LIVEdigitally

Anyone who’s ever been in a car with me driving knows I’m always having two conversations: one with my passenger(s), and the other with other drivers as they cut me off, pass too close, tailgate, or drive a “no sale blue” (a phrase that appears surprisingly absent on the Internet, only good reference here) Oldsmobuick.  Unfortunately, it seems that for the most part, these other drivers can’t quite seem to hear me. 

I heard today that Roadmaster USA is launching two products that allow scrolling messages to display, either in your rear window or on your license plate.  Not only that, it’s a customizable message.  Sounds like a product made it heaven!

The products come priced at $69, and come with a mounting kit and a remote control.  From reading the manual, it seems that the programming process might be a little clunky (obviously, I’d have it work with USB and a simple PC app), but since the pre-programmed messages are things like “Everybody is entitled to my opinion” and “Holiday Opening Hours”, I think I’d need to spice it up a bit.  There’s the obvious “LIVEdigitally” but really, how much fun is that?  I think my vocabulary would probably include:

• Either “Stop picking your nose.” or “, , was that you?”
• “No Vacancy” (I don’t know why, I just think it’d be fun)
• “Days since last accident… 002″
• “In the time it took you to read this message, shouldn’t you have been watching the road?”

From their Web site, it seems like the units go on sale immediately.  Since my wife’s current mode of ‘convergence’ is really about getting rid of extra gadgets, I don’t think I’ll be picking one up myself, but if anyone grabs one, come back and share your thoughts!

I’m also looking forward to a second generation version, in which I’d love to see the company add SMS capabilities so I can update the message in real-time.  I’m sure that’d be safe, right?

A new site called Spotplex launched recently and it has a different way to find highly rated sites different than the way Digg does. Instead of having users rate your site like Digg does, your site is rated by how many views a certain page or post receives. The more views the higher rated your page or post receives. This is done by the webmaster putting a small java script in the page and whenever it is viewed it gets counted by Spotplex.

The results on their site look similar to Digg, showing very popular content, latest content, or by tags or publisher.
The first thing that comes to mind is how they are going to handle the possibility for abuse or mislabeling. Hopefully they have thought this through carefully and have devised some ways to handle it. They also do not have a place to comment on the post, like Digg does To comment you would have to go to the original site and page. This is great for the original site because it forces people to go back to the originating site to make comments. Not too great for the user, most like to comment directly at the post, like Digg does.

They are taking only 1,000 blogs right now, and is still in Beta. I can definetly see a problem with the loading speed of the site. They will need to fix this right away if people are going to stick around and they are going to grow. They also have several different ways sites can create widgets or embed code into their own page to show specific posts based upon a selected criteria. They also have added RSS feeds to the site. But, again the feed is very slow to load.