I'm heading to Tampa, Florida for a couple of days to take care of some business. I have my second thesis defense at the University of South Florida, and tomorrow I'm scheduled to give a teleseminar with the Poynter Institute about producing news with with smartphones.

My mobile media journey started a couple of years ago when I used Twitter to share news from the field as I covered the 2008 Gulf Coast storm season for the now defunct HDNews. I don't know how many journalists were doing it at the time, but I found Twitter and hashtags (like #Ike and #gustav) to be a great way to share first hand accounts of what I was witnessing from the field during Tropical Storm Fay, Hurricane Gustav, Ike and Tropical Storm Hanna.

I also used my blog to post the stories that we produced from the field and I shared footage that wasn't included in my stories. Oh if only the iPhone 3GS was out back then. The iPhone and other smartphones like the Android and Nokia models make it extremely easy to share video from anywhere. Other applications and sites like TwitPic allow easy photo sharing.

We all know that media can't be every. But people with these devices are everywhere, and it's changing the face of news and information. As an example, check out these pics from the Chile earthquake that were posted via Twitter.

Of course I can't share all of my secrets, but if you check out this Webinar, you should have a greater understanding of now TV news stations, and vloggers like myself are using technology to innovate the gathering of content.

WTTG Fox 5 in Washington DC, and KOB in New Mexico are doing a great job of experimenting with technology to enhance coverage.

I'll probably be posting mostly mobile videos, so keep it tuned to either my Twitter account, or check back here for the latest video updates.

Forgive the typos, I gotta board my flight!

Apple Stacks The Deck Against Amazon's Kindle App

Jay Yarow | Feb. 26, 2010, 11:00 AM | 5,634 | 34

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Tags: Gadgets, Amazon, Kindle, Apple, iPad, eBooks, Big Tech, Media

AAPL Feb 26 2010, 05:20 PM EST

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When Apple's iPad goes on sale in a few weeks, its iBookstore will have a distinct user-experience advantage over e-book competitors like Amazon's Kindle App.

That is, the iBookstore will let you seamlessly buy books from within the iBooks reader app, with the iTunes account it's already aware of.

Meanwhile, rivals like the Kindle app and Barnes & Noble e-reader will require you to boot up their apps, then click a button to boot up the iPad's Web browser, shop for e-books in a Web store, sign in and pay with a non-iTunes account, relaunch the e-reader app, and sync up your new e-book. Not as elegant.

It's not a huge difference, but it's the kind of small simplicity advantage that has helped Apple's iTunes music store maintain a lead over its rivals, including Amazon.

People who use the Kindle app on their iPhones today will know that this isn't a new thing: Since the Kindle iPhone app launched last March, users have had to leave the app to buy e-books.

Amazon didn't built the app this way from the beginning. We have learned that when Amazon first submitted its Kindle application for the iPhone to Apple, Amazon included its own payment system within the app, so customers could just pay for e-books and download them right in the app.

When Apple spotted the payment system, it told Amazon to get rid of it, according to a source familiar with Amazon's operations.

Why? It's a rule Apple smartly instituted at the App Store's beginning, forbidding third-party e-commerce of digital goods within apps.

That is, it's okay to use an iPhone app to buy physical goods -- as you can in Amazon's main iPhone app, or the Fandango app, etc. And developers are welcome to use Apple's in-app purchasing system -- and give a 30% cut of revenue to Apple -- to sell digital goods within apps.

But Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other vendors are prohibited from using their own e-commerce systems within apps for virtual goods. Thus the trip to the Safari browser to buy books.

It's obviously a rule Apple itself is allowed to break -- it's Apple's iPhone, and it can do whatever it wants, as we've seen recently with Apple's recent raids on thousands of sexy apps. But it does put competitors like Amazon on uneven footing.

Obviously, Amazon is never going to want to give Apple a 30% cut of e-book sales, so it's not going to implement Apple's in-app purchasing system. So it's indefinitely stuck sending its customers into the browser to make purchases. (Meanwhile, on the new BlackBerry Kindle app, you can buy e-books directly within the app.)

Assuming the iBooks app and the iBookstore have similar selection, pricing, and e-reader features, this one simple step could give Apple a substantial advantage over Amazon.

See Also: 10 Burning Questions About Apple's iPad

We Americans like to think of ourselves as trendsetters for the rest of the globe, but when it comes to cell phones, we're still playing catch-up with countries such as Japan and Korea.

In general, Asians use their cell phones in more robust ways than the typical U.S. resident as TVs, wallets, GPS devices, and music players. Japanese cell phones can double as a house key, a credit card, and an ID. Users can even use their cell phones to send their vital signs straight to their doctors.

In recent years, U.S. companies have made baby steps toward incorporating more advanced cell phone features, particularly in the areas of mobile banking and video broadcast. Meantime, the Asian cell phone market continues to be a good predictor of features that could soon be included in American cell phones. For example, Japan had cameraenabled cell phones two years before Americans ever went gaga for them.

Curtis Schenck, a manager of corporate relations at NTT DoCoMo USA, gave TechNewsDaily the scoop on the hottest features in the Japanese market right now. Try not to be too jealous.

1. Personal Butler

Customers don't have to Google for information, since i-Concierge acts as their butlers or personal assistants and caters to their every need. Users can input their food preferences, neighborhoods they like, and entertainments that they enjoy. When new information is downloaded into the system, they get push notifications that are based on their preferences. For example, if they like Thai food and a new Thai restaurant that is opening nearby, their cell phones will notify them.

2. Investigative Visits

This takes the Verizon commercials to a whole new level. If a users' five-bar reception signal drops to three bars or if they have a dropped call, they can call customer service and a team will be sent out to investigate the problem.

3. Barcode Reader

Japanese phones can read QR marks, which are sophisticated barcodes for businesses. If an Asian cell phone user is walking down a Tokyo street and walks past a restaurant that isn't open, they can point their camera to the QR mark and their phone's browser will automatically be routed to the restaurant's Web site.

4. Free TV on the Phone

Subscribers can surf 13 free TV channels on their phones. DoCoMo has also launched their own channel called BTV to air programs that are filmed specifically for the mobile phone.

5. Phones as Payment Systems

Osaifu Keitai, also known as the mobile phone wallet, lets users load up credit card information onto their phones. If stores have a reader, users can swipe their phones over it to pay for their purchases. Cell phones can also be used to pay for subway and train tickets.

6. Send Money to Other Subscribers

Some Asian countries allow users to send money using their cell phones. Users simply input another person's phone number and the amount they owe them and like magic, the money is transferred.

7. Internal Wi-Fi Spot

Japanese cell phone users can download a movie onto their mobile phones and show it on their TVs. This is another way to get entertainment on demand. A femtocell base transceiver station (BTS) in the home hooks up mobile phones to the DoCoMo network through a broadband line such as an optical fiber. The femtocell BTS lets a person with a cell phone download videos and music files. Through femtocell BTS, a person can set up a private wireless network for their home appliances, entertainment systems, and other devices.

8. Home Security Service

Japanese cell phone users can lock their doors and manage their home security systems remotely using their mobile devices. They can also adjust appliances and set environmental controls, so their lights and heat can be switched on before they get home.

9. Environmental Awareness

DoCoMo has deployed environmental sensors throughout Japan and people are now able to monitor air quality, temperature, and UV rays around them using their cell phones.

10. Reads Vital Signs

In the same way that we might plug headphones into our iPhones, Japanese cell phone users can plug in equipment such as a blood pressure monitor to their phones and send vital signs directly to their doctors. This helps save some people a trip to the doctor.

• Mobile Phone Use Soars
• 10 Profound Innovations Ahead
• Americans Are Info-Junkies

Giants of trip hop visit the lounge for the very first time this week, as do several friends old and new. Plus, we're giving away four free copies of Artemis' new EP Auralei. Check out my Twitter feed for more details.

Playlist for Dave's Lounge #182:

1. Massive Attack, "Girl I Love You (feat. Horace Andy)" Free download from: RCRD LBL
2. Jazzra, "The Only One" Buy from: iTunes | eMusic
3. SoulAvenue feat. LazyGrooves, "Walk With Me" Buy from: iTunes
4. Colette, "Like the Sun" Buy from: iTunes | eMusic
5. Artemis, "Ella" Buy from: Bandcamp
6. Adani & Wolf, "Lady in Black" Buy from: iTunes
7. Water (feat. Fay Lovsky), "Hold Me" Buy from: iTunes
8. Yubaba, "One" Buy from: iTunes | eMusic

Not an eMusic member? Click here to sign up for a free 15-day trial and receive 25 free MP3 downloads, plus 35 MP3s a month for only $15.89. It's a great value for indie music lovers and a great way to support both the artists and this podcast.

Own an iPhone or an iPod touch? Check out the Dave's Lounge iPhone app, which will givw you to access all the latest episodes of Dave's Lounge from anywhere for only $1.99. The Dave's Lounge iPhone app is now available from the iTunes app store.

Dave's Lounge has it's own Facebook page! Become a fan today and find out how to win a free digital copy of Artemis' new EP!

Enjoy the show!

What would a world be like without the idea of heaven? How would people behave? What would they live for?

Of course, it is not as if the world that we live in, where the notion of an afterlife or some form of continuing existence is prevalent, is all that great. No, there are lots of wars and disagreements in contemporary life. But perhaps we are able to escape a sense of desperation in the belief that modern medicine, prudent behavior, and the possibility of an afterlife will allow us to continue our existence for a while at least, and perhaps permanently.

The ancient, pre-literate Greeks of Homer's day could not so easily apply the balm of eternal life to their troubled psyches. They had no notion of a heaven of the type that Christians believe in, no sense of reincarnation such as the Hindus expect, no Muslim vision of paradise, no anticipation of a reunion with relatives and friends who had predeceased them. Instead, death led to a trip to Hades, the underworld, where existence was a pale and not very attractive shadow of earthly life, not something to be eagerly awaited. So if we want to know how men live when the notion of heaven doesn't exist, we might well look to these people.

Remember too, that the life of the pre-literate Greeks (the Greek alphabet is thought to have come into existence somewhere around 800 B.C.) was painfully short. Even at the turn of the last century, around 1900, the average American lived only about 50 years. The brevity of life was certainly known to the ancient Greeks.

Greek literature and philosophy point to two driving concepts that motivated men. (And I speak of men, because women were extraordinarily disadvantaged in that period, seen as having almost no function or status other than for sex, companionship, rearing children, and domestic handicrafts). Honor and glory were what men sought. Honor tended to come in the form of goods, precious metal, slaves, concubines, and the like; in other words, mostly material things or things that could be counted or displayed or used. Sort of like today, perhaps you are saying to yourself. In our world, honor is conferred by status and very similar material thingsthe size of your house, the amount of money in your bank account, a trophy spouse, the car or cars you drive, a gorgeous vacation home, etc.

Glory (the Greek word kleos) is another matter. What might glory have consisted of in a world without heaven? It took the form of a reputation or fame that continued beyond death. And, since there was no written word, you and your accomplishments had to be sufficiently great to generate discussion, song, and story once you were gone. This was usually achieved by being a great hero or warrior. In war, then, one could hope to grasp both of these things: the honor that came with sacking cities and accumulating wealth, slaves, and sexual partners; and the glory of having the fearlessness, strength, and tenacity to carry out that accumulation via battle; sufficiently so that people would (sometimes literally) sing your praises after you were dead.

As I mentioned, today's world doesn't strike me as much different from yesterday's on the point of achieving honor, although we are a little more discreet about our sexual conquests and have largely risen above keeping slaves. On the subject of glory, however, we seem to do everything we can to avoid death, which in the ancient Greek world was the only path to glory; a path that required both risking one's own death on the battle field and inflicting it on others in the same place. So, whether you believe in heaven or not, it would seem that the idea of heaven has had some civilizing effect. There are, after all, more ways of getting to heaven in our cosmology than killing people, despite what some terrorist/martyrs might tell us.

To me, even apart from the question of a civilizing effect of a particular religious concept, is the human need to conquer death as revealed in the heritage that the pre-literate Greeks have bequeathed us and, of course, in our own religious behavior. Both the ancient Greeks and most of us seem to hope that when we breathe our last, we are not finished forever. It is not a new idea, even if our solutions to the dilemma of mortality are (in part) different from those of our ancestors.

Unless, of course, you are such a brave soul that you have dispensed with the idea that you will live on in any form much beyond the time of your earthly demise: not in words or writings, not in great buildings that bear your name, not in photos or videos, not in businesses that survive you, not in the students you have taught, not in your artistic creations or inventions, not in making the world a better place for those that succeed you; not in the biological output of children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren who continue your genetic line.

Clearly, it is pretty hard to give up the idea of glory, some sort of posteritythe hope for an afterlifeisn't it?

(Footnote: this essay was prompted by rereading The Iliad and The Odyssey for the first time in many years, and by listening to The Iliad of Homer by Professor Elizabeth Vandiver of the University of Maryland. This course and many others are offered by The Teaching Company. Professor Vandiver is a wonderful lecturer and I have relied heavily on her discussion of honor and glory in the pre-literate Greek world in this essay. I can strongly recommend courses sold by The Teaching Company. I should say, however, that I am in no way affiliated with that organization or benefit from any purchases from them that you might make; I'm simply a satisfied customer).

Seth's Blog: What Matters Now: get the free ebook

A few months ago, Seth Godin asked about 70 people to talk about a word or phrase related to their own idea of What Matters Now. He collected them all into one big ol' le, and now you can download a PDF of all those contributions, including pieces by folks like Elizabeth Gilbert, Kevin Kelly, Steven Presseld, and, improbably enough, yours truly.

My essay's called, Enough.

Wanna read more of these? Download the PDF of What Matters Now, or view it here using this squirrely widget from that totally annoying Scribd site.

I was fortunate enough to get my hands on a Nokia N900 today for a little while. After the Wired Store NYC debacle I thought I owed it to you to at least do something techy cool.

So I cut my trip home short and went over to the Nokia New York Flagship store on E. 57th Street in search of a the elusive N900.

Turns out in a Nokia store, it isn't so elusive.

Once inside the store it is the first phone that is on display. Right behind the N900 was the previous big dog, the N97 and the puppy, the N85.

I made my way to the back of the store near the cash wrap, grabbed a blue stool and squared myself up with one of the two N900's available for customer hands on testing. Well, available for a blogger's hands on testing, one could say.

The phone is much lighter than I expected it to be for its size. The phone is thicker than an iPhone but weighs nearly the same. It doesn't feel cheap. I have to say, the Droid, feels kind of cheap compared to the Nokia smart phone.

Something that came as a surprise was how responsive the phone was to switching between applications. It was seamless. Which is a good thing because the phone has two levels of app nagivation one for inside the application you are using and a root level.

Take for instance you are using the web browser and have a couple of sites open. The first click of the menu will display all of your open pages as thumbnails on one screen (take that iPhone weird tri-page display). A second click will take you back to the root menu system.

The root menu system of the Nokia N900 like most devices is prescribed by Nokia's developers as what they deem to be the most important applications. However, you can modify this menu like you would on most other handsets. Say, you wanted to move the feed subscription app to the root because you're an RSS nut you could do that.

Browsing on the phone was a great experience. Pages loaded quickly on T-mobile and scrolling was a breeze. What did take me a second to get a handle on was the zooming in of the content. My first instinct was to put my iPhone knowledge in place and go multi-touch in an attempt to pinch release. That failed. The N900 reacts to the not so multi-touch double tap to zoom.

The QWERTY keyboard experience was better than I expected. I fired up the note taking application and tried my best to write up stuff that made me sound smart so that the next person to pick up the phone in the store would know that a genius had just been there. It's like random phone note graffiti and a keyboard test all in one. Back to reality . . . the keyboard was very responsive and I was able to type reasonably fast. Much quicker than an iPhone or Droid with its off center keypad.

I don't know what the battery life of this phone is like or whether T-mobile outside of the store location is as good as in it. But what I do know is that this phone, unlocked, wants to fill the smart phone void in my life.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Nokia N900 With Maemo Internet Browser Video Demo (mrgadget.com.au)
• Nokia N900 First Impressions are Surprising, Both Good and Bad (jkontherun.com)
• Nokia steps up attack on iPhone with free music mobile (telegraph.co.uk)
• Nokia N900 quick hands-on (engadget.com)

Nokia N900 Hands On is a post from: TechStartups.com

There is hope. The Huffington Post calls this The Obama-Effect in Journalism, where small donations from a crowd is used to fund stories. If crowdfunding becomes the future of journalism, the editorial power will shift from an elite group of editors deciding on what is important to the community choosing which issues they care about most.

Several companies such as Kickstarter have figured out a way to fund the creative mind. Musicians and journalists can connect with fans to raise money for their projects. For example, Polyvinyl Records sold their overstock through Kickstarter and racked in $15,000. The donors received complementary DVD sets for their payments.

David Cohn founded Spot.us, a non-profit that recently had one of its community funded stories end up in The New York Times. Spot.us raised money for Lindsey Hoshaw's $10,000 trip to the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch. Hoshaw spent a month aboard Captain Charles Moore's research vessel, the Alguita, to report on the plastic trash floating in our seas. Eventhough The Columbia Journalism Review was underwhelmed by the actual reporting of the story, it is an example of how community funded reporting can be done.

Hoshaw's garbage patch story might be a one-hit wonder. Crowdfunding isn't going to save traditional media. The real issue is figuring out the best payment model for online content. Sadly, 80 percent of us admit that we wouldn't pay to read anything online. But if you're in the minority, these companies will collect your spare change.

Image: flickr/ Donncha @ InPhotos.org

Fund Your Stories and Projects With Small Donations is a post from: TechStartups.com

What I am about to say is because I have been a long time member of the eBay affiliate program, now called eBay Partner Network. It is also of value to anyone that is starting or currently responsible for managing an affiliate program for a company.

My affinity for their brand is the result of being a partner for over three years, my wife being a seller on eBay for nearly ten years, API ease of use and the ability to earn revenue consistently for three years as part of the partner network.

But try as they might, eBay has not driven me away from the partner network . . . yet. They transitioned the program from Commission Junction to an internal program two years ago. The metrics and other monitoring tools suffered as eBay had to get their affiliate legs underneath them. No longer could an affiliate view the extensive reports for click monitoring, referrals, purchases, week to week comps, etc.

Then eBay transformed the program most recently from their CPA (where a partner was paid if their link resulted in a sale) program to a CPC program. This isn't your average CPC program with prices set per click it is based on an algorithm that calculates the quality of the clicks from a given link on a 24 hour basis and assigns them a monetary value.

With this most recent transition to CPC and a program controlled by an algorithm (see: bot) eBay developed a Transparency Team. This team has the task of reaching out to partners that have links that aren't performing in a manner that matches the eBay partner agreement (see: fraudulent).

This is a great idea in theory. However, this team wouldn't need to exist if the eBay partner network returned to the same type of reports that Commission Junction used. Instead, when reinventing the wheel, eBay eliminated any useful monitoring for partners. Thus making participating in their program as opaque as it can be. Metrics that provide a payout, ranking or trip the algorithm to send an automated email stating that a partner is somehow engaged in fraudulent activity are nonexistent.

Ebay has removed any substantive accounting for themselves in the process of monitoring or payouts, the crux of a developer or user becoming an affiliate. Hiding reports from users that are accustomed to them as part of other vendor programs.

The problem is a that is a basic customer service issue that has not been addressed by eBay. Reporting, prompt replies and useful feedback data would allow partners to build better programs that meet eBay's standards and can be crafted to drive more quality traffic to eBay.

This example says it all:

Two months ago I was contacted by the eBay Partner Network Transparency Team (see: bot generated email) stating that in their quest to be transparent I should do the same and that I was failing as a large percentage of my links weren't sending referrer data. Meaning that they don't have a record from these links of the website where the link was displayed and clicked on.

Fair enough to ask me about the links. Not fair or right, accusing someone of not being transparent when all of the click data is hidden away. Not fair is waiting two months to reply back with meaningless data stating that eBay is right. See below:

Ebay sure is right that I have a high non-referrer rate and that bots are removed. I guess I should stop questioning their authority . . . sure. I'd do that if I knew what the criteria were or what bots are being removed. Because for nearly two years they didn't remove a single bot from click data.

I've requested more data from the Transparency Team like IP addresses and user-agents of those clicks. Since I can't track the click that is actually going to eBay without breaking the user-agreement with eBay I will be at their mercy to figure out if the clicks are coming from mobile devices or and some proxy bot that has a lust for finding its way to eBay auctions. Maybe the bot master was blocked by eBay for not being transparent enough when scraping their auctions.

Ebay, this isn't how to be transparent or run a valued affiliate program. If my experience hadn't begun with your program on Commission Junction I wouldn't have such high hopes for how the current partner network could operate. As an affiliate, I want to make money, but I also want eBay to succeed.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/4

Ebay Partner Network and Transparency is a post from: TechStartups.com

About the author: Matt is a software developer and author living in Chicago. He is the author of five programming books, most recently Drupal 6 Javascript and jQuery and an Open Source project called QueryPath for PHP that allows developers to easily build applications from XML data with jQuery like functionality.

Matt's personal blog is at TechnoSophos.com

I saw into the future. At 10:00 AM PDT on October 25th, in a conference room seating 16 people at the Googleplex in Santa Clara, I saw into the future of the web. And it was good.

What I saw was the demise of Web 2.0, a technology grown to capacity. And it is not Web 3.0 (whatever that is) that will take its place. No, tomorrow's web is about user interfaces.

The weekend of October 24th was the annual Google Summer of Code (GSOC) Mentor Summit at Google's headquarters. Ostensibly, this is the opportunity for all of the Open Source organizations who participated in GSOC to get together and perform a collective postmortem on the summer's successes and failures. But anytime such a menagerie of geeks is assembled under one roof, much more is bound to happen.

Unsurprisingly, many of the unconference's sessions were focused on the GSOC program itself. But a healthy dose of technology centered sessions made their way onto the schedule as well, and the hallway may very well have seen more code than the conference rooms.

Beyond the physical conference space, much was happening in the virtual sphere as well. As a gesture of thanks to the GSOC participants and mentors for a summer of work, Google gave everyone Wave accounts.

Wave's utility lies in numbers. Signing in without a friend is like throwing a party but inviting nobody. Bring a friend or two into the Wave, and it feels like hosting tea in a room with too much furniture. But once the numbers start to rise, Wave's strengths surface. It is a cocktail party that comes complete with a birds-eye view of all of the chit-chat. Conversations swirl around, splintering into smaller threads of conversation only to merge back into the main discussion later. Images, maps, polls, and an API for building extensions make Wave a promising tool except for one thing.

The user interface stinks.

Yes, Wave's merits surface only when many people are in a discussion. Unfortunately, that's also where the big shortcomings surface. As one conversation forks into many smaller discussions, the wave quickly becomes visually unmanageable. The Quickest Scrollwheel in the West will still have a hard time traversing the continuously growing vertical pane that wraps the conversation. The entire advantage gained by the birds eye view of the conversation is lost to clumsy scrolling.

But this failing is indicative of something greater. Once again, Google has achieved an engineering masterpiece. And for all technical purposes, Wave is a marvel. It certainly pushes AJAX and asynchronous web interaction to its very limits, and I have no doubt that the source code for the server component would make my head swim. But the user interface, for all its visual business, simply doesn't work. Wave is an attempt to cram the internals of a Hummer into the body of a circa 1996 Honda Civic.

This is where the Mentor Summit offered a revelation.

On the second day of the summit, the PyMT team hosted an hour-long session on multi-touch input. PyMT is a set of Python application bindings for various multi-touch libraries. Linux, Windows, and OS X all support multi-touch input technologies. Last week, Apple's new Magic Mouse made its debut featuring a multi-touch surface atop a traditional laser-based mouse. Dell offers a laptop with a multi-touch screen. Wacom offers a multi-touch tablet. Microsoft's Surface technology boasts table-sized multi-touch surfaces.

Multi-touch is arriving in a big way. But what's the hubub about? What's the big feature that suddenly makes these technologies attractive? It is the extension of point and click to touch, tap, pinch, swipe, expand, drag, rotate, throw. The simple mouse model that has driven graphical interaction for decades is mid-way through an extreme makeover. And with deflection- and pressure-sensing surfaces rapidly advancing, mice and fingers are just the tip of the input iceberg.

The PyMT team took an hour-long trip to Google's hands-on room and came back with an impressive demonstration. Beginning with some Lego pieces, a flat sheet of metal, and a PlayStation 3 camera, the pair of programmers from PyMT built a gaming surface and a couple of paddles. The camera tracked the motion of the paddles on the surface, transforming the physical paddles into virtual ones in a game of Pong projected onto the wall. In an hour!

When we can build new input devices with an Open Source library and $35 worth of corner-drug-store toys, a whole new universe of possibilities appears.

And that's where Wave returns to mind. As I walked out of the room with UX Design guru Steve Fisher, he turned to me an remarked, When I watch a demo like this, it makes me wonder What is the Web going to look like in a few years. Yeah, it makes me wonder, too.

Wave is a fantastic architecture. But the architectural gems are obscured behind yesterday's user interface limitations. In that way, Wave is a milestone that marks the death of Web 2.0. And it is more than that. It's a fingerpost pointing not to the technologies touted as Web 3.0, but toward a new mode of human-computer interaction. What is going to make tomorrow's web compelling? Not metadata. Not cleaner layout. Not even native support for videos. Better user interfaces. Interfaces tuned to convey information more effectively. Reactive interfaces. That's where tomorrow's success stories are waiting.

HTML 5 and RDFa are good and all, but the real sea-change is coming from your fingertips. All ten of them.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/4

The Demise of Web 2.0 is a post from: TechStartups.com

Last week we had a search come in for what happens in a startup merger? A brilliant question that is most likely being asked at the worst time the merger.

This question might have been asked by an employee of the startup, but let's for this instance suppose that it came from the lucky founder of a startup that found an exit well before the business has matured. This merger allows them financial compensation and just how much is at stake.

What appears to be missing from this founders startup experience and vocabulary is a very important term and process due diligence.

One of the best, if not the best, resources for helping this startup founder would be the Technology Due Diligence (TechDD) written by Mike Dunn (@glemak). Mike's current role is CTO of Hearst Interactive Media. He's a tech veteran with stripes pre and post bubble that guides Hearst's technology investments like Brightcove, BuzzFeed and UGO.

Dunn's document is a view behind the curtain of venture capital. It gives a startup a view that a potential investor or a more experienced merging company has of the process that is about to unfold and seeks to make it as smooth as possible.

Dunn describes his open source TechDD as:

The goal of this due diligence process is to allow us to fully understand the technology practice of your company, including how you are staffed, your tactical and strategic utilization of technology and the processes that allow them all to work together to produce what you do for your company. We would like to be able to understand this for both your current state and your roadmap. So where relevant to your business, please be prepared to discuss and provide written answers for the following scoping questions

And scoping they are.

The documentation is broken down into three sections:

1. Technical Staffing
2. Infrastructure and Architecture
3. Workflows and Processes

Each with a keen focus on extracting the most information that will allow outsiders to understand the inner workings of the startup. If these questions are answered truthfully by a startup before being approached by a potential investor the process of a merger wouldn't cause anxiety but provide for a source of relief that from the very beginning the building of the business was transparent.

The Technology Due Diligence documentation that Dunn has created isn't designed to trip up an entrepreneur. It is written in the spirit of the open source community to be a transparent and genuine glimpse into what is often the most fear inducing a process and unprepared startup can find itself in.

The document is a comprehensive primer for any tech startup to integrate with their business plan. It clears the way for building a business that is investment or acquisition ready at any time.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Tech Startup Due Diligence is a post from: TechStartups.com

• Developers who have been active in the developer preview we started back in June
• The first users who signed up and offered to give feedback on wave.google.com
• Select customers of Google Apps

We've all been there. You climb into bed, you turn off the nightstand lamp, and you think "Did I close the garage door?" Save yourself the midnight trip to check on the garage with this ingenious hack.

Instructables user kcj2010 hated peeling himself out of bed to double check on the garage door and hated waking up in the morning realizing he'd left it open even more. His solution was to wire a sensor to his garage door and place an indicator light hidden in the light fixture of the master bedroom.

When the garage is open, a small red LED shines on the light fixture and gives an immediate and highly visible indicator that the garage door is open. No light? The garage is closed. Seems like an idea that could be applied to any swinging or sliding door that causes you concern. Check out the Instructable for the parts list and wiring diagram. Sound off in the comments if you've undertaken a novel hack of your own to solve a problem around the house.

John Quincy Adams, the sixth President of the United States, was born in 1767 and lived until 1848. You would think that alone would exclude him from using Twitter to communicate his thoughts, not to mention him using a computer or even electricity.

But that's exactly what the Massachusetts Historical Society is going to make happen starting Wednesday. The kicker's that every tweet will be formulated by President Adams (@JQAdams_mhs himself. How is that possible, you ask? A high school student browsing the archive of President Adams made a unique observation about his diary entries: they were the length of the standard tweet.

Here are two gems, courtesy of the Associated Press:

August 6th, 1809: Thick fog. Scanty Wind. On George's Bank. Lat: 42-34. Read Massillon's Careme Sermons 2 & 3. Ladies are Sick.

August 15th, 1809: Weather fine_ wind scanty. Lat: 44-13. Long: 53-40. This afternoon I found the Caboose on fire.

The concise nature of his entries, combined with the historical importance of his life, convinced the Massachusetts Historical Society to try a novel approach in teaching history to Generation Y. His trials, tribulations, and top books will all be tweeted out. On top of that, the MHS will tweet out maps showing the location of President Adams during his trip to Russia while he was a diplomatic representative of the U.S.

Our hat goes off to the Massachusetts Historical Society for trying this exciting approach to historical education. Also a thumbs-up to the student who discovered the possibility. This should be a great way to learn more about one of America's most important historical figures and the time in which he lived.

Tags: history, john quincy adams, twitter

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At the same time, I watch the mainstream press report on the same old nonsense, our government struggle with big issues that seem to polarize everyone, and I listen to chatter in trains, planes, and automobiles about all the problems that exist.

This weekend I went on my annual Feld Men's Trip. This year we went to Chicago, ate at Mortons and Follia, went to a Cubs game, and had chocolate ice cream (twice) at Ghirardelli's.

I was exhausted from the week so I slept a lot. But, I did notice an amazing amount of activity in downtown Chicago and on Michigan Avenue on Friday and Saturday night. Chicago was buzzing, everyone was enjoying the warm weather, and the mood was very positive.

There's dissonance between the broad sentiment echoed by the mainstream media that seems to hang over everything and the energy and attitude on the street. I can't decide if it's me and my innate optimism, if there's an illusion of progress, or if there's a massive disconnect between reality and what mainstream media reports.

I'm going to be in Seattle, LA, and San Francisco this week; my antenna is going to be tuned to the tone of the cities.

Steven Levy, who was embedded with us during our State Department trip to Iraq this past April, has a feature story in this month's issue of Wired:

Courtesy of MAKE, we have this interesting "hack" that provides step-by-step instructions for getting 1984 back on your Kindletimid publishers frightened of New Media be damned.

It's not too complicated a process, other than that expensive plane ticket of course, but there are a few instructions and tools you'll need, so head over to MAKE when you're ready.

If you're already in Australia and care to embark on this completely free-of-charge literary journey, send us some interesting shots of you giving Big Brother the picture while reading 1984, won't you? [MAKE]

21st century media literacies from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

A week ago, as we were wrapping up the Traveling Geeks two-day visit to Cambridge, I was walking down the main drag with author Howard Rheingold when we stopped for a moment in front of King's College. I took out my loaner Flip Ultra and shot this 6-minute interview of Howard, colorfully garbed as always, in front of the 500-year-old King's College, talking about 21st century literacies.

Howard hit on one major takeaway that I had from our week in the UK. Increasingly I think the digital divide is less about access to technology and more about the difference between those who know how and those who don't know how, he said. He's convinced that what's most important is not access to the Internet we have more than a billion people on the Internet now and there are 4 billion phones out there but access to knowledge and literacies for the digital age. The ability to know has suddenly become the ability to search and the ability to sift and discern. Skill plus social is the key.

Earlier in the week Howard gave the keynote address at Reboot Britain, and he recounts some of the highlights here. Among the Essential Literacies he cites are:

Attention
Participation
Collaboration
Critical consumption (which includes crap detection we live in an age when you can get the answer to anything out of the air, but how do you know what and whom to trust?)

He also talks about focused attention vs. multitasking and the importance of being able to handle an array of tasks simultaneously.

We had a great dinner (at an Italian restaurant), and it was a bonus to get to know Howard a bit better during our trip.

Once you've installed the extension, you'll need to take a trip to the add-on options panel to enter your Google account information, where you can also filter by label, force a secure connection, or choose whether or not to open Google Reader in a new tab. Hovering your mouse over the status bar will show a tooltip with the updated feeds, but right-clicking on the icon will bring up a menu that you can use to drill down directly into that feed in Readervery useful for those of us with a massive number of feed items.

Google Reader Watcher is a free download, works anywhere Firefox does, and is a good replacement for the previously mentioned Google Reader Notifier for Firefox, which has since been turned into malware by a greedy extension developer. If you'd rather have your RSS notifications outside of your browser, you can check out the Google Reader Notifier for Windows.

Extended care warranties, car rental insurance, trip cancellation protectionyou know they're just margin boosters for companies, but you can't shake that vulnerable feeling. Personal finance author Ramit Sethi says you need only look in your wallet.

Photo by TheTruthAbout.

Sethi, author of the I Will Teach You To Be Rich blog, and book of the same name, notes that most credit cards extend purchase warranties to one year automatically, on top of the 30- or 90-day standards included in the box. Car rental insurance is also included in most card policies, and even if the airline tries to stiff you for a "late cancellation," many credit issuers grant their users $1,000-$2,000 per year in trip cancellation paybacks.

Sethi details these perks and others in a recent CNBC appearance, along with a free book chapter and related posts linked below.

[YouTube Video]

What "secret" credit card perks have you discovered, accidentally or through fine print research? Share the hidden wealth in the comments.

This was my first meeting with the Web's creator, whose work and philosophy was a direct inspiration for me when I launched ReadWriteWeb back in 2003.¹

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After shaking hands, I told Tim Berners-Lee that this blog's name was in part inspired by the first browser, which he developed, called "WorldWideWeb". That was a read/write browser; meaning you could not only browse and read content, but create and edit content too. It was a shame then when Mosaic, a read-only browser, became the first mainstream web browser in the mid-90s. It wasn't until the rise of Web 2.0 that the read/write philosophy gained widespread acceptance.² On that note, we launched into the interview...

Note: the interview will be published in two parts, with Part 1 today on the topic of Linked Data. Part 2 will explore other topics and will run tomorrow.

How Linked Data Relates to The Semantic Web

RWW: Earlier this year you gave an inspiring talk at TED about Linked Data. You described Linked Data as a sea change akin to the invention of the WWW itself - i.e. we've gone from a Web of documents to a Web of data. Can you please explain though how Linked Data relates to the Semantic Web, is it a subset of it?

TBL: They fit in completely, in that the linked data actually uses a small slice of all the various technologies that people have put together and standardized for the Semantic Web.

We started off with the Semantic Web roadmap, which had lots of languages that we wanted to create. [However] the community as a whole got a bit distracted from the idea that actually the most important piece is the interoperability of the data. The fact that things are identified with URIs is the key thing.

The Semantic Web and Linked Data connect because when we've got this web of linked data, there are already lots of technologies which exist to do fancy things with it. But it's time now to concentrate on getting the web of linked data out there.

Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee and ReadWriteWeb founder Richard MacManus

How Linked Data Has Evolved via Grassroots

RWW: Linked Data has had a lot of grassroots support, which you mentioned in your TED speech. This is something Semantic Web technologies, such as RDF, have struggled to get over the years. Has the W3C been pushing the more bottom-up Linked Data world, because of the frustration over lack of take-up of top-down Semantic Web?

TBL: A lot of the initial RDF and OWL projects came out of the academic world; and some of them were projects to show what you could do in a closed world. And the files were zipped up and left on a disc. While they were interesting projects, and while the systems were useful systems, the semantic web community maybe missed the point of the 'web' bit and focused too much on the 'semantic'. However the work that's been done in the Semantic Web, the standards, was really valuable. It's relatively recently for example that SPARQL [an RDF query language] has been developed.

Somebody drew an analogy the other day: can you imagine trying to promote a world of databases without SQL? Even though it's not an interoperable protocol, it's just a query language. So similarly, all that's been put into RDF, rdfs and OWL is very valuable to the linked data community.

The Linked Data community tend to use a subset of that [Semantic Web technologies], of OWL for example. But they certainly use SPARQL. So you could argue that really it wasn't ready to be deployed widely.

Linked Data started as a very informal Design Issues note that I put in; it was a grassroots movement from very early on. So yes W3C has been emphasizing the importance of Linked Data. It's been the Semantic Web Interest Group of course, and various [other Semantic Web] activities, which has been pushing it. But also Linked Data has been seized on - a group of people for example put together DBpedia.³ That wasn't commissioned, that was that they just thought it would be a really cool idea.

Graph of Linked Data sets on the Web, as at March 2009

Linked Data and Governments

RWW: In a recent Design Issues note, you urge governments to put their data online as Linked Data (although you'd also be happy for governments to just make available the raw data - presumably so that others can then structure it). What do you realistically expect, for example, the U.S. or U.K. governments to do over the next year? And in the near future, do you foresee different governments interconnecting their Linked Data sets?

TBL: One can't generalize, governments are (like most big organizations) fascinatingly diverse inside them. So you'll find that there are places inside governments where you get a champion who gets linked data and who's just written a script and produced some linked data. So in the UK government for example, you'll find there's RDFa [in the code of its website] for civil service jobs. So if somebody wants to make a database of all the jobs, they can do that very easily.

There are other cases where the easiest thing for somebody to do is to just put data up in whatever form it's available. Comma separated values (CSV) files are remarkably popular. They're exported sometimes from spreadsheets. It's remarkable how much information is in spreadsheets. Or sometimes pulled out of a database and then put up on the web. It's not as good, not as useful to the community, as if Linked Data had been put up there and linked. But the first step of actually putting the data out there is the one that nobody else can do.

Data.gov, a catalog of public data, was launched in May by the U.S. government

The way to go is for government departments to go the extra step and convert [their data] into Linked Data. One of the nice things about Linked Data, when they have a pile of it, is that they could run a SPARQL server on it. SPARQL servers are a commodity product, a solution for all of the people who say 'but actually I wanted to have XML.' A SPARQL server will generate an XML file [and] allow somebody to write out, effectively, a URL for the XML file.

In fact, I don't see why SPARQL servers shouldn't provide CSV files, something which as far as I know isn't in the standards. But I'd recommend it, certainly in government context, because CSV files are what people have and what people want.

So the message [for government] is to use RDF. Linked Data is the backplane, it's the thing that you connect to in both directions. As a [web] producer your job is to make sure that you produce Linked Data one way or another. And as a consumer, there are lots of ways to consume that data once it's out there as Linked Data.

Part 2 of ReadWriteWeb's interview with Tim Berners-Lee will be published tomorrow...

Footnotes:

1. The very first sentence written on this blog, on 20 April, 2003, was: "The World Wide Web in 2003 is beginning to fulfill the hopes that Tim Berners-Lee had for it over 10 years ago when he created it."

2. For more on read/write browsers, you can read another early RWW post entitled What became of the Browser/Editor.

3. DBpedia is a community project to extract structured information from Wikipedia; see ReadWriteWeb's profile of this and similar resources.

On a good morning there's no alarm clock. I wake up with the sun and do my best to resist the instinctive urge to look at the computer or check email for at least an hour.

My vice of choice isn't coffee, but the Kindle. Its electronic shelves are filled mostly with the business books I read in order to grow up to be a real businessman (before someone figures out I'm not). At any point in time I have about 120 books downloaded. Interspersed between Drucker, Godin, and Buffett are classics like Seneca, which I wish I could read more often but only get to a few times a year.

Automattic, the holding company behind WordPress.com, finally got an office late last year at Pier 38, a beautiful open-floorplan space right on the Embarcadero. It's about a five-minute walk from my apartment, but my preference is to work from home. We're very much a virtual company where everyone primarily works from home (or their coffee shop of choice). The half dozen of us in the Bay Area will go in on Thursdays to have a little company, but six days out of the week the space is usually empty. But we throw some great parties there.

The team communicates mostly via P2, something a little like Twitter but password-protected, with real-time updates and threaded inline conversations. P2 is almost like a chat channel, but structured like a blog, and we've evolved to have almost a dozen across the 40 people at Automattic serving a variety of purposes. We fill any gaps in communication by IRC, Skype, and, in a pinch, email.

In my home office there are two 30-inch monitors a Mac and a PC. They share the same mouse and keyboard using Synergy so I can copy and paste between them. The Mac is mostly used for email and chat, while web stuff and coding happen on the PC. The keyboard is, of course, Dvorak, a more efficient keyboard layout that I switched to 10 years ago. I also have a Sony Z90 laptop with me all the time, whether I'm going overseas or just to the doctor's office. I'm pretty rough on laptops, sometimes going through two a year. At home I like to geek out with home servers and networking, and sometimes find myself doing IT support for family, friends, and colleagues.

One of my favorite programs that we didn't make is RescueTime. Hackers all know that you have to profile before you can optimize, and RescueTime runs in the trap of my computers and tracks how much time I spend on different things, sometimes with surprising results. My biggest time-suck is email, and to help out I wrote a WordPress plugin that filters people into folders based on their email address and priority settings which helps keep my inbox relatively clean. Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Work Week, advocates checking email only twice a week but that's too severe for me. I'm currently trying Leo Babauta's approach from The Power of Less, which suggests small steps like checking email five set times a day instead of constantly. It's like dieting: People who binge diet gain it all back. That happens to me with email.

Music is my muse and I listen to it all day. There's a lot of jazz Dexter Gordon and Sonny Rollins but I'm also a big fan of Jay-Z, Beyonc, and Method Man. I have an analog Shindo stereo that was hand built in Japan and the aural experience is mind-blowing. When you're coding you really have to be in the zone so I'll listen to a single song over and over on repeat, hundreds of times. It helps me focus. The other best way to focus is to turn off email and instant messenger. The moment that little toaster pops up and says you've got mail you're taken out of the flow. You're juggling variables and functions and layouts and the moment you look away it all falls to the ground it takes you 10 minutes getting it back in the air again.

A big part of my job is to manage the support, usability, and product development people who are scattered all over the globe, from Alabama to Ireland to Bulgaria. My management strategy is centered on hiring: find extremely self-motivated and curious people and then give them the autonomy to succeed. There's no manager looking over anybody's shoulder, so everyone needs to be self-directed. For every person we hire there are hundreds of applications. We always start people on a contract basis first; that way we mutually understand what it's like to work with each other. One of the most important things I look for in rsums is a history of contributing to Open Source projects, because I know these people will understand our ethos.

For four years I was the only developer on Akismet, our anti-spam service. It started because my mom had wanted to start a blog but I was scared she'd be bombarded by spam for Viagra and worse, think that's what I looked at all day. We finally added a second engineer to the project at the end of 2008, which was weird for me but was necessary for growth, especially as I'm pulled in more and more directions.

I go out for lunch whenever I can, which fits well with my preference for no meetings before 11 AM. There's something very personal about sharing food with someone; it's a deeper connection than shaking hands in a boardroom. Often when I'm in town I'll have lunch with Toni Schneider, my CEO. He and I get along super well which is one of the reasons I think the business has worked. He brings gravitas because he's a digital native but also has great startup experience including being the CEO of Oddpost, a webmail company Yahoo acquired in 2004. Sometimes we'll go to lunch at 12:30 and stay until 5.

In general, I'm pretty darn disorganized, late as often as not, and really bad at keeping a schedule. My PA is now focusing on office and event tasks so I'm in the market for someone new. Last year I was on the road 212 days and clocked 175,000 miles, which is seven times around the globe (according to Dopplr, a great travel journal I use). The bulk of my travel is to WordCamps, which are educational and networking events that celebrate blogging. Automattic held our first annual WordCamp in San Francisco in 2006, thrown together just a few weeks before the event happened. Now they've exploded all over the world and I've been to over 30 community-organized events from South Africa to the Philippines. I say they're a great bargain: a full day of quality speakers, BBQ lunch, a cool t-shirt, and a party for $25. We just wrapped the largest WordCamp ever here in San Francisco with over 700 people. Though I'd love to, if I went to every WordCamp I wouldn't have any time to actually build WordPress, so I'm cutting back and trying to go to every other one. They are great fun, though; it's a chance to be a rockstar for a day. In the Philippines after the conference was done I stayed almost two hours afterward taking pictures and autographing badges and laptops. I've even been asked to sign body parts. Really.

To document my experiences when I travel I use my Nikon D3 camera. My photos are autobiographical my memory is so bad (and the travel pretty grueling) that I'll forget everything about a trip, and the photos help trigger my memories. On the plane ride home I'll process and edit the photos as a narrative of each day, a visual diary. On my trip to Vietnam last February I took 2-3 thousand photos. I've heard that the difference between an amateur photographer and a pro is that the amateur shows you everything they shoot. I'm somewhere in between I'll post maybe a quarter of what I take.

I used to think constantly about building an audience for my blog but now my attitude is that if I'm not blogging for myself it's not worth it. I don't force myself to post once a day, I just do it when it feels natural. Sometimes people complain Write more about WordPress; we don't want to see photos of kids in Vietnam but I don't really care. For my 25th birthday in January I published a list of 2009 goals on my blog. It included learning Spanish, learning how to cook, and posting 10,000 photos. Cooking has been a total fail so far; I go out for every meal. If you open my refrigerator you'll find Girl Scout cookies and barbecue sauce. Photos are blazing along, half-way through the year and I've taken 20,000 photos and posted about 4,000 of them.

My blog is fortunate enough to get lot of comments and I read and manually approve each one. I think the broken windows theory a broken window or graffiti in a neighborhood begets more of the same applies online. I'll happily approve a comment from someone who completely disagrees with everything I believe in, but if I get a positive comment with a curse word in it I'll edit it out. My blog is like my living room: If someone was acting out in my house, I'd ask that person to leave.
I look at our numbers every day, usually after 5 PM PST when GMT goes into a new day. We have an internal dashboard where we track 500 to 600 statistics about everything from how often people are logging in to WordPress.com to how many words they're pressing per day. Almost all of the numbers are real-time.

I do my best work mid-morning and super late at night, from one to five in the morning. Some people don't need sleep, but I actually need a ton. I just sleep all the time, catching naps in the afternoon or a 20-minute snooze in the office. Our business is 24 hours folks in Australia start their day around 4 PM my time and our guys and girls in Europe get going around midnight. Sometimes I'll go out at night, come home from the bar at 2 or 3 AM, and then go back to work.

For WordPress we're trying to set up a community that will be around 10 to 30 years from now, one that's independent from the whims of the market. My role is somewhat like Linus for Linux or Shuttleworth for Ubuntu, affectionately referred to as BDFL, and it's my responsibility to meet as many users as possible and direct the software in a way that reflects their interest. Last year I probably met 5,000 or 6,000 WordPress users, about half of them who make their living from it. We want to be like Google, eBay, Amazon they all enable other people to make far more money than the company captures. That's ultimately what we're trying to do, we're trying to create a movement.

My Mom started a blog a couple of months ago. Six years into this, and we finally made it easy enough for my Mom to use. (She hates it when I say that.)

If you ask questions in the comments, I'll do my best to answer them.

In last week's launch announcement, Bing was being bandied about as Microsoft's latest attempt to steal market share away from Google. In particular, according to Microsoft, Bing will focus on four verticals: making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition, and finding a local business. We took the new search engine for a test run tonight.

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A note about the branding. Microsoft isn't known for its clever (or even coherent) branding, but we truly wonder about the decision to place images of hot air balloons on the bing.com homepage. What is that trying to tell us - that Bing is powered by hot air?

In any case, a search for our current topic de jour, "web 3.0", brought up fairly similar results for Google and Bing. Although frankly we found that Google's Universal Search, which mixes different types of results together in one page (such as video in the below example) gave us a better search experience here. In Bing, you have to click 'Videos' to get multimedia about Web 3.0.

Bing - "web 3.0"

Google - "web 3.0"

How about one of the four areas in which Bing is supposed to be focusing on? Let's pick 'searching for a health condition'. My favorite search is for "diabetes type 1", so I keyed that into both search engines:

Bing - "diabetes type 1"

Google - "diabetes type 1"

The main difference between the two search engines is that Bing offers more options on the left, including special sections for symptons, medication, children, etc. It also offers 'related searches', which with health-related searches is typically helpful.

As usual Google offers a straight list of results, but again with Universal Search (in this case news and video results inline with normal webpage results). With Google you can get more options too, but you have to click "Show Options..." - which we're not sure how many users do. To be honest, I haven't once clicked it in my daily Google searches since it went live a couple of weeks ago.

So Microsoft's Bing does hold promise in this type of search. Maybe it's not all hot air after all...

Average Tech Company Layoffs? 21%
Being native to the tech industry, I'm watching Techcrunch's layoff tracker, which has a roster of 288,153 layoffs since August 08. Let's assume that Techcrunch's data is right, and focus on one of the columns listed on the report shows the percentages of layoffs per company. Being the analyst I am, I did a quick average and found out that most common percentages of layoff is 21%.

21%, this means that if you work at a tech company, and look up and down your aisle, 1/5 people you know, could be packing their boxes.

Hate Your Job? Suck It Up
After speaking with others that were thinking of leaving their jobs before Oct, they are now thinking twice, why? The competition for specific jobs is fierce, and with less compensation, people that have crappy jobs are going to suck it up, despite the fact they have to do more with less.

Got Laid Off? You've A Stigma to Overcome
I speak to a lot of CEOs in my job as an Industry Analyst, and I've been asking them where they would hire top talent from, from the existing workforce (already have a job) or those that got laid off. Each one (over 5) told me that they would still try to poach top talent from existing companies, sadly those that were laid off on first round have a stigma attached to them. In fact, some of you may be over and under qualified, and you should know the dangers and solutions.

For those that were cut in first round, I'm sensitive to your situation, you know I'm doing what I can to help those that got laid off with my survey results of those that were hired since the recession was announced.

Filtering the True Social Media Experts
So what about those that got laid off? friend and former colleague Robert Scoble suggests several tips to those who joined the mobility pool, while many make sense, he suggests that:

This means removing ANYTHING that says you are a social media expert from your Twitter account. There is no such thing and even if there were there's no job in it for you. Chris Brogan already has that job and he's not giving it up.

I disagree and agree, here's why: first of all, recognize there's a few different types of social media experts, those have have done it, and those that say they can.

Within the corporate (client) environment, it's easy to find folks that have done it, in fact, I've created a list of those within companies larger than 1000 employees that are social media strategists, or community managers. I'm a bit behind on updating the list, I'll do it soon, please carefully read the requirements before submitting.

On the vendor or agency side, this is a bit more challenging, as an client, you should ask for at least 3 case studies of success, and gauge if they are walking the talk.

However, it gets more difficult on the consultant side, why? When people get laid off, the first instinct is brand themselves a consultant for hire. As a result, anyone who has been using social media tools for personal use could brand themselves as having social media skills and experiences for corporate yet we know it's often very different.

Now, if you truly are a social media expert, and a consultant, you've likely already a book of business and you're working with clients. Therefore any employer who is seeking to hire you, and sees that you're positioning yourself as a social media consultant without a book of business or client or vendor experience will quickly see through it. That's where Scoble is right.

Key Takeaway: If you are the real deal, tout it. Of course you should highlight what you've done right, but because we're in a community, others will reference you so it may not matter as much.

Update: Dawn Foster has some good points on how to find out who's a real social media consultant.

Talking About It Openly Can Help
Here's a unique approach, my friend Cece Salomon Lee a PR/Marketing/Social Media professional on vendor side recently god laid off, (her husband was laid off the next business day) and she's chronicling her journey on this blog Survival Mode. I worked with her on a client/vendor relationship and am happy to be her reference.

When Layoffs Are A good Thing
Before the recession was announced, I planned a trip to Maui, in fact I just got back last week. What did I notice? Now is a great time to go on a vacation. Flights were $250 round trip from SF to Oahu (ours was only 1/3rd full), and condos were renting at $100 a night. You can go to Costco and buy food on first day, avoid eating out, and rent a car for $25 a day and go to the world's best beaches. So if your job is secure, or you got a nice severance check take that trip you've always wanted to.

Of course, layoffs are good, actually great, but only if you're the CEO of Seagate, who received a $5,000,000.00 severance paycheck, that's a golden parachute inside of a parachute, with a backup parachute on a glider. I counted last night, that means they'd need to sell over 50,000 Seagate Free Agent Drives (less than $100 each) to make up for that compensation not counting his $500 hourly consulting fee. I'll be he's going to Hawaii.

I have a Forrester report coming soon based on the survey results from top brands, whether or not they are going to increase or decrease their social media marketing spend during a recession stay tuned.

You see that pile of stuff sitting on your bed, waiting to be stuffed into your suitcase? Take half of that stuff and put it back in your closet. Seriously. I know you think you've already narrowed your pile down from what you really want to bring. I know you don't see how you'll ever survive for weeks/months/years on that meager selection. But you will, I promise. And you'll thank me when you're dragging/carrying an already heavy suitcase/backpack down a 500-year-old cobblestone road. If you don't ditch the stuff now, you'll ditch it on the road. Trust us: unlike most scenarios in life, having too little is far, far better than having too much.

It's pretty good advice for how many features you pack into a product too. Lay out everything you think your product needs and then cut out half.

You'll be liberated:

1) You don't have to spend as much upfront.
2) You don't have as much weight to carry.
3) In truth, you won't actually need a lot of the things you fantasize you'll need.
4) You can pick up whatever you didn't include when you get there.
5) You have extra room for future additions.

Proper Trip Preparation offers similar advice:

Remember and repeat these words: PACK LIGHT. PACK LIGHT, PACK LIGHT. A good rule of thumb is to pack half of what you need, then take half of that out of the bag. Face it, do you really want to be schlepping around a three suitcases on the train or dragging them up five floors of narrow stairs in Amsterdam?

Keep your product light and it will have a lot better chance of chasing down that train about to leave the station.

Related: Getting Real: Half, Not Half-Assed

Daniel Zemans, our man in Chicago, checks in with another piece of intel on the Windy City pizza scene. Daniel also blogs about Chicagoland pizza with his friends on the Chicago Pizza Club blog. The Mgmt.

Pequod's was founded by Chicago pizza legend Burt Katz a little over 30 years ago. He sold the place in 1986, but Pequod's has remained one of the most beloved deep dish spots in Chicago. There are two locations: the original in the Northwest suburb of Morton Grove, and another in the Lincoln Park neighborhood (where I went for this review).

Before heading to the restaurant, I took advantage of a trick that many deep dish and stuffed pizzerias allowI preordered, which is like calling ahead for takeout, except when you get to the restaurant, you sit down and eat. Since these pies take 40 minutes to cook, it makes sense to call ahead so you don't have to wait long before starting your meal. I phoned in an order of half sausage, half pepperoni pizza before eagerly making my way over to Pequod's.

In previous experience at Pequod's, I have been disappointed with the balance of the ingredients. The bottom crust, while quite tasty, is thick and a bit denseit blocks my ability to savor the cheese, crust and toppings. To balance out the crust during this visit, I added a little twist to my order by asking for extra sauce and extra cheese, a wise decision.

The Famous Caramelized Crust

The first thing everyone notices about a Pequod's pie is the caramelized crust. Some critics call it burned, but they're wrong. Before cooking the pizza, the chef spreads a thin layer of cheese along the outside of the crust. While the resulting flavor is merely decent, the texture is magnificentthe caramelized cheese gives the back of the pie a chewiness that doesn't exist in most pizzas.

Good Vs. Bad Chewiness

This type of chewiness is not to be confused with that a bad, greasy New York slice that's been sitting on the counter for half an hour; that is bad chewy. This is a firm chewiness allowing diners to savor each bite in a way that's not generally possibleotherwise known as good chewy.

The Cheese

The cheese is basic mozzarella, and with so much of it, there's more than sufficient gooey delight. Those of you who are horrified by the concept of eating pizza with a knife and fork should avoid asking for extra cheese, as it slides off the sides. After a couple minutes of cooling, there's sufficient congealing to prevent sliding, which is good for the second and third slices.

The Glorious Meat Toppings

For those who prefer a sweet sauce, Pequod's chunky version is spectacular. As a tangy sauce fan, I was a bit disappointedbut that needs a major caveat. The sausage, which comes from Scala's Preferred, a Chicago institution, was incredible. And while the sauce was generally too sweet, the interplay between sausage and sauce was perfect.

Pequod's does a special trick with their meat toppings, which adds crispness to the pepperoni and thick pieces of sausage. Not sure if they put the pies in a broiler for a couple minutes after baking them, but the results are: great texture, and a release of juices sitting freshly atop the pie when it arrives at your table.

Given how great the sausage interplays with the sweet sauce, my next trip to Pequod's will involve an order of extra sauce, extra cheese and extra sausage. Before this visit, I liked Pequod's plenty, but now I'm convinced it's one of the better deep dish pizzas in Chicago.

Related

Art of Pizza: Usually a Classic, But Not This Time
Coalfire: Chicago's Entry into the Coal-Oven Pizza Craze
Home Run Inn: You Can't Ball Like Derrick Rose, But You Can Eat His Favorite Pizza
Lou Malnati's: Home of Flawless Deep Dish
Thin-Crust Pizza in Chicago? Yes, and It's Outstanding at Vito & Nick's
Giordano's, a Stuffed Pizza Classic in Chicago
Uno's, Chicago's Original Deep-Dish Pizza

Pequod's was founded by Chicago pizza legend Burt Katz a little over 30 years ago. He sold the place in 1986, but Pequod's has remained one of the most beloved deep dish spots in Chicago. There are two locations: the original in the Northwest suburb of Morton Grove, and another in the Lincoln Park neighborhood (where I went for this review).

Before heading to the restaurant, I took advantage of a trick that many deep dish and stuffed pizzerias allowI preordered, which is like calling ahead for takeout, except when you get to the restaurant, you sit down and eat. Since these pies take 40 minutes to cook, it makes sense to call ahead so you don't have to wait long before starting your meal. I phoned in an order of half sausage, half pepperoni pizza before eagerly making my way over to Pequod's.

In previous experience at Pequod's, I have been disappointed with the balance of the ingredients. The bottom crust, while quite tasty, is thick and a bit denseit blocks my ability to savor the cheese, crust and toppings. To balance out the crust during this visit, I added a little twist to my order by asking for extra sauce and extra cheese, a wise decision.

The Famous Caramelized Crust

The first thing everyone notices about a Pequod's pie is the caramelized crust. Some critics call it burned, but they're wrong. Before cooking the pizza, the chef spreads a thin layer of cheese along the outside of the crust. While the resulting flavor is merely decent, the texture is magnificentthe caramelized cheese gives the back of the pie a chewiness that doesn't exist in most pizzas.

Good Vs. Bad Chewiness

This type of chewiness is not to be confused with that a bad, greasy New York slice that's been sitting on the counter for half an hour; that is bad chewy. This is a firm chewiness allowing diners to savor each bite in a way that's not generally possibleotherwise known as good chewy.

The Cheese

The cheese is basic mozzarella, and with so much of it, there's more than sufficient gooey delight. Those of you who are horrified by the concept of eating pizza with a knife and fork should avoid asking for extra cheese, as it slides off the sides. After a couple minutes of cooling, there's sufficient congealing to prevent sliding, which is good for the second and third slices.

The Glorious Meat Toppings

For those who prefer a sweet sauce, Pequod's chunky version is spectacular. As a tangy sauce fan, I was a bit disappointedbut that needs a major caveat. The sausage, which comes from Scala's Preferred, a Chicago institution, was incredible. And while the sauce was generally too sweet, the interplay between sausage and sauce was perfect.

Pequod's does a special trick with their meat toppings, which adds crispness to the pepperoni and thick pieces of sausage. Not sure if they put the pies in a broiler for a couple minutes after baking them, but the results are: great texture, and a release of juices sitting freshly atop the pie when it arrives at your table.

Given how great the sausage interplays with the sweet sauce, my next trip to Pequod's will involve an order of extra sauce, extra cheese and extra sausage. Before this visit, I liked Pequod's plenty, but now I'm convinced it's one of the better deep dish pizzas in Chicago.

Related

Art of Pizza: Usually a Classic, But Not This Time
Coalfire: Chicago's Entry into the Coal-Oven Pizza Craze
Home Run Inn: You Can't Ball Like Derrick Rose, But You Can Eat His Favorite Pizza
Lou Malnati's: Home of Flawless Deep Dish
Thin-Crust Pizza in Chicago? Yes, and It's Outstanding at Vito & Nick's
Giordano's, a Stuffed Pizza Classic in Chicago
Uno's, Chicago's Original Deep-Dish Pizza

A few weeks ago, I was contacted by Kelly Jane Torrance, a reporter for the Washington Times. She was working a piece about the Amazon Kindle ebook reader, and had seen my Kindle unboxing and initial review video. We conducted an email interview, part of which went into her final article in the Washington Times (The Carry-On Library - beware popups).

Of course, all of my lengthy replies didn't make it into the article, so I'm posting them here. Consider this my two month review of the Kindle - that's about how long I've been using it. Read on for the rest of the interview/review.

How long have you had your Kindle?

I've had my Kindle for about a month and a half, since they became reliably available in mid-April. But I've wanted one ever since they were released in November 2007 (and subsequently sold out in 6 hours).

Why did you decide to purchase it?

I've been a long time fan of ebooks. I've read hundreds of them on various PDA and phone devices over the last few years. Needing to touch a physical book as part of the reading experience stopped being an issue for me a long time ago. The convenience of being able to take a library of hundreds of ebooks with you on a small device is very appealing. Already a fan of ebooks in general, I wanted a dedicated reader device with an electronic ink screen (super high contrast and DPI, low power usage). Among the dedicated eInk reader devices out there (Sony Reader, etc.), I chose the Kindle for a couple of reasons.

First is the Kindle Store - the almost-150,000 books that Amazon has made available to purchase and read on the Kindle. You could have the greatest ebook reader device in the world, and without a great library/store, it would fail. I figure if anybody can do the electronic bookstore right, it's Amazon.

Second, the Kindle has a built-in unlimited cellular wireless data connection. That means it can access the internet and the Kindle Store almost anywhere there's cell phone coverage, with no monthly fee. Besides being able to look things up on Wikipedia, or browse the web, this means I can go from I want to buy a new book to having the book purchased and downloaded to my Kindle in a matter of minutes, from anywhere.

You mentioned you have an iPhone, so are you the sort of person who tends to buy the latest gadgets?

I'm definitely the kind of person who always wants to have the latest gadgets. I'm a geek all the way down to the core. Interestingly, it was when I bought my iPhone that I stopped reading ebooks, because there was no ebook software for the iPhone, and it replaced the other mobile gadgets that I used to carry. So when the iPhone came along, I went back to buying dead tree version of books. I lost the advantages of ebooks, and the paper books I was buying started piling up all around my house.

Have you always been a big reader?

Yes, I've been a voracious reader all my life. It drives me crazy to have a few minutes go by without something for me to read (either on my Kindle, or reading the web on my phone).

How many books do you read in a month/year?

I read probably 6-8 books a month, around 100 per year (first time I've counted that up - yikes!).

What sort of things do you find yourself reading on the Kindle?

I find myself reading mostly books from my favorite genres on my Kindle - science fiction, history, computer books. Besides the books that are available for purchase from Amazon, I read a ton of free books that are available from places like Project Gutenberg, Creative Commons, and the Internet Archive. Many of my favorite authors, like Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross, have embraced Creative Commons (Some Rights Reserved) as a way to distribute their work for free in order to gain new fans. Cory Doctorow has written extensively on why he follows this model (the basic argument is that for most authors, your enemy isn't piracy, it's obscurity), and in my case, at least, it works. I buy hard copies of Cory's books to give to friends, as well and recommending they get the free versions of his books. He and others like him have gotten way more money out of me this way that they would have if they followed the traditional publishing model.

Are you happy with your purchase?

I am very happy with my Kindle purchase. I use it every day, and I love it more and more. I read to my daughter from it every day (she calls it my magic book, the best way I could think of to describe how it works to a 5 year old). I highly recommend it to anyone who loves reading.

What have been the best things about the device?

As a concept, the best thing about the Kindle and ebooks in general is being able to hold hundreds (or thousands) of books in one physical device. As a device, I love the electronic ink screen on the Kindle, and the built-in wireless connection (and the fact that Amazon doesn't artificially block you from using the web with it). The battery life is stellar (with the wireless radio turned off, battery life is measured in thousands of page turns, which translates to days and days of active use). The design and layout, while controversial, becomes immediately comfortable when you start using it - you can tell why it's designed the way it is as soon as you hold it in your hand. For me, it has changed reading the same way MP3 and iPods changed music. It's a real-life Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Anything you've been dissatisfied with?

My only real complaint with the Kindle is that I wish the page would refresh faster when you turn it. The refresh time is about 750 milliseconds - three quarters of a second. I understand why this is - the electromechanical eInk screen just can't flip all those pixels very fast. This will improve as the technology matures. But it's still irritating sometimes, when the Kindle can't keep up with me and my page turns. I also feel a little guilty when visiting my favorite local independent bookstores. I still go there, browse, and buy books that aren't available or wouldn't work well on the Kindle (photography books, etc.), but I'm spending a lot less time and money there than I used to.

Have you shown your Kindle to others through the forum on Amazon?

Yes, I posted a See a Kindle in Portland, OR in the forum that Amazon set up for this purpose. A couple people came, including another Kindle owner (at the time, the only other Kindle I had seen in the wild besides my own). Since then, I've been keeping loose track of how many people in Portland have a Kindle - we're up to 8 or so that I know of (and a whole lot more that I don't know about, I'm sure).

Do you find people coming up to you to ask about the Kindle? And do you enjoy showing it off?

People often come up to me and ask about the Kindle, and I love to show it off, and tell them all about it. I know several people who have decided to buy a Kindle after hearing me sing the praises of mine. Sometimes I feel like I'm working for Amazon and Jeff Bezos, and they should pay me a commission. (Actually, I am an Amazon affiliate, and I get a small percentage of Amazon credit when someone buys a Kindle through the links on my website.)

Have you traveled with your Kindle?

I have traveled with my Kindle, and it's one of the most brilliant uses for the device. A few weeks before I got my Kindle, I took a two week trip to Shanghai, China. I brought a dead tree book with me to read during the trip. I finished the first book before I even left my home airport, and bought another one there. I finished that one by the time I got to San Francisco, and bought another one there. I finished that one before we landed in Shanghai. While I was there, I bought a couple more books, which were sufficient for the rest of the trip. By the time I got home, I had been carrying these five or six books in my luggage all over the world. It was that experience that gave me concrete evidence of how a Kindle could simplify my reading.

Could you see yourself taking it to the beach and places like that?

I take my Kindle with me everywhere I go - it has a semi-permanent place in my cargo pants pocket. I take it to work, to appointments, to meals, everywhere. I love being able to read for a few minutes when I have the chance.

Did this factor into your decision to buy To me, this seems like one of the biggest benefits, being able to get what you want wirelessly, without having to carry books or worry you'll run out of reading material.

This is exactly why I love my Kindle - being able to read what I want, when and where I want, and get new stuff to read easily and quickly, and I can carry it all around in my pocket.

/end of interview

Do you have a Kindle? If so, what do you think about it? If you don't have one, what would it take for you to get one? Have any questions about mine? Post a comment, and let me know!

Daniel Zemans, our man in Chicago, checks in with another piece of intel on the Windy City pizza scene. Daniel also blogs about Chicagoland pizza on the Chicago Pizza Club blog. The Mgmt.

"I have tried more pizzas than I can possibly remember, and Lou Malnati's remains my favorite."

When I was a young sparky attending Cubs games, I noticed advertisements for a pizzeria called Lou Malnati's on the back of the tickets. I have a vague recollection (perhaps completely fabricated) that I asked my father about going there and he explained that they were in the suburbs and did not have stuffed pizza. That meant they were far away and that I would have seen no point in eating there (in my young mind, if a pizza wasn't stuffed, it wasn't good).

By the time I tried Malnati's for the first time in 1999, I already knew that deep-dish pizza was worth eating. But the buttery crust, sweet chunky tomato sauce, and fresh homemade sausage on a Lou Malnati's pie changed my pizza worldview forever. Since that time, I have tried more pizzas than I can possibly remember, and Lou Malnati's remains my favorite.

Lou Malnati and his wife, Jean, opened the first Malnati's in 1971 in Lincolnwood, Illinois, a northern suburb of Chicago. Before that, he had worked at Uno's with his father, Rudy Malnati. In fact, there is some debate as to who actually created the deep-dish pizza that Uno's introduced to Chicago. Uno's says Ike Sewell did, but a Malnati's spokesperson says that Rudy Malnati was the creator. According to Wikipedia, there was a 1955 newspaper article that backs up the Malnati version of events.

In 1978, Lou Malnati died and his sons took over the family business and still run it today. In that time, the business has done well. In 1995, they were up to nine locations, and today they have 28. However, only ten of those are sit-down restaurants, three of which are in Chicago and seven are in the suburbs. In addition to the restaurants, the company ships 250,000 pizzas around the country every year.

It is also worth mentioning that Malnati's has been a remarkable corporate citizen. In 1995, the company partnered with a local community organization and opened a restaurant on the far west side of Chicago in Lawndale, a community that could be the poster child for urban decay in America. In addition to employing local residents and offering high-quality food, the Lawndale Lou Malnati's contributes 100 percent of its profits to help finance educational and recreational programs for neighborhood youth.

Enough Business, Let's Talk Pizza

Photograph courtesy of the Chicago Pizza Club

Normally when I go to Malnati's, I get The Lou, which is the pizza in the upper left in the photo above. The Lou starts with the buttery crust that is, in my opinion, the best pizza crust in Chicago. It is not quite as thick as the traditional deep-dish crust found at the more visible downtown pizzerias like Uno's and Gino's East. The texture is perfectflaky but not weak, and crisp but not hard. The cornmeal gives it a nice flavor and a yellow shade. While The Lou automatically comes with a butter crust, other deep-dish pizzas do not, although they can be upgraded to a butter crust for 75 . I've always paid the odd nominal amount, so I can't say a word about the regular deep-dish crust.

On top of the crust comes a fantastic blend of mozzarella, Romano, and cheddar cheese. Malnati's has bought its mozzarella from the same small dairy farmer for 35 years. On top of the cheese in The Lou is fresh spinach and fresh mushrooms. The next layer is Malnati's chunky, sweet, and slightly acidic tomato sauce. The Lou is topped with sliced Roma tomatoes, which are also available as a topping on its other pizzas.

A Sausage-Crust Pizza

As much as I love The Lou, which I have no problem describing in detail from recent memory, I decided to expand my horizons a bit on my recent Slice trip, and I ordered a pizza that may well only be available in a city that once was Hog Butcher for the World. I'm not sure when or why it started, but Malnati's offers a unique gluten-free pizza. Other places offer gluten-free pies, but they typically make a crust out of rice flour rather than wheat flour. There is nothing resembling bread in the Malnati's version. The crust is one large piece of savory, juicy sausage.

The bottom layer is about a quarter-inch-thick piece of sausage. The next layer is about the same thickness of mozzarella cheese. I opted for mushrooms and Roma tomatoes as toppings. The mushrooms were under the sauce, and the sliced tomatoes were on top. For reasons I can't explain, even though there is no thick crust to deal with, it still took 35 minutes to cook the pizza.

Both my dining companion and I agreed it was worth the wait. One unavoidable flaw of the sausage crust is that it does not hold onto the melted cheese nearly as well as a traditional crust. As a result, this can be a messy treat.

While Malnati's remains primarily a suburban chain, there are two conveniently located restaurants in Chicago that out-of-towners can easily reach. One, where I went tonight, is on the north side of the city, just more than a mile directly south of Wrigley Field. The other one is in River North, just north of the Loop and west of the North Michigan Avenue shopping district. Both restaurants are filled with Chicago sports memorabilia and offer deep-dish, thin, and gluten-free pizza.

I am far from alone in my infatuation with Lou Malnati's pizza. In the 1990s, Mark Evans, a suburban Chicagoan and retired Air Force officer, sent 50 pizzas to the troops in Bosnia. Recently, his 16-year-old son Kent asked Evans whether the troops currently in the Middle East had access to the family's favorite pizza. Following an email exchange with Gen. David Petraeus, the Evans family got to work. They are currently raising money to buy 3,000 pizzas to ship to soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan for the Fourth of July. That's some patriotic pizza love.

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