In a couple of weeks Blog Navigiator 1.0 will be released and boy is it cool. It's the only way I interact with JoeUser pretty much these days because the speed advantages of RSS feeds vs. slogging it through the JoeUser.com website are so apparent.

The only thing I can't do - yet - is navigate through the forums. But that should be rectified fairly soon.  But it's not just reading blogs, posting blogs is easy too. The posting part requires Blog Navigator Pro which will come out afterwards.

We've decided to make Blog Navigator freeware and then have the Pro version be the $20 one.  The difference between the two being the ability to create your own blogs. Blog Navigator Pro supports posting to pretty much any type of blog site too, not just JoeUser.

For other blogs sites, Blog Navigator will be a boon as well because we've made it so that you can customize the free version of Blog Navigator for your own site (complete with default links, product branding, etc.). Then the blogger can sell from their blog site the "Pro" version and get a cut.

As conceited as this is to say, I know of no RSS reader available, on any platform, that can compete with the features of Blog Navigator Pro.  Even the free version of Blog Navigator has few that are really competitive -- even its non-free competition.

But I'll be going through more of that as the release date gets closer. Stay tuned!

If you don't already have Natural Desktop, check it out at www.naturaldesktop.com. It's a new program that includes a bunch of natural looking wallpapers created by Digital Blasphemy with a sound track made by Mason Fischer with natural sounds and then has software behind the scenes to figure out what wallpaper and sound track to play based on the current time of day, time of year, and weather conditions.

It also includes a really cool animated weather portal (there's nothing like this anywhere, you have to see it to believe it) that displays the current weather and lets you control the various options in it.

Anyway, because it's been so much more popular than we had anticipated, we've decided to open up a Stardock news group for it: news://news.stardock.com/stardock.naturaldesktop. On there, you can post questions, get support, make feature requests, etc.  Since it's becoming so popular, we are definitely open to adding more features to it over time.

The traditional news organizations have tended to look at the on-line world with a considerable amount of contempt.

Blog sites, tech sites, and others have often been the first to break a story on the net. How many MS articles first show up on-line now on sites like Neowin or The Register? In fact, many stories, tech and non-tech show up first on-line.

But respect has been slow coming as there was always the believe that there was something inherently less reliable about the news from a Neowin or a blog site or what not because they don't have the editorial controls that traditional media outlets such as the New York Times or network news have.

This flap over the CBS Bush memos, however, seems to call that all into question. The documents CBS had insisted were authentic seem pretty obvious forgeries and the further third parties investigate, the more it seems that the entire process - the so called "layers of editiorial control" were little more than empty claims.

Here's an article that argues that this CBS memo scandal may be the moment that old media "jumped the shark".

USA Today reviews The Political Machine and gives a play by play example of a Bush vs. Kerry game. Check it out at:

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/games/2004-09-09-politicalmachine_x.htm

 

Was on CBS Radio in Seattle Washington and then CBS Radio in Boston and then on AP News Wire talking about politics and The Political Machine.

I got all tingly tonight when I heard Little Green Footballs mentioned on The O'Reilly Factor. I thought "Hey, good for him!" Though a little jealous that he beat us to a mention.

I couldn't help joke about the whole memo thing though when talking about Smear Merchants.

 

With millions of bloggers on-line and even with network TV news stories now getting fact checked in real time, the question is, has blogging become mainstream?

Mormegil has put together a simple tutorial on how to use some simple scripting to create your own really cool desktop widgets.

Bummer, the artist we were trying to hire in from the west isn't going to be able to come. Now we're still stuck without a lead modeler on Master of Magic/Sorcery. The search continues.

The Political Machine is published by Ubi Soft, one of the world's premiere game publishers.  But the game was designed and developed by Stardock (www.stardock.com).

Stardock came up with the idea for The Political Machine back in 2000 during the Florida debacle. Realizing that the country was split evenly, a strategy game idea was born.  Stardock's last game, Galactic Civilizations, won numerous awards including best turn based strategy game and editor's choice awards from Computer Gaming World, Computer Games Magazine, and several other game magazines.

Stardock is best known for their desktop enhancement software such as Object Desktop (www.objectdesktop.com) whose components are used by millions of users across the world and whose corporate customers include Microsoft, Sony, Good Year, ATI, nVidia, Nintendo, Alienware and others.

Stardock is located in Livonia Michigan.

Next week will mark the official launch of JoeUser.com, arguably the world's fastest growing blogging community on the Internet.

On JoeUser.com, you can create your own free blog site and post articles on any topic you can imagine. Articles in the politics category gets syndicated out to sites like this one for instance.

Visit https://www.joeuser.com to check out the articles written by thousands of others on-line or to create your own free blog.