Scoble: One thing I totally agree with Joe on is that Apple is WAY WAY WAY better than Microsoft at coming up with names. “Apple Front Row” certainly beats “Microsoft Windows Media Center Edition 2005.” It’s not just the name that’s better though, it’s the fact that Apple is shipping it with every new iMac. I have no idea if the software is better or not but at least people know about it and will try it out.

Daring Fireball: NetNewsWire users get a generous transition deal: two years of subscription service to NewsGator online, including synching storage, access to other NewsGator software, and all updates to NetNewsWire released in that time. Considering that NetNewsWire 2.0 was a free update, this makes NetNewsWire 1.0 look like one of the best deals in Mac history — if you bought NetNewsWire 1.0 in February 2003, you not only still haven’t paid a dime in upgrade fees, but you won’t for another two years, either.

Anyone know of good HTML diff tools that actually work well? For that matter, does anyone know of any diff tools that work well with plain text that isn’t line based, eg: the standard type of text you’d find in a blog entry or a book? I’m guessing a combination of word based and line based diffing might work okay for that type of thing but I haven’t come across much that actually tries to deal with the problem.

Scoble: Nick says Memorandum sucks Nick Davis says he’s done with Memeorandum and is going back to Newsmap. Says I like Memeorandum cause I appear on top of that page. Well, yes, but that’s only cause the rest of you haven’t started participating in the conversation. Memeorandum is done automatically by analyzing linking and posting behavior. If you wanna be on top write a more interesting post. Hey, I bet this one has a chance of getting on Memeorandum.

Scoble: Story about single-play DVDs is false Ed Bott reports the truth: no truth to Microsoft single-play DVD story. Yes, the news system can be hoaxed. But, it cleans itself out pretty fast. Bloggers, please include links to original sources and the source where you saw it. Also, correct any post where something false is reported. Help the system clean itself out. For instance, will Slashdot correct this post? Ah Scoble, how young and naive you are… Slashdot holding back on a good ol’ fashioned Microsoft bashing indeed…

It seems that John Dvorak doesn’t like advertising much either. I’ve previously complained about advertising in various forms (1, 2, 3) so it’s nice to see more voices joining the chorus. In fact, also today I see O’Reilly Radar noting that Ad Skippers Do It With Research. It is however a shame that Dvorak’s article was so jam packed full of ads, including splitting it over two pages so they could show more ads that most people would have been distracted from his point, which ironically demonstrates his point.

Office 12 to support PDF natively Oh, the Office 12 team just announced native PDF support. That’s big. [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger] I agree. It sucks to be Adobe right now though as a huge chunk of their PDF related profit just went out the door but they really should have seen it coming and I’m sure they’ll survive – they have enough going on around PDF that the Word document to PDF side of it won’t be a major set back for them.

Ah Scoble, you’re just digging yourself deeper and deeper. The cynical part of me wants to point out how unsurprising it is that a Microsoft employee doesn’t understand why an application isn’t a spec and why precise specifications are so important for avoiding vendor lock-in. But what Dave did was give me an application. It works. And, as a user, I wonder “if the format is so crappy, how did Dave get it to work in his own application?

I spoke a little while back about Feedburner vs Blogbeat. I wish I’d taken more time to give constructive advice to the Feedburner team about what they could improve because as is so often the case these days, they picked up on my entry and Matt Shobe responded in the comments. One of the things he commented about was being able to redirect your feed so users don’t have to update their subscriptions:

Robert Scoble takes James Robertson to task for criticizing OPML in response to Scoble’s feature request. Mostly I agree with Scoble, when a user asks for a feature you shouldn’t give them a rant about why the specific technology they’re talking about is crap, you should give them your considered, professional opinion and recommendation. Hopefully that means identifying their problems and providing a solution but it might mean just telling them that their proposed solution won’t work and you don’t have an alternative.

As soon as I saw the new Office 12 interface I questioned why you would add modes to a user interface when modes are so frowned on in usability – particularly by Jef Raskin. I was immediately banging my head against the table with the thought that to do anything in the new Office I’d have to figure out which mode the functionality was hidden under instead of just working with the menu categories that I was used to (no better than the ribbon modes but at least I’m used to them).

I’ve been playing around with the beta of BlogBeat and recently switched on FeedBurner for my feeds (just the free version). Both systems attempt to show who’s reading your blog and provide some statistics about them. FeedBurner does this by looking at the number of people viewing your RSS feed and BlogBeat does it by looking at the number of people looking at your web site. In the end, you have to realize that the actual numbers are irrelevant because both these methods are really quite inadequate.