But if you saw any of the headlines recently, you might think Blockbuster is on a roll. Once a slumbering, lumbering giant, over the past week the company has reversed course and made some key moves in an effort to catch up to the competition, including launching a set top box (just in time for the holidays), and announcing that they are working with Microsoft to deploy video content to multiple screens using the Live Mesh framework (our coverage). Are things starting to look up for the Texas-based company?

Those are definitely both key developments for Blockbuster in their quest to remain relevant, but it is likely too little, too late. On paper, Blockbuster’s 2wire MediaPoint set top box competes favorably with the competition: they have less total content than Netflix, but more new releases, the progressive playback technology will look good to people with slower web connections, and the a la carte pricing might appeal to casual renters. But Netflix has their streaming service on way more devices. Tivo, Xbox 360, Blu-ray and DVD players from Samsung and LG — Netflix integration turns these into multi-function devices that will trump the MediaPoint for many (most?) consumers.

Integrating with Microsoft’s Live Mesh might eventually yield some neat applications — such as the ability to pause a rented movie on one TV and continue watching it later on another TV, or mobile device, at the same point in the film. But the problem for Blockbuster is that if Mesh is a success, we see no reason that Netflix won’t also be using it.

After all, Netflix is also a Microsoft partner — they stream movies to the Xbox 360, as we said, and their live streaming service uses Silverlight. It wouldn’t make sense for Microsoft to form an exclusive partnership with Blockbuster at the expense of one of their other high profile partners.

Essentially, Blockbuster is still going to be playing catch up with more agile competitors like Netflix, Apple, and Amazon as more people shift to downloading their movies rather than renting them on disc.

However, whereas Microsoft won’t save Blockbuster, Blockbuster will be good for Microsoft. Microsoft has been able to push its Silverlight technology out onto 25% of web connected computers in just under 2 years thanks almost exclusively to high profile corporate deployments, including one at Blockbuster. By leaning on their enterprise partners, Microsoft can likely do the same thing with Mesh and push it out to consumers. Whether or not Blockbuster’s usage of Mesh is a positive for the movie rental company, it will almost certainly provide a great demo of the technology’s capabilities for Microsoft.

Even though the Blockbuster-Microsoft partnership made news today, it was actually announced about a month ago at Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference, where Mesh applications under development at Blockbuster and the BBC were demoed on stage. Microsoft provided us with a video of the Blockbuster app demo, which can be viewed here.

A lot of people believe that desktop applications are migrating to the cloud and the computing experience of the future will be one in which we interact with programs that are actually running and storing our data elsewhere. Adobe and Microsoft, with Flash and Silverlight respectively, are among the leading candidates to provide the development platform on which many of these next generation rich Internet applications will be built.

However, even though adoption of Silverlight has been good, and Microsoft claims that some version of their 20-month-old technology is installed on 25% of web connected computers, that’s still a drop in the bucket compared to Flash. Flash is near ubiquitous, and Adobe claims its install base is over 98% of web connected computers — or about 4 times larger than Microsoft’s install based for Silverlight.

Still, Microsoft is actually innovating quite rapidly with Silverlight, with plans to release version 3 of the RIA technology next year. And because of Microsoft’s strength in the enterprise, they’ve been able to score a large number over high profile deployments for Silverlight over the past couple of years. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that Flash and Silverlight could be on more equal footing when it comes to user reach by the end of 2009.

Last week on Hacker News someone posed an interesting hypothetical. If Silverlight had the same install base as Flash, which would you use? We’d love to hear your responses, so vote in our poll and let us know in the comments why you voted the way you did.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Windows, meanwhile, sunk below 90% of Internet usage by operating system for the first time. Internet Explorer also sunk below the psychological barrier of 70% to 69.78% for the first time in Net Applications’ tracking survey. Though Windows Vista made gains, they were not enough to make up for losses in Internet share sustained by the Windows XP operating system.

IE’s slip, meanwhile, can be attributed mainly to gains by the Firefox browser, which finished the month above 20% of the first time ever. The reason Firefox saw such a huge jump in November, according to Net Applications, is because the browser enjoys increased use by residential users and the month was jam-packed with days in which business users would be surfing from home: the US election, the Thanksgiving holiday, and extra weekend days.

While Net Application’s net usage data doesn’t really measure “market share” in the traditional sense, the data should nonetheless be alarming for Microsoft. Even if Apple’s gains could be attributed to Apple users just using the net more than Windows users, and not to an actual shift in market share, given that the operating system of the future may be based in the web, that’s still bad news for Microsoft.

Edit: The clips got pulled from YouTube, so we’ve embedded the entire episode from Hulu below. This one won’t disappear, but it means you’ll have to watch other parts of the episode to see the bits where they lampoon Apple.

Now, tiny Emeryville, California-based Good OS, has taken the browser-as-OS idea a bit further with the announcement of their latest operating system, dubbed “Cloud.” Good OS is most famous for the gOS, a Linux distribution that debuted last year on the Everex gPC, a $199 computer sold at Wal-Mart. gOS is a slimmed down version of Linux that is made to specifically play nice with web applications and web-centric apps like Google Calendar, Docs, Gmail, Skype, YouTube, and Firefox.

The new Cloud OS product, which was announced today at the Netbook World Summit in Paris, France, is specifically designed for netbooks and nettop computers. Cloud boots “in seconds” into a browser that is specifically designed to make access to cloud based applications, like Google’s suite of web apps, quick and easy via a built-in Mac OS X-like dock that has been added to the browser. Notice that the browser looks a lot like Google Chrome, which is open source. That seems unlikely to be a coincidence.

Because Cloud integrates a browser with a compressed Linux kernel, users can also load other applications, such as Skype. The OS can be installed alongside Windows or another Linux distribution, and users can switch between them. Cloud’s footprint is a tiny 35MB and can boot from a thumb drive or CD. According to the web site it “does not require additional hardware and is compatible with any operating system.”

Good OS founder and CEO David Liu said Cloud was his “favorite gOS product yet.”

It will find its way onto GIGABYTE Touch-Screen Netbooks early next year, along with Windows XP. Those machines are expected to debut at CES in January.

The demonstration was such a hit, that a number of other web frameworks emulated the Rails screencast and released their own versions. Akelos, CakePHP, CodeIgniter and others have released screencasts inspired by the original Rails video.

Recently, Hansson’s influential screencast received an update for Rails 2.2. The new screencast was produced by Ryan Bates of Railscasts, which puts out free Rails tutorial screencasts every week. In addition to the better production values that Bates brings, the new screencast has been ratcheted up a few notches by creating a blogging application that include commenting, RSS feeds, an API, an admin interface, AJAX, and more in just 15 minutes.

The new screencast might actually be a bit too fast and cram in too much information for it to be very useful as a learning aid (of course, that really depends on how fast you synthesize information and your individual learning style). But it definitely raises the bar in terms of showing the beauty of the Rails framework in a quick and easy to digest format.

The official screencast page also links the two previous Rails blog screencasts, created for version 0.5 and 1.0 of the framework, for those interested in seeing how the framework has changed over the year.

The willingness of users to pay for applications released on the App Store has made the iPhone an attractive development platform for programmers. We wrote in August that many developers are now making a living selling applications, especially if they can keep their costs of living down. The Inside iPhone blog reported last week that full-time contract developers are making $5,000 per week writing applications for the iPhone — that’s a quarter million dollars per year.

But how many of those iPhone applications are worth your time? With so many vying for attention, how does one sort out the fluff from the worthwhile apps?

The comparison with the Facebook platform is unavoidable. Though there are clearly many differences (iPhone developers can charge for apps, for example, and iPhone users, since they paid for the phone and monthly service, are likely more willing on the whole to pay for apps), there are also similarities, so the comparison is warranted. Even though the iPhone’s platform has just about a fifth of the total number of applications on the Facebook platform, now up over 48,000 apps, we started to see reports of application fatigue on Facebook last January when the platform had just 15,000 apps.

As more and more developers flock to these platforms to try to make a quick buck, the noise level inevitably rises. We’re seeing it on Facebook, where the number of apps continues to grow steadily, but user engagement has leveled off. Will the same thing happen on the iPhone?

We actually may already be seeing the beginnings of that. About a third of the applications on the iPhone platform are in the Games or Entertainment categories, according to 148Apps.com. On Facebook, those categories are generally code for “fluff” apps. The iPhone is now being marketed as a game platform, so the Games category likely doesn’t mean poorly made apps as often as it does on Facebook, but coupled with the fact that most apps sit below the $1.99 price point it seems plausible that noise on the iPhone platform is on the rise.

Compete recently surveyed smartphone users and found that 93% of users have added an application from the App Store, with 45% having added more than 11 apps. It will be interesting to see how that number changes. Hopefully Compete will do follow up surveys to see how many of those apps people are still using 3 or 6 months from now.

Because the App Store’s Top 100 List — which drives a huge number of sales on the platform — is based on number of apps sold per day, the price of successful applications has been consistently driven lower since Apple launched the store in July. That might be having a negative effect on quality as developers may now be more inclined to spread their development time over a number of cheaper apps, rather than spending more time developing a more expensive (and more well-made and useful) application that is less likely to sell well.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Do you find the noise levels in the App Store too high? Is it easy to sort out the good apps from the bad or is he iPhone App Store heading the way of Facebook’s platform? Let us know in the comments, and be sure to check out our list of 5 must have productivity apps for the iPhone.

The government will maintain two blacklists, one that filters out illegal material, mostly child pornography, and another that filters out objectionable material as determined by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA). The first list will be mandatory, while users will be able to opt out of the latter.

Under the guise of protecting children, Australians are seeing their freedoms limited. There’s a slippery slope here: no on really knows how the ACMA determines what content is added to the blacklist, and it can change those criteria without telling anyone. “The Australian government’s agenda on national censorship is based on an appeal to emotion - it doesn’t matter what it bans or censors, it can always claim it’s for the benefit of children,” wrote reporter Laura Parker in the UK newspaper The Guardian

In fact, the Australian Electronic Frontiers group (EFA) noted earlier this month that though the contents of the blacklist are secret, the AMCA does public some statistics on the makeup. Of the approximately 1,300 URLs on the list, only 3 were blocks because they were classified as pedophilia related. A large portion of the sites on the list were blocked for nudity, violence, crime, or “sexual fantasy,” but were actually legal.

“I’m not exaggerating when I say that this model involves more technical interference in the internet infrastructure than what is attempted in Iran, one of the most repressive and regressive censorship regimes in the world,” said EFA chair Colin Jacobs.

The EFA has been staunchly against the filtering scheme, and public sentiment has been against it as well. An online poll by the Courier-Mail newspaper in Queensland found that 86% of respondents did not want censorship. And there is some question of whether censorship schemes will even work, on a technical level. Australia’s last try at censorship, the AU$84 million NetAlert program put forth by former PM John Howard, was cracked in a half hour by a 16-year-old Aussie named Tom Wood in August 2007. Upon hearing about Wood’s feat, the government added another layer of filtering to beef up the system — Wood got through the new filter in 10 minutes.

The EFA recently published a letter in which Internet engineer Mark Newton expressed a number of concerns with the clean-feed plan. In addition to voicing fears about the slippery slope — the government has apparently begun to talk about filtering “unwanted” sites along with those deemed illegal — Newton lays out a number of other reasons the filtering plan is a bad idea. His points are summarized below:

1. The Government has failed to identify a need for this policy.
2. Even if there was a need, the Government has failed to demonstrate that its solution is wanted by the public.
3. Even if the public wanted this solution, it won’t work.
4. Even if it could work, it’s too expensive.
5. Even if it wasn’t too expensive, it’ll be implemented poorly.
6. In the unlikely event that it’s implemented perfectly, it will enable child abuse.

The last point is predicated on Newton’s assertion that a leak of the blacklist itself is inevitable, and once that happens it will spread among pedophile groups helping unscrupulous individuals locate child pornography web sites that are up and online.

A number of consumer advocacy groups in Australia have begun to protest the government’s plan. GetUp!, a progressive political action group in Australia, has started collecting signatures for a petition against the censorship aimed at Labour Senator Stephen Conroy, the minister for broadband, communications and the digital economy, who came up with the censorship plan.

Another group, No Clean Feed, has started a separate petition, which as gather over 21,000 signatures, as well as an letter writing campaign to Conroy and other representatives, and ISPs.

What do you think of Australia’s censorship plans? Let us know in the comments below.

A big special thank you to the entire SitePoint staff who were kind enough to share their Christmas wish lists with me and help me put together this list of must-have gift ideas. Please share what you want in the comments below.

For Waking Up

Sunbeam Café Series Espresso Machine

Everyone knows that caffeine is the fuel that powers web developers the world over, and in the SitePoint offices, espresso is our caffeine of choice. The Sunbeam Café Series Espresso Machine is an excellent choice for making the perfect cup of coffee at home. It’s a slick and beautiful machine.

Home Barista Kit

Just having the right coffee maker isn’t enough, though. If you really want to make the perfect cup of joe, snag the Home Barista Kit, which comes with a nock tube, cocoa shaker, group head cleaning brush, measure spoon, tamper, tamper mat, stainless steel jug, thermometer and espresso machine cleaning fluid. Keep that new Sunbeam in good working order for years to come.

NANDA Alarm Clock

Before you even get to the coffee, though, you have to get out of bed. For some heavy sleepers, an alarm clock isn’t enough — we just turn it off, roll over, and go back to sleep. The innovative NANDA Alarm Clock won’t let that happen, though, because after switching on each morning, the clock rolls off your dresser and hides, forcing you out of bed to turn it off. Evil, yes, but also ingenious.

For Getting to Work

MacBook Pro

Once fully awake, it’s time to get to work. Give the gift of style, with the new MacBook Pro. You didn’t honestly think we could publish a holiday gift guide without a MacBook on it, did you? Yes, it might be a cliché to include a Mac on our gift guide, but there’s a reason these things grace almost every tech/geek gift guide each year: they rock. The new all aluminum unibody case, LED-backlit display, and glass, multi-touch trackpad make this year’s model the best yet.

Humanscale Freedom Task Chair

Move over Aeron, the Freedom Task Chair from Humanscale is our preferred product on which to rest our posteriors during a long day at work. If you buy one for yourself in this economy, it probably means you’re blowing through funding in ways that would make your investors cringe, but if you get one as a gift it just means someone really loves you.

Basecamp Subscription

We’ve often talked about how great Basecamp is. It makes running a small to mid-sized business vastly more simple, and almost any web developer on your gift list who does client work would be happy to get a subscription for Christmas, we guarantee it.

For Having Fun

Foosball Table

It can’t be all work, work, work, though. At SitePoint’s offices, one of the ways we unwind is by playing foosball. The beautiful table pictured above isn’t actually for sale, as far as I can tell, but check out the Halex Oakmont, which is classy enough to go well with any living room decor.

Mix Tape Portable DJ Mixer

With dual 3.5mm stereo inputs, the Mix Tape Portable DJ Mixer adds a whole new dimension to the classic mix tape. Hook up two iPods and some speakers, then use the built in crossfader to mix tracks together.

Guitar Hero World Tour

Another way we unwind at the SitePoint offices is by playing Guitar Hero. The new Word Tour kit for Guitar Hero 4 will have your whole office or family rocking in no time with drums, guitars, and vocals.

For Looking Good

T-shirts

What is the preferred mode of dress for programmers? T-shirts, of course! We have something of a Threadless addiction at SitePoint (I have about 20 shirts from Threadless in my closet), and highly recommend them for Christmas shopping this year. If you want your purchasing to do some good, though, check out Andy Brice’s ‘shirts for programmers, the profits from which will go to charity.

8-bit Tie

If you know someone who has to dress up for work, the least you could do is help them do it in geek chic style. We recommend the 8-bit Tie from ThinkGeek. Wearing a shirt and tie has never been so, er, Mario-like.

GelaSkins

Of course, if you’re going to help someone look good, their laptop should match. GelaSkins is positively the best place to find gorgeous artistic skins for laptops, phones, and MP3 players. I bought my friend an iPod skin from these guys last year for Christmas and he absolutely loved it.

For Relaxing At Home

The Slanket

After a long day at the office, there’s nothing most people want more than to come home and relax. For those of us who live in colder climes, I can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t be happy to receive a Slanket for Christmas. The Slanket is like other blankets except for one key difference: it has sleeves! That allows you to keep your arms warm whole freeing up your hands for important tasks like holding a book, video game controller, or mug of hot cocoa.

Bose QuietComfort 3 Acoustic Noise Canceling Headphones

Especially for those who travel a lot for work, the Bose QuietComfort 3 Acoustic Noise Canceling Headphones are essential for relaxing and blotting out the world around you. I don’t think I’ve been on a plane in the past year without seeing someone break out a pair of these headphones — and somehow the trip always seems like it’s going faster for them.

The Dark Knight on DVD

It was the biggest movie of the year at the box office — one of the biggest of all time — and is already one of the best-selling DVDs of 2008, as well, even though it’s hasn’t yet been release! The Dark Knight is kind of like Gladiator, The Matrix, or 300: it’s an essential part of any DVD collection. Featuring a stunningly brilliant performance from the late Heath Ledger, this is a guaranteed winning gift for anyone on your list.

Google’s Site Search is so easy to plug in, and the resulting user experience is so good, that is has become a mainstay on an ton of sites around the web. Today, Yahoo! announced a revamped site search product that aims to take a bite out of Google’s search marketshare.

Yahoo! Vertical Lens is part of the Build Your Own Search Service (BOSS) platform, and allows developers to create site search engines that go beyond Google’s plug’n'play offering. Yahoo!’s launch partner for the initiative is technology blog TechCrunch, who are now using Vertical Lens for their site search.

Among the features that the new product offers are:

• Real-time indexing of proprietary content - When new blog posts or comments are added to the site, the search index updates almost immediately to reflect those changes. (Google is pretty good at keeping on top of site changes as well, so not much new here.)
• Customized ranking - BOSS is all about customizing Yahoo! search results, so Vertical Lens allows sites to find tune the algorithm to fit their audience and user experience.
• Structured search - Maybe the coolest aspect of the new Vertical Lens is that it supports faceted refinement of searches. For TechCrunch, their new search engine allows users to narrow query results by author, number of comments, blog category, or date, for example.
• Blending Web with proprietary content in a single search display - Vertical Lens can search both site and web content and blend results together in a single display.

Yahoo! Vertical Lens is currently only available to partners, but Yahoo!’s YaJie Ying promises that the company is “working to share the technology more openly through the BOSS API.”

For logophiles — those who have a love of words — the following list of web sites presents a selection of places around the web where you can keep tabs on how the English language is evolving through the addition of new words and neologisms. Careful, though, these sites are very fascinating and can be addicting to browse through.

Addictionary

Addictionary is a community of neologists who submit new words and vote on the submissions of others. The site has a lot of fun, interactive features, such as the “Wordoff,” in which two new words are pitted against each other, and “There Oughta Be a Word,” where users suggest a definition and others come up with the new word.

Sample: friendvy, noun, Envy over how many friends someone has on Facebook.

Wordspy

Wordspy is a blog that tracks neologisms. They only post about new words that have been used in more than one credible source (such as newspapers, magazines, or popular blogs). That sets it apart from the other sites on this list. Words found at Wordspy might be closer to actually entering the English vernacular because they’re apparently in semi-common use at respected publications.

Sample: tweetup, noun, A real world meeting between two or more people who know each other through the online Twitter service.

The Unword Dictionary

The Unword Dictionary is another user generated site full of new and emerging English words. The site is well organized, and founder Steve Kiehl put a book out last year based on the site’s 1,000 best words.

Sample: gank, verb, To take for one’s self; to steal a part of a song from another song and pretend it’s one’s own.

Pseudodictionary.com

Pseudodictionary.com is a large user generated new word site, but it’s honestly not as well organized or as well moderated as Addictionary or the Unword site. Still, it offers a very large collection of words to search through.

Sample: cankle, noun, The fatty deposit between one’s calf and one’s foot.

Urban Dictionary

Urban Dictionary is a huge site documenting English slang. Online for 9 years, it’s amassed over 3.4 million definitions for words that don’t exist outside of casual speech. Be careful: this site has a much higher tendency than others to serve up NSFW content (being a slang dictionary, a lot of the entries deal with content of a sexual nature).

Sample: bleep, noun, A substitute for a profane word.

Rice University Neologisms Database

Over 5,500 words are collected at Rice’s actively maintained database, making it a great place to keep tabs on what’s new in the English language. Because it is a University-backed project, you can expect high quality and very complete definitions, including sourcing and etymology.

Sample: digerati, noun, Those people who are the literati of the tech world. The savvy and knowledgeable users of computers and the internet.

The International Dictionary of Neologisms

A well maintained list of neologisms that actually comes from the University of Minnesota. You’ll find some gems among the over 2,600 entries, but the definition quality varies widely on the site depending on the source of the word. Some entries in the database go back over 20 years.

Sample: loguum, noun, A vacuum in the language; a not yet named concept or object, or a not yet adequately named concept or object — i.e., a place in the language which clamors for a neologism.

The Double-Tongued Dictionary

There are people who love language, and then there is Grant Barrett. Barrett is a lexicographer who hosts a weekly radio show about words, and is the editor of The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English. His site, the Double-Tongued Dictionary, is a great compendium of “undocumented or underdocumented” words in the English language. Only well-sourced words make the cut.

Sample: schmoopiness, noun, Behavior that is excessively cutesy, precious, or adoring.