From one of my favorite Ask a Ninja episodes:

Doesn’t Matter is the space between things that matter. It is a type of matter that is very addictive but yet has no ultimate meaning.

With plans to move coming soon and the recent season finales of all the shows my wife likes to watch, I started researching Apple TV as an alternative to cable and our Netflix account.

Since my wife and I upgraded our TV (I think it was two years ago) to a big plasma, we’ve been paying $149 a month for HD cable service. That does not include Internet or other services. Just cable TV with a basic package for HBO, Cinemax, etc. I realized very quickly when I began adding up the cost to buy all the episodes of shows that we watch combined, we would be able to save at least $100 a month with some major advantages over cable.

So we went to the Apple store and came home with the 160 GB Apple TV and the next day I gleefully marched into the local cable company office and handed in our converter box. Now two weeks later, here are some observations about living with Apple TV.

All things considered, it has not been a one for one exchange for broadcast television, but it has changed the way we consume media, and I love it.

For this first of two blog posts, I’ll describe the shortcomings:

1. Miss out on local network broadcasts.

The first day without late night TV or broadcast news drove me nuts. I really did not expect it to bother me. I don’t actively watch much TV at night, but I do like to have Letterman and Ferguson on in the background while I’m working.

The solution to this was simple — a Terk HD over the air (”OTA”) indoor antenna. By the way, this $40 Terk antenna is not your mother’s rabbit ears… it looks like a ray gun that mated with robot reindeer antlers.

It was a breeze to connect and we now get full digital HD versions of CBS, ABC, PBS, FOX, NBC, and two 24 hour weather news channels. The video and audio quality is not intermittent like analog antenna reception, you either get an incredible signal (as good as HD cable) or you get nothing at all.

2. This is not an iTunes library storage solution.

One of my motivations for the Apple TV was to get my entire music collection off of my laptop and USB hard drives and have it centralized. The Apple TV certainly has a drive big enough to do this, but that’s not how it works.

The Apple TV behaves like an iPod in your iTunes application. This means that, with the exception of items that you purchased on the Apple TV, when you delete something from your iTunes library, it is removed from the Apple TV (just like the iPhone). This was a big let down but I realized quickly that 160 GB was not going to be enough space for our music library plus the video content we were going to be storing.

The solution was to buy an Apple 1TB Time Capsule. The Apple Time Capsule is a WiFi router with a built in printer server and network hard drive. It works flawlessly with Mac OS X 10.5’s Time Machine backup software.

I moved our entire library off of my local hard drive to the Time Capsule and then pointed iTunes to the Time Capsule for accessing the media. There is one drawback in moving your iTunes library to the Time Capsule or any network drive — when you are not on your home network, you cannot access your media. I found this is completely tolerable as long as I sync my iPhone before I leave for a trip.

Note: There is currently a bug in iTunes that resets the location of your library to your hard drive whenever you are not authenticated to the Time Capsule. The work-around is to create a symbolic link (Apple calls them aliases) in your local iTunes folder that points to the folder on the Time Capsule. Google it, you’ll find the step by step.

3. Apple TV is not passive enough.

It’s amazing how accustomed one can get to having a TV decide what we are going to watch. Using Apple TV makes you have to think and act frequently enough that it is sometimes annoying.

With broadcast television, viewers can autopilot on a channel and be guaranteed a constant stream of media. In contrast, Apple TV breaks down channels to individual units (episodes) of media, making it necessary for viewers to constantly be switching to view the next thing.

I wish there was a way to have Apple TV group together channels I like to watch and just loop whatever is new so I don’t have to be constantly babysitting it. This is particularly annoying when we are in the mood for YouTube videos or video podcasts which both tend to run shorter than regular television shows.

In a Part 2 post, I’ll explain the positives which far out number these drawbacks. Stay tuned!

There seems to be a hot new social network aggregator being launched now for every dancing animated GIF image posted to the web during the 1990s. Ok, maybe not that bad.

Social network aggregators are sites that consolidate activity across multiple social networks and RSS feeds. Some make it easy for users to quickly syndicate an update to all of their online profiles while others are focused on aggregating feeds of information as form of lifestreaming (or lifelogging) with a friends list and comments.

The first social network aggregators of this Web 2.0 generation that I remember was Ziki which has been around a few years. The parody FriendFeedFeed points to more recent sites like plaxo, friendfeed, socialthing!, MyBlogLog, spokeo, fuser, mylifebrand, iminta, and PointCast.

I find it surprising that the recent Google acquisition Jaiku, a service that combines Twitter with friendfeed, is not getting more love from the social media inner circle. The functionality is nearly the same so I can only guess that people like a blue color scheme more than green.

I just launched a new industry blog over on the Electric Sheep Company website.

I will continue to post personal bits here but wanted to let everyone know I’ll be writing more business related things over there.

I blogged yesterday that News Corp was going to be announcing quarterly results and speculation was that social network advertising (and usage) is falling flat.

It seems that the pundits were right, because News Corp and their ad partner Google are not giving specific numbers on the last quarter for MySpace. The WSJ reported this morning that “Google declined to comment on MySpace specifically last week, but hinted the revenue from such an arrangement wasn’t covering the guaranteed payments.”

Last week, Amazon announced its acquisition of Audible, signaling their continuing interest in digital goods. This is a great move competitively and it compliments their existing digital delivery of movies, TV, music, and their digital book reader.

Amazon clearly wants to be a formidable player in the digital delivery arena. I am most excited about this move because every step they take into digital delivery is one step closer to selling virtual [world] goods.

Om Malik has a good write up on the acquisition if you happened to miss it.

I’m on the Keystone train heading to NYC for the week, wondering if I’ll get to eat a Fasnacht on Fat Tuesday. Something tells me Pennsylvania Dutch traditions may not reach as far as Eli Manning country. (What a game, btw!)

This past week I had the privilege to speak at Penn State’s 2008 IST Graduate Symposium where I met some amazing people. I was really impressed by the level of energy around virtual world research by the faculty and students.

Joyce Bromberg, Director of Workspace Futures for Steelcase, gave an excellent presentation on processes for innovation and as part of her intro, she relayed a story, that while I forget the context, had an quotation I found fitting for the title of this post.

I’m sitting here reading about the “decline of social networks” in my news reader. It seems that rumblings of a social network slow down will be further confirmed today at 4pm when News Corp gives an earnings report on MySpace.

People like Nick O’Neill blogged last week that “while Facebook had fantastic growth in their overall user base, the total amount of time spent on the site decreased month-to-month.”

When masses of ordinary Internet users engage a new technology, and they do so to a lesser degree than the technology’s early adopters, it does not mean the technology is a failure, it’s just technology in search of a [common/mass marketable] purpose.

Similar to what happened with virtual worlds in 2007, the hardcore users and evangelists quickly find themselves outnumbered by a class of curious users wanting to understand what the buzz is about. They sign up, log in, and some “get it” while others lose interest.

I think Raph is on to something when he suggests here that the gaming industry is in trouble because its too focused on hard core gamers. I think all these industries are experiencing a similar trend.

Are social networks and virtual worlds a boutique industry? What kind of incarnations must they go through to be integral to the same mainstream that watched the Super Bowl last night?

Max Levchin has written a great piece that summarizes the primary motivations that cause developers to get excited about your platform.

“Designing a social platform is in some ways similar to designing a competitive multi-player game.”

His focus is social platforms but one can use “social” and “virtual world” interchangeably.

Read the full post here.

“I will read 8 books a year, 2300 web pages, and 1281 FaceBook profiles this year.”

The professor that gave us The Machine is Us/ing Us last year posted a new video called A Vision of Students Today. While it’s mostly a strong statement about the problems facing the education system, there are also some useful statistics for those of us in social media.

The group of 200 college students surveyed themselves and collaborated to arrive at some interesting conclusions. Here are some media-related highlights from the transcript:

• I will read 8 books this year, 2300 web pages, and 1281 facebook profiles.
• I will write 42 pages for class this semester and over 500 pages of email.
• I spend 1.5 hours watching TV each night.
• I spend 3.5 hours a day online.
• I listen to music 2.5 hours a day.
• I spend 2 hours on my cellphone.

There are interesting stories in these figures. One particular that stands out is the amount of multi-tasking this generation is doing.

Multi-tasking is one of the key drivers in the “small bites” media consumption phenomenon — the tweet instead of the blog entry, the 99-cent track instead of the album, and the text message instead of the phone call.

FaceBook was mentioned a few times in the video and just last week FaceBook provided some reinforcing statistics at the CMA Digital Marketing Conference:

• Average users spend twenty-one minutes or more on the site daily.
• Average users visit four times per day.
• 65% of users return the next day.
• There are three hundred and fifty thousand new users every day.
• The site’s size doubles every six months.

All this coming just one week after Chris DeWolfe told us at the Web 2.0 conference that MySpace accounts for 12% of Internet usage.

The pilot season of The Grid Review won the Best Series award at the Machinima Film Festival in Europe a week ago. Thanks to everyone that voted for the series! We were quite surprised and overwhelmed by the results.

I had the pleasure of executive producing the project with the award-winning Ill Clan team that joined Electric Sheep Company around the start of 2007. We really had fun working together on it!

The Grid Review was an experiment commissioned by Edelman and Electric Sheep to run 8 episodes. While there have not been episodes in recent months, there is renewed interest in bringing it back for another full length season.

We are currently seeking sponsors for the series, so if you might be interested, contact me.