newmediaMike

Zune coming to Canada this spring

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To be honest, I didn’t even know it wasn’t sold here yet, that’s how far off the radar it is. I am the parent of a teen and a tween, both of whom have iPods. I asked them if they knew what the Zune was and received my usual “the what?”

So I told them about Microsoft’s Zune portable media player, which was first launched over a year ago as an alternative to Apple’s ubiquitous iPod, coming to Canada, which was just announced on the weekend.

The first Zune players, along with Zune software and Zune Social, an online music community, will be available in Canada this spring. they weren’t overly thrilled, not even when I told them Canada will be the first market outside the United States to get the Zune.

All they wanted to know, as do I was … when will we get the iPhone?

Tags: apple, iPhone, iPod, microsoft, zune

Blue Skies for Blu-ray

Yesterday it was the announcement that in response to consumer demand, Warner Bros. Entertainment will release its high-definition DVD titles exclusively in the Blu-ray disc format beginning later this year.

Today at the upcoming CES show a planned HD DVD press conference was canceled as the consortium behind the format is discussing the potential impact of this announcement and evaluating next steps.

Toshiba, masters of the HD DVD format, also issued a press release expressing their “particular disappointment” with Warner, also implying that the move to go Blu-ray exclusively is a breach of contract.

All of this continues to reinforce my belief that Blu-ray will emerge the victorious format in the end.

Tags: Blu-ray, CES, HDDVD, high-definition DVD, Toshiba, Warner

Follow me … Follow you

Am I following you or are you following me? I was wondering this question the other day, and I really wanted to find out the answer. Scrolling through the Twitter pages of my friends/followers was a little time consuming and the twitter server gods kept crashing the pages on me. So I gave up trying to figure out who I was following who followed me and getting caught up with people following me who I wasn’t following (are you following this line?).

Today one of my new followers - Guy Kawasaki - someone who I’ve been following for a while now posted a link to a great new application called Twitter Karma.

Twitter Karma is a Flash application that grabss your friends and followers from Twitter when you click the “Whack!” button, then displays them for you, letting you quickly sort through them. The default sort is a list containing all your friends and followers and is sorted by last update, showing those who most recently updated first. You can sort the list alphabetically either ascending or descending by Twitter ID. You can filter the list in several ways: only friends or only followers, all friends or all followers, and mutual friends.

Now with just a couple of quick clicks I can see whos is following me that I’m not following and those who I follow that aren’t following me.
To follow me on Twitter click here or on the picture of our retired racing greyhound G-Race.

Email Bankruptcy

I was offline for most of yesterday and late last night before turning in I decided to check to see if I had any email.

Just from the subscriptions I have signed up for over 150 emails flooded into my already overflowing in box. Between Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Spock, LinkedIn, Plaxo YouTube, Revver and my blogging network I am overloaded with inbound emails.

At Podcamp Pittsburgh last year a group came up with a name for these emails. Bacn (pronounced bacon) is the term they chose for electronic messages which have been subscribed to and are not unsolicited but are often unread by the recipient for a long period of time, if at all.

I cannot physically keep on top of the influx of emails. I have only one choice, which is to declare email bankruptcy and go on a bacn free diet.

I, newmediaMike of Toronto, Ontario Canada do as of this date the third day of January in the year 2008 do hereby declare email bankruptcy. My In box cannot take the strain of the incoming email any longer.

This will entail a mass deletion of all my emails sitting unread in my email box. Whenever a new piece of bacn arrives in my In box I will automatically log onto the site it came from and change my email preferences. I know I brought this on myself when I signed up for these social media sites. I just didn’t think ahead to the deluge of notices I’d receive.

I mean, who knew I’d ever be so popular!

Tags: bacn, bankruptcy, email, facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Plaxo YouTube, Revver, social media, spam, spock, Twitter