I came across a (relatively) new torrent aggregator for TV shows called tvRSS.net. It’s pretty awesome - much better than TVTorrent.info which I used to use but one day ceased to exist a few months ago. tvRSS.net has torrent listings for just about every popular show on TV right now and seems to stay very up to date. Torrent listings appear just a few hours after the show airs. You will notice that tvRSS doesn’t really “aggregate” tv-show torrents so much as just organizes torrents that are listed on mininova, a popular torrent search engine. Even though, it’s possible that there may be more torrents out there that aren’t on mininova, I’m guessing it’s pretty rare.

It looks like Brian/alienvenom, the creator of tvRSS.net, is really trying to build a best of breed TV show torrent destination - adding such simple, but novel, functionality like parsing torrent names so that they can be searched more effectively and removing torrents that are of the same show episode (but released by different groups). I’m definltey looking forward to what else he has in the works for the site.

Oh, if you are going to download torrents, make sure you install and run PeerGuardian. PeerGuardian blocks connections to peers from IP addresses which are known to be up to no good. An example of why you should run this is there have been many reports of people receiving threatening letters in the mail from HBO after downloading torrents of various HBO shows like The Sopranos and Entourage. PeerGuardian works off of a block list so it’s certainly not foolproof but it’d be stupid not to use it.

This afternoon, Yahoo! sent me a friendly reminder that my Yahoo Music Unlimited annual subscription is up for renewal in a month. I had signed up for Yahoo Music right when it came out a couple years ago and I must admit it’s been an awesome companion for me. Having access to well over a million songs across all kinds of genres has introduced me to a lot of new artists that I hadn’t been famliar with and also given me the chance to listen to the full albums of artists I already was a fan of. The downside is that the Yahoo Music application is pretty slow and clunky. Also, while the star-rating recommendation system does an OK job at pushing me music that might fit my taste, it would be nice to have more help, such as having some better social features or more editorial content.

After reading reviews about other music subscription services that have launched over the past couple of years, I thought I’d do some quick research before renewing. A couple of my friends have Rhapsody and say really great things about the service. Also, in this CNET review from a couple weeks ago, they named Rhapsody their Editor’s Choice amongst competing services. One of the best features of Rhapsody is the team of music editors which write commentary on the various artists and genres. Rhapsody does cost a little bit more but the difference is only a few dollars a month. I became really tempted to make the switch - if for no other reason than to have a change of scenery.

Then it hit me. I have now rated over 2k songs, artists, and albums on Yahoo Music. Those ratings represents thousands of hours of music listening for me and represent a deep description of my music taste. When browsing music it helps me sort out music that I have and have not listened to. Furthermore, in a sense I’m sort of proud of my ratings. I’ve put in a lot of time creating those ratings and since my music taste is a big part of my identity, hence my music ratings are a big party of my identity. I don’t want to lose those ratings. As is typical of big portal sites, there’s no way to export my music rating data. In all fairness though, import/export is not supported by any of the services and since they presumably use different music databases, it’s not even clear if an import/export could reliably be done.

The bottom line is that I don’t want to lose my ratings so the switching cost for me is impossibly high (I’d have to manually transfer my ratings one-by-one).
It turns out that there is actually a very good reminder here for consumer services. The deeper a customer can personalize the service, the higher the switching cost is.

Anyway, in conclusion, for the time being I’m Yahoo Music’s bitch. I’ll be renewing for another year…

A friend of mine just sent me a link to the website of a new indi film “Palo Alto”. The movie takes place in, you guessed it, my hometown Palo Alto, CA. The American Griffiti esque story takes place on the last night of Thanksgiving Break for four college freshman who who grew up in Palo Alto. The creators of the movie are all college students at USC and UCLA who as you also might have guessed are Palo Alto & Menlo Park natives. Even though the movie is a total grassroots effort, the cast does include Ben Savage, some past and future cast members of the “O.C.”, and Tom Arnold (pretty random huh).

“Palo Alto” official website
“Palo Alto” on IMDB

Businessweek Interview

The truth is what Google is doing now is transferring the wealth out of the hands of rights holders into Google. So media companies around the world are all threatened by Google. Why? Because basically Google is telling you how much of your ad revenue you get to keep.They better get some competition. Us. Yahoo! (YHOO). Somebody better break through or you can short all media stocks right now. As long as there are two, you can hold onto media stocks.

Worth reading…

What’s an “Install Fair” you ask? Well apparently Microsoft is more serious than ever about making sure users upgrading their Windows install to the new version, in this case that version is the soon to be released Vista, have a smooth and successful experience. Microsoft invited volunteers to come to their Silicon Valley campus and install the latest build of Vista (RC2) and report on their experience during and after the Vista upgrade. Several Microsoft engineers were on hand to assist and observe.

How was my experience? Well, not so great. I arrived a little late and combined with the fact that the Vista Upgrade process took FOREVER, my laptop was still grinding through the upgrade even as the event wound down. At one of the points when the setup process required a reboot, I shut the laptop with the intention of continuing it back at home. However, after talking with some MS folks about application compatibility with apps like Apache and MySQL, I realized that I was better off first dual-booting Vista on a separate partition and check for compatibility before I make the leap with my primary environment.

Luckily, Vista has an awesome setup rollback feature. At any point of the upgrade, you can quit the upgrade process and rollback to your prior XP installation. Since I was about 90% done with the upgrade process, I was really wary about trying the rollback. I had a bad feeling that I might end up with no Vista and a defunct XP install. I did some quick searching on the Web and found that many people were reporting that the rollback functioned flawlessly. So I crossed my fingers and went for it. Maybe 5 minutes later, I was back in XP like nothing ever happened. I was blown away.

When I get some time in the coming week, I’ll dual-boot Vista and check it out. I must say the new Aero UI in Vista is slick as hell. Unfortunately, you need 128MB of dedicated graphics memory to run Aero at resolution of 1280×1024 and above. My laptop only has 64MB. I’m definitely going to look into whether an upgrade is possible…

Have you ever been browsing around Yahoo! Shopping or Shopping.com clicking on various products. You see a product you like, read about it, click around to some of the merchants that sell it, click on another product, read about it, …. Well, whether you realize it or not, each one of those clicks from the shopping comparison site to the merchant’s web site costs money for that merchant. Brian Smith over at ComparisonEngines.com put together a nice table listing the minimum rates each of four popular shopping comparison sites charge merchants for various product categories.

CPC Price Floors on the Shopping Comparison Engines

A few months back when I was shopping for a plasma TV, I spent a long time browsing through various models on Yahoo! Shopping and clicking through to various merchants. There’s a good chance I earned Yahoo! Shopping well over $20. Unfortunately for Y!’s merchant advertisers, I ended up buying the TV through an alternate source. Sorry Y! merchants!!

What surprised me was ink and toner cartridges also tops the list with a minimum of $1/click. I wonder if the high CPC is because of a high gross profit margin in this category (how much profit does a merchant make on a $30 ink cartridge… $1, $5, $10??) and/or high conversion rates amongst users in this category (x?/100 users who click actually follow through with a purchase?) I’ve got a contact who manages SEM at an online office tech retailer so hopefully I can get an answer for this question in a few days.