Site Feed of the Day: Ed Bott

This weeks theme for the Site of the Day feature is going to be Windows Media Center blogs. I chose people that I regularly read and that I feel always offer something interesting to say about digital media.

Today’s Site of the Day is Ed Bott’s blog. Ed has been the editor of PC World and PC Computing and has written numerous books about Microsoft Windows and Office. Ed’s blog is all about Windows, including a lot of content on Windows Media Center and the convergence of the digital living room. Ed was kind enough to do an email interview with me that you can read below. I recommend checking out his site (watch for the Windows Tip of the Day, one my favorite features) and also his books!

I'm a big fan and you've written some great books. Are you going to do a Media Center book?

I certainly would like to do a Media Center book. I've looked around, and there are currently no books out that do a very good job with the topic. I've prepared a proposal and an outline for what I think would be a dynamite Media Center book - now I just have to get my publisher to say yes!

How long have you been blogging? Has this had any impact on the way you write or what you write about in your books?

The first blog post at edbott.com is dated December 22, 2002. It was the usual "Welcome to my new blog" sort of post. Interestingly, the second post I ever wrote, which was published on December 23, is still one of my most popular pages. It's a simple explanation of what to do if you lose the product ID (CD key) for your copy of Office or Windows. I had been tinkering with Movable Type for a month or two before that and decided to take the plunge. It has indeed had an impact on the way I write books. I'm often able to work out ideas in a blog post and get feedback on them from the community. The result in some cases is that what I write in the book is changed from my original idea, directly because of that feedback.

What is the message or focus of your blog?

In a word, Windows. The focus has expanded a bit in the past couple of years to encompass what I think are the two most important trends in computing: security and the convergence of PC-based digital media with home entertainment equipment.

What is your Media Center setup? What other home entertainment equipment do you have?

I have two PCs running Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. Both are homebuilt. One is strictly for testing. The one I use daily is based on a Shuttle ST61G4 with a 3GHz Pentium 4, 1GB of RAM, and a 200GB SATA hard drive. It has a dual-tuner Hauppage WinTV-PVR-500 card. It lives in my office; I have a Linksys Media Center Extender in the living room hooked up to a Mitsubishi HDTV. I have a five-year-old Series 1 TiVo, which I hacked to include a much larger drive; it is now retired. I also have a high-definition DVR from Cox Cable which I've expanded with an external SATA drive. The house and the outdoor spaces are wired for sound, with speakers that run back to the living room, so we can listen to music from the Media Center anywhere in the house. We also have a system from AVCast to distribute video from the Media Center to TVs in other rooms. No satellites, no game consoles.

What do you feel is the best feature of Media Center? What area needs the most improvement?

The best feature of Media Center is its recording interface, and specifically the movie spotlight. It lets me go through a whole list of upcoming movies, sorted by star rating. I can see cast information and plot summaries and read reviews and record whatever looks interesting. I'm an old movie buff, so this is ideal for getting the most out of American Movie Classics and Turner Classic Movies, not to mention the many HBO and Starz channels we subscribe to. Right now I have at least ten classic comedies on tap, including the Marx Brothers, Charlie Chaplin, and Harold Lloyd.

What needs the most improvement? Two things: First, cable connections and HDTV support. The biggest weakness in Media Center right now is that it can't receive HDTV signals from a cable; it has to be connected to a digital set-top box and can only get SD. Second, it needs to be more appliance-like. It's still a Windows computer, which means it can hang, crash, and require a level of maintenance that is way beyond what an appliance like a TiVo requires. Of course, that also means it's incredibly expandable, so it's a mixed blessing. I think that the Longhorn-based Media Center PCs (fall 2007, maybe?) will be a huge leap forward.

What are your thoughts of the digital convergence in the living room? What do you think is the biggest obstacle?

There's a psychological and physical obstacle for people to overcome before a PC feels like a natural addition to the living room. We need much smaller form factors with quieter designs. And they need to be more reliable. Oh, and the price needs to be right. I'm guessing $500 is the magic number for a box that does everything at an acceptable level of functionality, with under $1000 for a tricked-out unit. Current prices probably need to come down by half.

Any predictions on Media Center when Longhorn comes out?

Ask me again this summer!

Give us a little background about yourself and how you got into technology.

I've been interested in technology for as long as I can remember. At UCLA, I majored in communication studies and political science and stayed far from the science and engineering buildings. I suspect my life would have been very different if I had gone to MIT and gotten a computer science degree! In my very first full-time job, back in the 1970s, I wrote round-ups of home and automotive audio equipment for a popular men's magazine, and I covered the semiconductor manufacturing industry in the early 1980s. I got my first job in the PC industry as managing editor of PC World in 1987 and then became editor of PC Computing in 1991. I've been using and writing about Windows since way before it was cool. I've lost count of the number of books I've done about Windows and Office over the past 10 years, which I guess is a good thing! It's been gratifying to see the near-universal acceptance of computing technology, and I think we're still in the early days of the technological revolution. The idea that I can write whatever I want, whenever I want, have it read by thousands of people, and even change the world in some large or small way, is pretty amazing.