The myth of the opinionless man*
The problem in the cases of ousted Gen. Stanley McChrystal and ousted Washington Post reporter Dave Weigel is not that they had opinions. Of course, they had opinions. Indeed, we should damned well want them to have opinions. If they each only accepted what they were told without doubts and complaints, without discrimination, they'd each be be very bad at their jobs, wouldn't they? The problem is not that those opinions were reported. Publicness — transparency, openness, authenticity,...
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Journalists’ votes matter
Media have an Obama problem they're going to have to grapple with now or after the election: They love him. They hate Hillary. And the gap between the two is clearly seen in coverage, which surely is having an impact on the election. This, to me, only gives more weight to the argument that journalists should be disclosing their allegiances and votes. Reporters are not just covering the story. This year, they are part of the story. The ethic of transparency that I have learned online and that journalists apply to everyone they cover should also apply to them. I say that journalists have a responsibility to reveal their own views and votes — even as they endeavor to report apart from them with fairness, completeness, accuracy, and intellectual honesty — and we have a right to judge their success or failure accordingly as we also have a right to judge their roles in the stories they are covering. No, I don't buy for a second that journalists don't have opinions. They're human. To say that they are above opinions is just another means for journalists to separate themselves from the public they serve, to act as if they are different, above us. But journalists couldn't do their jobs if they didn't have opinions, if they didn't have a reason to do this story over that, if they didn't have a goal. Yet this is the fiction some journalists tell when they try to prove they are opinionless by not voting. As far as I'm concerned, that's only evidence that they are trying to delude themselves or us. And this year, the media's role in the Obama wave is an angle of the story that itself warrants reporting. Says Bill Clinton: The political press has avowedly played a role in this election. I've never seen this before. They've been active participants in this election. Don't you want to know the opinions of the political press? Don't you want to be able to judge their reporting accordingly? what makes them think that they can and should hide that from us? * * * Terence Smith wrote a dead-on column about the delta between negative Hillary and positive Obama coverage: The coverage of Hillary during this campaign has been across-the-board critical, especially since she began losing after New Hampshire. . . . And her campaign has taken the tough-love approach with the reporters who cover it, frequently ostracizing those they think are critical or hostile. That kind of aggressive press-relations strategy may sometimes be justified, but it rarely effective. Reporters are supposed to be objective and professional. But they are human. They resent the cold shoulder, even if they understand the campaign’s motivation. The result is coverage that is viscerally harsh: her laugh is often described as a “cackle.? Her stump speech is dismissed as dry and tiresomely programmatic. She is accused of projecting a sense of entitlement, as though the presidency should be hers by default, that it is somehow now her turn to be president. When she makes changes in her campaign hierarchy, she is described as “desperate.? . . . And on Obama: By contrast, has the coverage of Obama been overly sympathetic? Have reporters romanticized the junior Senator from Illinois? Have they glamorized him and his wife? Did they exaggerate the significance of Ted Kennedy’s endorsement? Have they given him the benefit of the doubt when it comes to his meager experience? Of course they have. His rise to front-runner is described as meteoric, his speeches as mesmerizing, his crowds as enraptured, his charisma as boundless. Obama is characterized as the second-coming of JFK, etc. etc. It is all a bit much. On NPR, media watcher David Folkenflik says: Many reporters admit privately that they feel differently about the two candidates. And there's a phrase that's surfaced to described the phenomenon that's afflicted MSNBC's [Chris] Matthews: the Obama swoon. And why should reporters get away with saying that privately? I want a camera in the voting booth with Chris Matthews — he of the too-frequent too-late apologies — to verify the obvious. I want to know how they're voting. But some journalists try to evade that legitimate question by not voting, as if that absolves them of opinions and blame. Len Downie, editor of the Washington Post — and by that evidence, a damned good editor he is — has long argued that by not voting he keeps himself pure: “Yes, I do not vote. . . . I wanted to keep a completely open mind about everything we covered and not make a decision, even in my own mind or the privacy of the voting booth, about who should be president or mayor, for example.” Sorry, but I still don't buy that and I fear that excuse is seeping down to others in his staff. Here is the Post's Chris Cillizza — a fine political correspondent himself — arguing that not voting makes him objective: . . . [O]bjectivity in covering these races means that you stay objective before, during and after the contests. As, or perhaps more, importantly, however, is the obsession among some people to sniff out a reporter's “secret” political leanings. Time and time again, I find people commenting on this blog and elsewhere accusing me of having a pro-Clinton or pro-Obama or pro-McCain or pro-someone else viewpoint. I know in my hearts of hearts that I don't have any of those biased viewpoints, but if I did vote — even in a local or county election — it would add fuel to the fire of those folks who think I am a secret partisan. I have to say I smelled some Obama roses blooming in this from Cillizza on Howie Kurtz' show: KURTZ: Chris Cillizza, you could argue about whether this Kennedy endorsement was a big deal, but what a collective swoon by the media — ask not why this was such a big story. Are they totally buying into Obama as the new JFK? CILLIZZA: Well, you know, I do think, Howie, that in the Democratic Party, people have been waiting for the next JFK. A lot of people thought or maybe believed it was Bill Clinton. And I think Barack Obama is the next obvious heir to that legacy. It’s a powerful story, and I think as much as the media gets accused of bias, in the decade I’ve spent in it, I don’t think it’s bias as much as it is good storylines. And I will be frank — this is a very interesting, fascinating storyline…. If you are looking for the next John F. Kennedy, I believe he is it. After a line like that, there is good reason to ask where his heart is. You can stay away from the voting booth but that doesn't make you into the Tinman. I agree with John Harris, head of Politico, who calls this a tedious argument — “a subset of the most endless and least satisfying debate in the whole profession: Is true objectivity ever possible?” Harris does vote — sometimes. It is admirable that [Politico colleagues] Mike and Jim cleave to a scientific ideal of journalistic detachment, the way a surgeon cannot tolerate even the slightest bacteria on his instruments. Their piety on this subject is especially notable in an era when traditional lines governing journalism (or even who counts as a journalist in the first place) have blurred, and many new arrivals to the business don’t care at all about old notions of neutrality and fair-minded presentation. But Jim is right that I find his obsession a bit silly — and a bit self-deluded. . . . My belief is that being a journalist for an ideologically neutral publication like Politico, or the Washington Post, where I used to work, does not mean having no opinions. It means exercising self-discipline in the public expression of those opinions so as not to give sources and readers cause to question someone’s commitment to fairness. But Harris turns around and says he didn't vote in the primary because he didn't want to declare a party and then have readers make assumptions about where he stands. So he's pulling the same trick: He's trying to hide his opinions. Isn't that a form of deception by omission? Isn't it at least coy? I like his scientific analogy but I'll take it a different way: A scientist surely has desires. A doctor studying cancer naturally wants to cure it; she's against cancer. That doctor has opinions and beliefs, hypotheses to prove or disprove. But intellectual honestly will demand disproving a hypothesis that is wrong even if she believed it to be true. One can have opinions and still be factual, fair, honest, truthful. Indeed, it is easier to judge that scientist's work by knowing what she's looking for. Steve Baker of Business Week goes one step farther: I think it’s impossible for a person who thinks about politics, and cares about it, not to prefer one candidate to another. It’s fine for journalists not to broadcast our political views, but why pretend that we don’t have them? What’s important is to be fair. And if we want to keep our views secret, well that’s why it’s good that voting booths have curtains.. . . I don't think either Harris or Baker goes far enough. I believe that journalists should vote. They are citizens — and some get mad at me when I refer to amateurs as citizen journalists because they demand the label, too. They are human, too — they have opinons. They also have ethics that demand that they try to be — repeating the list of verities — fair, honest, complete, intellectually honest and I believe most hold to that. But now add the ethics of transparency and openness — and trust in the public you serve — and I believe that especially this year, journalists owe it to us to tell us what they're thinking. The only thing worse than an agenda is a hidden agenda.
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Rules for journalists/bloggers/witnesses? A Guardian debate
Here's a debate that just went up at CommentIsFree (please go comment there; the discussion's already underway): me vs. Michael Tomasky, the Guardian's man in Washington, over whether, as he has said, bloggers should operate under the rules of journalism….. Editor's note: Earlier this month Barack Obama's election campaign was shaken by a report that Obama had described rural, white voters as “bitter”. The news was broken by a “citizen journalist”, Mayhill Fowler, and was carried on the Huffington Post's politics blog, Off The Bus. Last week Guardian America editor Michael Tomasky argued on CiF that Fowler's reporting raised serious ethical questions and argued that blogging, like journalism, needed rules. CiF commentator Jeff Jarvis responded on his blog Buzzmachine that openness, not rules, was demanded in the era of the internet. The answer? Bring the two men together to thrash it out, right here. Jeff Jarvis to Michael Tomasky: I believe the rules you long to carry into the new world are inherently corrupting for journalism: We journalists have long traded in the currencies of access and exclusivity with the powerful. But the price we pay is complicity in a system of secrecy. That's what off-the-record talks and unnamed sources add up to: secrets. As journalists we should be allergic to the idea of helping public officials hide anything from the public. And as journalists, I'd have thought we'd be rejoicing in the idea that witnesses can now share what they hear from public figures. Openness is our cause, transparency our goal, no? Yes, we may lose some exclusives - but exclusives now have the half-life of a click. With more openness and more reporting - by all - we will end up with more stories, the public will get more information, and politicians will learn that anything and everything they say and do can (and should) be reported. You want transparency from the citizen journalists. I agree, but I'd expand that: I want transparency from all journalists, and not just about donations but also about influences, especially in the US, where claims of objectivity have lately become a cloak for partisanship. That's the simplest rule: openness for all. I think we should be applauding and supporting Mayhill Fowler. Her reporting of Obama's “bitter” remarks - in spite of her support of his candidacy - is an impressive act of intellectual honesty. She knew those remarks would be newsworthy. She knew they could hurt him. But she opted for openness, directly to the public, around campaign spin as well as press filters: the witness reports. I'd say she showed veteran journalists how to operate under new rules of her own that, in this case, were superior to the old rules of conspiratorial secrecy. Michael to Jeff: Well, sometimes the rules I “long” for (what a word!) are inherently corrupting and result in secrets being kept from the public. But sometimes, indeed more often, it's just the opposite. Sometimes, only the protection of anonymity will ensure that a source with important information about powerful people comes forward. In this way, the public has learned about a million things, from the Pentagon Papers to the less alarmist intelligence assessments about Iraq before the war. You know that. And very few journalists I know would favour “[hiding] anything from the public.” They would, however, favour not publishing something until it's verified. That's scarcely complicity in secret-keeping. That's just being responsible. I'll tell you what. Let's go ask Alan Rusbridger the following: One of his reporters hears from one source (unwilling to go on the record) that David Cameron praised Oswald Mosley in a private talk. Should the Guardian publish on the basis of that alone? I'm guessing that Alan would prove himself to be “old-fashioned” on this point, and properly so. But none of this has to do with what Fowler did. To recap: She got in the door because she donated money to Obama's campaign. This is something no beat reporter would or could do. Then she was able to take advantage of that situation. She “showed veteran journalists” nothing, because “veteran journalists” would not have been allowed in that meeting! You write as if these “veteran journalists” would have heard Obama's remarks and kept them secret. But the point is that veteran journalists would never have gotten through the door in the first place. So fine; call them “witnesses” and drop the whole conceit that they're journalists. And I'm glad you agree about listing witnesses' donations. Will you take that message to Arianna Huffington and Jay Rosen [the co-sponsors of the Off The Bus citizen journalists' blog]? Jeff to Michael: Well, I think you're mixing apples and kumquats into a bit of a rhetorical fruit salad. There's quite a difference between hearing a tip from a whistleblower and recording a presidential candidate speaking at a forum. There's also a difference between verifying such a tip with reporting - which we'll all agree is necessary - and playing that tape-recording, which itself was the verification anyone needed. Obama's words and voice spoke for themselves. So I don't see the connection you make between keeping something off the record and verifying it; the former does nothing in the interest of the latter in this matter. To make your hypothetical case consistent with the discussion at hand, if the witness who heard David Cameron praise Oswald Mosley put a video of it on YouTube for all to see, I imagine that you and the Guardian would deal with it at face value. You would, as reporters did in the Obama case, report further - you'd put an oyster around the pearl. But these witnesses are the ones who now start the story. Now let me extend your hypothetical: let's say that a reporter did get in the room with Obama and had made a pledge to keep it off the record. But a donor - any old donor, with or without a blog - had recorded the session (as Fowler says many did) and put that on YouTube. Does it now matter that there was a journalist there? Who is serving the public better? I say the journalist should be delighted that word got out and that demanding such off-the-record pledges is now fruitless. This is a crucial element in a new architecture of news: when witnesses share what they see publicly we need to figure out how to integrate that into our journalism. It will become even more complicated when they share what they see live with their camera-phones, as technology allows today. Veteran journalists may be nowhere near that news - because, as journalists, they had not been allowed in the door or merely because they had not arrived yet - but they will depend on such reporting or witnessing, call it what you will. It will still add up to journalism in the end. As for your challenge on disclosure, I've done more: I reveal my politics on my blog's disclosure page, including my vote for Hillary Clinton in the primaries. I've blogged my expectation to see similar behaviour from bloggers and journalists alike. I went so far as to ask my readers recently whether, having revealed my preferences anyway, I should put my money where my mouth is and donate to Clinton's campaign. Their view (like mine) was mixed. But it's worth asking: if I'm going to be a citizen journalist, shouldn't I act like a citizen? Michael to Jeff: You make a fair point in the bulk of your third and fourth paragraphs, but then you end, for me, on a false note. I suppose Fowler served the public interest in the sense that, sure, those remarks of Obama's were revealing of something or other. But I still say it's a little sneaky and sleazy to be a citizen for the purposes of making a donation, and then getting to be a journalist for the purposes of writing it up. There is a certain duplicity there, Jeff. Let citizens or witnesses videotape and audiotape to their hearts' contents. But no, it doesn't add up to journalism. It adds up to recording, or transcribing. As I said in my original CiF column, I overwhelmingly embrace the blogosphere, and I like most of what I've read under the Off The Bus rubric. (I felt you didn't acknowledge this in your original Buzzmachine post, which practically made it sound like I have a Linotype machine in my basement to which I pay secret ritualistic obeisance.) But I admit that I'm a little less persuaded that it's such a great and necessary thing that we know every single word public people utter. People say dumb things and things they don't really mean. They misspeak. Whether constant recording of such missteps, and the inevitable intense fixation on them, will over time serve the public interest and help voters make more “informed” decisions is not yet settled in my view. That it will lead to more “gotcha!” moments on the campaign trail as candidates are caught saying naughty things isn't a particularly stellar claim to make for the blogosphere, which actually does far more important work in the areas of media-monitoring and community-building. What I like about the blogosphere is that, at its best, it elevates the debate. Mainstream journalists would think I'm out of my mind to say that, but it's true - there are, for example, all manner of policy experts with blogs who shed real light on substantive questions, or bloggers with the intellectual chops to make really interesting and important observations about something happening in the news. Or look at what FireDogLake did during the Scooter Libby trail, which was awesome. All those things are great. Catching pols putting their feet in their mouths may make news, but it's not exactly why John Peter Zenger went to jail. Jeff to Michael: I don't think this is really about bloggers. It's almost coincidental that Fowler had a platform at Huffington Post. If she hadn't, she'd still have found the way to tell her story, if only on YouTube. This weekend, at an open house for students at the City University of New York graduate school of journalism, where I teach, I spoke with a potential student who has been volunteering in the Clinton campaign and she has a great story to tell about the reaction she has gotten, as an African-American woman, from Obama volunteers. Now the fact that she's a volunteer is not just something to be disclosed, it's at the heart of the story. Hers is a great story that is revealing about the campaigns and, more so, the country and the times. I urged her to start writing and said she should pitch it to a magazine. Or better yet, wouldn't the Guardian like to see it? I think this discussion is balancing on what will add up to journalism and who all does that adding. I believe that coverage of stories and topics will, more and more, become molecules that attract all different sorts of atoms: a bit of reporting - and, yes, it's reporting - from witnesses; reporters' work adding balance, depth, vetting, answers to questions; editors packaging and adding links to background and source material; readers and bloggers adding - as you indeed point out - corrections and context; sources having the chance, at last, to respond in kind. Journalism becomes less of a product and more of a process. When I was at the Guardian a few weeks ago to talk about its new newsroom, this notion was at the centre of the discussion. What you're really talking about, I think, is not rules but is a new organizing principle of journalism. I'm glad that Fowler had her recorder and shared what she heard. That, I believe, is the seed for journalism and we in the business and in the society will benefit. And so, in the long run, will politicians, once they learn the benefits of living and working more transparently. Will we have silly gotcha moments? Sadly, yes. But sadly, we had those long before bloggers were born. Was what Fowler reported a gotcha moment or a revealing one? Well, that's where our perspectives - and our transparency about them - come into play. I thought it was revealing, but I'm a Hillary voter and you'd be within your rights to judge what I say accordingly. You have been laudably open about your preference and so it's right for you and your readers to wonder what impact that might have. This becomes one more ingredient in what it turning into a bigger and bigger pot of journalism stew. Michael to Jeff: Regarding your last paragraph, I already said that Fowler served the public interest. I think the quote was revealing of something; at the least, the fact that Obama has comparatively little direct experience dealing with and talking to white, rural working-class people and not enough familiarity with their way of life. So that's a fair knock. It's just that these things do get blown out of proportion, and it gets comical (or sometimes worse) watching millionaire pundits natter on about “elitism.” I'll just end where I started. I still say she came by the quote at best surreptitiously because she got in the door as a citizen (via her donation) and then became a journalist when that was handy, a contention you haven't seriously refuted except to say (1) that's the way it is these days, and (2) okay, then, let's drop the word journalist from our description of Fowler et al and just call them witnesses. That's my claim, and you haven't said anything to dissuade me from sticking to it. On all this other meta stuff, we don't especially disagree.
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Oversharing on oversharing
After reading Steven Johnson's wonderful essay on publicness, Mark Dery came to the conclusion that I should not talk about my cancer and my penis. He says I and so-called oversharers like me have a “disease of the psyche.” He says we are “redrawing the boundaries of publicly acceptable behavior.” That is to say, he doesn't deem it acceptable. But in this, Dery reveals far more about himself than I reveal about me. All you know about me is that my penis doesn't work well. What we know about Dery is that he's prudish, disapproving, controlling, Victorian, media-obsessed, retrograde, predictable, snippy, snarky, and self-righteous with some apparent penis and anus problems he should be discussing with his shrink. What's it to him if I talk about my cancer? He may object because he is offended (though he makes more ass jokes than I do) or doesn't like me (which he long ago established) or wants attention (damn, and here I am giving it to him) or because he mistakenly thinks this web thing is a medium he wants edited to his liking and now I've schmutzed it (he hates it when I call the web a conversation but that's what it is; would he also edit the talk at a Dunkin' Donuts?). Whatever. I really don't give a damn what he thinks of me. I bring up Dery because I think that when we hear such disapproval of our publicness, we need to turn it around and look at what it says about the critic, not the criticized. I've just been writing that section of my book, arguing that when gays had to hide in the closet because their behavior was deemed unacceptable, that was a commentary not on their lives but on society. The solution was to come out in public and dare the bigots and prudes to continue their disapproval. The bigots' behavior is what is becoming unacceptable. This is what I said to Julia Allison when she tried to interview me but instead, I interviewed her on the topic of publicness during Internet Week. Julia is quite the public figure and she draws an army of snarkers far cruder than Dery. “I have a very active group of detractors on the web who like to seize on everything I do — everything — and criticize it,” she said. She is torn. On the one hand, she began our conversation identifying herself as “a professional sharer — not oversharer.” On the other hand, I asked whether she feels burned — “yes, yes I do” — and trapped — “yes, absolutely, I do feel trapped by this…. I've lost jobs because of it. I've lost relationships because of it.” Why do they do this to her? She's self-aware enough to respond: “Oh, I've got a little bit of an ego.” So why not join a nunnery? “I continually play around with that,” she said — continuing with little apparent irony, “I went to an ashram last month and went completely off the web.” But she returned. It's a living. “I can pay my rent because of sharing on the internet,” she said. Then why not ignore her detractors? I know I'm being a bit glib asking this, as I'm a man and not the subject of the kind of attack she's under. Still, I said that she and I have at least one detractor in common and I told her I don't listen to him and only see his bile in the occasional Twitter search and when I do, I say, “fuck him.” At the end of our talk, she came around to agree at least that much: “But then at a certain point you do say fuck it.” Dery should be concerned that Allison is more insightful on this topic than he is. The two of them agree in some ways. He thinks there should be standards (which he sets). She thinks we need more decorum and protection from bullying. But she understands the internet better than he does. She understands that it is, whether he likes it or not, a conversation. When friends talk about their lives they don't accuse each other of oversharing. But online, strangers think they should. Oversharing, she said, is “a distinctively pejorative term.” When I talked about my cancer, Facebook hater Jason Calacanis — then still on Facebook — left a comment saying only: “Overshare.” I responded that he was the one who had just overshared. Did he need to say that? Why? What was he trying to prove? What did he add — what information, ideas, challenges, experience, support, value? He and Dery — like Steve Jobs — would simply like to tell us what not to say on the internet. Well, they're the ones with the problem. The problem is that they see the internet in their own image as a medium they want to edit, package, and control. “This is partly about the media-age article of faith that nothing is really real unless it's recorded and, increasingly, shared,” Dery wrote. Later he said, “Thus, we're increasingly comfortable with the disappearance of privacy and the prying media eye… we only feel that we truly exist when we see ourselves reflected in the media eye, because that's where the real reality is…” He said my talking about my cancer has “everything to do with our media-age fixation of fame.” Oh, yes, I want to be famous for my limp and leaky dick. The irony is that Dery accuses me of making media when I am merely living. Dery can't recognize real life when he sees it; he's the one who measures the world in media terms. He says this is a case of the “real and virtual” colliding as if you were virtual and media were real. You are what's real. When I tell my friends online about my cancer — and receive no end of valuable advice and information from my wise crowd, which I would not have received had I not — Dery thinks that “says more about the blogorrheic, tweet-expulsive times we live in, when so many of us feel the need to broadcast our every thought, at every minute, to everyone than it does about the civic virtues of making our private lives public.” Note his verb: “broadcast.” He thinks the web is a TV station rather than a means for people — real people — to connect with each other. “Is the desire,” he continues and continues, “to broadcast the most mortifying details not only of our private lives but of our private parts really about the desire to Feel the Love on an epic scale? If so, isn't it selfish, rather than selfless?” Note the judgment: “mortifying.” In his judgment, cancer and penises are embarrassing. He said that “exhibitionism is a form of social dominance.” How, because he doesn't want to see the word penis? No, it's that sort of imposed prurience that is a form of social dominance. As I said, that's his problem. If we continue to think — like little boys growing up in a Puritanical world — that penises are embarrassing, then as men they will continue to not get checked and more will die. Then it's society's problem. Dery argues that we reverse “the polarities of public and private here” and: “More and more, we're alone in public, oblivious to the world around us.” No, I'm merely oblivious to his disapproval. Had I not talked aloud, I would have been much more alone. A few paragraphs later, he contradicts himself asking: “What unconsidered intellectual, spiritual and psychological collateral damage are we inflicting on ourselves by being so outward-focused, so frenetically interactive, so terminally social that we get a death letter and 'the instinctive response is, I’d better tweet this up right away.'” Ah, so he does see that we are being social. Dery at least acknowledges that this trend train is moving with or without him. “[W]e're increasingly comfortable with the disappearance of privacy and the prying media.” Almost, Mark. We're increasingly comfortable with the disappearance of privacy and the connections with people that allows. This isn't media, Mark. This is life. Whether you like it or not, life, unlike media, is messy. That's what makes it real. Before I end, I should note that we learn one more thing about Dery from this essay, like so many of his others: If I am guilty of oversharing, he is guilty of overwriting (“The contention that civic duty demands we narrate the Director's Cut version of a Fantastic Voyage up our anal canals is the point where rectum meets reductio ad absurdum“) — not to mention criminal use of clichés (“We're all Norma Desmond, ready for our close-up”). Hate to tell you this, Mark, but I have another operation coming up this summer that I'll mention here later. You won't like that. But the solution is not to tell me what not to talk about. The solution is for you not to read me. Anyway, I'm not talking to you. I'm talking with my friends.
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Privacy wingnuts
I've been looking for a classic example of so-called, self-appointed “privacy advocates” gathered by the press going off the deep-end (if you have any, please send them to me). And then this dropped in my lap: a reputed outcry by these putative privacy advocates against Wal-Mart putting RFID tags on pants. What could possibly violate our privacy with tracking pants in a store to make sure there aren't too many extra-large sizes on the shelves? (That was my experience with Wal-Mart when I tried to buy sweats before my surgery; I wish they'd restocked the mediums.) Well, say the advocates the Journal found: “While the tags can be removed from clothing and packages, they can't be turned off, and they are trackable. Some privacy advocates hypothesize that unscrupulous marketers or criminals will be able to drive by consumers' homes and scan their garbage to discover what they have recently bought.” Yeah, and then what? So they find out that I bought 33/34 jeans. And with that precious personal data they will do what? Blackmail me because I'm no longer the svelte 32 I once was? Sell me illegal diet aids? Sell me ice cream? Target advertising for medium jockeys to me? Subject me to public ridicule as a pencil-necked geek? Don't the reporter and editor at the Journal stand back and laugh at the absurdity of this worry? Don't they ask the next, obvious question: “Yeah, and…?” Isn't that their job? Ah, but they report more and find further cause for worry: “Some privacy advocates contend that retailers could theoretically scan people with such [encoded] licenses as they make purchases, combine the info with their credit card data, and then know the person's identity the next time they stepped into the store.” And that would be worth the trouble and risk for the store how? That would give them more data than they already have from credit cards and other means? So often, articles calling on “privacy advocates” leave them unnamed — anonymous and private, you understand. The Journal digs up one Katherine Albrecht, “founder of a group called Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering and author of a book called 'Spychips' that argues against RFID technology.” Group? Just how many people go to her meetings? And does the book come with tin-foil underwear? The “group” was founded to oppose grocery-store loyalty cards. Yes, we see the damage they have done to countless lives. Her own site says that she has “earned her accolades from Advertising Age and Business Week and caused pundits to label her a PR genius.” I dare say. She next got the Journal to swallow her silliness. Listen, I'm all for privacy. I'm working hard to define it in my book on publicness. I will vigorously defend the need and right to control one's information. There are plenty of serious and difficult issues to discuss. But this kind of idiocy does not serve the cause. It only finds a spy under every leisure suit. In the long run, it turns the cause of privacy into an object of ridicule. And that's wrong. But this is often the case with technology and privacy. Technology spawns fears — and worries these advocates — because it introduces change and it's really change that they fear. Here's a tidbit from my manuscript illustrating the point: * * * Alan F. Westin, in his influential 1967 book Privacy and Freedom … found many devices to fear: LSD “may greatly affect the individual’s daily personal balance between what he keeps private about himself and what he discloses to those around him” and could again be used for government surveillance. Westin worried about radio pills, miniature transmitters, and even about fluorescent powders and dyes—not to mention radioactive substances—that could be applied to “hands, shoes, clothing, hair, umbrella, and the like, or can be added to such items as soap, after-shave lotion, and hair tonic” to track the unsuspecting person. Secret, miniature cameras, infrared film, microminiature microphones the size of match-heads, battery-operated tape-recorders, hidden “television-eye” monitoring, telephone tapping, “truth measurement” by polygraph tests, personality testing, brain-wave analysis, dossiers of personal data, and the means to steam open envelopes and measure TV audiences—these all concerned him. He speculated about “invisible magnetic-ink tattoos [that] might be applied (for example, to babies at birth)” and transmitters that could be implanted and “wireless, battery-operated television ‘eyes’ the size of buttons,” not to mention U-2 spy cameras from above as well as the ability to read brain signals. Westin warned of the dangers of computers. In 1966, he wrote, there were 30,000 computers used in the U.S., 2,600 of them in the federal government. What happens, he asked, when we come to the day when “computers in the field of health will eventually establish total medical profiles on everyone in the country ‘from the hour of birth’ and updated through life. Each record will be almost instantly accessible to medical personnel.” Oh, if only. Westin listed his fears of technology’s impact on privacy 45 years before you read this. How many of his dreads came to life? Few if any, I’d say. That is not to mock him nor even to diminish his warnings, only to put the fears technology fosters into context as we grapple with the concerns attached to our more-modern sciences. * * * LATER: I looked at all the coverage I could find on Google News and I found but one piece that, like me, dared to question the “Cassandras of the privacy movement.” CNBC's Dennis Kneale wrote: One day RFID tags will permeate the U.S. and global economies, cutting costs for manufacturers and retailers and letting them better respond to consumer tastes. A whole new stock-sector boom could loom as well, in companies that cash in on this inevitable tech trend. That is, unless the Privacy Police gets in the way. . . . Um, so what is it I should fear that Wal-Mart will do with this new data horde showing that I just bought a pair of boxers? (Alright let’s stipulate: We’d be less keen on Wal-Mart’s knowing we just bought Spanx.) The privacy guys always do this—raise well-intended but fear-provoking possibilities at the advent of most any new, promising technology. It is part of what the 1990s Internet sage, Nicholas Negroponte, called the “demonization of bits.” If a salesperson follows us around a store watching our purchases, fine; but use technology to do it and suddenly it’s Orwellian. Playing the privacy card seems a bit antiquated in this exhibitionistic era of gleefully revealing your inner-most foibles and fetishes to potentially millions of other equally indiscreet folks on Facebook.
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The problem with comments isn’t them
I'm coming to think that the — or a — problem with the quality of conversation in comments online is a matter of timing: Once we in media are finished with our work we allow the public to comment. We throw our product over the wall and let people react while we retreat into the castle and shut the gates so we cannot hear them. They know they are talking to bricks and so they shout and cover them with spray paint. Only we have the power to clean the mess but we've left the scene and so the castle walls are soon overrun with graffiti. This timing — which is inherently insulting to the public — comes out of our old media worldview brought to the internet. We think the internet is a medium and that we make products for it that the public consumes. When instead we open up to conversation earlier in our process then the conversation can become more collaborative and productive: We ask people what they know, which is a mark of respect and value. We listen to advice and requests. We end our separation from the public and join it. Waiting until we are done to listen is too late. We must stop looking at the internet as a medium. I spent a long time this weekend talking with a reporter who's writing about nasty comments — I'll link to her piece when she publishes it — and I tried to convince her that the media-view we from media impose on the internet is much of the problem: When we see the internet as a medium, we expect it to be packaged and pretty, clean and controlled like newspapers and magazines and shows, and so when someone dumps a turd on that — a nasty comment — we think the whole thing is ruined, as if bad editing allowed “shit” to get into a letter printed in The New York Times. But as Doc Searls taught me early on, the internet is not a medium — indeed, judging it as a medium brings all sorts of dangerous presumptions about control and ownership and regulation. No, Doc says, the internet is a place. It's a park or a streetcorner where people pass and meet, talk and argue, where they are right and wrong, where they connect with each other and information and actions. It's a public place. (And when I talk about publicness Now judge the conversation in those terms: If you pass someone cursing on the streets of New York do you write off the place? Well, I don't (especially because that person you pass might be me). But all this is not to say that I accept, or we should accept the level of discourse on the internet as it is. No, I'm coming to believe that comments — which I defended when I ran sites — are an inferior form of conversation for the reasons I've just outlined. That's easier to see because we've seen superior forms, like Twitter. Twitter, like Facebook, is build mostly on real identities and control of relationships. I decide whom to follow and you decide whether to follow me. It's an individual meritocracy in which each of us defines merit. Back in the day — and still today — we hear that anonymity is the problem and that identity will solve that. That has never been the case. Identity alone isn't enough. I may know the identity of that curser on the streets of New York but that doesn't stop me from hearing him rant. Social controls are also needed so I can walk around him. That's what Twitter and Facebook provide each of us. The result is better discourse. I don't find Twitter or Facebook littered with fools and nastiness and when I do stumble upon them, I unfollow; when they occasionally spit on me, I block (if only I could instead give them their meds). Somewhere in there is a secret to improving discourse online. Craig Newmark is talking about the need for distributed trust networks and in Twitter and Facebook I do, indeed, think we're beginning to see the outlines of them. Clay Shirky wishes for algorithmic authority. Identity is a factor, of course. But we need to be careful about thinking that there is some system that will just clean up messy talk. That doesn't work in life; it won't work on the internet, which is life. What Craig and Clay are asking for is tools to help each of us have a more pleasant stroll in the streets of the internet. But I also think we need to turn this question around and not look at the commenters but at ourselves as members of the conversation. What are we doing to improve the quality of discourse? So I return to that question of timing: When we open up and grant respect and talk with people eye-to-eye and collaborate, that creates value not just blather. In What Would Google Do? I told the story of MyStarbucksIdea.com as a platform for collaboration over conversation: Some threads emerged from the suggestions and discussion. Many customers wanted express lines for brewed-coffee orders so they could avoid waiting behind alleged coffee aficionados with their half-this, half-that, skinny, three-pump, no-foam, Frappuwhatevers. Some customers asked to be allowed to send in their orders via iPhone. And some customers suggested—and thousands more agreed—that the chain should enable them to program their regular order into their Starbucks card so they could swipe it as they enter, placing the order and paying for it at the same time, letting them skip the cash-register line. One more proposed a pour-it-yourself corner and another asked for a delivery service. The theme—that is, the problem for Starbucks—was clear: long, slow, inefficient, irritating lines. But not one of these customers started with that complaint. Instead, they offered solutions to fix the problem. All Starbucks had to do was ask. Should comments as a form of conversation be eliminated? No, of course not. The tool isn't the problem (any more than blogging tools or printing presses are). If you eliminate comments that's even more insulting than not listening to them and it risks giving up the incredible value the public can give if only they are enabled to (a value I saw so clearly in the comments under my posts here or here). The issue isn't comments or identity or registration or tools. The issue is how you play host.
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FTC protects journalism’s past
The Federal Trade Commission has been nosing around how to save journalism and in its just-posted “staff discussion draft” on “potential policy recommendations to support the reinvention of journalism,” it makes its bias clear: The FTC defines journalism as what newspapers do and aligns itself with protecting the old power structure of media. If the FTC truly wanted to reinvent journalism, the agency would instead align itself with journalism's disruptors. But there's none of that here. The clearest evidence: the word “blog” is used but once in 35 pages of text and then only parenthetically as an example of buying ads on topical sites (“e.g., a soccer blog…”); otherwise, it's only a footnote. The only mention of investing in technology — the agent of disruption — comes on the 35th page (suggesting R&D for tools such as “improved electronic note-taking”). There's not a hint of seeing a new ecosystem of news emerge – the ecosystem we study and support at CUNY — except as the entry of nonprofit entities that, by their existence, give up on the hope the market will sustain news. If the FTC truly wanted to rethink journalism and its new opportunities and new value in our democracy, it would have written this document from the perspective of the people it is supposed to represent: the citizens, examining how we can benefit from news that is newly opened to the opportunity of collaboration and greater relevance. Instead, the document is written wholly from the perspective of the companies and institutions of the industry. The document, like good government work, does a superb job of trying very hard to say very little. From its hearings and research, the staff outlines proposals I find frightening, but many of them as politically absurd as they are impossible — e.g., what I'll dub the iPad tax to put a 5% surcharge on consumer electronics to raise $4 billion for public funding of news — and the document doesn't endorse them. Still, it's the document's perspective that I find essentially corrupt: one old power structure circling its wagons around another. Change? That's something to be resisted or thwarted, not embraced and enabled. The FTC's mission in this administration of change — its justification for holding these hearings and doing this work — is to foster competition. Well, the internet is creating new competition in news for the first time since 1950 and the introduction of TV. But the commission focuses solely on newspapers, apologizing that it ignores broadcast — but not even apologizing for ignoring the new ecosystem of news that blogs and technology represent. “This document will use the perspective of newspapers to exemplify the issues facing journalism as a whole,” the FTC says. And later: “[N]ewspapers have not yet found a new, sustainable business model, and there is reason for concern that such a business model may not emerge. Therefore, it is not too soon to start considering policiies that might encourage innovations to help support journalism into the future.” That is, to support newspapers' survival. There's the problem. Among the ideas the FTC presents: * “Additional intellectual property rights to support claims against news aggregators.” The document even takes on the language of Rupert Murdoch and company describing aggregators as “parasitic.” It espouses their perspective, that search engines and aggregators “use” content when, from my perspective, such use promotes and adds value to that content (and we'll soon see how Murdoch's properties do without it). The FTC doesn't broach the concept of the link economy and the value and distribution created by aggregators — not to mention (and they don't) that created by recommendations from readers via Twitter and Facebook (neither word appears). The FTC looks at extending copyright and corralling fair use and also outlines the dangers, ending up with no recommendation, thank goodness. It also looks at proposals to extend the “hot news” doctrine of a 1918 court case by the Associated Press but doesn't begin to grapple with the definition of hot (Tom Glocer of Reuters says his news has its highest value in its first three miliseconds) and it does acknowledge that news organizations “routinely borrow from each other.” Rip 'n' read, it's called. What disturbs me most in this section is that the FTC frets about “difficult line-drawing being proprietary facts and those in the public domain.” Proprietary facts? Is it starting down a road of trying to enable someone to own a fact the way the patent office lets someone own a method or our DNA? Good God, that's dangerous. * Antitrust exemptions. The FTC looks at allowing news organizations to collude to set prices to consumers and with aggregators. Isn't that the precise opposite of what an agency charged with protecting competition for the benefit of customers should be considering? Shouldn't the FTC recoil in horror at such sanctioned antitrust to protect incumbents' price advantages? Not here. * Government subsidies. After saluting the history of government subsidies for the press — namely, postal discounts, legal notice publication, assorted tax breaks, and funds for public broadcasting — the agency looks at other ideas: a journalism AmeriCorps paying journalists; increased funding for public broadcasting; a national fund for local news suggested in Columbia's report on journalism; a tax credit for employing journalists; citizen news vouchers (a la campaign checkoff); grants to universities for reporting. It also looks at increasing the present postal subsidy (which would only further bankrupt the dying postal service in the service of dying publications); using Voice of America and Radio Free Europe content (aka propaganda) in the U.S.; and enabling the SBA to help nonprofits. * Taxes. At least the FTC acknowledges that somebody'd have to pay for all this. In one section, the FTC looks at licensing the news: having ISPs levy a fee on us that the government then dolls out to its selected news purveyors — call that the internet tax. It'snothing but a tax and it would support incumbents surely. In another section, it examines the aforementioned iPad tax; a tax on the broadcast spectrum; a spectrum auction tax; a tax on ISPs and cell phones; and a tax on advertising (brilliant: taking a cut of the last support of news in America). * New tax status. The document spends much space looking at ways to make journalism a tax-exempt activity and suggests the IRS should change its regulations to enable that. It also looks at changing tax law to enable hybrid corporations (“benefit” and “flexible purpose” corporations that can judge success on serving a mission and not just maximizing profits) as well as L3Cs. * Finally, the document looks at the one thing that should be in its purview as a government agency: getting government to make its information open and accessible to view and analyze. Well, amen to that. I'm quoted in the document from my testimony saying that I am “optimistic to a fault about the future of news and journalism. The barrier to entry into media has never been lower…. But what we do need is a level playing field.” And in a footnote: “If you're talking about surviving, you're talking about the perspective of the old, legacy players who had a decade and a half to get their act together, and they didn't The future of journalism is not institutional, we now know, it is entrepreneurial.” But this document does nothing to enable that entrepreneurial future. If you want to give somebody tax breaks — and I wouldn't — give them to those who invest in innovation — whether as disruptors from the outside or as visionaries from the inside. I certainly would not change laws to favor incumbents over those innovators. I see no reason to provide tax subsidies to support an activity that is now a hundredfold more efficient than it used to be. Rather than restricting the flow of information by making it proprietary, I'd argue that it is in the interest of democracy to make it yet freer. The real problem I see here, again, is the alignment of the legacy institutions of media and government. Here, the internet is not the salvation of news, journalism, and democracy. It's the other side. The real advice I gave the FTC is not quoted in the document. It's this: Get off our lawn.
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GigaOM’s Summer Reading List
At some point you're going to step away from the computer, jump on a plane, in a car, or on your bike, and take a break this summer (right? promise us!). Here are some of the GigaOM team's favorite recent reads — a diverse list that reflects the breadth of topics that interest writers across our network. We're sure you have recommendations, too, and we'd be much obliged if you'd leave them in the comments. THE ANTIDOTE TO CHICK LIT: “Comeback America” by David Walker (Random House, 2010) If you’re a saver — you know, the type of person who grabs a knife to capture the last dredges of ketchup in a squeeze bottle — then you probably don’t need to read David Walker’s “Comeback America” to know that the U.S. is heading for a fiscal meltdown that will ruin the lives of your children and grandchildren. But for the rest of us out there, it’s a story that needs to be told, and Walker, who was the former Comptroller General of the U.S. and head of the GAO, tells it clearly with a minimum of hand wringing and a maximum of scary fiscal stats. He’s not panicked so much as glumly resigned by the profligate spending in our nation’s capital. Sure, he says he’s peddling hope, but I couldn’t see a lot of hope in his message that business leaders and Congress need to cut back on spending. Walker doesn’t sugarcoat things, and I suppose it’s better to be informed ahead of time about our grim future. It gives me time to perfect my kitchen garden so my family will still be able to eat. Where to read: While waiting to see your Congressman about that tax break your special interest group is pursuing. (Stacey Higginbotham) HISTORY IN THE MAKING: “The Facebook Effect” by David Kirkpatrick (Simon & Schuster, 2010) Mark Zuckerberg chose David Kirkpatrick to write an authoritative history of Facebook's first six years. That's the most important thing you need to know about “The Facebook Effect.” Though he's an independent reporter, Kirkpatrick shares Zuckerberg's vision of a world improved by technology making people more connected and accountable. You should read the book this summer for its thorough accounts of the young and incredibly successful company's key product and hiring decisions while the specifics are still relatively recent. Skip the intro and conclusion where Kirkpatrick tries to coin the term “Facebook Effect” (pretty sure it's already called “network effects”) and forecast Facebook's long-term cultural significance. But read the middle of the book to connect the dots of Facebook's unprecedented arc of growth and be in awe of Zuckerberg's otherworldly clarity of vision. Where to read: Make your way to downtown Palo Alto and make sure to flash the blue and silver hardcover at University Cafe and other key venues from Facebook history. (Liz Gannes) HOW DIGITAL MEDIA COULD BE USED FOR GOOD: “Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity In a Connected Age” by Clay Shirky (Penguin Press, 2010) If our hyper-connected and digital age has an official media guru, it is surely Clay Shirky. A professor of new media studies at New York University, Shirky is widely quoted by everyone from the New York Times to the Economist on the future of digital media and the ways in which it is changing society. His previous book, “Here Comes Everybody” (Penguin Press, 2008) helped cement that reputation, with its look at the crowdsourcing philosophy behind such web centerpieces as Wikipedia, and his new book is an extension of those thought-provoking ideas. Shirky makes a good case for the idea that modern middle-class society wastes a lot of time doing non-creative things such as watching television, and that the effort expended on such pursuits represents a “cognitive surplus” that people could put to better use online by creating things such as Ushahidi (a website that aggregates Twitter and other social media reports to track survivors and aid attempts following disasters such as the Haiti earthquake) and even LOLcats. Where to read: In a Starbucks, of course, where the person typing madly on the laptop next to you is probably developing the next Facebook or Twitter in between gulps of his chai latte. (Mathew Ingram) THE BILL GATES BOOK CLUB: “Energy Myth and Realities: Bringing Science to the Energy Policy Debate” by Vaclav Smil (AEI American Enterprise Institute, due to be released on July 16) Until recently, few people, even within environmental circles, had heard of Vaclav Smil, a professor at the University of Manitoba, despite the fact that he's written some 25 or so books on energy, green technology and world resource consumption. That was until newly-turned greentech investor Bill Gates dedicated a full page of his Gates Notes blog to plug not 1 but 3 books of Smil's, including Enriching the Earth, Global Catastrophes & Trends, and Energy at the Cross Roads. Gates even said that Smil has “opened my eyes to new ways to think about solving our energy and environmental issues” Um, that's enough or an endorsement for me — sold. Energy Myth and Realities is Smil's latest eco reality check that comes out on July 16, and will make you more educated about the world's power resources, and likely quite a bit more depressed about the future. Where to read: For maximum guilt turn your AC up to max, flip on all the lights, crack open the fridge and dig into a book that's sure to make you feel more than a little bad about your lifestyle. (Katie Fehrenbacher) HEADING OVER TO THE FICTION SHELF: “The Mistborn Trilogy” by Brandon Sanderson (Tor Fantasy, 2006-2008) As an avid fantasy and sci-fi reader, it's not often that an author surprises me with ingenious originality. Amazingly, Brandon Sanderson did just that with his three-book Mistborn series. Like most epics in this genre, the Mistborn books offer a classic good vs. evil, whole-world-at-stake theme combined with character races filled with rich background history. But Sanderson keeps the reader off-guard as not even the characters in the story know their true origins or the role they play in either the saving, or the destruction, of their world. Even better is the unique scientific-based approach Sanderson takes to create magic in the Mistborn world. Magic isn't taught from tomes, nor are spells chanted aloud. Instead, magical abilities are learned throughout the story and based on characters ingesting specific metals — when “burning” metals, the characters gain amazing abilities for a finite time. There's even experimentation by characters ingesting various alloys for different powers, which leads to completely unexpected plot twists and turns. Need another reason to read Sanderson's work? After Robert Jordan, author of the “Eye of the World” series, passed away leaving the story incomplete, Jordan's widow read Sanderson's Mistborn books. She was so taken with the story that she asked Sanderson to complete her husband's work using notes left behind. I can think of no higher recommendation for Sanderson, nor his Mistborn trilogy. Where to read: Turn off the radio in your Kindle, iPad or smartphone so you can fully experience the fantasy world found within the Mistborn books. (Kevin Tofel) THE LAST TIME THE LITTLE GUYS TOOK OVER THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY: “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock 'N' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood” by Peter Biskind (Simon & Schuster, 1998) If you're at all a film fan — especially a fan of movies from the 1970s — Biskind's interview-soaked tale of how Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and other filmmakers of the era broke into Hollywood and completely revolutionized it is delicious gossipy reading. (Ever wonder how much drug use went on in Hollywood in the 1970s? The answer is A LOT OF DRUGS.) But it's also relevant today as an examination of a period when the entertainment industry was in a position of flux, when new voices were infiltrating the system but also becoming corrupted by it. As Biskind tells it, the great creative revolution that took place in that decade eventually resulted in the creation of the Hollywood blockbuster and the complete commercialization of American film. Call it a cautionary tale for the new media creators of today. Where to read: While waiting in line for tickets to see Christopher Nolan's “Inception” (in IMAX, natch). (Liz Shannon Miller) STOCK UP ON ANECDOTES FOR YOUR NEXT COCKTAIL PARTY: “The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home” by Dan Ariely (HarperCollins, 2010) The author of “Predictably Irrational” returns with a new book, “The Upside of Irrationality,” which is as exciting and fun to read as his debut effort. In order to enjoy Ariely's work one needs to appreciate a great truisms of life — that randomness and numbers essentially dictate the outcome of pretty much everything. Ariely both performs and describes various experiments to explain why big bonuses may not make sense for creative thinkers, but could work for folks who perform more mechanicals tasks — or why revenge is so important for people. He also touches on the topic of happiness as seen through the lens of economic data. A reader needs to remember that this is not a business manual, but instead it is one man's attempt to explain the irrationality around us, not to be taken too seriously. When reading the book, you feel you are having a conversation with the author. As a blogger, I like how Ariely has artfully weaved himself into the book without being overbearing. Where to read: While driving thousands of miles into a desert, baking yourself in the sun, and setting yourself up for an appointment with an oncologist. (Om Malik) QUALITY READING FOR YOUR TECH-SAVVY KIDS: “Miss Spider's Tea Party” by David Kirk (Scholastic Press, iPad version 2010) Miss Spider’s Tea Party is a media extravaganza, with a series of books, a television and an iPad app that will keep younger kids occupied for half an hour at least without triggering your gag reflex or causing your attention to wander. My focus is on the iPad app, which is a fantastic example of the future of books in a way the beautiful, but less engaging and juvenile-friendly Alice in Wonderland iPad app isn’t. The animation isn’t overpowering, and the interactivity is about the level that a preschooler can understand. The entire app integrates music, some animation and activity in a way that feels like part of the book as opposed to an add-on experience. Plus, (if you’re going to actually read the story) Miss Spider is shorter than Alice. My daughter especially loves the memory-style matching game, which I will totally cop to playing when I get bored as well. Which is good, because at $10, this app isn’t cheap. Where to read: In the pediatrician’s office while trying to keep junior away from the germ-laden toys. (Stacey Higginbotham) THE FRIENDLY, READABLE POWER PRIMER: “Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America’s Energy,” by Jeff Goodell (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006) “Coal was supposed to be the engine of the industrial revolution, not the Internet revolution,” writes Jeff Goodell. And if you’re like him, you’ll probably make it through much (or all) of your adult life without ever laying eyes on a lump of coal. But every day an average American consumes some 20 pounds of coal, burning it “by wire,” when we flip on a light switch or recharge an iPad. “Big Coal” is Goodell’s fast-paced, trivia-filled tale of the history, culture, politics, consequences and characters of the coal and electric power industries, and the future of energy. In just over 250 pages he takes us careening from strip mines to wind farms to debates about cap and trade. First published in 2006, “Big Coal” has sections on “the frontier” of technologies and policies meant to address climate change that could use an update. But coal’s reach extends far enough across the national and global economy that this book still offers a fat helping of context for emerging technologies in today’s (and tomorrow’s) greentech market. Where to read: On mass transit, or in the comfort of your solar-powered house. (Josie Garthwaite) A BUSINESS BOOK THAT GETS IT: “The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion” by John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison (Basic Books, 2010) Thanks to ubiquitous broadband connectivity the web has become more real-time and more interactive. The act of retrieving information is slowly shifting into availability of information through serendipity. And in order to do, the conventional norms and conventions of information gathering are being replaced by new ideas, such as the ones used by Facebook. Just as Facebook builds and aggregates the news feed to suit an individual's relationships, corporate entities will have to do the same in the future. That is the thrust of a coherent argument made by consultants/authors/thinkers John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison: In order to succeed in the future, companies must assemble people and resources at light-speed to quickly respond to business needs and collaborate. It is a well-written book, full of anecdotes and stories, though at times it brings on a sense of ennui. Some readers (as they should) will find that the book predictable, because of the work they do, but for a mainstream audience, this is a worthy read. Where to read: On your private jet … or in a commercial airport lounge. (Om Malik) SOMETHING PRACTICAL FOR YOUR PLEASURE READING: “Social Media 101: Tactics and Tips to Develop Your Business Online,” by Chris Brogan (Wiley, 2010) Social media is here to stay. No matter what you do, it’s probably impacting your industry — especially if you do most of your work online. Chris Brogan’s book, “Social Media 101: Tactics and Tips to Develop Your Business Online,” offers bite-sized chunks — the book is 337 pages, divided into 87 different sections — that will help you to make the most of social media. The information covered in this book isn’t just the basic “here’s how to sign up for Twitter” stuff, though. Brogan has managed to condense discussions on topics like creating a community with a blog into something that you can act on. There’s a lot of big picture packed into this little book, and it perfect for those looking to get a crash course in social media over the summer. Where to read: While simultaneously tweeting and updating your Facebook status from the beach. (Thursday Bram)
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Product v. process journalism: The myth of perfection v. beta culture
An alarm went off on some desk at The New York Times business section: Oh-oh, time to slam blogs again. But the latest assault reveals as much about The Times and the culture of classical journalism as it does about bloggers. Like the millennial clash of business models in media - the content economy v. the link economy and the inability of one to understand the other - here we see a clash over journalistic culture and methods - product journalism v. process journalism. In The Times, Damon Darlin goes after blogs for publishing rumors and unfinished stories, calling it a “truth-be-damned approach” and likening it to yellow journalism, the highest insult of the gray class. He hauls out the worst example again - just as bloggers trying to go after MSM reporters do: the Steve Jobs heart attack rumor and Times WMD reporting (or Jayson Blair or Dan Rather), respectively. Darlin leads with TechCrunch and Gawker sharing bogus rumors of Apple buying Twitter. He acknowledges that TechCrunch said in its post that it could not confirm the story. But still, he uses it to jump to the first of his broad-brush generalizations: “Such news judgment is not unusual among blogs covering tech. For some blogs, rumors are their stock in trade.” Couldn't one say the same thing about political reporters who spread rumors and trial balloons, knowing they are just that, or business reporters feeding rumors and speculation about mergers or firings? Blogs are hardly alone in scoop mentality. Newspapers invented scoops. When I tweeted about the story, calling it a slap to bloggers, Times Sunday business editor Tim O'Brien - who'd just issued his customary long string of tweets flogging his stories, including this one - responded: “isn't about 'product vs. process' or 'old vs. new'. it's about people publishing things they don't believe to be true. standards.” One word: standards. But which standards? Whose standards? The Times' standards, of course. They set the standard, don't they? Well, yes, they do, sometimes. Just not all the standards all the time. At my school, we say we teach what we call the eternal verities of journalism. But I also try to make sure the students are open to new worldviews and new methods and means of journalism. Those can come from bloggers and from the public we serve. Darlin touches on one such new view when he writes: [TechCrunch founder] Mr. Arrington and the other bloggers see this not as rumor-mongering, but as involving the readers in the reporting process. One mission of his site, he said, is to write about the things a few people are talking about, “the scuttlebutt around Silicon Valley.” His blog will often make clear that he’s passing along a thinly sourced story. To quote Gawker founder Nick Denton, when we put up “half-baked posts” we are saying to our public: Here's what we know, here's what we don't know, what do you know. I believe it is critical to clearly label that, giving caveats and context. The same is true of 24-hour cable news, where the viewer must become the editor, understanding the difference between what is known now and what what can be confirmed later (see: the West Virgina mining disaster). In short: We who publish must learn how to say what we don't know at least as well as we say what we know. This is journalism as beta. I make a big point of that in What Would Google Do? - that every time Google releases a beta, it is saying that the product is incomplete and imperfect. That is inevitably a call to collaborate. It is - even from Google - a statement of humanity and humility: We're not perfect. Ah, but there's the problem: journalism's myth of perfection. And it's not just journalism that holds this myth. It is the byproduct of the means and requirements of mass production: If you have just one chance to put out a product and it has to serve everyone the same, you come to believe it's perfect because it has to be, whether that product is a car (we are the experts, we took six years to tool up, it damned well better be perfect) or government (where, I'm learning, employees have a phobic fear of mistakes - because citizens and journalists will jump on them) or newspapers (we package the world each day in a box with a bow on it - you're welcome). The posse of pros who jumped on me in Twitter this morning will say that they do make mistakes and corrections but first they always try to get it right - perfect - while bloggers instead spread rumors. But that's where the fundamental misunderstanding comes. It's a matter of timing, of the order of things, of the process of journalism. Newspaper people see their articles as finished products of their work. Bloggers see their posts as part of the process of learning. I believe the contrast in methodology will become even more stark as we start using tools such as Google Wave to create news collaboratively in present-tense. Online, we often publish first and edit later. We do that on blogs. One could say that 24-hour TV news does that, though I rarely see the editing. Even a division of The New York Times Company - About.com (where I used to consult) - does its work in that order. (That is why About had dozens of writers for every editor [I don't know the mix today], while The Times has three editors for every writer. That level of editing before publication is what makes The Times The Times - both from a journalistic perspective and, today, from an economic perspective; it may be what makes a newsroom like that unsustainable.) Online, the story, the reporting, the knowledge are never done and never perfect. That doesn't mean that we revel in imperfection, as is the implication of The Times' story - that we have no standards. It just means that we do journalism differently, because we can. We have our standards, too, and they include collaboration, transparency, letting readers into the process, and trying to say what we don't know when we publish - as caveats - rather than afterward - as corrections. The problem with this tiresome, never-ending alleged war of blogs vs. MSM (Arrington attacks The Times) and MSM vs. blogs (The Times attacks Arrington) - (Mark Glaser scolded me for rising to The Times' bait - is that it blinds each tribe from learning from the other. Yes, there are standards worth saluting from classical journalism. But there are also new methods and opportunities to be learned online. No one owns journalists or its methods or standards. Robert Picard writes that journalism is not business model; it is not a job; it is not a company; it is not an industry; it is not a form of media; it is not a distribution platform. Instead, journalism is an activity. It is a body of practices by which information and knowledge is gathered, processed, and conveyed. The practices are influenced by the form of media and distribution platform, of course, as well as by financial arrangements that support the journalism. But one should not equate the two. The pity is that there are Timesmen who already are using these new methods. I see bloggers there asking readers to help them with stories, admitting they don't know everything yet - which means they are publishing incomplete news. I wish one of those people had been assigned to this story (if it needed to be written at all) and that such an open-minded, curious journalist could have seen and explained these different worldviews and how they are clashing as they also merge. But that, apparently, was not the assignment. * * * I addressed the myth of perfection in the foreword of Craig Silverman's Regret the Error (now out in paperback): Nobody’s perfect – not even journalists . . . especially not journalists. Reporters and editors make mistakes. Indeed, they are probably more likely than most to do so. For just as bartenders break more glass because they handle more beer, so journalists who traffic in facts are bound to drop some along the way. Yet too often, they won’t admit that. What is plainly obvious – even a matter of liturgical confession for people of many faiths – is heretical to the reporting cult: People are fallible. But journalists too often believe they are not. I was one of them. We were trained to seek and attain nothing less lofty than truth. Accuracy. Objectivity. We were the trusted ones. Impartial experts. Fair and balanced. Alan Rusbridger, editor of London’s Guardian, said at a 2007 meeting of the Organization of News Ombudsmen at Harvard: “Since a free press first evolved, we have derived our authority from a feeling – a sense, a pretense – that journalism is, if not infallible, something close to it. We speak of ourselves as being interested in the truth, the real truth. We’re truth seekers, we’re truth tellers, and we tell truth to power.” But then he quoted Walter Lippman saying in 1922: “If we assume that news and truth are two words for the same thing we shall, I believe, arrive nowhere.” It is time for journalists to trade in their hubris and recapture their humanity and humility. And the best way to do that is simply to admit: We make mistakes. Craig Silverman’s examination of the art of the correction in his blog and now this book could not come at a better time for journalism. For the public’s trust in news organizations is falling about as fast as their revenues (and, yes, those may be related). One way to earn back that trust is to face honestly and directly the trade’s faults. The more – and more quickly – that news organizations admit and correct their mistakes, prominently and forthrightly, the less their detractors will have grounds to grumble about them. But for journalists, to admit mistakes is to expose failure; corrections, in this logic, diminish stature and authority rather than enhance them. . . . But this discussion should be about so much more than just errors and corrections. This is about new and better ways to gather, share, and verify news. And it is about a radically different and improved relationship between journalists and the public they serve. These changes in the culture and practice of journalism will not just bolster journalism’s reputation but expand its reach and impact in society.
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SXSW: Privacy (and publicness)
At the privacy panel at SXSW. danah boyd says the issue is control. I always say that but she says it better. Siva Vaidhyanathan (fellow writer of books about Google) wants to beat down the assumption that just because we share a lot we don't care about privacy. He also wants to beat down the notion that there's a zero-sum game between privacy and publicity. Alice Marwick of NYU says - bless her - that “there is a value to publicness.” That is my rallying cry. Publicness is social. But publicness, she points out, is also valuable to companies. Judith Donath of MIT Media Lab says public space implies common control; private is under individual control. Donath discusses the idea of companies making transparent what they know about us. Isn't that what Google is starting to do by giving us the option to see our profiles, the basis for its targeting of us. I worked on a business once and wanted to expost our targeting data for ads so readers could correct us (the Amazon/TiVo problem of one action haunting you forever) and tell us what companies they didn't want and what companies they did want. In aggregate, this data - likely honest data in pursuit of an interest - would be many, many times more valuable than the targeting done now. A brave media company would tell advertisers how many readers didn't want their ads and why (anonymously, of course). Lovely phrase from Donath: “the digital mirror.” We look in our digital mirror, don't we, with our ego searches on Technorati and Google and Twitter. But we also need the ability to look in the digital mirrors others hold. And then we need the power to primp. She also says that the public sphere we are creating leads to more tolerance. I agree; see the snippets below. boyd and Vaidhyanathan agree that our data is currency but she says it is currency not just in an economic sense - many of us in this room, she observes, got jobs from revealing ourselves online - but also in a social sense: we trade our bits of data. On celebrity, Marwick says that it is a one-to-many relationship. Celebrity is having followers. Aha, so that makes Twitter a machine t hat makes us all celebrities, no? Everybody's famous to 15 followers. Ongoing…. * * * Here are snippets from What Would Google Do on privacy and publicness: When the photo service Flickr started, its husband-and-wife founders, Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield, made a fateful if almost accidental decision. As Fake puts it, they “defaulted to public.” That is, while other online photo services made the assumption that users would want to keep personal pictures private—stands to reason, no?—Flickr decided instead to make photos public unless told otherwise. Amazing things happened. People commented on each other’s photos. Communities formed around them. They tagged their photos so they could be found in searches because they wanted their pictures to be seen. They contributed more photos because they were seen. And as I will explain later, their usage of photos helped interesting ones to bubble up, which was possible only because they were all public. Fake calls this condition “publicness,” which is becoming a key attribute of society and life in the Google age. I believe publicness is also becoming a key attribute of successful business. We now live and do business in glass houses (and offices), and that’s not necessarily bad. Publicness is about more than having a web site. It’s about taking actions in public so people can see what you do and react to it, make suggestions, and tell their friends. Living in public today is a matter of enlightened self-interest. You have to be public to be found. Every time you decide not to make something public, you create the risk of a customer not finding you or not trusting you because you’re keeping secrets. Publicness is also an ethic. The more public you are, the easier you can be found, the more opportunities you have. * * *Another snippet: Google is changing our societies, our lives, our relationships, our worldviews, probably even our brains in ways we can only begin to calculate. Start with our relationships. I believe young people today—Generation Google—will have an evolving understanding and experience of friendship as the internet will not let them lose touch with the people in their lives. Google will keep them connected. Admit it: You’ve searched for old girlfriends and boyfriends on Google (and wondered whether they’ve Googled you). Your ability to find those old, familiar faces likely drops in inverse proportion to age: The older you are, the harder it is to find old friends online. I went to Google—purely as an academic and technical exercise, understand—and searched for old girlfriends. I found my college girlfriend, now a philosophy professor. I couldn’t find my high-school sweetheart as she had left no visible Google tracks. But she later found me because, with my blog, I had left as many tracks as a herd of buffalo in snow. We live on opposite coasts now but when I was in her city on business, we got together and filled each other in on the last—gulp—30-odd years. We never would have had that chance to catch up and come to account without Google. Thank you, Google. That won’t be the experience of young people today. Thanks to our connection machine, they will stay linked, likely for the rest of their lives. With their blogs, MySpace pages, Flickr photos, YouTube videos, Seesmic conversations, Twitter feeds, and all the means for sharing their lives yet to be invented, they will leave lifelong Google tracks that will make it easier to find them. Alloy, a marketing firm, reported in 2007 that 96 percent of U.S. teens and tweens used social networks—they are essentially universal—and so even if one tie is severed, young people will still be linked to friends of friends via another, never more than a degree or two apart. I believe this lasting connectedness can improve the nature of friendship and how we treat each other. It will no longer be easy to escape our pasts, to act like cads and run away. More threads will tie more of us together longer than in any time since the bygone days when we lived all our lives in small towns. Today, our circles of friends grow only larger. Does this abundance of friendship make each relationship shallower? I don’t think so. Friendship finds its natural water level—we know our capacity for relationships and stick closest to those we like best. The so-called Dunbar number says we are wired to pay attention to about 150 relationships. I think that could grow with relationships of various kinds that are easier to maintain online. But remember the key insight that made Facebook such a success: It brought real names and real relationships to the internet. It’s about good friends. Won’t our embarrassments also live on? Our missteps, youthful mistakes, and indiscretions will be more public and permanent, haunting us for the rest of our lives because the world, thanks to Google, has a better memory. True. But here the doctrine of mutually assured humiliation enters to shield us. We will all have our causes to cringe. The tarnished flipside of the golden rule becomes: I’ll spare you your shame if you spare me mine. Or to put it more eloquently, I once again quote author David Weinberger, who said at a conference (according to the Twitter feed of blogger Lisa Williams, who was there): “An age of transparency must be an age of forgiveness.” Our new publicness may make us more empathetic and ultimately forgiving of each others’ and even of public figures’ faults and foibles. We see that already. Barack Obama said he inhaled and no one gasped. Who are we to throw stones when Google moves us all into glass towns? In Googley terms: Life is a beta. But still, I hear, hasn’t life become too public? What has become of privacy? “Nothing you do ever goes away and nothing you do ever escapes notice,” Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the internet and most recently a Google executive, told an audience in Seattle. Then he added—please note, with irony—“There isn’t any privacy, get over it.” He’s right. I say privacy is one of the most overused fear words of the age. Privacy is not the issue. Control is. We need control of our personal information, whether it is made public and to whom, and how it is used. That is our right, at least for matters outside the public sphere. The ethics and expectations of privacy have changed radically in Generation G. People my age and older fret at all the information young people make public about themselves. I try to explain that this sharing of personal information is a social act. It forms the basis of the connections Google makes possible. When we reveal something of ourselves publicly, we have tagged ourselves in such a way that we can be searched and found under that description. As I said in the chapter on health, I now can be found in a search for my heart condition, afib. That is how others came to me and how we shared information. Publicness brings me personal benefits that outweigh the risks. Publicness also brings us collective benefits, as should be made clear by now from the aggregated wisdom Google gathers and shares back with us thanks to our public actions: our searches, clicks, links, and creations. Publicness is a community asset. The crowd owns the wisdom of the crowd and to withhold information from that collective knowledge—a link, a restaurant rating, a bit of advice—may be a new definition of antisocial or at least selfish behavior. For all these reasons and one more powerful than any of them—ego—we will continue to reveal more of ourselves online. We will want to speak and to be discovered. Our online shadows become our identities. To stand out from our crowd, we need distinct identities. I’ll bet we’ll soon see parents giving children unique names so they can stand alone in Google searches. Wired editor Chris Anderson linked to an early indication of the trend: Laura Wattenberg, author of The Baby Name Wizard, reported that in the 1950s, a quarter of all children got one of the top 10 baby names; more recently that has fallen to a tenth. I was about to predict that someday soon, parents would check to assure the .com domain for a name is available before giving the moniker to a baby. Then I searched on Google and, sure enough, the Associated Press reported in 2007 that it’s already happening: “In fact, before naming his child, Mark Pankow checked to make sure ‘BennettPankow.com’ hadn’t already been claimed. ‘One of the criteria was, if we liked the name, the domain had to be available,’ Pankow said.” At last check, young Bennett wasn’t blogging, but his digital destiny is set. More than names, identity will be about accomplishments and creations, things you are known for that narrow your Google search. I am the blogger Jeff Jarvis who writes about Google and media, not Jeff Jarvis the jazz trumpeter, Jeff Jarvis who ran Segway tours in Thailand (drat—I think I’d like to be him), Jeff Jarvis who heads a mobile field service software provider (whatever that is), and certainly not Jeff Jarvis the high school athlete (sadly, I’m too old and too clumsy). I am the No. 1 Jeff Jarvis. In Google wars, it’s every Jeff for himself. This brings us to another argument against public identity: It turns us into egotistical exhibitionists. We share everything, down to the most intimate and mundane. Who cares what I had for breakfast? Why share it? London blogger Leisa Reichelt found that this “ambient intimacy”—reporting small signposts of life, sharing what we’re doing, who we’re with, when we get a new haircut or a new car—allows us to “keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible.” Ambient intimacy is good for friendship. “It helps us get to know people who would otherwise be just acquaintances. It makes us feel closer to people we care for but in whose lives we’re not able to participate as closely as we’d like.” And on a practical level, Reichelt said, “It also saves a lot of time when you finally do get to catch up with these people in real life!”
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★ The iPad
Back in December, here’s how I concluded my piece on what I expected from Apple’s then-still-unannounced tablet: If you’re thinking The Tablet is just a big iPhone, or just Apple’s take on the e-reader, or just a media player, or just anything, I say you’re thinking too small — the equivalent of thinking that the iPhone was going to be just a click wheel iPod that made phone calls. I think The Tablet is nothing short of Apple’s reconception of personal computing. After the iPad was announced, I got two types of emails from readers. The first group saying they were disappointed, because they had been hoping I was right that The Tablet would be Apple’s reconception of personal computing. The second group wrote to tell me how excited they were because I was right that The Tablet would be Apple’s reconception of personal computing. Count me in with the second group. Apple hasn’t thought of everything with iPad, but what they’ve thought about, they’ve thought about very deeply. I got mine Saturday morning, and I’ve been using it since — or at least as often as I could get it away from my son. Here are my thoughts. The Big Picture The whole thing feels fast fast fast. The only thing that feels slow overall, so far, is web page rendering. Not because it’s slower than the iPhone — it’s not, it’s definitely much faster — but because it’s so much slower than my MacBook Pro. It’s easy to forget on modern PC-class hardware just how computationally expensive HTML rendering is. The funny thing is, the iPad, in raw CPU terms, is a far slower machine than a modern Mac. But the iPad is running a lightweight OS and lightweight apps. It’s like a slower runner with a lighter backpack who can win a race against a faster runner wearing a heavier backpack. Thus, many of the things you do are faster, or at least feel faster (which is what matters), on the iPad than the Mac. Like, for example, launching applications. The built-in apps, and many of the third-party apps I’ve been using the most, are ready to use within a moment of launching them. (Games tend not to load instantly, but that’s true on high-power consoles like Xbox and PS3, too.) There’s something fundamentally strange about how fast the iPad feels considering how underpowered it is versus a modern PC or Mac. How can a computer with so much less CPU speed feel faster? What Apple has done is re-think several fundamental aspects. The iPad was designed from the ground up with a different set of priorities. I think Tim Bray summarizes it well: For a 1Ghz device with limited memory, the iPad is unreasonably fast. I suspect this accounts for a whole bunch of the “Wow!” reaction the iPad obviously provokes. Since there’s no free lunch, I think it’s really important that we understand what they sacrificed to get that performance. My bet would be on some combination of windowing and virtual memory. I tend to work on lots of things at once, but in fact I look at things in rapid succession, my eyes can really only focus on one thing at one time. Given sufficiently fast switching, maybe we all ought to be getting less WIMPy. The iPad (and iPhone OS across all devices) does indeed lack virtual memory. The only memory is honest-to-god RAM. RAM is fast, virtual memory is slow. The tradeoff is that without virtual memory, the iPad can do far less at once, but what it does do is never going to require hitting virtual memory. Without a windowing system, drawing is simpler and faster. Apple has made other significantly different tradeoffs as well. Battery life on the iPad is simply stunning. Reviewers across the board are getting real-life results that beat Apple’s promise of 10 hours of battery life. This is a function both of software (which does less and works hard to keep the CPU from drawing power while the iPad is being used) and hardware — iFixit’s teardown shows that, internally, the iPad looks more like a battery with a computer than a computer with a battery. The iPad, so far, never gets warm. Browse a bunch of web sites. Play some video. Play a game. It still feels as cool to the touch as when it’s turned off. It is also dead quiet — no fan, no humming, nada. This is the future of computing. The iPad was designed with an entirely different set of priorities than Macs or PCs. Someone may well produce a worthy iPad rival in the next year, but it’s not going to be something like HP’s Slate that runs Windows 7, an operating system that epitomizes the traditional set of computer design priorities. The iPad is also eminently affordable. $500 for this thing seems hard to believe. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it at double the price. But clearly there were tradeoffs involved to hit this price point. Build quality is not one — the thing feels perfect in hand. But it only has 256 MB of RAM — perhaps the single biggest hardware weakness of the device (see the section on Safari below). It is super high-quality, but clearly designed for the mass market. Anyone who thinks Apple only makes high-priced products has completely lost sense of reality. “Affordable luxury” is the sweet spot for mass market success today, and Apple keeps shooting bulls eyes. In fact, the only thing that makes my heart ache regarding the iPad is when I start imagining a hypothetical Pro model — imagine what Apple could put in an iPad that cost as much as a MacBook Pro. (My dream iPad Pro: double the display’s pixel resolution and include a gigabyte or two of RAM.) Affordability presents itself in other ways, too. Nothing is included in the box other than the power adaptor. The dock and case are separate SKUs, and it doesn’t even come with headphones. It’s like buying a Honda, not an Acura — the base model is not “well-equipped”. $500 is affordable but not cheap, and the iPad does not feel cheap in any regard. The build quality is outstanding. The brushed aluminum back makes my plastic iPhone 3GS feel cheap. The iPad takes more cues from the current iMacs than it does from the iPhone. The seam between the glass and the aluminum is nearly perfect. It’s just one piece of aluminum and a piece of glass — there is no superfluous chrome bezel between the glass and the backing as there is on all iPhones and iPod Touches to date. Even without turning it on it looks and feels a step beyond the iPhones and iPod Touches we’ve seen to date. The Killer App One thing that’s making it hard for some people to grasp the purpose of the iPad is that no one has an answer to what precisely it is for. This was not so for the iPhone. The answer to the question of what the original 2007 iPhone was meant for was right there at the bottom of the iPhone home screen, in the “dock”: phone, email, web, music and video. The other apps were icing on the cake. The four apps in the dock were what Apple designed the iPhone to do. The iPad also has a “dock” on the home screen, and the default apps in that dock are clearly important: Safari, Mail, Photos, iPod (which, on the iPad, is only for audio). But some are treating the iPad as, fundamentally, an e-reader. Others as a gaming device. Others as a movie player. None of those things are represented in the iPad’s default dock apps. The truth is that the App Store is the killer app. The iPad is meant for anything that can be represented on a 10-inch color touchscreen. Back in January when we were playing the “What’s Apple going to name the tablet?” game, my favorite, by far, was “Canvas”. I’m not saying here that Canvas would have been a better name than iPad, but the word conveys perfectly what the iPad is. Adam Engst captured this: The iPad becomes the app you’re using. That’s part of the magic. The hardware is so understated - it’s just a screen, really - and because you manipulate objects and interface elements so smoothly and directly on the screen, the fact that you’re using an iPad falls away. You’re using the app, whatever it may be, and while you’re doing so, the iPad is that app. Switch to another app and the iPad becomes that app. If that’s not magic, I don’t know what is. As did Cultured Code’s Jürgen Schweizer: Steve Jobs said about the iPod that “it is all about the music”. With the iPad, Apple has done the same for personal computing as it has done before with the iPod: it made technology go away. But if the device is gone, and the operating system is gone, what is left? The iPad is an empty canvas that invites us to imagine what is possible. It inspires our imagination and it makes us want to create, because never before were we able to create software that was so close to the user. The iPad hardware and OS are profoundly humble — they put all the focus on whatever app it is that is open. Out of Box Experience One thing that is very iPhone-like about iPad is that when you first take it out of the box, it wants to be plugged into your Mac or PC via USB and sync with iTunes. In some ways, that’s understandable. USB syncing is how you load your iPad with music and videos and transfer over stuff like your email accounts, and, if you’re not using MobileMe, your contacts and calendars. But, on the whole, it feels retrograde. It’s creates an impression that the iPad does not stand on its own. It’s a child that still needs a parent. But it’s not a young child. It’s more like a teenager. It’s close. So close that it feels like it ought to be able to stand on its own. Android devices do not have this problem. You can sync an Android device with a desktop computer via USB, for transferring things like music and videos, but you don’t have to. Out of the box, a Nexus One is ready to go. Google’s big advantage here is that they’re using online services as primary data stores. The Google Way is to use Gmail for email and contacts, and Google Calendar for events. You just tell your Android device your Google ID and password, and your email, contacts, and calendars start syncing over the air. Apple has MobileMe, but because it’s a paid service, they can’t (or at least won’t) assume that all iPad owners are going to use it. But then even those of us who do use MobileMe get stuck with a first-run iPad experience that involves a tethered USB connection to a computer. The Apple Way is to assume that your primary data stores for these things are locally stored on your Mac or PC — Address Book, iCal. At the very least, these things ought to be able to sync between iTunes (on your Mac or PC) and your iPad over your Wi-Fi network. Third-party iPhone OS apps like Things do a great job with this — there’s no reason iTunes and the iPhone OS shouldn’t too. Those Heart-Stopping ‘Scratches’ On the iPhone (and iPod Touch; assume from here out that when I say “iPhone” I’m referring to both), app icons on the home screen sit atop a plain black background. On the iPad, they’re spaced further apart, which is why I think Apple has added wallpaper — making the iPad home screen look a lot more like a Mac or Windows desktop. The default wallpaper shows a sunset skyline of a mountain range in front of a like. There’s a meteor shower in the sky. And the streaking meteors look, at a glance, like a series of severe scratches on the display. It’s a curious choice. The Touchscreen Keyboard It’s a lot like the iPhone’s, but, it’s different. Because it’s bigger, there are no pop-up indicators showing which key you hit as you type. They’re not necessary. The feel, overall, is pretty much like typing on a really big iPhone. If you’re in a position where you can set the iPad down on your lap or a table top, it’s not too hard at all to type with all your fingers when the iPad is in landscape (horizontal) orientation. Now, to me, it’s nowhere near as good as even the worst full- or nearly-full-size hardware keyboard I’ve ever used. You can’t just rest all eight of your fingers on the home row keys, and you can’t feel where the key cap edges are. You have to look at the keyboard a fair amount as you type. On a hardware keyboard, I hardly ever look at the keys. But for a touchscreen, it’s good. In portrait (vertical) orientation, I can type on the iPad using just my two thumbs, as I do on my iPhone. I have relatively large hands, though — I don’t think most people can do it. The keyboard in this layout is way too small for me to type with all of my fingers, though. In portrait orientation most people will type using one finger, I expect. Now, the funny thing is, in general, bigger keyboards are easier to type on than smaller ones. That’s why big laptops are easier to type on than compact ones, and, indeed, that’s why the landscape iPad keyboard on the iPad is easier to type on than the portrait one. But at a certain point, the curve flips around and smaller becomes faster. I type much faster on my iPhone using the smaller portrait orientation keyboard than the wider landscape keyboard. In both modes, I use just my two thumbs. With the smaller iPhone keyboard, my thumbs have to travel less from one key to the next. People who aren’t very proficient at the iPhone keyboard, or who have very large thumbs and therefore have trouble precisely tapping the smaller keys, may well prefer the iPhone’s wider landscape keyboard. But for me it’s not even close. I never type in landscape on my iPhone. And in fact (and this is the aforereferenced “funny part”), I type faster on my iPhone than I do on the iPad. That’s especially true for when the iPad is in portrait mode, which puts the keyboard size in a no-man’s land — too small to eight-finger-type, too big to thumb-type. But it’s also true for when the iPad is in landscape mode. I’m hopeful that this is just a factor of experience and muscle memory — I have nearly three years of experience typing on the iPhone, and only two days experience with the iPad. Last Friday I watched Andy Ihnatko eight-finger-type on his iPad — which he’d been using for over a week — and he was typing pretty goddamn fast. One problem I’ve run into is that Apple has subtly changed the layout of the keyboard from the iPhone’s. On the iPhone, the Delete key is on the lower right, above the Return key. On the iPad, it’s in the upper right corner, and the Return key is next to the L key. The iPad adds a right-side Shift key. The iPad layout makes perfect sense — both these keys are now where they reside on traditional hardware keyboards. Their weird positions on the iPhone are a compromise forced by the extreme lack of space on the iPhone display. Apple has also added a new key to the iPad keyboard’s numeric/punctuation mode: Undo. It’s a good idea — I have the feeling most iPhone users don’t know about the system-wide shake-to-undo gesture, and even for users who do, the iPad is harder to shake (and, when docked, downright silly to shake). But this new Undo key moves the period and comma keys over to the right by two positions. The iPhone keyboard layout is so firmly ingrained in my mind that these changes are problems for me — I keep hitting the (new to the iPad) right-side Shift key when I mean to hit Delete, and I keep hitting Undo when I mean to type a period. I’ll get used to it soon, I’m sure, but I find it interesting that my iPad typing muscle memory is based on the iPhone keyboard, not regular keyboards. I think this is because, overall, it really does feel like a big iPhone keyboard. Hardware Keyboard Support I don’t have (and did not order) the iPad keyboard dock, but I have been using an Apple Bluetooth keyboard. In fact, I’m using it to type this entire review. It works great. Pairing (via the iPad Settings app) is easy and quick. And it works great. Several essential text-editing shortcuts from the Mac OS work system-wide on the iPad: Command-Z, -X, -C, and -V work for Undo, Cut, Copy, and Paste. Command-A works for Select All. You can use the arrow keys to move the insertion point. Option-Arrow keys work to move the insertion point one word at a time. Command-Left/Right moves the insertion point the beginning/end of the current line; Command-Up/Down moves the insertion point the start/end of the current text field — which, in the case of something like Pages, is the beginning/end of the entire document. Holding down Shift extends the selection range, and works in conjunction with the Option and Command keys as expected. (Certain of Cocoa’s long-standing Emacs-style text editing shortcuts work too: like Control-K (kill) and Control-H (backspace).) Certain of the function keys on the Bluetooth keyboard are useful on the iPad. The brightness keys control the iPad’s display brightness. The volume (and mute) keys work. The playback buttons — play/pause, next, previous — all work to control the iPod app. By default, once you’ve started using a hardware keyboard, the on-screen keyboard no longer appears, which is great, because the full display is now available for displaying content. But if you want to use the on-screen keyboard while a hardware keyboard is active, you can toggle it using the hardware keyboard’s Eject key. The Esc key dismisses the auto-complete suggestion — it’s like tapping the little “x” next to the suggestion under the current word you’re typing. While a keyboard is connected, you can wake up the iPad by hitting any key — completely bypassing the iPad’s slide-to-unlock screen. Very nice. The iPad is fundamentally a touchscreen device. You absolutely do not need a hardware keyboard for it. But if you’re hoping to do any amount of serious writing with it (and, for obvious vocational reasons, I plan to), you’re going to want one. There are a few places in the iPad UI where I really wish the keyboard was useful but it isn’t. For example, Safari location field suggestions. On the Mac, you can use the up and down arrow keys to move through the list of suggestions. On the iPad, you must use touch to select from the list. Since you’re already typing if you’re entering a URL, this is just begging for arrow key support. (Ditto for suggested results from the Google search field in Safari.) The Esc key does not dismiss popovers, but that’s probably OK. It’s only possible to invoke popovers via touch, so it seems OK that you must dismiss them via touch as well. The Tab key can be used to switch between text fields; Shift-Tab goes in reverse order. (When using the hardware keyboard, I do find myself hitting Command-Tab, without thinking about it, when I want to switch to another app; it does nothing on the iPad.) Display The iPad display is, overall, wonderful. Colors are bright and (unlike the Nexus One’s OLED display) accurate. Photos and videos looks great. Touches seem precisely accurate. The glass feels good. Viewing angles are shockingly good. You can lay the iPad flat on a table while you eat or drink and it looks just fine at a decidedly skew angle — far more so than with the iPhone. This IPS stuff is the real deal; here’s to hoping for an IPS display in this year’s new iPhones. The only complaint I have about the display is that the pixel resolution isn’t all that dense. The iPad’s 1024  768 display has a resolution of 132 pixels per inch. The iPhone’s 640  320 display has a resolution of 163 pixels per inch. The difference isn’t huge, but it’s definitely noticeable. Type looks crisper on the iPhone than the iPad, and type rendering falls far short of even newspaper-caliber resolution, let alone glossy-magazine caliber. (Those of you who doubt that the pixels-per-inch resolution isn’t high enough, just wait until you see the type rendering on this summer’s new iPhones.) Safari The iPad is so good as a web reader, that, if you’re a web junkie, everything else the iPad does is just gravy. It’s good. I’m so used to Safari on the iPhone, though, where the toolbar is at the bottom, that I’m having a hard time getting adjusted to the toolbar at the top. I’m not saying it’s a bad decision on Apple’s part. In fact, the iPad HIG is quite explicit that iPad toolbars should go at the top, not bottom — which makes me think Apple thought about and tested this and has concluded that the top works better for the iPad form factor. It’s just that I use Safari on my iPhone a lot, and I am really used to the button placement. When you create a new page in Safari on iPad, text focus goes to the Google search field by default, rather than the URL location field. That’s a change from both desktop and iPhone Safari. I’m finding this hard to get used to, but I can see how this might be a better design for typical users. It makes the default search engine all the more essential to the web browsing experience, though. Zooming and flicking are essential to the experience, just like on the iPhone. Flicking is how you scroll, no surprise. The zooming, though, may come as a surprise. It wasn’t too long ago when 1024  768 was considered a large display for full-size web browsing. But: what matters on the iPad (and iPhone) is not the pixel count of the display, but the physical size. 9.7 inches diagonally is a bit small for non-zoomed web browser. But the action of zooming — whether through double-tapping or pinching — is so smooth, fast, and natural that it feels better, not worse, than old-school desktop web browsing. There’s one severe problem in Safari for iPad, though: memory crapping out. MobileSafari for iPhone has always allowed you to open up to eight pages at a time. It tries to keep them all truly open, in RAM, so that you can quickly switch between them. But when it runs out of memory it starts flushing some of the pages. It doesn’t forget the URL for those pages, and, in recent versions, it saves a static thumbnail image of the rendered page, but when you switch back to those purged pages, MobileSafari must reload the page — thus, you must wait both for the contents of the page to download and for the page to actually render (which — the rendering — often takes longer than the downloading). It’s very noticeable. Switching between unpurged Safari pages is instantaneous. Switching to a purged page takes as long as opening it from scratch. Wolf Rentzsch, linking to this complaint from Peter-Paul Koch, wrote a brief technical overview of why Apple might have designed MobileSafari this way. (Keep in mind that iPhone OS does not use virtual memory; thus RAM is severely constrained.) This purging problem got a lot better with the iPhone 3GS. The original iPhone and iPhone 3G only had 128 MB of RAM. The 3GS has 256. MobileSafari’s ability to keep more pages in memory is probably my single favorite aspect of the 3GS. The iPad also has 256 MB of RAM. But, in my use, iPad’s Safari isn’t able to keep nearly as many pages open as I can on my 3GS. In fact, sometimes it seems I can only have one, and every page I switch to gets completely reloaded. This is more than just annoying — it can lead to data loss if you have unsubmitted form data sitting in an “open” iPad Safari page. I’ve run into this posting items to DF from the iPad — my posting interface is a web page form. When I want to link to the current page, I invoke a bookmarklet which opens a new page with the title and URL fields of the posting form set to the title and URL of the page from which I invoked the bookmarklet. Often, though, I want to switch back to the page I’m linking to copy another URL or a bit of text to quote. Twice so far, when going back to the posting form, it’s been purged and must reload from scratch — in which case I lose anything I’ve already written. I never run into this problem on my iPhone 3GS when switching between just two open Safari pages. The problem is also severe for AJAX web apps, which tend not to be designed with full page refreshes in mind. I hope this can be improved significantly in an iPad software update, but I worry that it’s endemic — that because the iPad screen is so much larger than the iPhone’s, that MobileSafari must allocate significantly more memory per page for the framebuffers. 256 MB of RAM simply may not be enough for MobileSafari to keep more than two or three pages in memory. If so, Apple really needs to consider some sort of caching or serialization scheme rather than completely flushing away purged pages. Pages I wrote the entire 4,828-word first draft of this piece on my iPad using Pages.1 I didn’t use any of the formatting or layout tools — I used it as a text editor rather than a word processor. It’s quite serviceable. What I like best is that it opens very quickly. Switching between, say, Pages and Safari and back to copy-and-paste a URL feels more like switching than quitting, launching, quitting, relaunching. You don’t need to (and can’t) save manually. Whatever you do in a document simply persists automatically. When you go back to the list of documents, they’re presented as big thumbnails — very much like the list of open web pages in Safari. Pages’s toolbar and ruler are only visible when in portrait mode. In landscape mode, all of the chrome disappears. It’s just a full-screen editing view, a la WriteRoom. I’m writing this piece in this full-screen (landscape) mode, with my iPad propped up on a table in Apple’s iPad case. It’s a nice setup, and I can genuinely imagine leaving my MacBook at home for trips in the future, with the addition of few missing iPad apps (like, say, a good SFTP client). But when I say there’s no chrome in the landscape mode, I mean none. Pages has a decent simple little find and replace feature, but it’s only possible to invoke it in portrait mode. (I must have hit Command-F a dozen times so far, to no avail.) There are already complaints piling up that the iWork apps don’t support the complete feature set of their current Mac counterparts — open a file created in a Mac version of Pages/Numbers/Keynote on your iPad and certain document features may be removed. (The iPad apps prompt you with an alert telling you which aspects of the document have been changed or removed.) Another way of looking at it though, is that the iPad iWork apps are to their Mac counterparts what the iPad as a whole is to the Mac — simpler, more focused, but in some ways faster. Pages launches and is ready for input far quicker on my iPad than on my MacBook Pro. Writing this review, I’ve been switching back and forth between Pages and Safari. It doesn’t feel like quitting Pages, launching Safari, copying a URL, quitting Safari, and re-launching Pages. It feels more like switching — it only takes a moment after tapping the Pages icon on the home screen to be back where I was in my open document. (My only complaint is that you lose the insertion point when leaving and coming back to Pages — the document re-opens to where you left off, but you must tap the screen to place the insertion point. When switching several times, that becomes slightly tedious.) This is obviously not even close to a full review of Pages, but I can say without hesitation that it’s easily worth $10. Syncing There is, however, a severe shortcoming inherent to the iWork suite of iPad apps: document syncing between Mac and iPad. It’s a convoluted mess. In short, the only way to edit a document on your iPad that was created on your Mac, or vice versa, is to go through a convoluted multi-step process of exporting, copying, syncing or downloading, and importing. Ted Landau has copiously documented the entire situation in this article at The Mac Observer. Read it and weep. What it boils down to is that there is no syncing really. Real syncing is something like IMAP for email, or the way MobileMe handles calendars and contacts. When I read a bunch of new email messages using my iPad or iPhone, when I next sit down at my Mac, those messages are marked as read in my inbox. I don’t have to do anything on the Mac for that to happen. That’s just how IMAP works. I can add a new calendar event on my Mac, then walk away from my computer, take my iPhone out of my pocket, and the event is there. I can add a note to that event using my iPhone and a few moments later the note will be synced to the event on my Mac. Certain of my favorite iPad and iPhone apps sync like this too. When I read a bunch of RSS items using NetNewsWire on my iPad, they’re marked as read on my Mac. Sitting at my Mac in my office, I can send a long article to Instapaper. I go downstairs, pick up my iPad, sit on the couch, launch the Instapaper iPad app, and a few seconds later, there’s the article I just added to my Instapaper queue. This is the sort of data flow that makes me feel like I’m living in the future — using multiple hardware devices to view, edit, and modify the same data. I don’t worry about where separate copies of my data exist. Conceptually it’s just there in the apps, and the apps do all the hard work of pushing and pulling changes made on other clients. The data flow with these iWork apps isn’t like that at all, and needs to be for them to be truly useful. It doesn’t matter how good the user interface for viewing and editing spreadsheets is in Numbers for iPad if my spreadsheets aren’t there. Here’s an example. I keep the schedule for Daring Fireball RSS sponsorships in a Numbers document. What I’d like to be able to do on my iPad is launch Numbers and access the current version of that spreadsheet. But the only way I could possibly do that today would be if I went through the following steps every single time I made a change to the document on my Mac: Before opening the current version of the file on my Mac, check to make sure there isn’t a more recent version of it on my iPad. Open the file on my Mac and make changes. Save. Dock my iPad to my Mac via USB. Switch to iTunes and go to the Apps tab for my iPad. Add the newly-saved revision of the document to the file sharing list for the iPad’s Numbers app. Sync. Even after going through all of this, when I do want to open this file on my iPad, I have to remember not to open the last revision of it listed in the iPad Numbers app’s “My Documents” list, but instead remember first to import the latest revision from Numbers’s file sharing list to Numbers’ “My Documents”. And, again, it’s effectively up to me to keep track of which machine, Mac or iPad, has the most recent revision of the file. To say the least, this is a recipe for disaster, and even if you don’t make a mistake and inadvertantly make significant changes to an out-of-date version of the document on one of the two machines, you’re stuck with a preposterously, mind-bogglingly convoluted workflow each and every time you make a change to the document. The bottom line, obviously, is that there is no way that anyone is going to use these iPad apps in the way I describe above. As-is they’re only useful to me in two ways. First, I can imagine using Pages on the iPad to compose original new documents — posts for Daring Fireball — while I’m using my iPad. I’ll either finish them there and then copy-and-paste the result into the web-based posting interface for DF, or, I’ll send the draft to my Mac for further editing (which is what I did for the piece you’re reading right now). I can also imagine creating finished Keynote decks on my Mac and then moving them, once, to my iPad, and taking only my iPad with me to the presentation — i.e. using Keynote, Numbers, and Pages on the iPad as viewers for finished documents. (And, conveniently, they’re viewers that can make edits if you notice a mistake or want to make a last-minute change or addition.) But there’s no possible way to use these apps as clients alongside their Mac counterparts on an ongoing basis. The sort of over-the-air syncing I’m imagining for iWork is, admittedly, a difficult problem to solve. But the bad news for Apple is that their top competitor in this space has a solution: Google Documents. With Google Documents, there’s no making copies, importing/exporting, manually invoked syncing, or USB tethering involved if you want to edit a single instance of a spreadsheet from multiple machines. You just make changes on one machine, and when you next look at that document from another machine the changes are there. The workflow for iWork is downright antediluvian. It’s not just pre-Cloud, it’s pre-network. It’s effectively the “Who’s got the latest revision of this file?” workflow of the days when we moved files from one machine to another via floppy disks. What in the world is iWork.com for if not for solving this problem? At least iWork.com lets you avoid having to physically tether the two machines via USB to get a document from the Mac to the iPad (or vice versa), but it’s no better than file sharing through iTunes conceptually. When you send a file to iWork.com (from either Mac or iPad) you’re pushing a copy, a snapshot of the document from that moment. After making subsequent changes, you’ve got to push those changes to iWork.com all over again. And to get them on the other device, you must manually import — making just another copy. What you ought to be able to do is specify iWork.com as the canonical shared storage location for an iWork document. iWork.com doesn’t serve as any such purpose today. iPhone Apps I predicted it’d be crummy to run non-iPad-optimized iPhone apps on the iPad — like Classic apps running on Mac OS X — and I was right. It’s OK for games — they look jaggy, but jaggy games aren’t that uncommon. But regular (non-game) apps just look and feel weird. When you run them pixel-doubled text doesn’t scale dynamically — everything is pixel doubled. It’s a good way of proving that the iPad is not “just a big iPhone”, though. The only iPhone app I find myself using on my iPad is Simplenote, for copying and pasting bits of text to and from my Mac and iPhone. Needless to say, I’d love an iPad-optimized version of Simplenote. iBooks and Kindle The iBooks app is free, but doesn’t ship with the iPad by default — you have to download it from the App Store. Apple hasn’t explained why this is so, but there are several reasons I can think of. For one thing, e-book rights are managed on a country-by-country basis — it seems likely that the iBooks store won’t be available in every country where the iPad will soon be sold. Making it an App Store app will also allow Apple to update the app on its own schedule — built-in system apps only get updates along with the entire system. So in some ways, the iBooks app is on equal footing with other e-book readers available in the App Store, particularly Amazon’s Kindle app. But iBooks does get some special treatment — the first time I launched the App Store app on my iPad, it prompted me with a dialog box asking if I’d like to down the free iBooks app. It’s impossible to miss. The iBooks app also has display brightness controls that are not availble through public APIs. Winnie the Pooh is included as a free sample, and the choice is genius — it’s a beloved story, a good read, and best of all (from Apple’s perspective) it can’t be read properly on the Kindle because the color illustrations are a big part of the experience. No book on the Kindle will ever look this good. The Kindle has its own advantages — its books are generally cheaper, its selection bigger, and e-ink works better in bright sunlight — but Winnie the Pooh epitomizes the iPad’s advantages. iBooks’s page-turning animation is delightful — it doesn’t just track your finger-swipe precisely, but even renders the type faintly in reverse on the other side of the “sheet”. The practical minded can simply tap the right and left edges of the screen to turn pages. Amazon’s iPad-native Kindle app is good, too. Oddly, to my mind, it is superior to their recent Mac app in every way. It looks better, feels better, renders text better, and has more features. I say this is odd because the iPad was announced just two months ago; Mac OS X was announced over a decade ago. I suspect part of the reason the Mac version is so crippled is that they were more worried about keeping Mac users from un-DRMing Kindle content than they were about making the Mac app an actual good-to-use app. The Kindle doesn’t do animated page-turning, but that’s not a big deal. Reading is great. And the Kindle’s ace-in-the-hole, of course, is the far larger selection of e-books in its store — hundreds of thousands versus Apple’s tens of thousands. I bought When the Game Was Ours, a new book by Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. It is not available in the iBooks store. So Kindle’s advantage is library size (and, secondarily, price per title). iBooks’s advantage is the color display. I’d be shocked if every single piece of advertising Apple produces for iBooks doesn’t focus entirely on screenshots of books with color illustrations, photos, and video. I think it’s going to be easier for Apple to improve the iBooks store library than it will be for Amazon to create a Kindle hardware model with a color display. I think Amazon would do well to add color support to Kindle e-books for use on iPads and iPhones. Kindle has a better chance of long-term success as a software platform than a hardware one. Third-Party Apps in General Given that most iPad-native apps in the store right now were developed using only the simulator by developers without access to actual iPads, you might expect apps to be buggy and UIs to be awkward. I’ve found the bugginess to be true, but the UIs are actually good. I think the physical prototypes developers jury-rigged for themselves paid off, design-wise. There’s no question that UIs are going change rapidly in the coming weeks now that developers have the real deal to measure the feel of their apps against, but for the apps I’ve been using the most, they’re pretty damn good already. As for the bugginess, I’m not saying it’s inexcusable or even surprising — the SDK simulator is not a perfect simulation. Several of the bugs I’ve reported are only present when the apps are running on actual iPad hardware. On the whole, though, the quality of iPad apps on day one is better, by far, than I had expected considering that developers had to build them in the dark, as it were. Prices, so far, are significantly higher than for iPhone apps — but still far cheaper than category equivalent Mac apps. For example, NetNewsWire is $10 (and going to $15 in May); Things is $20; and OmniGraffle is $50. No doubt there are going to be wildly popular 99-cent iPad apps, but it’s also shaping up as serious platform for serious tools. Games are a bit more expensive, too, but, to me, reasonably so. The final word count is just short of 7,300, so admittedly I wound up writing quite a good chunk of it in BBEdit on my Mac.↩