I got a brief view of all the capabilities of Active Video and was impressed. Sure my company, VoyageTV has an Active Video channel on Cablevision (channel 608), but I had never met Active’s CEO Jeff Miller nor had I seen what the capabilities could be.

And I have Boxee running on my laptop and have distribution deals with several over-the-top solutions, but Active Video has a couple big advantages that could help them win. While Active Video can run off a cable box, it doesn’t really need to. It can run with a Web connection. And it doesn’t require “box” which is a mistake that Boxee is making (in my opinion). I doubt I would buy a box — even an Apple TV box. Why would you? The TV is itself a box. Connected to the Internet it just needs to “tune” to an IP address that can deliver a user experience given the aspect ratio and size of most sets.

And Active Video delivers on the Interface. Big Plus. Finally, partnering with the cable companies seems like perhaps anchoring to a sinking ship, but I wouldn’t bet against cable just yet. There is simply too much ad money there and people watch a lot of TV and will be doing so for quite some time. So trying to capitalize a start-up waiting for the cable companies to run out of steam seems like a painful ordeal. Better join ‘em. For now. Like Active Video.

Google giveth and Google crusheth.  One of our VC’s at VoyageTV sent me a note during the week about Google’s changing algorithm. I tend to not always respond to emailed articles during the day, but I tend to always respond to our VC. Google’s move was welcome and search results were shuffled immediately.

My point of view at the time was something along the lines of Hallelujah. After reading more my POV remains the same. There is no shortage of coverage on the topic and here is one that’s more General Interest at CNET if you hadn’t seen/followed the announcement. Coming from the magazine business where getting a good story assigned, edited, and fact checked – I mean a GOOD story – was always a challenge, and I’m always amazed by the amount of dreck being tossed up on the Web.

So maybe there’s hope for writers who approach the task as a craft as opposed to a search optimized, trend predicted, word counted endeavor. Good writing, like a good film, good food or anything that takes talent is still a scarce commodity. Ranking sites based on who could simply post the most sentences tipped the balance toward the Demand Media’s of the world (still does apparently – sell below). But good to see the pendulum swing. Let’s see if Google can create a ranking for a good story as opposed to good web story.

Now there have been reports of blogs and others being “hit” by the new algorithm – for me traffic is up, but here are some interesting articles on the topic:

Google Kills eHow Competitors

Google Farmer: Quest for Quality

And as much as I disagree with Demand Media’s version of content, it seems like Google’s recent adjustment was more about duplicate content than less-than-stellar content. Let’s see where the pendulum ends up.

Did a quick Q/A with BlackWeb2.0 founder Angela Benton for my FastCompany Blog. I’ve always thought the site had an interesting and wide perspective of what’s going on, and has an interesting edit focus that’s a cross between tech and culture.

There are more interesting sites than can be mentioned in any story — so the site itself acts like a reference for what’s going on. The bigger question is which sites can become truly financial viable, can the successful sites already up stay up, and will we see some evolution out of content and more into applications. Certainly there are many Black app developers and interesting businesses such as Sheldon Gilbert’s Proclivity, but would be great to see more.

Kevin Kelly is the founding executive editor of Wired Magazine. I don’t remember how I came up on his YouTube presentation about Web 3.0, but aside from the shots of the audience, it’s the most compelling clip I’ve seen on YouTube to date.

Kelly reminds the audience that the World Wide Web, as we know it, is only 5,000 days old, give or take. And the amount of development we’ve witnessed in this period almost defies description, and certainly was not predicted at the outset.

Kelly’s thesis is, in part, that what we are really constructing is one GIANT computer. Each individual laptop represents a node in this newly engineered neural net. His description far exceeds mine and I highly recommend taking the time (some 42 minutres) to watch his presentation. But given his scenario, I’m not sure I am as pleased about it as he is.

We all generally agree that technology has improved our lives, but has it changed what we are as an “us” as well? Has being insulated from nature made us more unnatural? I see two sides to the coin in this technological march. There are tremendous benefits; medical advances that are amazing even if access is uneven, we’ve explored the universe and understand much of it with the brute computational power of these machines. But why do we need one GIANT computer? And why would we be happy about it?

His comment resonated as I had been thinking that Twitter was really one giant conversation, as opposed to many. It’s not even a conversation, but just short flashes of ideas and obervations from around the world, saying not so much individually. Aggregated, however, if all of those tweets were scraped and analyized, what does it tell us? What are the trends? What are “we” thinking. I wonder on Twitter if we would even know if we were talking to a person or a machine.

In any case, it’s something to think about, and perhaps “think” is all we can do as this march barrels ahead in one direction led by no one in particular to who knows where. It’s certainly got me thinking.

Have seen some high energy comments about the new “Black” browser, Blackbird. With a Black president it might seem that the ultimate in assimilation has been accomplished, so why now?

I haven’t used the browser, but I don’t think it’s a bad idea. On-line users are grouped by likes, age, and all sorts of demo’s, so if some users feel like they get the best out the Net using a Black browser, fine. Some of the most outspoken people have been Black and see it as some sort of throw-back, or even an insult.

But Black people are not monolithic. Black people are as diverse as any ethnic group, and as mixed racially, and are literally all over the map. If some portion of the folks want to use a Black browser because it speaks to them, and delivers more relevant search returns then it’s a win for Ed Young. But read the comments at TechCrunch and you can see that some have taken the browser as a symbol for something bigger.