I started a new blog today about changes that affect, and hopefully improve, the way we watch television. http://takingintelevision.blogspot.com/ Would people prefer that I cut way back on the TV-tech related posts here and just feature them there? I felt kind of guilty the past two months by posting here about TV gadgets and gizmos, and not about actual TV programs themselves. I am not going to write much about TV shows themselves in that blog above. At least, as a general rule, I will not. I figure saying things about shows themselves is more what TV.com is all about, and probably more what I should be writing about in my blog here. That and anything exciting them happens to me. Let me know what your thoughts are. Oh, by the way, if you own a TiVo, MS-Windows, and an iPod - you really should read this week's news about the new version of TiVo Desktop / TiVo To Go.

The word for the day is "meme". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme Read it. This is a real theory. What do you think about it? Can you think of any "successful" (not necessarily good or correct) memes that have been widely "accepted"?

Flock 0.7.1 released! Here are the release notes.

We had one of the heaviest rains here tonight that I have seen in a year.

I ran out to get some cat food the yowling "little gray one with the pointy feet and pointy face" and was treated to a real light show while I went to the store.

While I was out, the heavens opened.  When I got home - I got soaked just running from the car to the front door.

The only thing that bugs me, is she ate less than half the can.

It is not clear from the article I just read if this means Invasion is not going to appear next season, or that it is and he will be juggling 2 shooting schedules. Hope the Invasion TV show continues. It is pretty interesting.

Aaron Spelling, who has probably produced more TV shows than anyone in history, had a stroke this weekend. I just read an article that he is recovering from it now. I think it said he was back home from the hospital.

I revisited my vast technical library last week and started studying some recent advances that had caught my eye. At the time I bought those books, I was pretty excited by them. However, as fate would have it, I did not really get to use a few of those things as quickly as I would have liked. Last week I went back and dug back in. Felt good to be back in that familiar saddle again. Those technologies are working great for me on my computer. There is an old saying that says, "The more things change, the more they remain the same". Technology is like lightning. "Once it strikes, the spot is never the same again." They say that "lightning never strikes twice in the same spot" but that last sentence is one of the standard retorts. So it is with the technology of computers. While there are cycles, sure, the main thrust of things is to go constantly forward. Not too many other areas in life and civilization can say that. Technology can.

In the world of computer software, there is more than one kind of data.

Shocking, you say - right?

Well, it is true. Everyone is familiar with more than one kind of file format. We have all run into that.

Some programs cannot read documents written with other applicaotins at all. Others will recognize them, and make a fiar attempt at converting them.

How about a web page?

Can there be more than one kind of web page?

Sure, there are actually many types. HTML, XHTML, SVG, RSS, XML - just to name a few.

Us humans can read the content on this pages. Our computer formats it, to make it readable to us. Does our computer really understand what that page is "saying" though?

Generally, it does not.

It knows what text is in it. It recognizes instructions telling it how to style on the page in general, and in specific places - like when I say, "make this bold".

And, lo - so it is.

However, there are ways to tell a computer program what a document is about - and even how to find specific bits of data - or information - inside.

We programmers refer to these ways, collectively, as "metadata".

Metadata is data about data. The prefix "meta-" means "like". Not in the sense of "having affection for" but in the sense of "being sort of the same as".

Anyway, there is a new kind of metadata being rolled out onto the web. This new data provides a way of tagging specific bits of information in a web page.

This new technique uses something called "Microformats". What Microformats try to do is take existing standards, say like the vCard file standard or the iCal file standard, and shoehorn the same information into a web page.

One particular Microformat of interest here, in the TV.com community, I think - is called the hReview microformat.

What hReview allows you to do is create a book, article, movie, or TV show review. The review is physically generated with a dual purpose.

1. be readable by humans, because that is the point
2. be readable by software, so search engines and social web data aggregators can find it and lump it together with other data & documents they know about

Here is a sample blog post containing an hReview of a TV show.

The author of the post created it with a program he created himself and put on a website called hReview Creator. The name is pretty self-explanatory.

Here is a blog post about hReview, if you are interested in learning more about it.

So far, you know what hReview is for, and you know how to create a review in that format that can be stuck in a web page.

What you do not know, are specific services or applications that can use that format.

There are a couple already. There will be more to come.

1. Firefox 2.0 (currently in alpha) web browser has a feature called Microsummaries which can be taught how to read individual Microformats, and extaract the information from them - and generate little summaries of them. This could easily be used to create a Table Of Contents for a web page that was packed with a whole bunch of hReview-formatted reviews.
2. Technorati, the web 2.0 blog reading/monitoring service just announced that their service is now able to read/understand information in Microformats, such as hReview.
   

Now, at the moment, this is not too germane to TV.com.

One way it could become very germane, is if TV.com started creating RSS feeds of TV show/series reviews, and automatically supplied the metadata it has on file in the hReview Microformat. That would be, in a word, incredible.

Another way Microformats could be useful is if TV.com started generating an RSS feed for each person's blog. Then people could embed Microformat-based information into their blog posts.

There are Microformats for events, contacts, addressses - you name it. And the number of Microformats out there will probably steadily grow throughout 2006-2007.

I have introduced you to Microformats, in particular - hReview. I have provided one example of a review that was written adhering to the hReview standard. I have supplied you with an address of a web page that can generate hReview formatted information for reviews you write. I have given an example of one website and one web browser that can already read/parse/understand/aggregate this information.

I hope you found this interesting. If you have any other ideas for how it can be useful, please post a comment and let me hear your thoughts.

One thing I like about the Yahoo TV site that works very well for me is that it does not assume that I have cable or satellite TV.

Lots of TV-related sites, not just TV.com, presume that people no longer watch broadcast TV. Well, I do.

I also own a TiVo. My brother actually got one first, and when I went to visit him one time, he showed me how cool it was.

Ironically, he mentioned after I bought my TiVo, that I had pointed out the TiVo to him on an earlier visit when we dropped by a popular home electronics store.

I had just read about it in a magazine, I vaguely recall, and was juiced on the fact that it ran Linux (yes, I TiVo has a whole computer with an OS inside). I had also heard it made TV watching easier.

Anyway, now Yahoo TV works with TiVo, as Yahoo is pointing out in their website. So, if you have a TiVo, you might want to check that out.

Someone has written a nice review of Flock beta 1. Flock is a web browser based on the famous Firefox browser, which works on all versions of Windows from Windows 98 on, as well as on Mac OS X, and Linux. Flock adds fun "social" features to the browser, like a word processor for blogging, photo-sharing, news-watching, news-reading, etc. Flock works on this site too. So does Firefox, for that matter. And Camino. All 3 of them use the same web page rendering core.