Cable TV Ala Carte: Who’s in Your Top Five?

Does anyone, who is not a coma victim, watch the Golf Channel?  Is anyone without insomnia watching HSN or QVC?  Isn’t the need to buy useless crap fulfilled by the Internet now?

There are at least 15 channels in everybody’s cable TV lineup that are completely useless. Admit it, for $60 a month, you are paying for a lot of content that you’ll never watch.  Ratings are sinking since the web has arrived. Ratings have even taken serious blows since the highly adopted use of TIVO and DVRs. Most people in the know don’t watch a talking head for 20 minutes to find out which mission critical toxin “might” be present in their cupboards. Anyone with half a brain knows that real content today is delivered on-demand and chosen to reflect your interests.

Gone are the days of spending a half an hour with your eyes glued a scrolling marquee on the lower portion of ESPN. Today you check your phone or ESPN’s own web site for the score.  Today you can use your computer or mobile phone and have all of of the day’s news fed directly to you.  So why are we still paying for cable as a complete service when we only want the programming we actually watch? read more

Dear IMDB, It’s not me its you.

Dear IMDB,

When we first met, I knew it was love.  We spent hours together discovering hilarious movie quotes and remembering long-forgotten TV shows I once loved.  Your wealth of trivia was unmatched by any I had ever met!  You had all the answers for me.  You knew everything I asked you.  You were magnificent!  You helped me grow and strive for more knowledge and connect with others who shared my interests.  Even after connecting with others, I consulted you on a regular basis!  I found, in you, everything I had been looking for in a movie website.  But I’m afraid you’ve changed IMDB.  And not for the better.  read more

Facebook harvests your soul, then acts confused when you get angry.

Facebook did WHAT?!

Unless you’ve been in hiding, you’ve probably seen stories about the Facebook Terms of Service change.  You know, how they assumed you were OK with them taking your firstborn.  Apparently our brouhaha was over nothing.  When you log in to Facebook today, you will see a message regarding TOS.  While the legal verbiage did lay claim to everything you ever posted on your account, they now say that isn’t what they wanted at all.  They say they really don’t want to own the rights to your list of 25 random facts, or that sloppy drunken pic on New Year’s Eve, but the way the TOS update was written, that’s what it legally let them do.  read more