SmugMug's Don MacAskill

ZDNet asks a stupid question – “Blogs turn 10 – who’s the father?”

Stupid for two reasons: First, blogging is older than 10 years. Second, I doubt anyone could prove who the father was anyway. Like most technology changes, blogging evolved naturally.

How do I know blogging is older than 10 years? Because I was blogging in 1995. We didn’t call it blogging, and it was missing some bells & whistles like RSS feeds, but blogging it was. At a dinner at GDC two weeks ago, I even ran into someone who’d gotten flamed on my blog during 1996. And there were a lot of people blogging before I did it – I was a copycat.

Dave Winer apparently claims to have the longest running blog on the Internet. Sorry, Dave, but that’s just not true – I know my friend sTeve started blogging in 1995 or 1996 with sCary’s Quakeholio (which has changed names, but still remains his). I believe my friends Blue and Redwood did as well. All of their sites have evolved into news-focused sites around video games, not unlike all the so-called “modern” bloggers who are now doing news and commentary, but the point remains – they’ve been blogging longer than 10 years, and so have I. We definitely weren’t the first, either – we didn’t invent the idea.

sTeve may very well have been the first blogger hired for the fact that he blogged, though. Ritual Entertainment hired him on February 8th, 1997, to come be their in-house blogger.

ZDNet got the whole .plan thing right, though – and ironically, much of sCary’s, Blue’s, and my initial posts were just reposts and commentary on id Software’s .plan updates.

But I’m still not sure why we care… ?

Had our first ultrasound yesterday, saw the heartbeat, we’re in business! My twins don’t know it yet, but they’ll be thrilled. 🙂

That makes 5 SmugMuggers (out of 20) who are pregnant. It’s going to be a busy fall – we’re all within a few months of each other. As Robert Scoble told me yesterday, “There’s something in the water” (he’s expecting a little one of his own in September).

So I apologize in advance if our feature releases get a little sparse this fall – we’ll all be busy changing diapers and burping babies. 🙂

Life is wonderful!

(And is it strange that I announced it first on Twitter before my blog or any emails? I think it is, but I can’t put my finger on why).

There are three major players about to vie for a spot in your living room to download videos: Xbox 360, AppleTV, and Amazon Unbox on your TiVo. I have an Xbox 360, a TiVo Series 3, and my AppleTV should be here “any day now” (right Apple?). Saying that I’m thrilled at the ability to order movies from my recliner is an understatement. 🙂

Some of you will howl that Netflix and BitTorrent and other things should fall into this category too. I say “Nay!”. I’ve built and re-built so-called Media Center PCs before and I’m sick of it. I don’t want a PC in my gear stack, I just want a device that does one thing well: A giant video store in the sky.

So, how does Amazon Unbox stack up? Let me break it down:

THE GOOD

• Amazon lets you rent OR buy your movies. This is super important, and something Apple is blowing, big time. How many movies that you see do you really want to own? If they’re not Disney (if you have kids), or Indiana Jones or something, you probably want to watch it once. So you want to rent. But there are still those few movies you want to watch over and over and over.. so you want to buy. Give consumers the choice! We’re smart – we’ll figure it out! This is a big win for Amazon.
• Amazon keeps your purchases “in the sky.” This is huge! If I run out of room on my TiVo and delete something that I later want to watch, I’m not out of luck. Amazon will happily re-download it to my TiVo and I’m all set. Apple loses out on this one too – I’ve lost songs I’ve bought from iTunes and had to re-buy. That sucks… they have my purchase history, why can’t they give me another copy?
• 1-Click rocks. Ok, the patent thing was stupid and silly, but nonetheless, being able to click “Buy Now” and have the video almost instantly appear on my TiVo really really rocks. It downloads, for me, 2X realtime (1 hour TV = 30 min download), and I can watch it before it’s finished. Xbox 360 sucks here – you have to wait for it to finish a big chunk first, and it’s terribly slow.

THE BAD

• The selection isn’t that great, yet. I’ve bought a bunch of TV shows, but some of them I really wanted, like The Sopranos or Lost, just aren’t there.
• Browsing for stuff is confusing. I browsed through the TiVo listings and found movies that I couldn’t actually get for my TiVo. Want to watch Sum of All Fears, for example? Tough, it’s listed in the TiVo section but only available on Windows PCs. Ugh.
• They have rentals only for movies. Um, hello? How many times do I really want to watch an episode of 24? Let me rent those, as well. I’ll happily buy every episode of the Simpsons, but I want to rent 24. Gimme the option.
• No HD. Xbox 360 already offers 720p downloads. I’d gladly pay more for HD versions of my favorite movies and TV episodes. I already do with HD-DVDs, afterall.
• Wish I could browse Amazon Unbox from my TiVo. I’m not smart enough to know how this could be done well, but maybe using Amazon recommendations + TiVo thumbs up/down, it could get smart about what to offer me? My wife doesn’t want to open a web browser to buy her movies, she wants to use her remote.

THE UGLY

• There’s something terribly wrong with the video encoding. Anytime there’s a lot of horizontal movement (especially camera pans), the video gets all jittery and ghosty. Plus the interlaced picture structure is super-visible. I’ve done enough video editing and encoding that I’m gonna make a guess here: they inverted the interlaced frames and have encoded it wrong. For most scenes it’s tolerable (but not good!), but for some, it’s downright awful. I’m hoping this is a simple oversight and will get fixed, but of the 6 or so shows I’ve watched so far, they all had this problem.

All-in-all, I think it’s off to a good start. Certainly competitive, and I’m certainly going to use it more than the Xbox 360’s download stuff, which was very disappointing. I’m glad there are big competitors duking it out – that means you and I win. 🙂

I’m happy to pay the content holders a reasonable price to download this stuff in a convenient way. It’s no secret that every TV show and DVD is available for free via bittorrent, but the same can be said about music, and I love shopping at iTunes. The people who make this stuff do deserve to get paid, and I’m happy to help. I wish they wouldn’t muck it up with DRM so that I could use it more easily, but hey, that’s life.

Word to the wise: I’d buy *MORE* of this stuff if it were DRM free.

I met Evan Williams a few months ago at Web 2.0 Expo and told him I thought he’d done a brave and awesome thing by buying back his company, Obvious, and taking control of the direction it was heading.

Today, I finally bit the bullet and tried out his latest product, Twitter, and I’m afraid to say that I may be hooked. So if a SmugMug feature is delayed, you can blame Evan.

The crazy thing is that Twitter seems sorta useless and meaningless when you first glance at it. I know I did, since I checked it out on the day it was announced. I didn’t even bother signing up, I’m afraid.

But Scoble’s been preaching the Twitter gospel a lot lately, so I took the plunge today. It’s a blast. It’s sorta like IRC-to-the-world or something, and it’s clearly going to waste a lot of my time. But oh well – it’s fun. 🙂

Oh, and you’ll likely get sneak peaks of what I’m working on there, too. So if you wanna peek, better stop in.

Cya there – here’s my profile.

One of the things I love most about the Internet is the way jaw-dropping photos bubble up on sites like Flickr, PBase, Zooomr, and SmugMug.

We sponsor an independent site for the love of photography called Digital Grin where people with photo lust indulge their passions. It’s truly photo-sharing site agnostic – we don’t care if you use PBase, Flickr, Zooomr, or anyone else. We do it because we love photography, and if you do too, you’re more than welcome.

Over time, the Digital Grin community has started hosting photo contests where photographers from all over the world have entered spectacular photos for all kinds of reasons: prizes, exposure, critiques, etc….

So this year they’ve upped the ante American Idol-style, where the best of the Internet face off until a new supreme god of photography is anointed and grabs some major prize love. The total prize pot is $25K.

Got a great shot or know someone who does? The world is waiting.

My programmer personality type is: DHSC:

You’re a Doer.

You are very quick at getting tasks done. You believe the outcome is the most important part of a task and the faster you can reach that outcome the better. After all, time is money.

You like coding at a High level.

The world is made up of objects and components, you should create your programs in the same way.

You work best in a Solo situation.

The best way to program is by yourself. There’s no communication problems, you know every part of the code allowing you to write the best programs possible.

You are a Conservative programmer.

The less code you write, the less chance there is of it containing a bug. You write short and to the point code that gets the job done efficiently.

I’ve known the answer to this one my whole life, but at least we know the test is accurate. 🙂

I wonder how she feels about Lex Luthor or Green Lantern?