I would really like to build or buy a box that lets me easily watch files I download with bittorrent on my TV. There are a lot of interesting new media appliances for the TV these days, including:

• PVRs, which are hard drive-based TV recorders with nifty features for automatically scheduling shows to be recorded,
• XBox and XBox 360, which are game consoles that can buy and update games through an online service
• Windows Media Center, which is basically a PC running a special version of Windows XP designed for PVR and other functions

I don't have any of these things, but I'd quite like something that does at least the PVR stuff, but also lets me run bittorrent.

If you don't know what bittorrent is, it's basically a network protocol for downloading files that is well suited to transferring large, popular files. Without going into the technical details (which, as a geek, I find fascinating), bittorrent turns the usual dynamics of downloading files on their head - the more people that are downloading a file, the faster it will be for you to download.

This makes it an ideal and increasingly popular way to download software, television shows, movies, etc, which tend to be large files. Serving media files on the Internet requires a lot of bandwidth, which gets very expensive for popular files, but with bittorrent it's much more efficient, cheap, and faster, so better for everyone involved. Of course much of the content people download using bittorrent is of dubious legality.

Personally, I like to download TV shows that aren't available in the UK using bittorrent. The two big things I like are that I can watch it when I want, and without commercials. The big thing I don't like is that I mostly have to watch these on my PC instead of my TV. It's possible to hook my TV up to my PC, but not convenient, since they're in different rooms, and the PC doesn't have a remote control.

A PVR like Sky+ would probably give me the two things I like about bittorrent, and solve the thing I don't. But there is another advantage bittorrent has over a PVR, and that's the Internet. A PVR still only lets me watch whatever is made available by my cable company, satellite service, or local broadcasters. A torrent box connected to my broadband Internet connection and my TV would give me access to any content people put on the Net.

This would do for TV what VOIP is doing for phone service, and what IPTV doesn't even try to do) - wipe out geographical limitations. Producers and/or distributors of television content could make their stuff available on the net via bittorrent, either charging a fee or, for promotional or amateur content, for free, and reach viewers everywhere. My wife and I could watch TV shows from Turkey, local stations in the US, and independent producers, no matter where we live. That would rule.

The box is actually trival to make. It's a hardware device that can connect to a TV and a broadband connection (a plain ethernet jack or wifi would work for me), play media files (XviD), and run a bittorrent client (ideally Azureus), and a UI to make it easy to browse and select files to download. Adding 1 or 2 TV tuners would give you a PVR as well, and a DVD drive (preferably a writer) replaces your DVD player.

The quickest way to get a box that does this, and more, would be to get a Windows Media Center device. This is basically a PC shaped and designed like a home entertainment component, running a special version of Microsoft Windows. It would be a simple matter of installing Java and Azureus, and ideally writing a decent UI (or perhaps WMC plugins?) to browse and select torrent files to download. Alternately, the same hardware could run Linux and a free PVR software package like MythTV.

The drawback of this is expense. Most of these boxes seem to cost around £1,000. I'm sure a box could be sold for around £300-400 that could handle this, maybe not quite as full powered and full featured as the media center PC's, but enough for downloading and watching TV. The new XBox 360 games console actually looks to have the right hardware. I think the only thing keeping the 360 from being able to do this easily is that its Internet connection seems to be restricted to connecting to Microsoft's online service. I'm sure there are hacks for this or, at the worst, Linux will inevitably be ported to the 360 the way it has for the original Xbox.

In fact, I could probably get a workaround for what I want by installing Windows Media Center on my normal desktop PC, and buying the XBox 360 and connecting it to my TV. The 360 apparently works with Media Center as a "Media Extender", so it can play music and video on the Media Center PC's hard drive. I'm not sure how easy it would be to install a program on the XBox that let me browse and choose bittorrent files from the X-Box though, and it is overall an awkward solution.

In any case, the hardest part of all of this is the content. Most of the content out there right now is illegal, so nobody other than a hobbyist like me is going to make a bittorrent box. The key to making it popular will be on the content side, which is an interesting business challenge. I've got more on that subject for a later post.

If anyone knows of a box that costs around £300 and can run Linux (or Windows Media Center), has a hard drive, TV connectors, and ethernet or wifi, let me know. The closest I've found in price is the Topfield (also see the UK forum), which is a sweet-sounding PVR but has no network interface. Shuttle makes many different small form-factor PC's, but these are pretty powerful and more expensive than I'm looking for.

Most bloggers have missed the most useful points of the recent eyetrack study. I've seen a number of blog items on the eyetrack study recently published by Poynter. But checking it out this morning, I've found much more interesting things in it than the "people look at the top left of the page first" angle that most people are talking up. Granted, that's the angle mentioned at the top of the story.

Reading the article and looking at kief.com, I realize my new design is an atrocity of unreadability. Some key points:

• Headline sizes affect whether people actually read what's on the page, or skim it. Big page headlines, and article headlines significantly larger than the blurbs, encourage people to scan the page rather than read the details.
• My biggest crime is the groovy lines I put around the headline of each article. Even underlining headlines discourages people from reading the text beneath. Looking at it, the way I have the header and footer blocks of each post indented, although I find the look pleasing, is jarring for reading through the stuff on the page. This is the nastiest effect of my new design, I think.
• The first few words of the blurb are critical; they determine if someone is going to read the whole blurb. Of course it's no news that the lede needs to have a hook, but on the web it looks like the hook needs a sharper barb than in print.
• Shorter paragraphs are better. We're talking one or two sentences each
• Summary paragraphs at the beginning of an article are a winnder
• Interesting words or phrases can draw a reader's attention to areas of the page that wouldn't normally get looked at:

We observed a high number of eye fixations on a headline about clothing maker FCUK, which was placed far down on a page with a long list of headlines and blurbs

People do scroll down a page looking for interesting bits, but need something special that hooks them. One point is that although many people would probably try visual tricks to highlight things they want people to look at, like changing the color, using a big font size, or underlining it, but the other findings of the study suggest that would actually be counter-productive. The key is to make the actual words used compelling enough that people will read them.

Some other things I want to think about:

• Right side navigation actually gets people to spend more time looking at it
• Ads work better on the left side than the left
• Ads in the middle of the text work best (this is for attention, I don't know if they affect click-throughs)
• Separating ads with lines or even whitespace decreases the chance people will look at them. Not sure how you would do this without confusing people about what's advertising and what's editorial, this sounds like a false "win".
• People look at text ads much more than banners

So I need to take a stab at making my design more readable. I probably won't get around to it soon, since my plate is overflowing both at work and home, and we've got a trip to Turkey next week.

When I have more time, I need to check out this tutorial by Jaza on how to modify Drupal to make a nice organization system.

I've rebuilt kief.com using new software, a PHP-based content management system called Drupal. I didn't have any particular problem with my old software, Movable Type, I changed because I wanted to learn how Drupal works. Movable Type is designed for use in a weblog format, with backwards-chronological list of posts, which is fine for kief.com. But I've been wanting to create a new website which will have a more complicated format which I think Drupal is well-suited for.

The choice of Drupal is significant for me in that it is written using a language/technology I haven't worked with before, PHP. This isn't out of any desire to learn PHP, I would actually prefer to use Java, which is what I work with professionally. However, I've been farting around with Java-based content management for years, and it's actually been a big obstacle for me starting the kind of website I would like to have, for several reasons.

Part of the reason I haven't been able to get a Java-based, content/community-oriented website going is exactly because I am a Java programmer. Whenever I have started on one of these projects in the past, I inevitably get bogged down fiddling with the software, and usually end up wanting to write big chunks of the system myself. The software is never quite done the way I want it, so I spend all my time coding. Since I don't have gobs of free time for this kind of project, I never get anywhere with it. Since the projects I want to do are usually building websites rather than writing software, this is counter-productive.

This problem is exacerbated by the state of Java content management systems. There are plenty of frameworks out there that can be used to build a content-oriented site, but nothing that you can just drop into place and start using. I particularly like JPublish, and also Daisy, but either one (or both) would take a lot of work to get going with.

The reason I've started playing with Drupal is that it's oriented towards the type of site I would like to start - mixing community (blogs, forums, comments), and old-style traditional content. It has some fairly large gaps - it doesn't handle images very nicely yet, and it seems awkward to create pages that collect different types of content in useful ways, such as section hubs and monthly archives. But it's technical architecture looks very clean, solid, and extensible, and there is plenty of activity with modules that can do the kinds of things I'm interested in.

Of course none of this actually guarantees I will get a new site underway any time soon, there is still plenty of work to do.

So I don't use an aggregator, here are my reasons.

I tried out Radio, but I found it awkward - I couldn't figure out how to update my feeds without reconfiguring Radio's update time to a minute from the current time. Radio runs a desktop server (yuck) which updates feeds once per hour, but like most Net users worldwide, I'm behind a single phone line with per-minute fees (albeit very low, less than $1/hour) for staying online, so I'd much rather have something I can fire up to grab the latest stuff whenever I go online.

Fine, I'm sure other aggregators would be fine for this, but the other problem I have is that I almost always read everything on my blog list anyway. I have a dozen blogs in a Mozilla Tab group which I read every morning, and I always read through all of the posts, even if I only skim some. If I aggregated these, I'm sure I would first read the summaries, then read all the posts, so I would only be adding to the time I spend in my morning blog reading routine.

Now that I think about it, it might be useful to aggregate my second and third tier blogs, the ones I read when I'm bored, waiting for things to compile/download, etc. Generally when I decide to check out one of these I read the whole thing then too, but if I had summaries of all of their content, I might spot them talking about something especially relevant to me right now, that would otherwise scroll off into their archives. I'll chew on this.

The other thing on my list of things I'll never have time to do is to play with the idea of aggregating into my blog pages. That is, it might be neat to list the headlines of posts on some of my favorite blogs in my sidebar or somewhere similar, sort of a super-blogroll.

One of the advantages of using a popular, established package like Movable Type is the support available. Brad Choate seems to be an alpha MT guru, and has written a number of useful plugins, including KeyValues, which is a hack for storing metadata in extra fields of MT entries as well as category, and blog descriptions. This seems like an easy way for me to store my per-category link lists, so I've been using it. I ran into a problem, posted a question in Brad's comments section, and less than an hour after sending him a copy of my offending code he emailed me updated code which fixed my problem. Thanks, Brad!

Brad maintains that although Movable Type is not intended as a general purpose CMS, it can be coaxed to do a lot more than its authors intended. MT does have the core of a good CMS inside it, but its code is rather locked into its special-purpose application as blogging software. It's template management limits pages to be indexes or archives based on categories or date, and its tag library is similarly restricted. These can be creatively abused to do more than they were intended, but it would be nice if the authors rearchitected it a bit to allow the core to be more easily repurposed for non-blog uses.

The really useful thing about MT is it's got a great model for baking web pages. There are a baskillion web page frying systems whose templates are processed at runtime, ASP, JSP, PHP, et. al. Even more down-to-earth systems like Turbine fry their pages, although Velocity does offer baking functionality with DVSL.

MT bakes its pages when the content or the template changes, and whats more, offers a plugin architecture that makes it easy to extend what happens at bake-time. Since it puts out flat files, pages which really need to be fried, because they have elements which change at view-time (e.g. user personalization), can be produced with whatever frying template code you need.

If the MT authors refactored their code to move the blogging-specific features outside the core of MT, the core could become a very strong web application framework. Of course it would help if they open sourced that bit (they could keep the blog-specific MT stuff under the current semi-open license), but that's a different story.

Like me, Anthony Eden wonders what Dave Winer's point is in his post about making money from blogging. I think Dave is talking about a completely different thing than most bloggers are when they ponder this.

Dave's Cluetrainist idea is a that companies which are transparent to their customers will be more competetive, at least as consumers come to expect it, so blogs will become a standard tool to achieve that transparency. I think he's right, to an extent, but the idea that CEO's and Congressfolks are going to personally blog throughout their day without a PR/legal screen is unlikely. The American legal and political systems can make the consequences of saying the wrong thing very dire. I do think blogs, or something very similar, should and will become a common tool for corporate and political communications, I just don't think we're going to be reading Lou Gerstner bitching about his daily drive to work anytime soon.

That said, the real problem with Dave's vision is that it completely fails to answer the question current-day bloggers are asking, which is "how can I make money from this?" They're publishing content, they're wondering how to make money doing it. Dave compares blogs to word processors because he makes tools for a living, so he's thinking about blogging from the perspective of the tools.

The bloggers aren't talking about the tools, they're talking about the web as a medium for publishing original content. The issue isn't really about blogs, it's about profitably publishing on the web. Individual publishers face many of the same problems as corporate publishers, i.e. subscriptions and advertising don't seem to be profitable, at least not yet.

Bloggers are producing a somewhat different type of content than most big publishers, in that it's largely referrals to and commentary on other content, and it's possible this may make some different opportunities. But bloggers have different challenges, they have a harder time using the web as a loss leader for other revenue streams, although many are authors who hawk their books, and theoretically some tech bloggers might promote consulting services or software (*cough*Userland*cough*Citydesk*).

If the big guys find a way to make web publishing independently profitable, the independents will most likely use the same tactics, even if they have to group together, for example offering a subscription which covers a group of blogs. What would be most interesting is if the bloggers discover a business model that allows an individual publisher to make a good living, but can't be scaled up to support an organization with lawyers, accountants, HR departments, etc.

A couple of links for independent publishers:

I've played around with a few different blogging packages, and so far I like MT well enough. It's a mature piece of software compared with most of the alternatives, and I like the fact that it is both server based and produces flat output. My only gripe is that it is, in fact, a blogging package. This means it's designed with the blogging paradigm firmly in mind, so it's hard to twist and bend it to do exactly what I want.

My main gripe is the templating language doesn't have quite enough oomph to it. It offers a set of tags useful for making blog-shaped pages, but not much else. There are no conditionals - I can automatically create a list of links to each category in the sidebar, but it can't recognize the current category and mark it up differently - leaving it unlinked and flagging it with an icon, for example. I can't tell it to leave certain categories out.

I also can't easily add different data types or fields to the typical blog entry. I want to treat books specially, so I can automatically create Amazon links with my affiliate code. Plus bookmarks. I want to have a different set of links for each category page.

It's possible to stretch and bend MT in ways it wasn't obviously intended, but writing Perl plugins looks like the best way to get the functionality I want. It shouldn't be necessary, though, the MT templating architecture ought to be a bit more flexible than it is.

In the end I settled on MT for kief.com because I don't want to bother either writing Yet Another Goddam Blogger, spend a lot of time helping an existing blogger like Roller, or build blogger functionality on top of a framework like JPublish.

I was seriously considering these things a few weeks ago, because I was planning to get into online publishing as a line of consulting work, but it now looks like I'm going to take on a lot of Unix sysadmin work, so I won't have the cycles to spare. So MT will let me run my site with a minimum of hassle, and if I do get some cycles maybe I'll tackle some of those minor annoyances.