Star Treatment to Bloggers

I must admit, classes are definitely not bad this semester, content-wise. I though the Business courses would be stupid but I think I'll end up learning a lot from them. Anyway, I just had fun reading this so I figured that I might as well talk about it a little more. As you may have noticed on the right sidebar, I read Delicious Days occasionally because food just fascinates me (hence my regular viewing of the Food Network while in Houston), and that article comes from a blog that reviews restaurants. Anyway, people like reading about stuff like food and technology online because I think we just get a kick out of hearing from people who don't get edited by some important person or who isn't some elitist in their field. Hence, we turn to blogs. What's funny is that companies have started to notice this, and really targeted bloggers. Last month, as I mentioned, Microsoft sent Acer laptops to bloggers loaded with Vista. A while ago, I was actually offered a review unit for an IP TV product! Talking to my cousin's husband (another techie), he told me that companies are trying to find a better way to get to the consumer than standard advertising, and what better way than through people they trust: bloggers. It's an interesting thought, because I had never really seen it that way. I received a hat and a pat on the back from Cranium from praising them, but I don't think it necessarily affected my opinion of Pop 5 (though a friend of mine was sad I didn't bring it to her place last week because she really liked it), I still think it's a pretty fun game. That article I plugged was about that blogger's experience at a restaurant that gave her star treatment because she posted an unfavorable review. Funnily enough, it didn't change her opinion of the food, but she praised the owner for being so cool to them. I just think it's really funny for common people to become celebrities and get noticed within their fields, even though they're not really certifiably famous. It's kind of cool, in a way; that the web has become the platform for people to have intelligent discussions and get noticed, not just pre-teen girls talking about their drama on their Xanga.

In the vein of user-generated content, just wanted to briefly mention this list of YouTube mashups, several of which are fairly entertaining. I personally love the "I Love Music Videos" one for its integration with Last.fm, which I still use and enjoy. According to a tipster, Apple will be holding a special event on February 20, presumably to talk more about Leopard, iLife 07, iWork 07, and new Mac Pros. They may talk about more stuff, but I doubt that we'll see anything really shocking. The music industry is finally acknowledging that they have an issue, and maybe DRM is the problem. I agreed with one great quote in the article that basically said that you can't get rid of all piracy, but if you try then you'll get rid of the whole industry. Stop with the DRM so people don't have to do so much damn research to buy an mp3 player and be happy with their music. The easier you make it for everyone, the more money you'll make. Meanwhile, someone has cracked the Blu-ray DRM. They managed to decrypt a Blu-ray media, and I'm happy for it. I hope that it's made very public so that Sony realizes how stupid their DRM is. Sun has decided to partner with Intel and have them provide the chips for some of their servers, and in return Intel will make sure that Solaris runs well on their chips. An interesting deal since Sun was a competitor and is now in financial troubles, let's see if Sun's situation changes anytime soon. Lastly, Windows Genuine Advantage has supposedly determined that 22% of Windows installations are illegal. Why do I feel that the real figure is much higher than that?

The Oscar nominees are up, and you can see the whole list over here. Not a whole lot of surprises, but I feel unqualified to comment much on it since I missed some of they year's best movies. If you didn't catch Prison Break or Heroes last night, first of all, shame on you. However, the 300 sneak peak you missed can be found here. Not a whole lot of new footage, but still fun to watch. It looks like Speed Racer may be a G rated movie, which doesn't bother me since it's based off a fairly light-hearted cartoon, but I'm sure it'll bother some people. It's not like the Wachowskis are experienced at family films. A random Russian site has a few shots from Transformers (including some impressive cleavage, sorry ladies), but the real money shots are for Spider-man 3 over at IGN. I kind of like the new Smokin Aces poster better than all those pics though:



Now for the Tuesday Twosome:

List the last two…

1. Movies you watched:
I guess Pan's Labyrinth and MI:3 (repeat viewing). I should've re-watched Spider-man 1 and 2, just didn't get around to it.
2. TV shows you saw:
Heroes and The Colbert Report
3. Items you purchased:
A textbook for Programming Languages and my water bill for the past couple of months.
4. Beverages you drank:
Water and milk
5. Internet sites you surfed (before coming here):
JoBlo and The Daily Meme