AU Interactive

Top 5 Must-Have Add-Ons for Your Blog in 2007

These are the top five things that have made by blogging experience richer/better/easier in 2006. I recommend you try these out (if you haven’t already) in 2007.

» Continue reading “Top 5 Must-Have Add-Ons for Your Blog in 2007″

5 Comments

How to Make your Readers Look Good: Change your MyBlogLog style

Recently I’ve added a MyBlogLog widget (top right) to my blog and I’ve seen many other bloggers do the same.

I’ve had it running for a few weeks now and I think it’s one of the best widgets out there. It’s unique because it gives you a glimpse into who your regular readers are. It helps you build a community of readers effortlessly.

» Continue reading “How to Make your Readers Look Good: Change your MyBlogLog style”

68 Comments

Obligatory Blog Tag Post

Sugarrae blog tagged me a few weeks ago but I haven’t gotten around to posting since the holidays have been so busy.

» Continue reading “Obligatory Blog Tag Post”

1 Comment

Blockbuster Total Access: In Store and Online Movie Rentals in One

Blockbuster Total Access
Free Trial for Blockbuster’s Total Access

Netflix
Free Trial for Netflix

Michael Arrington (of Techcrunch) just posted about his switch to Blockbuster’s online movie rental service called Total Access away from Netflix. Apparently Blockbuster is now offering the option to rent movies online AND bring them back into a local store to instantly get another movie rental. Basically it combines Blockbuster’s online movie rentals with traditional in-store rentals - you can do either or. This is something Netflix can’t offer.

Many years ago I tried Netflix - but at that time their systems were slow and their distribution was not as efficient as I’m sure it is now. The spread between when i mailed back a movie and received the new movie in the mail was too long - about 4-5 days. I canceled it a few months later and have not used an online video rental service since.

Now that Blockbuster Video introduced Total Access, I think I’m going to give it a try. I like the option of just driving down to the Blockbuster any given night and exchanging the video. This should also solve the “difficult to get a new release” problem that Netflix apparently has.

I’d really love to see one of these services come out with an API. I think widgetizing people’s movie queues or what they just watched (sort of like Last.fm for movies) would be a killer marketing strategy for either Netflix or Blockbuster. I also think people could come up with some cool mashups if they just let their data loose.

Actually, I think I’ll sign up for both Netflix and Blockbuster (using my own my affiliate links below) and compare the two video services in a future post.

Update: My experience with Netflix v. Blockbuster Total Access

Both services have free trial offers:

Netflix free trial Blockbuster Free Trial

16 Comments

How to Lie with Statistics 2.0: Using Pageviews as a Metric

Earlier this week comscore came out with numbers that showed Fox/MySpace had surpassed Yahoo in pageviews for the very first time. There was a lot of buzz in the blogosphere about this and many people took these numbers to mean that MySpace was more popular than Yahoo.
» Continue reading “How to Lie with Statistics 2.0: Using Pageviews as a Metric”

1 Comment