In other words, a company like HP should partner with a company like AT&T, subsidize a computer (say, a compute for $150) and make the end user sign a contract for $60/month for a built in always-on high-speed connection to the internet.

Looks like they’re doing it now.

Apples can be sliced, arranged, and eaten.

Hurricanes are loud, dangerous, and circular.

Four is totally the new three, at least for me. I keep writing lists of three and then adding one more, just because I think it sounds better.

It changes the cadence, meaning, pace, and emphasis of your statement. This is one more than enough.

Of course I could be alone on this ; )

And once that’s no longer on the home page, you can see the picture here:

Picture

They should really have permalinks for the state of the home page, like Techmeme does, shouldn’t they?

I wonder if a certain amount of problems is actually good for business. It seems like Apple still can’t keep the iTunes server up for iPhone activations.

I was at the University Village Apple store this morning when it opened, and the first batch (they could help 11 people at a time) stayed in the store for a full 40 minutes, trying to activate their new phones. Eventually they started just letting people wander off (read: without in-store activation) after the phones failed to activate on the third try.

I think that if Apple had actually wanted to, they could probably have spent a little bit of time making sure the iTunes server would stay up today. But I guess it’s better PR to be able to say “so many people bought the phone that our system crashed, and most of them couldn’t use their phones at all for a while after they bought them!”

Update: here’s the word from Gizmodo on what they call the iPocalypse:

So How Did This Happen:
The source of the iTunes crash/slowdown seems not be those buying iPhone 3Gs from Apple/AT&T stores at all but the millions of people updating to the new firmware at home. Firmware 2.0 isn’t like other firmwares in that it needs to update the phone and reauthenticate the service. And in turn, when the servers are slammed and the phone reaches for reauthentication, the server isn’t always there to reactivate the service. This is how some of those newly bricked iPhones are occurring, and a source tells us that even first gen iPhones are susceptible.

Good thing I did my firmware update yesterday ;)

This is part of the “lean forward, lean back” dichotomy of reading habits that I’m going to talk about eventually on Eat Sleep Publish. Breaking news, blogs, and web sites are all “lean forward” types of media, and I love my laptop for that.

But I find myself frequently printing out free e-books, reports, and other PDF content that’s scattered around the internet because I want to read them in “lean back” mode.

A Kindle would be great for that.

Of course, I’m a huge fan of what the Kindle is trying to do in the first place. I love that Amazon is establishing a paid platform for digital books, although they may not quite have the model right yet.

They are, however, going to save the book industry if they succeed. Too bad the major publishers can’t see forward far enough to maintain control of their business. They’re ceding it to Amazon because Amazon is going to control (even more of) book distribution going forward.

In any case, /love affair with Kindle. I’ll get one when the price hits $250.

The most disappointing feature is apparently the GPS, which doesn’t really have the pinpoint accuracy people expect from systems like car navigation systems and will often get blocked by something as trivial as skyscrapers.

However, that’s not really the point. Just like the iPhone was mostly a kick ass way to browse the internet (with a few phone-like features attached), the iPhone 3g is a speedier, kick ass way to browse the internet, with a mobile computing platform attached.

I think I’m going to be able to get away with just upgrading my 1st gen iPhone software, using the app store, and calling myself happy. But I gotta tell you, this is damn tempting:

Of course, the article isn’t really about Google, it’s about how the internet in general is rewiring our brains to give us all information ADD. Nick warns:

Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.

But like Scott Karp, I’m not convinced that we’re losing the capacity for deep thought as much as we might be changing the way that we come to our conclusions.

What’s the real difference between reading ten chapters of a book and reading thirty shorter articles and studies online if they relate to the same topic. As Scott puts it:

Nick romanticizes the ???contemplation??? that comes with reading a book. But it???s possible that the output of our old contemplation can now be had in larger measure through a new entirely non-linear process.

Nick’s right that the internet is rewiring our brains. But what that means is that we can’t measure the quality of our thought the same way that we use to. I think we’re starting to draw conclusions less by following a single line of reasoning (a book narrative) and more by finding a series of interconnected nodes, and then finding the middle point where they all intersect.

That’s my picture from the back of the room. You can’t really tell what’s going on, though.

Warren Sukernek is doing a good job of outlining the basics of Twitter, why it’s useful, what it’s used for, and who is using it.

Interesting: the majority of Twitter traffic is international, and the majority of the international traffic is from Japan. So Japan tweets more than the US. Taiwan has the smallest slice of international Tweets.

I think I’m going to go through and follow everyone who tweets with #podcampseattle today. Looks like a good crowed.

If blogs and social media are about conversation it doesn’t make much sense to try to close out a topic before anyone gets a chance to comment.

I’m writing this post while running on an eliptical machine, where it is virtually impossible to:

a) have complete thoughts
b) look manly

What do you think?

Eff that.

Videoblogging is something that I’ve always thought of as fun and interesting, but like everything but Twitter it can be a huge pain in the butt to take the time to do it right. I think that if I could simply pull out my phone and start broadcasting, I’d do it a lot more often.

Now it looks like Qik has finally brought that functionality to the iPhone, albeit you need to jailbreak your phone to get it installed for now. Given that I haven’t jailbroken the phone yet, and the official release of the app store happens in a mere few weeks, I don’t think I’ll bother messing around with it now.

What they do—and I have absolutely no idea how they do this—is to force the browser to display your site in any font that they have in their library. This is a significantly larger number than the 6 or 7 fonts that you can normally count on everyone having (which is why web design is usually so typographically limited).

So what you are seeing now (I hope) is everything my headlines displayed in Calibri, a sans-serif font that I like.

I think it’s loading noticeably slower, and so far I’ve only got the one font installed. But if the load times can be improved, and you can get a good mix of fonts going, this type of tech could open a lot of doors for web design that will, I think, vastly improve the way the web looks.

Update: Looks like the technology is called SIFr, and I could improve load times by serving it myself (means getting my hands dirty). Kind of a pain for an individual blogger, but a news organization should have no trouble with it…

PodCamp is a free, informal type of event where you get to meet a bunch of cool people and hopefully come home with a few new tricks. The planned presentations are split by topic: tech, marketing, social good, and intro/101.

It runs from 9am to 3:30 in the afternoon, and I’m not the only person giving a talk. You’ll also get to hear from Eric Weaver, a really smart social media guy from Edelman (who is organizing the event), Kathy Gill, a super energetic communications professor at the University of Washington, and Warren Sukernek who calls himself a “social media wannabe-strategist” — just to name a few speakers.

If you’re planning to attend, you should register on the eventbrite page - it’s free to go, but they’re using the eventbrite registration count to plan how much space is needed.

When I comment on blogs about business and facebook, I like to leave the url of the community/facebook blog Web Community Forum, so that people click back to something relevant.

when I comment on blogs about publishing, i like to leave a link back to eat sleep publish, so that people will hopefully find a relevant site they’re interested in

when I comment on blogs about videogames, I like to leave a link back to my personal blog, since that’s where I pontificate about gaming…

you get the idea.

It would be cool if Disqus let me select from one profile or another (or simply show all blogs in the drop-down) when leaving a comment on another site.