Back in early 2003, a friend and I started a blog called Choking on Popcorn. This was the blog that introduced me to Pivot, Movable Type and later WordPress. My personal blogs (the first on was on Blogger, started in May of 2002) have come and gone, but CoP is still around, and now has almost a thousand movie reviews.

I did a post there yesterday that I could just as easily have posted here. It’s about how new technology is changing the way movies are consumed. About how downloading a movie is often significantly easier than going to see it at the cinema (at least in my case). I’d ove to hear your thoughts on this, so please place your comments over there: Why do you pirate movies?

Wired recently did a great story on how and why netbooks became last year’s big tech trend. “The Netbook Effect: How Cheap Little Laptops Hit the Big Time” starts with the OLPC and ends with cloud computing. It explains why these little laptops defy every rule in the business, and why many of the big brands were late to jump on the bandwagon.

…Netbooks violate all the laws of the computer hardware business. Traditionally, development trickles down from the high end to the mass market. PC makers target early adopters with new, ultrapowerful features. Years later, those innovations spread to lower-end models.

But Jepsen’s design trickled up. In the process of creating a laptop to satisfy the needs of poor people, she revealed something about traditional PC users. They didn’t want more out of a laptop—they wanted less.

While the are a few factual errors in the article (MSI did have a laptop business prior to its first netbook), this is the best article I’ve seen on the netbook phenomenon. Recommended.

Stephane Grenier sent me a copy of his newly published book Blog Blazers, 40 top bloggers share their secrets this week. Having a new book mailed to me reminded of my adventures into book publishing when I contributed to a book about Flash optimization back in 2002. Since then I’ve become an avid blogger, and although I read very little paper nowadays I was curious about this project. Stephane interviewed 40 successful bloggers about how they became just that, and the results are hard to put down.

First impressions

I have to admit that my initial impressions weren’t great. The cover isn’t my favourite piece of artwork, and the page layout isn’t terribly appealing either. Once I’d read a few of the interviews however I thought I’d detected a far more fatal flaw. Every single interviewee answers the same set of questions. Most of the interviews were probably done by email, but I really felt some of the answers warranted further investigation, for which this rigid format does not allow. The conversation just doesn’t take off in all sorts of directions like a most natural conversations would. But even though I was almost ready to put the book down then and there, I didn’t. And a few chapters after that I couldn’t.

The ‘same questions approach’ means you get different views from different people and requires you to make up your own mind. The more of these perspectives you read about the more a consensus begins to form and the more you start to relate it to your own blog. The somewhat monotonous format will probably keep you from reading the book front to back in one go but it does have its merits. Don’t be put off by this either.

Get rich quickly

In my opinion, the focus of the book is a little too much on revenue. Most of the questions are about success in terms of traffic and monetization of weblogs, and even though some bloggers stress that other success factors can be more important I felt the book didn’t quite disspell the myth that blogs are an easy way to get rich. It would have been great to have had a few more questions about the blogger’s motivations and passions.

If you’re serious about blogging and haven’t finished your holiday wish list yet, this might be a good gift idea. It’s not a very expensive book and there is some great expert advice in there. If it leaves you, like it did me, craving for more details, I guess we’ll have to urge Stephane to dive into this a bit deeper and do a follow-up book.