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Logo by Kay Partain

About 24 hours ago I had the privilege to push the proverbial switch on launching http://sociologyplus.com/  and I swear I had no idea that Google was planning on opening G+ to the public the same day as well. Sometimes things just work out like that.

A lot of people worked some long, tireless hours on this site and we’re all really excited about it. It’s not only a great resource for G+ Tips & ideas, but it’s a wonderful look on the culture and sociology behind Google Plus and social networking in general.

Google+ over the past couple months has really grown like no other social network I’ve seen before, especially with the Art & Photography crowd. This probably has a lot to do with picasa and the ability to share images and control who sees them, but I digress.

We’re all real excited about SocioloG+, +Ryan Crowe, +Christina Trapolino, +Christopher Watson, +Drew Nicholson and +Johnathan Chung put a lot of work into the site.

Current featured artists are: +Nathanael Card, +L. Gray, +Vivienne Gucwa, +Cayenne Linke, +Kay Partain, +John Phillips, +Rodney Pike, +Amy Redstone and +Graham Tiplady If you’d like to have your art featured, contact +Drew Nicholson

I encourage all of you to go check it out, comment, post, etc. We’re all really proud of this! Any feedback would be much appreciated.

Edit: Follow all of these people. I command it.

(this is a direct copy from my G+ feed.)

I’m freakin’

The HTPC software I’ve poured thousands of dollars into and built my entire household’s media viewing experience around — SageTV — has just been bought out by Google. The software and hardware media extenders are no longer available for purchase on the SageTV website, and to top it off, you can’t get to the support page by clicking “support”. You can get to the SageTV Support page with a URL found in the SageTV Forums, but who knows if anyone will answer.

I know Google’s unofficial motto is “Don’t be evil” but you can’t help but freak out a bit when something you depend on is bought out by a giant corporation. Google’s been trying to push their GoogleTV for quite awhile, and it hasn’t really taken off. My main concern probably lies deep within the old Meedio / Yahoo fiasco, where Yahoo bought out a promising HTPC software startup, released their own branded version of it (Yahoo GoTV), and a year later deleted all traces of it. I’m worried that Google will just take out the parts they want of SageTV, get it to run on Android, and the rest will fall by the wayside. I mean, that’s what corporations do, right? They cannibalize smaller companies?

I really don’t know what to do right now.  I’ve been having some issues with my HTPC, and I’ve been thinking of doing a full reinstall of it.  I’ve dabbled with other HTPC software including Microsoft’s own Media Center, and it just doesn’t do what SageTV does.  MythTV may be my only remaining option, but I know it doesn’t work with my existing TV Tuners very well, not to mention one of the best parts of SageTV were it’s hardware extenders for other TVs in the house.

I guess there’s not much for me to do but sit and wait to see what becomes of it.  Whether I buy the Ceton InfiniTV 4 Digital Cable Quad-tuner Card which I’ve had my eye on for over a year now is still up in the air.