it and was comfortable with the steps. I nearly manged to lose access to all of my work just days before midterms. Bad news. I think I need a drink!
h3. What Really Happened
For the technical in the audience, the story went like this. After being put to sleep, a press of the power button on my laptop would cause the power light to turn on, the disk activity light to flash once, weakly, and then the power light to turn off. Repeated presses of the button, running on mains only or battery only, nothing made the difference. A quick visit to Dell support suggested poorly-seated or failing memory or wireless card, so I reseated the memory and got the computer to restart. When the problem appeared I replaced the stick of memory I thought was failing and got a successful power-on again. Problem solved, I assumed.
But not so! Soon the problem returned, and no amount of memory swapping or re-seating would solve it. Finally, nothing would seem to do the trick. Then, on a lark, I put my head on my laptop and listened to the hard drive — and there was the magic sound, click click click click (the clicking is the key here — that means the drive is getting power, so it’s the drive that’s failing and not another part of the computer). That’s the sound of the read-write head on a drive trying to break free but not succeeding, a problem known as “stiction”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiction#Stiction_and_Computer_Maintenance. You see, a disk works a lot like a record player — the data is stored on a round platter, and read by a head on an arm that looks a lot like the needle of a record. Imagine that the needle got stuck to the record, unmoving; no sound would come out. That’s exactly what happens in stiction, except no data comes out. The vain clicking of the motor as it tries, but fails, to spin the platter and move the read-write head is a dead giveaway.
The only problem is, stiction’s rare these days, and really only seen on servers, for various reasons. The only explanation for seeing stiction on an 18-month-old notebook drive is insufficient heat dissipation leading to the drive’s mechanism overheating and sustaining damage — but in this case I know that happened to my computer. Windows failed to sleep after I closed the computer and put it in my messenger bag, and the computer was very hot to the touch (and out of battery) when I took it out of the bag hours later. I’ll just say that I can’t remember any time any of my Macs failed to sleep when asked to.
Anyway, so that was the problem. Fooling with the memory helped because the fix for stiction is to rattle the drive around — or even drop it — and work the head loose. Problem is, a disk that’s suffering stiction will fall victim to it again, guaranteed; eventually the stiction will be strong enough that the read-write head will be immovable. Then it’s time to throw away the disk or drop $300-$600 at “rescue superstars DriveSavers”:http://drivesavers.com/ to have them take the platter out of your disk and hook it up to their own read-write head and try to read off of it that way. Hopefully, I hadn’t used up all of the times the fix would work with the memory-swapping solution.
So I got a new hard drive at Best Buy, probably overpaying but then I got it NOW — and, frankly, I think I got a great drive. It’s not that the drive is super-special, although it’s a Hitachi Travelstar, which is a generally well-rated brand. No, the best part was the package that Hitachi put together. The box contained not just the drive but also an enclosure, USB cables, and drive cloning software. It was all set up so you could put the drive in the enclosure, hook it up to your computer, run the cloning software to copy everything from your old drive to your new drive, and then move the new drive to the computer and the old one to the enclosure (or, in my case, put it aside to throw away later, when the clone has been shown to be effective). This packaging made the whole job ultra-easy and, for just $17 more than the comparable Seagate drive, it was a great deal.
The software seems to have worked great, too, transferring all of my files – about 50 gigs — in just a few hours (I set it up to run while I was at school and came home to a completed transfer). So I’m back up and running, and am happy, but, folks, back up your hard drive. It took multiple tries for me to get my drive to boot and I would’ve been itotally screwed if I’d had no backup — as it was, I was in deep doo-doo anyway. “Back those files up!”:http://juniorbird.com/archive/000750.php

Somehow, despite Cingular’s best efforts, I have a Treo 650. It amazes me that it wasn’t easy for me to give them my money, but my plan was from the wrong region (PAC – California) and the Arizona salespeople couldn’t access my account to either give me an upgrade or switch me to a national, roaming-free plan. So, once you’re in a Cingular store, how do you switch your region, switch your plan, and walk out with a new phone, at the two year contract discount price? Well, that’s what this blog entry is for.
First, a little background. Cingular offers two kinds of plans:
* Regional plans, which give you a local number, charge you less overall, but charge you for roaming. If you got your plan more than a year or so ago, you probably have a regional plan.
* National plans, which don’t charge for roaming but offer fewer minutes at the same price.
Now, if you’re on a Regional plan, you can only deal with your regional support staff, and you are locked into that region. Cingular’s salesepeople will tell you that you can’t leave your Region without giving up your cell phone number, and goodness knows that I wasn’t going to give up a number that I’d had for seven years.
The problem is that staff in one Region can’t touch any kind of record from any other Region. You need to find someone who can; that person is in the Relocation Department, 800.826.7356. They can do two things for you:
# Get you on a national plan, so that you don’t pay roaming
# Enter you into the system so that you can get the rebate on your phone to get it down to the price you’d otherwise pay with a contract
That phone? You have to buy it at full price. It’s an awful deal, really, more expensive even than an unlocked phone direct from Palm. But the rebates make it a good price in the end.
Obviously, this is a preposterous set of acts to have to go through to get a good phone and a good plan. I’ve been a Cingular customer for seven years and, frankly, they should make it easy for me to stay. In this case, they actually make it harder for me to stay than to leave. If I hadn’t been persistent, I would have either:
* Been unable to change my plan or get a new phone
* Been forced to get a new phone number but still not gotten a new plan
Because I’m new in town, I didn’t know where the closest T-Mobile store was. That is the only reason that I did not leave Cingular. In fact, it would have been easier to leave; because of phone number portability, I could have switched to another carrier, with any plan I wanted, with only a few minutes of negotiating and waiting for my account to be activated. Now that’s a problem for Cingular — not that other carriers are necessarialy better, but I only know about Cingular.
There’s some business lesson in here, but, frankly, it’s almost too obvious to be worth writing about. Have your administrative structures; don’t make your customers care about them. Set up your company to take your customers’ money. If a customer wants to stay a customer and give you their money, don’t fight them on it. All that good, obvious stuff.

I want a Treo 650. I covet a Treo 650. Remarkably, I even _need_ a Treo 650. Yet, somehow, there doesn’t seem to be a Treo 650 in the Greater Phoenix area. Truly, I am an oppressed victim of the system.
It all started when I got here on Saturday; no cell phone reception. Sunday, I drove around and got occasional reception. Monday, more driving around, less signal. I do not believe it is possible, in the 21st century, for an individual under 40 to live for an extended period without cell phone service. Certainly, I cannot live like that. Every day I make my way without this phone I think of more friends — good people, special people, people with whom, I admit, I haven’t spoken in a year — I need to call. It’s torture to actually have to interact with individuals geographically proximal to me for entertainment.
So, with no cell service, I did what anybody would do as a very last resort: I called Cingular. Apparently the Cingular network in Phoenix is provided by AT&T Wireless (since acquired by Cingular), and my phone is too old to be compatible with that network. I have two choices:
* Get a new phone
* Begin to live in the last century
So I decided to get a new phone. I’d coveted the Treo 650 for some time now — it syncs with Outlook, it runs all sorts of programs, it’s got a keyboard, and it’s kinda slick-looking. I’ve had my Nokia 3650 for two years and I’ve got an upgrade coming to me, so I drove to the nearest Cingular store. The woman in line in front of me got the last Treo in the store; so I went to another store. No Treo there either! I called the third Cingular store and they were out too. Fry’s was, similarly, sold out, and Sprint was out-of-stock as well. Verizon only has the Treo 600 and I can’t live without Bluetooth.
Being a (for the moment) 21st-century inhabitant, I jumped on the Web to get a Treo. Well, Cingular’s Web site crashed on me, and the only vendors who would sell me a Treo and overnight it wanted over $500 for it. So I broke down and decided to speak with an actual human being and called 611 on my rommate’s Cingular phone. Can I use the word Cingular enough? Cingular Cingular Cingular.
Anyway so I called Cingular. Three times. No joy. Transferred into the ether; transferred to the wrong person; sorry, by now the department you’re calling is closed.
I’d get mad, but I want my gadget too much to think of anything but its imminent acquisition. I’ll get mad later. Until then, I need to decide:
* Do I call local stores every day to see if a Treo becomes available, and then drive over and acquire the item immediately?
* Do I call Cingular and order the phone now, and wait 5 business days for it to be delivered?
I want my Treo 650! Waaah!

I used to have this incredible crush on “Carly Fiorina”:http://images.google.com/images?q=carly+fiorina , the CEO of HP. I was so jazzed, there was a hot, erudite woman in charge of a major tech company!
Then she turned out to be a crappy CEO. First she spun off the part of the company that made the calculators and testing equipment that had made HP famous, because growth in those categories was too slow during the dot-com era. Then, when the bust comes, well, HP-minus-testing is bleeding red ink while the testing equipment company, Agilent, is doing the same business as ever.
Then she merges HP-now-we-just-do-printers-and-computers with Compaq, making a real big company that, oops, isn’t real good. All that business and they can’t figure out what it is they’re all about.
Well now Carly thinks she’s got it — she’s decided HP is going to be Sony or Apple”:http://www.fortune.com/fortune/fastforward/0,15704,475309,00.html . Woo. Now there’s a plan! Let’s either take on a well-established consumer electronics giant with a massive head-start in selling products that people actually put in their living rooms, or try to become a company that’s about 10% the size of yours. That’s a stunning strategy, stunning.
The “Fortune article I linked above”:http://www.fortune.com/fortune/fastforward/0,15704,475309,00.html talks a lot about how important it is to “just make things work” and how Apple is the icon for that. It’s important to just make things work, consumers like it (although they don’t like it enough for Apple to have more than a 3% market share). But you know what? That’s what HP used to do. They had calculators that just worked. They had testing equipment that just worked. That was the HP Way.
Then they got away from it. Their computers were mediocre at best, their sales chain was complex and convoluted compared to Dell or Apple, the only good thing they made was printers. Those were bulletproof and just worked. I have a LaserJet 6MP from 1996 that’s still going strong and that I plan to keep for many more years.
Now Carly realizes the value of that printer franchise and wants to make the rest of the company like that. I hope she succeeds. It would be good to have a powerful corporate sex symbol again!

“Matt Haughey”:http://a.wholelottanothing.org/archives.blah/007181 has recently added his name to the row being raised by “The Register”:http://theregister.co.uk suggesting that blogs be removed from search results at Google. Now, when an A-list blogger and longtime proponent of the medium suggests such a thing, well, it may be time to seriously consider the proposition.
The controversy centers around a simple set of observations:
# People use Google extensively to search for stuff on the Web
# The ability to find stuff is key to the usefulness of the Web
# Therefore, it’s important that Google continue to return high-quality results
# But, increasingly, blogs are showing up as top results in many searches
# This is because blogs are frequently-updated, heavily linked-to, and link, in turn, to other heavily linked-to sites
# Blogs also tend to have better-structured information that Google’s bots have an easier time handling and relating to other information
# As a consequence of blogs being rated so high in search results, sites selling items and news sites reviewing items receive comparatively low rankings in search results
# It is these news and sales sites that users are trying to find
# Blogs, therefore, obscure the sites that users are looking for
Writers at The Register have long held that blogs should be removed from Google results before they drown out all other results. But that position relies on assertion #8 above being true. I tend to disagree with that, and here’s why:
* Searchers on the Web are looking for relatively specific information
* This information involves specific items (concepts, etc.)
* Searchers are looking for information on these items (concepts, etc.) that is _relevant to them and their particular situation_
* Sales (advocacy, etc.) sites provide only information designed to turn the visitor into a customer
* News and review sites provide information targeted at a wide demographic, or at a very specific (and usually clear) demographic
* Bloggers provide information about their knowledge and experiences
So, what of the above information best matches the searcher’s needs? Well:
* Sales sites only match if the searcher is planning to make a purchase _and_ if the searcher is not going to make that purchase from a well-known and trusted store, such as amazon.com, bestbuy.com, etc.
* News and review sites only match if the user is in their demographic
* A blogger may have experienced _exactly_ the same set of needs or events that the searcher has — they may have looked around for a new religion, or tried to buy a DVD burner, or whatever.
To me, it looks as if the blog result may actually be the _most_ relevant of all listed. For instance, Matt Haughey talks about his TiVo blog turning up as a high result for TiVo searches. That’s exactly the site I’d be looking for, with information on usage and upgrading and personal experiences that might be like mine. Why drop it?
Now, blogs aren’t perfect. They tend to be incestuous, absorbed with minutae and even masturbatory. Worst of all, some lack any kind of peer review or outside responsibility (some bloggers, however, have made their name from providing high-quality information on their sites — and it’s these who are the most-linked and therefore would likely turn up highest in Google results). Some proportion of blogs are likely to be the _worst_ results returned. It’s probably best to remove those results. But how do we do this without removing blogs in general? Here’s a few ideas:
# Relegate blogs to a different section of Google, and return no results in standard searches. This fails the smell test because it discards a substantial portion of useful results.
# Let the user selectively exclude blogs from search returns. This is a reasonable approach, although it begs the definition of a blog. It also would likely have to be relegated to Google’s advanced search options, given that company’s unwillingness to complicate their front page in the past.
# Maintain a higher standard of accountability for blogs. Google bases much of its ranking on the quality of incoming and outgoing links on a site. If blogs were required to have more (or better) links to achieve the same PageRank as a non-blog site, this would mitigate the excessive influence of _most_ blogs, while still ensuring that the best bloggers got the results that they deserved — and that searchers were looking for. Again, this begs the definition of blogs and also is invisible to the user, who doesn’t know that certain sites are being rated comparatively poorly.
None of these approaches are perfect, but some combination of the three (in fact, *all* could be implemented) would increase the quality of Google’s search results without excluding a large pool of potentially useful sites.