Online Media Cultist

Along with being an online media cultist, I’m something of a TV nut. Just as I enjoy defending and promoting the greatness of the blogosphere and the Interwebs generally, one of my favorite soapbox topics is to argue that TV has the same relative mix of quality (mostly junk, some good, and a little astoundingly great) as any other medium. And great TV these days (The Sopranos, The Shield, The Wire, Rescue Me, Lost, The Office, etc.) is truly phenomenal.

My DVR helps immensely in keeping up with the shows I love. I often watch shows a day or two after they air. However, my cable company-provided DVR is imperfect: it sometimes doesn’t pick up on when shows switch nights, switch times, and will occasionally “forget” to record new episodes of a show that has been in repeat mode for several weeks.

This is my greatest TV-related fear. Is Heroes coming back this week? Lost is running new episodes through the end of the season, right? When is Drive coming back, if at all?

TV Squad, beyond doing great comprehensive coverage of the huge wide world of television, runs a “What’s on Tonight?” column which is helpful, but again is something I have to remind myself to look out for before consulting my DVR to ensure that my shows are locked in for recording. They also have a nice panel on the side nav of their new site design that displays little “new” labels for “Primetime Tonight.” Still, though, only the major broadcast networks are mentioned. Sometimes I need to get a little Real World on, you know?

MeeVee runs more comprehensive listings right on its front page, with little “N” labels to signify new episodes.

Here’s what I’d like to see though. If anyone knows of such a service, please let me know – I know that I and likely others would appreciate hearing about it!

I want a service where I plug in the shows that I follow. Prison Break, for example. I plug in Prison Break, and it sends me an e-mail alert the day before or the day of (I get to decide when) the night that a new episode is going to air. And then, for the rest of time, it will let me know what’s going on with Prison Break. It’s going into hiatus for several weeks? The alert lets me know. The premiere date is set for the fall – again it checks in. And then when the new season comes it’s right back with the alerts, so I’m ensured of following a show I like from hiatus to winter break through new seasons, and so on. If I stop digging Prison Break, I simply cancel my subscription to that show.

I think that this would be a valuable service, and would love to see someone do it.

Gmail is an e-lifeline for me. It’s typically the first thing I open up when I go online, and it serves as the main channel in which I not only communicate with the world, but it’s also the place where I store an enormous amount of information and organize my online life.

One of my ongoing challenges is to stay organized on the multiple fronts that make up a modern online media cultist’s life. I’ve experimented with a bunch of calendar applications, but still haven’t found anything that has worked for me. Partly out of desperation, I’m giving Google Calendar one last go. I’m hoping that its e-mail alerts will give me help me to have some hope of keeping up with things (remembering people’s birthdays: the bane of my existence!).

I’d really love to see an embeddable widget within Gmail that would let me scroll through events in my calendar. I kind of envision the interface to work something like meevee’s television widget, allowing you to scroll up and down through upcoming events. If we wanted to get fancy about it, it would be really cool to have a widget with different tabs that could be related to channels or tags. So I could set it up that I could have a “birthdays” tab on the calendar widget that let me scroll through only birthdays that I had entered, or “deadlines” or “essential TV shows” (Sopranos! The Shield! Lost!) and so on.

By the way, one application that has been a really pleasant surprise in how much it’s helped me keep tracked and organized is Joe’s Goals, which is a simple, easy, and kind of fun way to track progress and goals day-to-day. Thanks to the great Lifehacker for the tip on that.