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I’m looking forward to having TiVo available for this year’s Tour de France. Four more days until Saturday’s prologue. I probably won’t visit the official English site of the Tour de France very often during the Tour, since I’d rather watch it for myself. Be warned, though: www.tourdefrance.com (deliberately not linked) seems to be bad news. The index page looks appropriate, but clicking on those links tried to download some crazy dialer application. One more reason I’m glad I was using Safari, although I would hope that IE on Windows would have the appropriate security settings to foil the attack (if that’s what it is). You never know. [CNET News.com story on infectious web sites and the successful counter-measures taken]

Alex Salkever offers “The Scoop on CNET” over at BusinessWeek. There is a companion Q&A with CEO Shelby Bonnie: “CNET’s CEO: “We Can Be Switzerland”.”

Always interesting to see external viewpoints about what we’re doing. In the main piece, I found this quote interesting:

Yet, CNET is still struggling to become a well-known brand beyond the Internet. It makes the lion’s share of its money as an online-ad play.

I’d say, read Steve Yelvington on that position. We’re still crossing the chasm in the media space, but online has demographics on its side. That doesn’t let any of us off the hook in the short-term, of course. But it’s won’t be long before the phrase “beyond the Internet” has no meaning. The internet/TV/radio/print/name-your-delivery-vehicle-here are all just facets of the attention experience we call media.

After spending the last few hours figuring out travel plans for a weekend in July, I know that I miss having a travel agent. The internet is often about self-service and removing the intermediary, but time is money, too… and I just spent a lot of my personal currency. (Eventually, I spent some dollars, too.)

Spent significant time with the following airline websites today:

• Orbitz
• Ted (first time)
• Frontier Airlines
• Southwest
• Delta
• America West
• SkyWest
• Continental (eventually got our $)
• JetBlue

I didn’t link all those because (a) they are easy to find/guess (b) I’m lazy and (c) none of them really deserve a link. My wife and I were both working on this, with separate computers. Still took a lot of time.

Of course, with all my whining, it’s still pretty incredible that any individual can peruse so much dynamic information on their own schedule. And the schedules and places we’re trying to coordinate aren’t particularly common, so it was bound to be complicated. Maybe I should be amazed that such a complex system is now manageable/navigable by normal people like ourselves instead of trained professionals.

Note: Every time I try and get to the Adirondacks in northern New York from San Francisco, I long for the replacement of the hub system. Maybe by the time my children are my age. Maybe.

Tom Clancy certainly writes some of the best “long trip without children” books around. Only problem is, I can never remember if I’ve read them all or not. I’m close, at least on the real ones (none of that OpCenter stuff). Two weekends ago, I polished off The Sum of All Fears. I’m fairly sure it was a re-read, but I enjoyed it all the same.

Commuting on a train is a great time to get a lot of reading done. For The Truelove, I have the MBTA (Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority) to thank. The Truelove is book 15 in the Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O’Brian.

Most striking about this book was having a woman character on board, an Australian convict stowaway who marries one of the junior officers. O’Brian doesn’t explore this character in real depth, but in what are so often all-male environments, any female presence is notable.

The RSS Weekly webcast today went well, I thought. I’d be curious to get some feedback from the audience, whatever there was of it.

A recurring topic was the metrics required of RSS readers/feeds for advertising purposes. If full-text feeds are the desired goal, then, yes, advertising models need to work for all parties (readers, marketers, and publishers). But I am not convinced that full-text feeds are necessary/desirable in all cases, both as a reader and as a publisher. Sure, like many, I appreciate the ‘normalization’ of the content that results from blending many feeds into a reader. But in many cases, I find the notification of the content availability is really all I want. I spend plenty of time sifting through content of different forms on different topics. I don’t want more than a headline, for instance, for most of the MacCentral feeds. And Tim Bray’s posts that require a visit to his website don’t bother me. The browser is better for longer material. Maybe that’s just me.

The FeedBurner folks, and their stats, got some nice airtime, in absentia, thanks to Rafat Ali and my explanation. Also, it didn’t seem like many people had looked at their log files, and noted the data provided by the Yahoo FeedSeeker spider. Given the panel’s expertise, that surprised me. But I learned some things, too, so I guess it was worth the 120 minutes of my time. I look forward to meeting Rafat Ali in person at BlogOn. I don’t think we’re on the same panel.

Some time ago, I bookmarked an audiocast, XML Content Syndication – Beyond the Blogs. Originally recorded April 1, 2004, I listened to its this evening, several weeks later. Nothing new to me, but definitely some A-listers. There is a 21 page transcript, which I didn’t realize until 30 minutes into the 48 minute recording. Oh well. I don’t listen very well when I’m doing other things (ask my wife!), so multi-tasking is almost lost on me.

I was grateful for the transcript helping me find the actual mention of “continuous, partial attention“.

On Thursday at 10am PT, I’ll join a group of interesting folks for Monetizing Weblogs and RSS feeds, a webcast. I’m very curious what the experience will be like. Here’s the other panelists:

• Jeff Jarvis, president, Advance.net
• Jim Pitkow, CEO, Moreover
• Florian Brody, director, business development, Red Herring
• Rafat Ali, editor/publisher, paidContent.org

Just returned from two weeks bouncing around the East Coast, working and visiting in Boston, New York, and northeastern Pennsylvania. A good trip, connecting with friends and colleagues, but I’m happy to be back in San Francisco. When my body time clock resets on Pacific Time later this week, I’ll really be glad to be home.

I know Jakob is both a respected figure and a lightning rod of controversy in the Web design community. I’ve continued to read his Alertbox columns every two weeks, although they don’t feel quite so insightful anymore (which probably says good things about the state of the web, however far we still have to go).

His latest, Remote Control Anarchy, immediately earns a place among his best ever. Just the picture of the six remotes says it all. I’m almost tempted to take a picture of our four current remotes (TiVo, DVD, receiver, VCR) and two abandoned (cable TV, TV) just to compare. The TiVo remote has justly earned a fair bit of praise, although I feel it, too, could go on a button diet.

And people wonder why Apple spends its time trying to use the computer as a gateway to the living room… when the computer is the more usable device, the living room isn’t even putting up a fight!