I’m a big soccer fan and catch it on TV as often as I can. Sometimes, that means catching the US National team or my favorite pro team in Spanish. Most of the the team we just watch the game and do our best to decipher the announcements comments (which we mostly do not understand except for GOL, GOL, GOL). Tonight FC Dallas was playing the LA Galaxy in the SuperLiga (the North American club championship) on Telefutura in Spanish and FC Dallas had an English language video feed available from their web site. So, we watched the video on the TV with the sound down and then turned the live online video feed on my laptop with a tspeaker hooked up to it. Then, I used the DVR to pause the game 20 seconds behind time to compensate for the buffering on the live audio feed.

Unfortunately, It looks like Dallas is going to lose this game 5-4 (in the 90th minute). LA took off to a 4-0 lead in the first half, then Dallas brought it to 4-3, then Donovan scored a goal for LA scored a goal to make it 5-3 and in the 89th minute Carlos Ruiz scored another Dallas goal to make it 5-4. The officiating has been horrific in this match (and in all of SuperLiga for Dallas) and cost Dallas this match.

• In the first half the referee failed to give a penalty kick to Dallas when a player was tripped in the box and instead carded a Dallas player for diving.
• At the start of the second half Carlos Ruiz scored for Dallas on a bicycle kick and the refs said he was offside.
• In injury time, the ref failed to call a penalty kick when Carlos Ruiz was tripped in the box.

UPDATE: LA scored in the 94th minute and then Dallas retorted with another goal in the 95 minute and LA won the game 6-5.

The Pew Internet and the American Life Project released a report yesterday on Technology and media usage. The report revealed that 59 percent of adults online have watched video and 19 percent of adults online watch video on a typical day. That’s a huge market for online video and why entertainment TV producers and local TV broadcasters should be jumping on the web video wagon to protect their market share.

Interestingly, if you look deep enough at their numbers you will see that adoption of broadband video is driving adult usage of online video.

eBooks have been around for a while, but they never have really taken off. On Sunday, I saw The Reader from Sony in a Best Buy insert. It was sleek, easy to carry and sparked my imagination because of the stack of 10 books I have piled up beside my bed. Wouldn’t it be nice to have one small reader that carries all of your books? It was on sale for $300.

There are a lot of iPhone reviews out there, but most of them are shallow and short sighted since Apple allowed very few copies out of the factory early . Informationweek published one of the best reviews that I have seen so far examining how the apps and corporate integration work after two weeks of use.

Becoming a good media practitioner (whether in journalism, public relations or advertising) you need to have a good understanding of pop-culture and your audience.

A few years ago my father introduced me to the USA Network program Monk. I think it’s a funny show and watch all the new episodes every summer, but my dad thinks it the best show on TV and watches it whenever it’s on. Tonight’s episode of Monk featured rapper Snoop Dogg as the special guest star. Snoop appeared throughout the show and even rewrote/rapped the show’s theme song. To me any show that is my dad’s favorite featuring a rapper is a culture clash, but I think this is a good example of the way our culture is created by mashing up diverse segments and opinions.

One of the results of the Internet and the Long Tail is the narrow segmentation of interests, markets and values. The mass media has always built mass culture between diverse interests, but the influence of the Internet is turning the mass media into the narrow interests. As web 2.0 blossoms, the convergence of ideas, cultures and opinions will move from the mass media to the individual mash-ups. People will find those mash-ups, be introduced to new ideas with referrals from their friends– online virtual friends who they trust.

We are all excited that a new Walgreens opened up down the street from our house a few weeks ago. One of the supposed advantages is that you can get your prescription filled at any of the 5,461 stores nationwide. Unfortunately, last night their nationwide system must have mixed our local temperature (86 degrees) up with their store in Antarctica.

The MLB is at odds with the media again in it’s debate over whether or not it can own the facts of the game. This time is a bit more interesting because they are mad at ESPN– the cable channel that helps sustain baseball as everything else is letting them down. ESPN ran a graphic of the MLB All-star players on SportsCenter with information obtained from the AP during the MLB imposed embargo period for this information. MLB had embargoed the information because they sold exclusive rights to the information to TBS for a live selection show. In this case, MLB is not suing ESPN (because they don’t have a cause), but it has decided that it is going to shut ESPN out of all all-star game coverage to teach them a lesson.

Let’s review for the MLB’s sake. Information such as the player’s on a roster, their number, batting average, ERA and game stats and scores are all just information that is not able to be owned by anyone. MLB is allowed to act like my toddler and not let ESPN play at the all-star game for not following their rules, but they aren’t allowed to sue over someone else using their information.

Jakob Nielsen’s words were the bible of my web design (and I take an authoritative view of the Bible) when I first started putting web pages together back in the late ’90s. I have very dog-eared copy of his book Designing Web Usability and read every article on his web site.

Unfortunately, I think he may be losing it. His latest alertbox, Write Articles, Not Blog Postings, trashes web 2.0 and how web sites and blogs create conversations. He insists that the authority of well written article far exceeds the value from the realism of the conversation that a good blog will create (this blog is NOT an example of that kind of conversation). I have to admit that the Google search algorithm’s tendency to rank blogs higher have helped blogs become more popular, but that was a reason to blog in the search driven era of the Internet that we just passed out of and doesn’t account for the conversation driven blogs we are now seeing. It shouldn’t surprise me that he doesn’t get it. This is probably the first alertbox that I clicked through on all year (and that is just because everyone else is trashing him for it).

I sure hope Steve Krug understands how the web is evolving.

Thursday night I finally finished reading Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel. I say finally because it took me about a month to read it. Please don’t let that be an appraisal of my opinion of the book. I just spent too much time online and not enough time reading in the past month.

Scoble and Israel are admittedly blog evangelists in the book writing from the opinion that blogs are a permanent part of the business marketing/communications landscape. The book starts answering why blogs are important and how to do blogs right and how to do them wrong. Blogs usage in the US and internationally are examined. They address how different cultures react differently to the blogosphere. Finally the close the book with a look at the future of blogs and tips on how to improve your blogging.

I really enjoyed the numerous case studies they wrote on different corporations use of blogs. I had heard some of the stories before, but most of them were new to me. The authors really presented a simplified, understandable history of the web to date. They offered numerous helpful tips on how to improve your blogging which will hopefully help me out here.

Now onto The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More by Chris Anderson (Did you see my Good Reads section change on my website?).

I have had a Canon Powershot A95 digital camera since April 1995. I bought the camera to take with us to Maui and it took awesome photos, but after I got my Canon 20D Digital SLR I haven’t used it for much more than shooting videos. Today, I was shooting video of my kids with it and after I took a couple of seconds of video the LCD went black with some brown highlights and light streaks. Every second of video I took after that looked just like that LCD screen: black with brown highlights and light streaks. I could go back and look at older movies that I had shot and they looked fine, but the new video looked horrible. It was obvious to me that the image sensor was knocked off center or had a short in it or something. I thought the camera was trashed since it has been out of warranty for at least a year already.

Just to make sure there wasn’t anything I could do I visited Canon’s support website and found a Service Notice describing my problem exactly and offering a free repair. I called their toll free service number and now they are sending me a shipping label to send my camera in for a free repair.

That is great service! I have recommended Canon digital point and shoot cameras to friends and students for a number of years because of their quality photos, custom settings, ease of use and durability. Just when I thought I had found a flaw in their product, I discover instead that I can add great service and integrity to the list.