LIVEdigitally

Daily Archives: April 26, 2007

Guess I'm not rushing out for an Xbox 360 Elite

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I’ve only had my Xbox 360 for three weeks, but I’ve wondered if the upgrade to the new unit would be worth it.  Ryan at Engadget did the xboxo y xboxo today, and it sounds like there’s not that much to be gained by bumping to the Elite.  Here’s his final thoughts on the topic:

Basically, unless you are seriously eagle-eyed, have a massive friggin screen, or for whatever reason need to use HDMI because you’re all out of component inputs, your investment in the first-gen Xbox 360 is probably safe. Do yourself a favor, just buy that 120GB drive if you need the space, the HDMI really just doesn’t justify replacing your whole console for a new $480 unit.

While the improvements seem barely marginal at present, I wonder if the next batch of games for the 360 will take advantage of the improved resolution.  The fundamental problem here is this: 1080i and 1080p video games might actually look the same unless you have a truly huge screen.  Remember, they both have the same pixel count, so the only difference is frame rate, and you aren’t going to be able to see the difference without a BIG screen.  I still think CNET’s piece from 2005 is the best-written article on the topic of 1080i vs 1080p. 

With my 32″ Olevia 720p/1080i display, I’d be surprised if there’s any real need for the “better” unit.  Besides, I can’t possibly rock any harder than I already do at GH2, so what’s the point?

Are Marketeers Spinning Viral Video Stats?

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I really like the eMarketer.com newsletter, it’s one of the few that I receive that I read every day.  It’s well formatted, has bite-sized info, presents useful and relevant stats, and gets most of what I want to see above the fold. One of today’s articles was lauding the success of viral video, but unlike typical articles from them, I felt this contains some questionable statistics.  Let’s start with a few quotes:

Next to ‘cool microsites’ and games, viral video is hot.

Video clips got generally good reviews from marketers, with about three in 10 saying they yielded great results, and just 13% admitting their results were dismal.

If you see the fine print, n=2914 “experienced viral marketers”.  At 30% we have about 1000 viral videos of which their marketeers claim “great success.”

I’m either living in a hole or I have a different definition of the adjective great.  Why do I say this?  Well, how about you count the number of “viral videos” you’ve seen that you’d attribute to companies.  Remember, if it’s in this category it cannot include a commercial that aired on TV, nor can it be a clip like “Lazy Sunday”.  I am surprised if anyone’s list exceeds their count of fingers + toes.

My hunch, and I’m up to hear a counterargument on this, is that the surveyed marketeers are answering this way because it is trendy.  Survey bias exists fairly commonly in most segments, but even more so in a field dominated by follow-the-leader activities.  And marketing folks are especially predisposed to report on the success of their activities.  This is especially interesting in light of…

But what are the chances of a video actually going viral? According to an Online Publishers Association (OPA) survey, not that high.

Now I’d prefer if this data was less than a year old, as it was in February 2006 when YouTube’s activities began spiking (again, thanks to Lazy Sunday – I sure hope Chad sent a big bagfull of money to Andy Samberg).  My hunch is there’s a lot more forwarding going on than there used to be.  Of course, there’s a lot more Portland ice storms and people getting haircuts than there are commercially-driven “great success” viral videos.

Is Technology Killing the English Language?

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How r u?  U OK?

Somewhere back in the 90s one of the versions of MS Word included a built-in spellchecker that finally, actually, really worked.  While typing, any misunderstood word gets instantly highlighted, and better yet, some clear tpyos even get automatically corrected.  There was being grammar checker too, but it not working as good, unless, of course, you write a “fractured sentence” (an error description that is truly on a par with PC Load Letter).

And once God Microsoft gave us spellcheck, all became better.  Peace and prosperity ruled the land.  And we started getting lazy.  Very lazy.  Just as the spreadsheet killed the need for learning math, spellcheck apparently killed the need for learning how to spell.  Both of these are a shame in my eyes, as I enjoy both activities, and as a very slightly (ok fine) somewhat geeky kid, I really excelled at both back in my day. 

With the surge of popularity of both instant messaging and online chat rooms in the later 90s, another blow to English arose.  In IM-land you can have a quick conversation about anything, and nobody’s paying attention to a little typo hree or tehre.  You’d have to really utterly manggle (sp?) a word for your conversation partner to say anything, and that assumes they recognized the mistake.  With IM, some form of “Quickie” English began to emerge, where phrases like LOL, LMAO, IMHO, BRB, gained a lot of popularity.

Quickie English gets even better (or is that worse?) when it comes to texting.  When texting, not only aren’t you getting feedback on a mispelt word, thanks to technology like T9 you might accidentally insert the wrong word into your sentence. But don’t worry, it’s just a text, who cares, right?  A recent study shows all this Quickie English might be causing some problems to Old Fashioned Written English.

I’m a fairly traditional person, but I am also one to know languages evolve over time.  For example, the word “connection” was spelled “connexion” through the first half of the 20th century.  Read books authored in the 18th or 19th century (sorry, e-books and audio-books on your iPod are not acceptable substitutes for this exercise), you’ll find all kinds of minor variations on common words.  Should the next edition of Webster’s include definitions for R, U, and LOL?  If these “words” are here to stay, then yes, language should evolve.  It must.

Update: I really wanted to find a way to link to this post, one of the funniest things I’ve read in a long long time, but I just couldn’t find a way to fit it in context.  But it does fit, somehow.  So, call it a non-sequitur, and just accept “cheezburger” into your spell-check dictionary, ok?