Friday, February 25, 2005
ESPN Changes Inside Pages
ESPN.com has changed some of the inside pages of their site, as seen here.
It looks pretty good IMO. A nice, clean layout. The biggest difference is the menu move from the left to the top of the page, a la Fox Sports and Sportsline.
When you have a menu with as many options as ESPN.com does, it’s probably a good move. It brings more visibility to the options towards the end, and with the dropdown menus you have more choices available in just one click (by having the submenus available for each sport on all pages).
What’s interesting is that the NHL is #4 on the list when ordering from left to right (same as Sportsline and Fox Sports) - probably a permanent spot (I hope). ESPN generally moved around their menu orders depending on season. I hope they stick with the non-moving menu.
Ordering for those interested:
ESPN - NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL
Sportsline - NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL
Fox Sports - NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL
What a new format like this does, besides being able to give you easier menu access and looking a little better, is that it gives you more screen space to work with for the content itself. They can use the space for anything, including stats, pictures - and possibly some different ad formats.
Besides the articles on the inside, the scores for the NBA are also in the newer format. I’d assume more of the site is expected to change over soon. Perhaps Reemer, ESPN.com employee, can fill us in more.
Star Trek Fans Attempt to Save Enterprise
Wired is running a story about Star Trek fans protesting the cancellation of Star Trek: Enterprise. As a hockey fan, I have to say I feel their pain. Having something you loved cancelled is awful. Just like the NHL, I have a feeling Star Trek will be back soon, at least in some form.
What’s unique about the Trek uprising - unlike other tv shows which have had fans sign petitions, write letters, make calls - is that the Trek fans are collecting money to attempt to pay for production of the show. TrekUnited.com and Save Enterprise are the two sites that are co-ordinating efforts.
$32 million needs to be raised, and as I write this $48k is in the bank so far. The Wired article mentions that $3 million is supposed to be secured soon from three anonymous donors.
Thursday, February 24, 2005
AP Feeds Are Here
So I found the AP RSS feeds yesterday from the RSS Compendium Blog.
Tom at the Media Drop wonders about the direction of news on the web:
New way: News came out on the wire, and various news sites / outlets picked it up. You, the blogger, have a subscription to the feed, and your reader automatically snags any article that has to do with a topic that you cover on your blog. You click on the link through the RSS feed, are directed to the AP.org website, and go from there. Blogger Y links to the AP.org website, therefore removing “News Station X” from the equation, readership declines for “News Station X” (as much as can be argued that bloggers deliver traffic), and advertising rates do not increase over time.
Now perhaps I’m being overly simplistic, but consider mass-trafficked blogs such as an Instapundit or a website like Drudge Report. I’m sure MyWay.com or Yahoo! News is more than happy to take the 1,000,000 visitors that Drudge sent them for the article about the three headed love child of some government official. But that might not be the case forever, if this continues as it seems like it could.
He could be right, but it’s certainly jumping ahead. The AP currently offers “only” 17 feeds (not much when you think of the number of topics the AP covers), and it’s only in RSS .92. It’s poorly formatted and it seems like they’re not serving the right header response either (it’s being served as text/plain instead of application/rss+xml or text/xml even).
I’m not so sure any website gets much of a benefit by using the AP feeds from the AP itself instead of using a source like Yahoo, who probably gets the same AP story at just about the same time (and has more categories and is RSS2, although not heavily detailed, there’s still more there); unless they simply don’t want to use Yahoo - but there are alternatives for almost every content topic nowadays.
So it’s a start, but I can’t see how it’ll make an impact until they beef it up some more.
Update: Thanks to rexblog I see the AP is already planning on having tons of feeds based on keywords, and a variety of ways to grab them. There we go, impact territory.
Wednesday, February 23, 2005
The Evolution of Mario
An interesting look at the evolution of Mario. Starts with a good “did you know that?”:
It’s a well known story that when creating Mario - originally called simply ‘jumpman’ - Shigeru Miyamoto made him look the way he does because of hardware limitations of the time. He was given a mustache to seperate his nose from his face, overalls so arm movements were visible, and a hat because hair was hard to draw.
Found via SimpleBits via What Do I Know
1UP Baseball Preview
1UP takes a look at this year’s baseball games:
EA’s MVP Baseball 2005, Take-Two’s Major League Baseball 2K5, and Sony’s MLB 2006
Sony’s game is PS2-only, while the other two are available for Xbox, and only MVP on GameCube. Pennant Chase Baseball will also be coming out for GameCube, but there’s no solid release date right now. Mario Baseball is a baseball alternative for GameCube.
For another baseball game round-up, check out GameSpot.
I’ll be picking up MVP or 2K5 for Xbox, hitting up Xbox Live hard. Just have to co-ordinate with friends to make sure we all pick up the same one. Drop me a line if you’ve played any of them and have a suggestion.
Monday, February 21, 2005
Jason Giambi, Meet Rock and Hard Place
Jason Giambi has one place to go to avoid heavy criticism all year long: the top.
If he’s not on the top of his game, Oakland A’s MVP-type numbers, all he’s going to hear are steroids jabs, and if he’s actually playing first at Yankee Stadium, it’ll be chants of “Tino, Tino…”
I was never a fan of the Yankees not re-signing Tino Martinez and paying a ton to bring in Giambi, but even I have to say: let’s give him some time.
We can argue all we want about how taking steroids is cheating and that Giambi is in a large circle of previous steroid users in baseball who deserve a lot of the condemnation they get, but Giambi is obviously in the group of people who have had steroids affect more than just their baseball game. While there’s been no research done, I think it’s pretty safe to say taking steroids has not helped Giambi stay healthy. He’s now another year older, and recovering from some pretty serious health issues last year. Expectations cannot be high. Without his grand jury testimony, he’d be just another “steroids suspect”, and we’d be focusing on his healthy. Now, people are just saying “he can’t do it without the ‘roids”, and while that may be a fair statement, it’s not too fair to look at someone who’s turning 34, coming off of injury and illness, and expect him to reproduce career years at 29-30.
I happen to think if he’s given a shot, he may be able to put together a decent season. .290s, 30HRs. Not worth his salary, but not bad numbers.
Dayn Perry at Fox Sports thinks Giambi will be something in between the old and new.
Paris Hilton’s Info Put on Public Display
Paris Hilton had her Sidekick hacked not too long ago. Now - all of her Sidekick info has been put on display. I link to Engadget because that’s where I first read about it, and I’m pretty sure people will keep putting mirrors up for you in the comments section.
FirstAdopter.com doesn’t like any of this one bit, letting everyone know it’s just tabloid journalism to spread this around and it’s an invasion of privacy. While we may not be sure that it’s an attack on Paris’ privacy, as she has virtually none in the first place - it is a complete invasion on any of the other celebrities listed in her notes or address book, as much of the contact information has been confirmed by Drudge and others.
FirstAdopter.com is not alone in thinking this is irresponsible, just read Engadget’s comments and look for some by Christopher MacManus.
But many point to something else: her pictures and the quality of the shots. Not the quality of the camera itself, but the pics that were in there. Perhaps these were filtered? Planted? Could this all be another publicity stunt at the expense of others’ privacy? It’s a possibility, no doubt. Do keep in mind that a model’s cell phone pics do have a good chance of looking better than most cell phone pics out there, especially when said model is in some of these pics naked, and making out with another girl. While some point to the flattering pics, others also point out that the website that sells her sex tape is in her notes.
So while Paris’ “invasion of privacy” remains in question, the other celebrities certainly had to turn off their cells or abandon their email accounts. If this was planted, Paris may be forefront and center in the public eye once more, but she’s certainly burnt a few bridges, intentionally or not.
T-Mobile, Sidekick’s carrier, should expect a good number of lawsuits from this. This will probably make many hesitant about keeping online contact lists. I’m sure you’ve gotten a few emails with invitations to those before, and I’m sure many will think twice about responding to them the next time they receive one. Of course, few people out there have so many others wanting to call them to say hello (or prank), but that won’t stop anyone from thinking about the “what ifs”, even if the “if” doesn’t exist.
Saturday, February 19, 2005
Blog Changes
So - new system here, slightly new look, although I’ll modify that more soon.
Besides the new look, the most obvious change might be the lack of hockey posts here right now. That’s because I’ve converted The Ice Block back into a hockey blog. While that’ll be beefier than the normal blog, I’ll leave that discussion there. However - if you’ve linked to vodkafish.com simply for the hockey posts, you may want to change your links to The Ice Block. One other note - the hockey posts will be back here soon. You’ll get a dose of all my stuff here on vodkafish.com, including any other future blogs I may start…
Some other notes:
Don’t bookmark any inside pages here right now. I’m not a fan of the urls that ExpressionEngine produces. I will be modifying it.
I’m trying to seamlessly move the feed. If anyone notices any interruption in the rss feed, please let me know.
Hey look, finally have a contact form - it’s up in the right corner currently.
There’s a real registration system here, with profiles and such. Feel free to sign up, helps you avoid my spam filter as I make it more aggressive.
I will be re-adding links soon. Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about you.
More to come soon, this transition obviously isn’t “complete”, but I couldn’t help but get this started now. Perhaps we’ll consider this vodkafish.com ver 2 beta.
Wednesday, February 16, 2005
Oh Those Search Results
Here’s one of the fun ones for the day: go to Yahoo!, search the web for “idiot”.
Scan results, what I’m laughing at comes in at #7 right now.
This message brought to you by the party that’s not aligning with a party, just laughing at the search engines. Thank you.
Tuesday, February 15, 2005
A Potato a Day Keeps the Hepatitis Away
Scientific American has a fun article: Potatoes Deliver Hepatitis Vaccine in Human Trials
The concept alone can wind up leading to a much different grocery store than the ones we’re used to today: have an illness, grab the right food. Imagine the flu could be cured with a carrot, and maybe a Mac & Cheese version for kids.
Of course, the idea behind this is to help poorer countries have easier ways to treat disease, but that doesn’t mean it won’t turn into some odd form of capitalization and marketing over here.