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It may sound like a minor tweak, but a lot of money flows through AdWords, and minor changes affect a huge number of companies bidding for placement next to search results.

Google on Wednesday added a new factor, Web page loading speed, to the criteria by which it judges which text ads to place next to search results.

Early in its history, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin set down “10 things Google knows to be true,” and one of them is “fast is better than slow.”

For more details, see the detailed Google article for advertisers on page-loading speeds.

The search company, which makes almost all its revenue from the text ads, gives a boost to advertisers with better ad quality. Google announced Wednesday that quality now includes a measurement of the loading speed of the Web page users see when they click on an ad.

Higher-quality ads serve a variety of purposes, Google argues. For one thing, it means somebody who clicks an ad–the action that triggers payment to Google–are more likely to be satisfied. In the long run, higher quality also means that users might be less likely to ignore ads as irrelevant or annoying.

Google warned in March that page-load speeds would factor into quality ranking and let advertisers see how they rated beginning in April.

“Starting today, this load time factor will be incorporated into your keywords’ quality scores,” Google said on its Inside AdWords blog. “Keywords with landing pages that load slowly may get lower quality scores (and thus higher minimum bids). Conversely, keywords with landing pages that load very quickly may get higher quality scores and lower minimum bids.”

“Apple wants to lock you in,” Robert Enderle said to BusinessWeek. “Dell wants to lock you in to choice.”

“Customers want access to content from a broad variety of sources–how, when, and where they choose,” Michael Dell told the publication.

Check out Don’s Digital Home podcast, Twitter feed, and FriendFeed.

Sure, it might appeal to us and I certainly think that’s a neat idea, but based on the information we have, it sounds like there are too many moving parts and too many people involved in the decision-making to make this a viable service.

The music industry is the most obvious sticking point in this whole solution. Granted, Dell claims it has most labels on its side, but we can’t forget that this is an industry that’s extremely worried and scared of change. And if anyone can buy just one song from Amazon and ship it to a friend’s car stereo, I don’t see the music industry being too keen on that.

But will all those choices translate into a profit and a new standard that will take iTunes and every other proprietary service down? Will buying a song on Amazon.com and sending “it to the mobile phone of a friend or the
car stereo of someone who has satellite radio” really work?

The idea will be unveiled in September and will attempt to give you more choice in how you buy and consume media, BusinessWeek reports. More importantly, Dell will give its partners the software they need to establish the solution and will try to turn a profit on the sale of hardware.

But it goes far beyond the music industry. There seems to be too many moving parts and too many companies with a hand in what’s happening for this to be a success. You mean to tell me that I should expect this new standard to beat Apple because companies like Kenwood, Amazon, Dell, EMI, Microsoft, iRiver, HP, XM Sirius, LG, and RIM are going to play nice with each other? I don’t think so.

According to BusinessWeek, Dell plans on taking aim at Apple and will unveil a solution that could see companies from a bunch of industries working together to create the first solution to give consumers real choice.

Sorry, Dell, I think you’re ahead of your time.

I look forward to the day where the content I buy from one service will work on anything I want it to work on, but I don’t think we’re at that point yet.

And although choice is what we all want, and I believe it could happen eventually, it’s not going to come from Dell and a loose alliance of partners. Instead, it’s going to come when the Old Guard leaves and a new generation of fresh ideas and business models starts dictating this industry.

Choice is something that we should all have, but the current state of the tech industry and company cultures dictate that that’s simply impossible. Call me a cynic, but I simply don’t see Microsoft being too excited about people buying a song from a different vendor and listening to that on the
Zune. And I certainly don’t see Jive Records getting excited when one person buys a song and sends it to five friends on five different devices from five different companies.

That’s not to say that this is an indictment of Dell or what it’s planning, but this is an indictment of the protectionist policies that are so rampant in the tech business right now. Suffice it to say that choice is not paramount in any company’s business model and more often than not, they want devices and software to be locked down for a reason–it keeps customers in-house and doesn’t let them stray.

Guthrie also pointed to a newly posted tutorial on Scott Hanselman’s Computerzen blog about integrating JQuery with ASP.net Ajax.

…The jQuery test suite is already integrated into the test suites of Mozilla and Opera and this move will see a significant level of extra testing being done on Internet Explorer and WebKit - above-and-beyond what is already done by the jQuery team.

The announcement came in a blog post by Scott Guthrie, a vice president in Microsoft’s developer division, who described the library’s attraction:

(Credit:
Microsoft)

A big part of the appeal of jQuery is that it allows you to elegantly (and efficiently) find and manipulate HTML elements with minimum lines of code. jQuery supports this via a nice “selector” API that allows developers to query for HTML elements, and then apply “commands” to them. One of the characteristics of jQuery commands is that they can be “chained” together - so that the result of one command can feed into another. jQuery also includes a built-in set of animation APIs that can be used as commands. The combination allows you to do some really cool things with only a few keystrokes.

Microsoft said Sunday that it plans to ship the JQuery JavaScript library with its Visual Studio developer tool suite.

The software powerhouse said that jQuery would be one of the libraries used to implement higher-level controls in the ASP.net Ajax Control Toolkit, and would also have a role in new Ajax server-side helper methods. The 15KB JQuery JavaScript library will be distributed as is, with no forking, and files will continue to adhere to the JQuery MIT license.

Sample JavaScript using JQuery.

Nokia is looking to use jQuery to develop applications for their WebKit-based Web Run-Time. The run-time is a stripped-down browser rendering engine that allows for easy, but powerful, application development. This means that jQuery will be distributed on all Nokia phones that include the web run-time…

Resig, a lead developer of JQuery, wrote:

In addition, Microsoft said that it would contribute tests, bug fixes, and patches to the JQuery open-source project and that later this year it would extend product support to JQuery.

Writing on the JQuery blog, John Resig said that mobile phone heavyweight Nokia also is adopting JQuery as part of its application development platform. As is the case with Microsoft, he said, Nokia isn’t looking to make any changes to the library, and its developers will contribute to the JQuery project.

Even now, the PS2 is still selling fairly well, moving 188,000 units in June, just 14.1 percent less than the 219,800
Xbox 360s Microsoft sold in the same period, according to industry analyst the NPD Group.

With all that in mind, the good folks over at IGN ran a recent story looking at the “state” of the PS2. And the general conclusion? The PS2 is doing just fine, thank you–even after all these years.

There may be some truth to that interpretation, but at the same time, Sony does indeed have a point, as evidenced by the continued strong performance of its PlayStation 2, a console it has sold more than 140 million units of since launching it in 2000.

The article goes on to make the case that the PS2 still offers a full spectrum of games in all categories, and that with the success of Nintendo’s
Wii, the PS2 is very well positioned as a more casual game machine.

“For the time being, the PS2 doesn’t seem to be left in the lurch and seems destined to actually live up to the much-vaunted ‘10-year life cycle’ that Sony keeps talking about,” IGN’s Sam Bishop wrote. “Some developers like Atlus and Sega, are still supporting the system with new, exclusive games like Persona 4 and Yakuza 2, respectively. With no shortage of Guitar Heroes or Maddens, the system’s library isn’t nearly as bleak as one would assume for a console entering the full decade stretch.”

When Sony argues, as it frequently does these days, that its video game consoles have a 10-year life cycle, critics often assume the company is just trying to make the point that its
PlayStation 3 has many years left in which to become the dominant machine of the current generation.

The PlayStation 2 has been on the market for nearly nine years, proving there may well be truth to Sony’s claim of a 10-year console life cycle.

(Credit:
Sony Computer Entertainment of America)

“The bottom line is that the PS2 is hardly down and out,” Bishop wrote. “It’s a little surprising, really–even to us–that the library has this much steam. Chalk it up to plenty of familiarity with the hardware…,an absolutely epic install base that’s still growing, and the fact that the PS2 is just plain awesome, and you can see why we’re still staring down another monster end of the year.”

MySpace is owned by News Corp., which operates MSNBC competitor Fox News.

Called Decision ‘08, the new site is part of MySpace’s “Impact” political channel, and showcases election news (complete with links to MySpace profiles of NBC News anchors and analysts), opinion, video from MSNBC, polls, and a discussion forum.

Social network MySpace might’ve chosen MTV as its media partner for the 2008 presidential primaries, but on Tuesday it’ll be launching an election news hub in conjunction with the more traditional NBC News and MSNBC.com.

“The 2008 election is proving to be the most youth- and technology-driven race in history, and MySpace is a significant forum for political discussion today,” Lee Brenner, MySpace’s executive producer of political programming, said in a statement. “We are privileged today to be partnering with such revered news organizations…and to be taking our first steps in what will be a unique and engaging collaboration for the MySpace community.”

This is very similar to what MySpace rival Facebook is doing through a partnership with ABC News. For NBC, it’s a way to reach a younger audience that likely isn’t watching nightly news broadcasts.

(Credit:
Facebook)

The social network is about to launch Facebook Lexicon, a new feature that tracks exactly what users are chatting about in their public posts on each others’ “walls,” based on search queries, and turns them into graphs and charts.

Facebook used to have a detailed trend-tracking feature called Pulse, which it quietly axed early in 2007, though representatives said it wasn’t permanently gone and would see a revamp. That hasn’t happened yet; maybe, particularly considering Facebook’s tendency to roll out a limited version of a new feature before expanding, Lexicon is the first glimpse at the reincarnated Pulse.

Are Facebook members more likely to be talking about hamburgers in January or May? Well, you can find out.

It’s kind of like Google Zeitgeist, a feature that tracks the search engine’s most popular queries across time. For Facebook, the launch of Lexicon likely has emblematic value: it’s one of those “Look, we’re the voice of a generation” moments.

“Facebook Lexicon aggregates and analyzes millions of Wall posts on the site every day to provide a snapshot of the collective conversation on the site,” the company explained in an FAQ. “Users can query as many as five strings of a single word or two-word combinations. The analysis for Lexicon is done automatically without any person reading Wall posts and without access to any personal information.”

“More than anything, we want our users to learn more about the world around them by learning about the collective conversation on the site,” the Facebook FAQ continued. “Lexicon is meant to be a fun, interesting way to look for trends in the topics and issues being discussed.”

It’s not so much “how much is this getting talked about?” but rather “how many Facebook members are talking about it?” A Lexicon chart shows the number of Facebook users who posted a given one- or two-word phrase on public “walls”–on other members’ profiles, group profiles, and event profiles–each day across a given span of time. Only data from September 8, 2007 on has been archived for the feature, and it currently can’t be divided up by regional, school, or business network.

Something was getting talked about around January 1. Wonder what it was?

Nuclear power, which concerns Lewis not for safety/security reasons but because of inability to expand nuclear utilization quickly/sufficiently to meet the world’s needs.

Carbon sequestration of fossil fuel burning, which Lewis says may not be available in time or at the volumes necessary to have significant beneficial impact on climate change.

“Powering the Planet” is the title of an extraordinary speech that is regularly given by Nate Lewis, Professor of Chemistry at CalTech. It is a bit long and detailed, but very much worth reading, as it elegantly frames the scale of the worldwide energy/environmental challenges to be faced in the coming decades.

Bio-based energy, which Lewis finds to be highly inefficient and therefore unlikely to be able to provide more than a small fraction of worldwide energy requirements

Richard T. Stuebi is the BP Fellow for Energy and Environmental Advancement at The Cleveland Foundation, and is also the Founder and President of NextWave Energy, Inc.

The gist of the presentation is that aggressive pursuit of energy efficiency is critical — but we still need to supply the remaining human energy requirement in some carbon-free fashion, which leaves us relatively few viable options:

This leaves solar energy, which Lewis concludes is the best hope for the planet — technologically known to work, scalable with no binding supply limitations, at potentially reasonable economics with continued advancement. Then Lewis closes with the clincher: if we’re going to succeed with solar energy, our priorities need to change:

Hydro, geothermal, wind and ocean energy, which are all fine in Lewis’ view, but inadequate in scope to supply global energy demands

“In the United States, we spend $28 billion on health, but only about $28 million on basic solar research. Currently, we spend more money buying gas at the pump in one hour than we spend funding basic solar research in our country over an entire year. Yet, in that same hour, more energy from the sun is hitting the Earth than all of the energy consumed on our planet in that year. The same cannot be said of any other energy source.”

‘Nuf sed.

You’re doing only UMGD. Why aren’t you doing delivery for all of its labels, such as Geffen?

McDaniels: Universal is obviously a very big client for us. They have a large catalog. The digital logistics business is very complex. Nobody really other than the people involved understands the complexities involved. To take on that large of a catalog with all the intricacies of distributing out to dozens if not hundreds of different retailers is a large undertaking so we decided to stage the migration of their catalog to our system.

INgrooves, a digital distribution company, is fast becoming a favorite of music acts embarking on comebacks.

Tell me what artists you work with and give me an example of what you do for them.

McDaniels: We provide services to Universal Music Group, K-Tell and VP Records as well as successful artists that are going out on their own: people like Dolly Parton and Too Short. We did Dolly Parton’s last release worldwide digital. Dolly formed her own label called Dolly Records and was looking for a digital partner for distribution and digital marketing. We signed her to an agreement and she opted into our worldwide digital distribution and our strategic marketing services. Our marketing group did an analysis of which retail partners would be the best ones, would do exclusives on the Dolly album, “Backwoods Barbie.” We then set about executing the marketing plan leading up to the release and then pushed it out to all of our online and mobile outlets on the day of the release. It was Dolly’s highest Billboard debut ever. We did very well digitally for her. The album has gone on to sell over 130,000 copies.

What are you doing for Universal?

McDaniels: About a year ago they made a strategic investment in us and we are providing them with digital distribution services. They looked at our software platform and they felt that it would be the right thing for the delivery of their content in North America. What our system does is handle the Universal Music Group Distribution labels and we deliver all their content under their contracts in all of North American retailers.

Who else have you done that for?
McDaniels: Artists we’ve worked for directly are Too Short, Tila Tequila, Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle Records, Thievery Corporation, and the Crystal Method.

But just don’t call the privately held INgrooves a music label. “I don’t like the label… label,” quipped Robb McDaniels, the company’s CEO.

(Credit:
INgrooves)

We provide sort of a menu of services that you can pick and choose from. It starts with distribution and it’s really the entire supply chain process for content managers. What we’ve built is more of an asset management system rather than just a distribution infrastructure.

McDaniels recently spoke with CNET News to discuss where digital distribution was headed.

Q: Do you consider yourself a label?

McDaniels: I don’t like the label…label. We provide some services that an artist would expect from a label. We provide some services that an independent label would expect from a major label. I think we are as good as anyone out there in terms of digital distribution and marketing.

Tell me about what you’re doing for Nokia.

McDaniels: This is an extension of our deal with Nokia for their online stores. Comes With Music is their new initiative based out of the United Kingdom but I understand it’s about to launch in the U.S. and a few other territories. It’s another retail outlet for us. It’s another way to reach the consumer and a great outlet for our independent music. We sort of approach the retail model in much the same way we approach the client model. We’re agnostic to the manner to in which music fans consume music.

McDaniels says INgrooves is a service company that acts much like an indie record company, such as IODA or The Orchard, but has no wish to compete against record labels. And in fact, one of the 7-year-old company’s most important clients is Universal Music Group, the largest of the top four recording companies. Universal last year invested in INgrooves.

I can access that music for more devices and more places and so it’s becoming more convenient. I think that Spotify is hitting the market at the right time. I don’t know it’s that novel of an idea but I think it’s got great timing and great user functionality.

Spotify is one of your distribution partners. That’s the site everybody is talking about in Europe right?

McDaniels: We’ve just signed Spotify. There certainly has to be a music solution out there that’s getting all the buzz. In the seven years we’ve been doing this I can’t tell you the number of times that one of my employees has come into my office and told me this is going to change the way we consume music or this is going to spell the end of us. Snocap was one at one point. Spotify is certainly getting all the buzz now. It’s a streaming-based model that allows music fans to effectively access millions of songs and share playlists and I think their music interface is catching on with fans.

So, if I’m a label or artist, I hire you to do what?

McDaniels: We’re agnostic to whether you’re a label, artist, production company; really we work for anybody that controls the rights to media, images, video, and of course audio.

I think what’s really happening is consumer behavior patterns are changing. It used to be when we’re moving from the CD to the digital download everybody was saying that music fans still want to hold something, hold the physical good in their hand and that’s why CD sales would stay strong. Now consumer behavior is moving more towards digital downloads and everybody is saying everybody wants to own the download and they want to carry it with them wherever they go and streaming models aren’t going to take off. Well now the consumer is saying I don’t need to own the download. I’m happy with a cloud model where all my media is housed somewhere in an Internet locker for me and I can access it at any time. One of the reasons that consumer behavior is changing is because streaming is becoming more portable and interoperable.

Last year, San Francisco-based INgrooves oversaw digital distribution and marketing for the release of Dolly Parton’s album “Backwoods Barbie.” The record debuted as the No. 1 country album on iTunes. This spring, when the spoof metal group Spinal Tap releases its first album since 1992, the boys in the band are trusting INgrooves to distribute the material to iTunes, Amazon, and other online retailers.

What is your relationship like with retailers and services such as YouTube?

McDaniels: We deliver content into YouTube, audio and video, for INgrooves clients. We sit in the middle. We’re like a clearinghouse between content owners, typically labels or artists, and online and mobile retailers. We’re like the Visa of media. We receive back from all of the retail channels all of the sale statements and process all of the paybacks to the content owners. We see all of the sales data, all of the content. We know who’s buying what, where, when and how much.

Yahoo is giving the U.S. Department of Justice three-and-half months to review its Google partnership, before it implements the search advertising partnership. Regulators, however, may find it more useful to evaluate the partnership after it’s been implemented when they can assess the before and after effect.

Kohl has previously expressed concerns that the deal between two technology search rivals could affect competition and have ramifications for advertisers and consumers. He noted the antitrust subcommittee plans to investigate the competitive and privacy implications of the deal.

Whereas Yahoo is looking to bolster its advertising inventory by allowing Google to post its ads on its search page, Google is going in the opposite direction by scaling back on the number of irrelevant ads it has on its search results page–adopting the view that less is more. The search giant on Wednesday also said it is rewarding advertisers with fast-loading advertisements.

Yahoo, meanwhile, also addressed privacy concerns raised by the legislators.

Yahoo is hoping to use Google’s ads to populate those search results where it tends to have fewer ads. Should Yahoo have a competing ad or ads on the same search page, may the most relevant ad that can entice a user to click on it win.

Yahoo is hoping to benefit from serving up advertisements on its search results pages where there are few advertising links that appear on the right-side column with relevant ads. For example, conduct a search for Fresno and spa and eight advertisements show up on Yahoo, but only two are actually for spas in Fresno. Yahoo gets its advertising dollars only if a user clicks on an actual ad, so the more relevant ads it can post on its search results page, the better its revenues.

During his one-day visit, Yang met with Sen. Herb Kohl, D-Wisc., who chairs the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee.

“Yahoo is deeply committed to building on our established trust with users by continuing to provide clear, comprehensive privacy policies. We structured the agreement with Google so that Yahoo will not transfer any personally identifiable information to Google without user consent,” Yahoo said in a statement. “We have also designed this agreement so that both companies have stayed within each of their existing privacy and data policies, such as Yahoo’s policy regarding logs anonymization after 13 months.”

Google’s slice of the U.S. search market reached 68.29 percent in May, according to Hitwise. Yahoo’s share of the market declined to 19.95 percent from 20.28 percent in the at same time.

Yahoo, however, has previously said its arrangement is non-exclusive and does not require Yahoo to use any certain number of Google ads on Yahoo’s search results page, nor does it require to give Google’s ads preferential treatment on where they appear on the right-side column of Yahoo’s search results page, where the sponsored links appear.

While Barton was not available to meet with Yang on this trip, the senator indicated he would be available next week. And also on the meet-and-greet trip was Rep. Edward Markey, chair of the Telecommunications and the Internet subcommittee for the House Committee on Energy & Commerce.

Sen. Joe Barton of the U.S. House Energy & Commerce Committee also weighed in on the issue Wednesday, issuing a statement (PDF) that expressed concern about the deal’s effect on competition in search advertising.

Yahoo’s CEO Jerry Yang made the rounds on Capital Hill on Wednesday, in an effort to dispel antitrust concerns surrounding its search advertising deal with Google.

The party was a lot of fun, and all the sponsors did extensive giveaways. I got a flight suit from Intel and Zero G, a private company that offers “weightless” (parabolic trajectory) flights. Alas, I didn’t win a Zero G flight, but I did win a free flight on Virgin America. In fact, I think pretty much everyone at the party won one of these prizes– apparently they gave away 80 flights.

Entrees– salad and sandwich type stuff, no hot food– were around $9; snacks were $1 to $2. These prices were competitive with those of airport shops, and it’s certainly more convenient to get the food onboard– but most airports offer more variety. A turkey-bacon wrap sandwich I ordered came without the expected accessories (napkin, mustard, etc.).

Although Virgin America flies to several West Coast destinations, I spend most of my time on this end of the country anyway. The two choices that seemed most attractive were New York and Washington, DC. Ultimately I decided I could have a better time in DC and not spend so much money, so that’s where I went.

(Credit:
Virgin America)

I had to pay $21 in fees for the flight, and I chose to pay $25 extra for an exit-row seat, but the discount still amounted to $277.20. Normally I’d say such a meager amount wouldn’t influence my posts here, but it’s probably the case that I wouldn’t be writing about Virgin America otherwise…

Buying the ticket on the Virgin America website was pretty easy once I figured out that the site requires customers to apply discount codes in advance rather than also accepting discount codes when paying for a flight.

Coming up next, a few museum reviews! I spent most of my time in DC doing the usual touristy stuff, and I ran across a chunk of ENIAC, the world’s first general-purpose digital computer, in an unexpected place…

I was pleased to see that the music videos and some of the pre-recorded TV shows and movies are offered free of charge. For example, I found several of the TED Talks and an episode of Patrick Norton’s Tekzilla (an old one– episode 17 from January 2008).

Virgin provides a high-quality multimedia entertainment system with a 9″ touchscreen LCD at every seat. The system, called Red, carries 24 channels of live satellite TV (sourced from Dish Network), 20 channels of live satellite radio, a good variety of on-demand TV shows and music, movies, simple games, and even chat rooms. I checked frequently but never found anyone in the chat rooms on the way out; on the way back, this feature was disabled.

A Virgin America A320 Airbus aircraft

The free flight coupon, which was good for one round trip in the main cabin (that is, coach class) anywhere Virgin flies in the US, was valid through the end of May, so when Montalvo Systems shut down in early April I was able to spend some time planning a trip.

I also appreciated the live flight map based on data from Google Maps, although it doesn’t offer a satellite view or a really close-up view of the road maps. It seems to me that these features would be useful, but I suppose that providing them would require much more on-board storage. The map can pop up over whatever TV show you’re watching, which makes it convenient to check the progress of the flight during commercials. There was an odd problem with this feature– the black pixels on the map overlay were actually transparent, so legends on the map (city names, etc.) were intermittently illegible depending on the TV image. This function worked well on the flight to DC, but was not reliable on the flight back. Even after we landed at SFO, the system showed the airplane was a few miles southwest of the airport.

The system has menu options called “Read” and “Shop”, but they were not active. It seems to me that unavailable options ought not to be displayed.

The system can also be used to order food, which seems like a great idea, assuming it doesn’t run the cabin crew ragged. Some of the things you can order are free, like sodas, but most items are sold to generate additional revenue. Accordingly, “Eat” buttons are easy to find on the wired remote control and the on-screen menus.

One of the most valuable features on board– to me, at least– was the provision of two 110V outlets for each set of three seats in the main cabin. (Presumably the folks in first class get one each.) Finally, there’s a legal way to power and recharge my laptop in flight. The DC outlets found on some airlines won’t charge a MacBook Pro, although they do let the machine operate without running down the battery further. Virgin’s AC outlets are oriented horizontally, rather than the usual vertical arrangement in most wall outlets, which made for a fragile connection to the MacBook Pro’s power adapter, which frequently fell out.

Virgin America also offers Ethernet and USB jacks at each seat, but these are currently useless. When I hooked up to the Ethernet jack, my laptop detected the connection, but didn’t receive an IP address, so there was no way to communicate over it. I can imagine this feature could be useful for business travelers who need to collaborate on some project during the flight, but until a DHCP server is provided, even peer-to-peer networking will likely not work.

The Dish Network channels are standard definition, not HD, but are stretched to fill the widescreen LCDs, which I find annoying. The broadcasts didn’t come through reliably; on both flights, there were long periods when some of the channels were experiencing trouble, even in level flight at our cruising altitude under a clear sky. Sharp turns caused the satellite receiver to fail entirely, but I suspect there’s no good way to solve that problem. On the return flight, four of the channels (ESPN, ESPN Classic, BET, and BBC America) were carrying Dish informational programming instead of the intended content.

I was able to get an exit-row seat on the return flight, but not on the flight out. The seat pitch in the main cabin is adequate for moderately tall people such as myself, but only barely. It’s about like American Airlines, which is the airline I usually fly on.

Bottom line– the electronics and the in-air food ordering are fun, but not enough to make a difference for me. I will certainly consider Virgin America for future travel, but I’ll continue to choose airlines based on price, schedule, and compatibility with my existing frequent-flyer miles, as I’ve always done.

In a way, this story is left over from CES 2008, where I attended a blogger party hosted by the Parnassus Group and sponsored by, among other companies, Virgin America, the US domestic airline counterpart to Virgin Atlantic.

When watching the pre-recorded content, there are pause, rewind, and fast-forward controls. These functions aren’t available for the live broadcasts– no in-air DVR yet, sorry.

The USB jack, allegedly provided to allow customers to recharge cellphones, iPods, and other USB devices (and, according to the on-board Welcome guide, to hook up a full-size keyboard for the in-flight entertainment system, an amusing notion), didn’t even provide power.

The airline charges $25 extra for “premium” seats at the bulkheads and exit rows in the main cabin. As a fairly tall guy, I like this idea– it discourages people from taking these seats if they don’t need them, and makes them more likely to be available for those of us who really need them.

Virgin America seems to have learned some valuable lessons from the success of JetBlue on these transcontinental flights. Virgin provides fairly comfortable leather seats in the main cabin and attractive leather massage chairs in first class. The airline’s Airbus airplanes (my flights were on A320s) are attractively decorated inside with color-changing “mood lighting” (which remained set to blue and purple on my flights).