While Blockbuster goes through bankruptcy provisions, Amazon puts the pedal to the floor in its competition with Netflix.

Combining its already existing Amazon Prime service (which costs $79 per year) with unlimited, commercial-free instant streaming of over 5,000 movies and TV shows, Amazon seems to be the one legit challenger to Netflix's throne.

It was bound to happen. By someone. Amazon already has a giant built-in user base, though it remains to be seen how many customers will leave Netflix for Amazon. Perhaps those who have both Prime and Netflix accounts will choose to consolidate. But here's why I'm staying with Netflix:

1. Physical discs. Call me old school, but I didn't get a Blu-ray for nothing. I love streaming for plenty of films - especially ones that I might not normally watch otherwise but since they're available, why not - but for others, I want the highest quality possible.
2. More streaming titles. Yes, this will most likely change in the coming months as Amazon catches up, but for now, Netflix has more streaming titles available, therefore I get more for my money.
3. Already a Netflix subscriber. Change is hard.
4. Blu-ray connectivity. My Blu-ray player connects via wi-fi to my Netflix account, making streaming to my TV as easy as cable's On-Demand.

I admit: the free shipping perks of Amazon Prime that come along with streaming video is tempting for my other online purchasing endeavors; but, it's not enough to trump the above four items for me.

Yet.

Gawker and it's host of sites were hacked this week, making public all kinds of confidential information -- including the passwords, emails, and identities of many of the commenters and users of the sites.

THE BREACH OF trust—and the logistical nightmare of contacting 1.5 million users—is humiliating and harmful to Gawker in the short term, but not fatal. Ditto for the possibility that the hackers have up to four gigabytes of the Gawker newsroom's internal chat logs. Staffers said those conversations would be embarrassing if made public, but few if any great secrets are traded there.

In this day and age, online privacy is the topic du jour. Companies like Facebook make their billions off our personal information, claiming that your info is safe with them yet at the same time urging transparency as the way of the future.

That's fine for me with my photos and the info that I put up on Facebook because I want exposure for my own blogs and content. But for those who want to sign up to a site and comment in privacy knowing that their true identity will remain hidden, that's not so good.

As with all forms of security, there is no 100%. No one can provide guaranteed protection. What goes for national security is the same with online security -- no matter what provisions we put into place, someone will find away around it. Just the way it goes.

What I found amusing about the whole Gawker thing (with which I'm inherently connected since I have a Lifehacker account) is that when they emailed me to say that my password and email information had been compromised, they directed me back to the Lifehacker site to change my login information, during which they asked me for an email address -- apparently I had created an account previously without one? Meaning this: they just lost over a million emails and passwords and now they think that I'm just going to willingly hand over my previously untarnished email address to them in the guise of better security?

I think not.

I don't need to comment on Lifehacker badly enough to entrust them with more of my information that they clearly have little control over protecting.

Then again -- how many other sites do I trust that could easily become the next Gawker? Probably all of them.

Facebook’s putting up some big numbers in terms of U.S. web traffic. Right now, the site accounts for one out of every four pageviews in the United States — that’s 10% of all Internet visits.

What better stat do you need to realize that Facebook isn't just for teenagers anymore?

25% of all page views in America go to Facebook.

If you figure that most people are also checking out their email online, you could even assume that 33% of all non-email page views are to Facebook.

Facebook is even five times more popular than Google.com.

Still think that this whole social media thing is just a fad? Or that search isn't going to be taken over by social media in the near future?

I'd been fascinated by space since I was a kid, so I leaped at the chance to take an Astronomy class in college. And it nearly changed my life.

Yes, had I had any math skills beyond using my fingers and toes to do simple arithmetic, I may have continued down a path toward becoming an astrophysicist.

Okay. Full disclosure: there was no way that I was ever going to become a scientist. The furthest I got with it was thinking about having an astro minor; but, again, the math thing.

This article, though, from Gizmodo explains how the ancient Greeks were able to figure out how far away the moon is from the Earth by just using simple geometry and plenty of imagination. A simple (now, at least) calculation that we figured out 2,000 years ago has lead us to what we're now attempting to explain today:

Dark Matter.

I can only imagine what those Greek astronomers would've discovered had they had the tools available to them like the Hubble Telescope. All I know is that space still fascinates me and I'm glad that there are people out there with the numerical prowess to study the cosmos for a living.

Part 2, for your viewing pleasure.

Once upon a time... okay, six years ago, my buddy Matt Cassatta and I had a dream.  That dream was Edison Price, a homeless vampire hunter, down on his luck, looking for a break. 

I became Edison.  Matt became Jack, the man who may or may not save him from his peril.  And we put it to haphazard celluloid (read: mini-DV tape -- this was pre-HD being super affordable, okay?) and loved it.

Only a few dozen people had the fortune to see this, since we made it before YouTube was relevant and enormous.  (How time flies in the digital era!)  Now it's here for you to see, segmented into 4 parts.  We hope you enjoy it.

If the city looks a lot better today, one thing that hasn’t changed about downtown is its flat skyline. The boxy look of the city’s buildings isn’t due to lack of architectural creativity, but the result of a Los Angeles Fire Department code requiring helicopter landing pads on all tall buildings

I had no idea that there was a city ordinance that requires all tall buildings to have a flat roof. That seems a bit excessive, no?

I mean, does EVERY SINGLE tall building (what constitutes tall, I wonder) need a heli-pad? I'd be curious to know how often those get used by the emergency services.

Regardless, it sure would be nice to freshen up the skyline. LA doesn't have the most impressive downtown as it is (sorry, it's true) -- least we can do is have the few tall buildings there come with some architectural and visual flair.

Could this be a reason to actually use Bing instead of Google?

I'm not sure it'll be enough to make me switch over. I use GMail. Firefox has Google search in the toolbar. I'm using Chrome more and more. I own all Mac computer products.

It would feel odd to go back to Microsoft -- even if just for a search engine. Just the other day I was asked to help a co-worker with her computer -- an ancient PC of some sort -- and it felt like I was back in my high school computer lab. It felt archaic, outdated -- obsolete. Just doing a normal search for a specific folder stressed me out (where's the Spotlight in the top right corner!?)

But, with Facebook growing to the point nearly unimaginable just a few years ago when it was just college kids posting photos of their Friday night shenanigans... makes you wonder.

I post a lot of content on my Facebook that I want people outside my current sphere of influence to find. Things like links to my blogs, links to other people's blogs, comments on articles that I find relevant, even photos. I set my privacy to Everyone for most of that stuff specifically because of the chance that people searching for topics related to what I've posted can be found in a search.

And right now: Bing is the only one to do this. Interesting to see where it goes from here. All I know is, it's going to be tough to get me to switch over when Google's search is superior in most other ways.

Nick Saint gets paid to try out both the iPhone and an Android phone and then write up the pros and cons of both. He must love his job.

But he didn't sell me on switching platforms. In reality, the only thing - literally - that I don't like about the iPhone is AT&T. The phone service is garbage. 3G doesn't work in half of LA, including my entire neighborhood. And even when I use my phone where it does have 3G service, it's still slow and times out frequently.

Don't get me started on the phone call quality. Much has been written on this topic so I'll assume you already know what I would say.

The reason that it's not so bad so as to cause me to switch: I don't talk on the phone much. It's true. I usually use it on wi-fi anyway so it's basically a mini computer. And why in the world would I go from a Mac OS to anything else?

It'd be like ditching my MacBook for a Dell. iOS 4 and the iPhone aren't perfect. But they're still light-years ahead of anything else.

It's just like TV on your computer. But on your TV.

I'm not impressed.

Having gone without cable for nearly two years, I essentially had GoogleTV by just connecting my laptop to my TV and using it like a second monitor. And let me tell you: it wasn't all that impressive.

Sure, it got me through some dark times of zero money; but, I just recently got cable TV again and this doesn't compare.

I do like the idea of being able to stream Netflix to my TV without attaching my laptop to it, but, again, that's not exactly revolutionary: plenty of Internet-ready Blu-ray players can stream Netflix for you right now. Plus they also play Blu-ray discs!

I see GoogleTV roughly comparable to AppleTV in that they're set-top boxes that aren't bad, just nothing game changing. And when you're Google and Apple, having both revolutionized Internet searches and smart phones respectively, the customer expects more than just "oh, it's like my laptop but smaller and cheaper and doesn't work as a laptop otherwise."

That close proximity and the way it was found so early in astronomers' search for habitable planets hints to scientists that planets like Earth are probably not that rare.

Der.

I mean, seriously, people. The Universe is beyond gargantuan. Just our galaxy is mindboggling huge with an absurd number of stars (have you looked up into the night sky lately? Angelenos: yes, there are stars above all that smog.), much less the Universe entire.

And we've only truly begun to look for planets because we've only recently developed the technology to see that far away at objects that small. Not to make our existence completely insignificant; far from it. I find it enriches our entire being.

To know that life is so rare yet there's even more diversity than we thought? Amazing.

Check it out: people do most of their searching twice a day: once in the morning on their computers (probably when they get to the office, yeah?) and then again in the evening on their smart phones (probably after dinner when they're lounging around).

How does this affect you?

Well, if you're a blogger and you're using Twitter and Facebook to promote your posts (and if you're not, then you really should), this may help you Tweet and Share smarter.

Let's say you're a night person. You stay up until midnight or later working that blog post and then just before you jump in bed, you hit the POST button. And if it's set up automatically, it'll then shoot out Tweets and post to your other social networks right then, too.

According to this chart, you might be missing out on your audience actually seeing your excellent, entertaining, and informative blog post that you spent so long laboring over. (You know how if you search on Google and it shows Tweets related to your search terms and it's just flying by at nearly warp speed?  It's easy to miss a Tweet.)

I've done my own research on this one by Tweeting and sharing on Facebook links to my blog posts at different times of the day to see what, if any, changes in views I received. And depending on your own personal sphere of influence, you may find that there are different times of the day that they are most active online that suits your needs more than this graph. Go for it.

The point of this is to be strategic with your blog posting and syndication and promotion. Get it out there in front of the eyes when the most eyes are there to be had.

BLOG EXERCISE #1:

Take note of what times you post and promote and track that along with the number of views your post receives. You might be surprised that just changing your posting schedule gets you way more hits.  Be sure to gather enough data to account for the natural difference in number of views per posts.  Look for your average to climb.

You should Tweet out your links at different times of the day, multiple times a day. When you first post and want to promote it hard, Tweet it once in the morning and then again at night the same day. Even if someone saw the Tweet that morning, perhaps they were at the office and didn't have time to read it and then they forgot about it because, hey, there are a lot of Tweets out there. But if you Tweet it again when they're scanning Twitter on their iPhone and see the link again, they may be in a better situation to read your post.

People have some very different feelings on how often to post on Facebook.  And I used to be of the mindset that you just post a link once and that's it.  That's how I'm still going about it, but I'm wondering if maybe more posts on Facebook wouldn't be such a bad idea.  Thoughts?

James W. Heselden, the owner of the company that makes the Segway, died Sunday morning when he drove one of the two-wheeled scooters off a cliff close to his home in West Yorkshire, England.

It's hard not to find this a bit amusing, even if it's a tragedy.

And we wonder why the Segway didn't revolutionize transportation. You think we'd be driving F-150s today if Henry Ford had died in his own Model-T? I doubt it.