For 53 years, NORAD has been tracking Santa’s trips from the North Pole and around the world and providing up to the minute updates on his deliveries. This year you and your children can track Santa with NORAD by visiting NORAD Track Santa where you will find real-time updates on Santa’s position, videos from his stops in various cities, and the option to track him with Google Earth in 3D.

We have our Santa tracker already set up and are watching him make his way from the other side of the globe to our house. I hope he remembers to stop!

Netflix on Xbox 360 is extremely disappointing.

It could be my fault.  Perhaps I had my expectations set too high.  I guess I fully expected to sit down at my Xbox 360, browse through Netflix’s amazing collection of movies and TV shows, click a few buttons and finally enjoy the ultimate home theater on-demand experience. Unfortunately Netflix on Xbox 360 is not that at all.

1. The browsing experience does not take place on the Xbox 360 at all.  Instead you have to browse and make your movie selection on a PC and then wait for the Xbox 360 to sync with your Netflix Instant Queue.
2. While browsing the Netflix Watch Instantly movies available, you will quickly find that the selection – well the selection sucks.  The currently listed New Arrivals include 2000’s Frequency, 1996’s Swingers and 1990’s Pretty Woman.
3. No HD quality videos available as far as I can see.  You will have to settle for DVD.
4. The delivery is actually pretty good.  Once you select a movie, it syncs to the Xbox in a matter of seconds, and you are up a and watching in under a minute.

To be fair, my disappointment is not Microsoft’s fault; unless you consider that they chose to partner with Netflix which seems like a really good idea on the surface.  Microsoft and Netflix could have done a better job of integrating the browsing experience into the Xbox Dashboard so I don’t have to bounce to a PC to select movies and them back to the Xbox to watch.

The real issue is with Netflix’s Watch Instantly selection, which they have touted on the PC for quite some time, and now on the Xbox 360.  The truth is the movies available are either very old, or films you probably haven’t heard of.

The Xbox 360 Video Marketplace on the other hand has a good selection, but you have to plan ahead as the download times ar way to long to consider “on-demand.”

Has anyone else had similar or better experiences with Xbox 360 video?

It seems that Bezos keeps his investing activities separate from the business of Amazon.com, so I don’t think we will see an influx of Amazon.com applications leveraging Twitter soon, but I wonder if AWS is not a viable platform for Twitter.

They already use S3 for serving up avatars, so I wonder if moving to EC2 and related services might be part of the plan?

What do you think? is this just a new round of funding for Twitter and Jeff Bezos just happens to be in the mix, or is this the start of something bigger for Twitter?

(Photo credit ETech)

But, does that really put enough teeth into it? I mean if you are not verifying email addresses, John Doe could easily put in something bogus and untrackable. What if you put something really identifiable into the watermark – like the credit card number used to purchase the book?

If you are not sharing it then no harm no foul, right? But does that cross a line in terms of trust?

What do you think? How much information is too much for a social DRM watermark?

(Photo Credit Leo Reynolds)

(About 30 seconds into the video – watch how it moves as it manages to stay upright after a kick from its operator.)

Several companies found out today when Amazon.com’s S3 service experienced an outage and left applications without their data tier. I first experienced it this morning about 8:30 EST when those of us on Twitter noticed that avatars were not loading. Later reports of missing images on Facebook, and other applications started rolling in as startups and application developers realized their apps were broken due to the Amazon S3 outage.

So, what to do when you rely on the cloud? Simple – don’t rely on the cloud completely.

SmugMug’s Don MacAskil has it right, and discussed his approach on TechCrunch’s report of the outage:

We do rely on S3 for our primary storage, but we do maintain our own “hot cache” of data in our datacenters, too, which is less than 10% of our total storage. Our customers weren’t affected by this morning’s outage.

PBwiki’s Nathan Schmidt agrees:

Never build your architecture to require low-latency, high-availability access to S3 or its competitors, because you won’t get those – that’s not what it’s for, that’s not what it’s optimized for, and you’re never going to be able to peel back those layers of abstraction and long-haul network.

(Photo credit akakumo)

I went through several steps including 301 redirects for www.ckwebb.com, a revamped robots.txt, and an optimized Google sitemap, but the thing that finally got this site listed in Google is one you might not think of. I finally came to the conclusion that the problem with my blog was not that Google couldn’t find it – it was getting crawled. The problem was that my website was banned from Google – blackballed, shut out, ignored – non-existent as far as the majority of web searchers were concerned.

I racked my brains trying to figure out what I had done – what had I written to cause the Google Gods to shun me? It finally dawned on me that it might not be something I had done. I started thinking that perhaps my domain name was on the ban list at Google.

I purchased ckwebb.com in February 2007. A quick lesson here – don’t assume that just because a domain name is available that it has never been used before. In my case, ckwebb.com has had a varied past. According the Internet Archive, ckwebb.com has a history dating back to 1998 when it was a portfolio site for photographer Charles K. Webb. But it was the activity on ckwebb.com from 2000-2002, a weird spammy landing site and doorway page that likely caused Google to shut the door.

I resubmitted my site for reconsideration via Google Webmaster Tools, and in about 48 hours ckwebb.com emerged as a legitimate website in the Google index.

So the takeaway here is to be sure and check the history of your domain before you buy it and to be aware of it possibly seedy past.

On Getting Patient Information 

It’s great because they submit all their information ahead of time, so I pretty much know what’s going on prior to the meeting. I know what to talk about, what points to hit, what things I can skip over that other physicians would concentrate on and waste time on. They spend 10-15 minutes giving me all their health information via an online form.

On his technology bag of tricks

It’s very basic, freely available technology. I have a Macbook and an iPhone. IM programs, like ATM and iChat for the Mac. I just use regular e-mail, Gmail in fact, because it’s very powerful.

I use a website called Formspring for my online forms. It’s very simply drag and drop forms creation. Any form can be made in three minutes or so. It uses skip branch logic, so questions can appear or disappear based on responses to previous questions.

 On making a living on $200 housecalls

Sure. Look, I have no overhead whatsoever. If I charge $200 a visit, $195 of that is straight profit. I think that’s a pretty good living. If I see eight patients a day, that’s $1600. Without having staff, an office, billers … it becomes a very easily doable practice. I definitely designed the business model looking at that. The concept of doing the housecall was a way to open a practice without putting $300,000 upfront. I started this whole thing for less than $1,500.

(Photo credit happysnappr)

This is a sad time for the web. It’s as almost somber as the time just before the last bubble burst in 2000. I was working in PR with dot-com startups at the time and the way I feel now is how I did back then. I wish I didn’t, but I do. Something needs to be said. Even if no one listens or cares what I think.

Social applications are exciting, and the buzz level is high to be sure.  I have been guilty of being a fanboy from time to time, but try to keep things in perspective.  Is it really as bad as Steve thinks?

What do you think?

Photo: Al-Fassam 

1. It is one of only a very few from traditional print publishers
2. It is not just a branding play
3. They have built in some interesting sticky features
4. Good tie-in’s to their content

I believe items 3 and 4 are the most important for content providers. The Quiz is offered every weekday morning and the scoring system is probably motivational enough to keep many coming back for more.

In addition, they offer ample opportunities to click through to the content related to the quiz, and I thought the “study links” for the next day’s quiz feature was especially clever.

The scoring seems a bit off to me, but that’s likely because it was my first test on the first day. My particular ranking of 68% among Facebook users is strange as I got 100% on the first test. See how competitive I am already?

It is important to remember that we are in the very early days of Facebook apps. I am sure we will see many more from content providers as the platform matures and as companies figure out exactly what they want to accomplish with these applications. Still, it’s exciting to see traditional publishers playing here.

(Thanks Read/Write Web)