OK. Wow. Seriously. The new A9 Yellow Pages search is one of the coolest, scariest, most experience-altering things I've checked out on the web since Google came along. Everybody's getting into the search game. Google dominates it. Yahoo is trying to get back in it; MSN is trying to pretend they were ever really in it. But Amazon, with A9, especially in the local space, might actually have something. If you're an Amazon customer, A9 knows who you are and localizes the search based on your address parameters. It's incredibly cool. Really.  ¶ 9:17 PM 0 comments

  How many eras are allowed to end at once? First, IBM sells off its PC business. Now, AT&T wants to sell their whole damn selves. More than most business stories, this one makes me a bit nostalgic. Not only can AT&T trace its legacy to Alexander Graham Bell, but my grandmother retired as a telephone operator in the 1960's, after more than twenty years at the switch (or in her case, the switchboard). She worked as an operator during the later years of the Depression through World War II, the 50's, and beyond. Without people like my grandmother, there would be no AT&T as we know it today. Now that she, and those of here generation, are no longer with it, perhaps I shouldn't be so surprised that the company cannot survive.  ¶ 9:54 PM 0 comments

  Oh, and by the way... Google's building a browser, too. Tell me Bill and the boys in Redmond aren't looking over their shoulder just a little bit. You can try, but I won't believe you.  ¶ 9:40 PM 0 comments

  Integration. No, really. Well, I've been quiet for the past few days. Lots going on in the world that's been keeping me busy, and lots going on the technology world as well. Remember back in the day when all anyone was interested in was integration? Well, it may be upon us. Seriously. First peer-to-peer advances allowing the trading of video files such as BitTorrent and eXeem made it easy for individuals to get access to media on their computer. Now Google is getting in the game with searchable video. Does anyone else see Google as Apple, with searchable, downloadable, licensed content from everybody's favorite little search company stepping in as the video successor to iTunes? iTVTuner, maybe? Stay, um, tuned.  ¶ 9:34 PM 0 comments

  The more things change... I'm watching Inherit the Wind on cable right now. What a great movie. Spencer Tracy and Frederic March both are tremendous. The writing is crisp, the performance, while a bit over the top, fit the content and the era well. The thing that bugs me watching it is how relevant it still is. It ought to be a quaint museum piece. Instead, the same debate is still going on. Here's an article about a small town fighting the same fight. Except that it's 45 years since the movie was made and eighty since the original Scopes Monkey Trial. All that's missing is the townspeople marching through town burning the teacher in effigy. Spencer Tracy says in the movie, "an idea is a greater monument than a cathedral." We could use more of these monuments.  ¶ 10:33 PM 0 comments

  Nope. Google News spotted this one, and I had to bite. I'm not sure who the author of this piece is, but I'm not impressed. The author mentions that the Mac mini isn't a good deal. He or she argues that it's not cost effective and that it won't work as advertised with most PC owners' keyboards, monitors, mice, or software. He is also seriously missing the point. The Mac mini (and the iPod, and the iMac, and the PowerBook), have changed the game recently. I mean, is it just me, or has Apple suddenly become relevant again? I remember these PC vs. Mac debates and their religious fervor well from the late eighties and early nineties, back when it was a winner-take-all kind of battle. Now, though, you can get a Mac and do all the things that your Windows friends do, too. You can surf the Web using Safari or, better yet, Firefox. You can get your email (given the popularity of Hotmail, Yahoo, and gMail) using any computer you like. You can connect with to a wireless network. You can use Office and share documents with your co-workers easily. You can burn DVD's and CD's (no more format issues). Does the platform matter anymore? Apple's betting that the answer is "no" and that consumers will soon realize that, too.  ¶ 5:15 PM 0 comments

  Thoughts on the future... My birthday was a handful of weeks ago, and maybe because of that I'm more reflective than normal. I'm really wondering what the world will look like in ten or fifteen years. Check out Mitch Kapor's interview with CNet about his views on open-source, Firefox, and his other future plans, such as Chandler. For a guy who was fundamental to the development of the software industry as we know it, I think it's pretty interesting how focused he is on the future. More on this in the future...  ¶ 9:05 PM 0 comments

  How much do you suppose a clean sample will go for? Especially if you play for the Yankees? Major League Baseball and the players' union agreed (did I really just write that?) to steroid testing for all players beginning this year. Who wants to bet that home run records stay intact for the next couple of years? I mean, besides Pete Rose?  ¶ 12:14 AM 0 comments

  The times, they are a-changing. Dylan can contact my lawyers if he has a problem with that one. At least I didn't post the MP3 or sample him. Socialcustomer returns to thinks with this article that examines the role of the blog as a force for change in product development and customer support. I like the concept. But until the boards of these companies have a blog and give their view, and allow their constituencies to respond, publicly, I'm afraid it's just more Pollyanna stuff. Time will tell.  ¶ 11:44 PM 0 comments

  The marriage of sports and entertainment... I'm trying to find a way to keep this on-topic, no matter how off-topic it might be. I know I write about technology, but c'mon... pitchers and catchers report in just a few weeks, man. Sports Illustrated, whose writers have forgotten more about writing than I'll ever know, has this interesting piece about the Mets dealings so far this off-season. Here's the relevance factor, as well as what makes this piece so fascinating: he focuses on the Mets need to sign Pedro, (for whom we all know they overpaid… by about two years), and Beltran (for whom half of us know they overpaid… the other half are too giddy to care), in order to hype their new cable network. Content producer meets content distribution. Not that we haven't had it before. Like most things, it's just fun to pretend it's "new."  ¶ 11:22 PM 0 comments

  Mac-eees back in town...! So this year's MacWorld Expo is about to start, and it looks like a lots going down. CNet has this story about what Apple may introduce. Sure, now they start doing some more cool stuff, y'know, 'cause the iPod, and iTunes, and GarageBand, and that PowerBook I had (...sigh...), weren't cool enough. Why is it no one gets hot and bothered about the things Microsoft announces? Oh, right. Because they don't ship.  ¶ 10:39 PM 0 comments

  Opinion? Sure, but it's in the Times... The New York Times reports on a Pew Internet & American Life Project study. The study polled experts for their views of what the 'net is going to look like down the road. The actual study can be found here. Anyway, as you might expect when you ask some 1,300 people what they think, the answers were all over the place. My favorite stat: half believe that "anonymous, free, music file-sharing on peer-to-peer networks will still be easy to perform a decade from now." The other half live in caves. I'm not saying it's right for artists to lose the ability to be compensated for their work, but, have you ever heard of, oh, I don't know, China? And let's not forget about sneaker-net. File-sharing, like warez before it, is here to stay. Whether you call it piracy or fair use, consumers have an expectation about their ability to listen to music where and when they want. The only way the incorrect half of that study gets to be right (and proves me wrong, to boot) is if music distribution becomes sufficiently intelligent that folks can do what they want with "their" music and makes peer-to-peer file-sharing irrelevant.

The full results makes for interesting reading as well. The study gives a quick insight into the disparity in answers right up front. Question 2 asks "What year did you start using the internet?" The response garnering the highest percentage, by far with 54%, was "1993 or later." How many other fields have over half its experts possessing roughly a decade or less of experience in that field? Folks, as smart as we may think we are, we're still in the cave painting days. The reason so much of what's happenin' on the 'net feels like it's completely new is because it is! I've got a 6 year-old child. Ask me what she's going to be like when she's 30, and I'm probably going to look like a schmo on half the answers even 10 years from now because so much is still so nebulous. Very few people manage to predict the future. The ones that seem to either react faster once it becomes clear, or make it what they want it to be. So stop predicting. Start creating.

  ¶ 11:04 PM 0 comments

  The ballots have been counted, and the awards are in! Wired News has published its annual Vaporware Awards which "celebrate all the wonderful gewgaws of 2004 that sadly never saw the light of day." Where the sad meets the funny is more like it. While gaming companies appear to be the most frequent offenders, our old pals Apple and Microsoft have their fair share of misses on this list. My favorite line refers to the continual delays that keep Microsoft from releasing Longhorn (the next version of Windows). Says Wired, "the company subsequently pushed the launch date to 3015 or something." Funny.  ¶ 2:11 PM 0 comments

  I want my CTV... C, being Carbon, that is. At least if I remember my high school chemistry. Companies have begun showing prototyes and working on production versions of carbon, or field effect display, televisions. These screens are supposed to be equally thin as an LCD with higher image quality, larger sceen widths, and lower cost. Ain't technology great? Unless you've just shelled out a couple grand for an LCD display, that is. Ah, the price the early adopter pays.  ¶ 1:53 PM 0 comments

  Fiction is occasionally stranger than truth. And damned funnier, too. This is great. I don't know what would be funnier: this or the people who don't get it. I don't know why the humor pieces have captured me today. Just lucky, I guess.  ¶ 2:42 AM 0 comments

  Microsoft demos new ways to make us insane... This is the funniest thing I've run across in a while. The Onion couldn't make this stuff up, even when they were still the funniest thing on the web. During his annual CES demo, Bill Gates had, um, some issues. My favorite part is that he hired a comedian, Conan O'Brien to host, so, of course, he made a bunch of cracks about who's running the place. Then Gates had O'Brien killed. OK, not really. He just outsourced next year's hosting job to India.  ¶ 7:07 PM 0 comments

  Here's a happy guy... He may just be right, too. Socialcustomer is a blog that I like. He's got an interesting piece about Real Networks and how customer-unfriendly they can be. See what you think.  ¶ 12:14 AM 0 comments

  In the immortal words of Private Hudson... Game over, man, game over! OK, seriously, as a musician and frustrated writer, as well as someone who likes feeding his kids, I feel for content producers. Having said that, producers and publishers of content need to come up with some alternate business models for getting their offerings to customers and soon. To think that lawsuits or some kind of legislation is going to change this dramatically at this point is just silly. Pandora's box is open for business, just not Hollywood's version of business.  ¶ 11:23 PM 0 comments

  Maybe someday... When can we just watch a show we've recorded where and when we want? TiVo will let users transfer some recordings to their computers, but not all. Is it just me, or did there used to be something known as "fair use" in copyright? Oy.  ¶ 1:08 AM 0 comments

  Perhaps trying to take a bite from Apple? Maybe these guys read my post from just a few minutes ago? It seems that a digital music distribution group has bought Commodore, and may yet make computers using the brand name. Which begs the question: was the Commodore 64 as solid a computer as the iPod is today?  ¶ 1:04 AM 0 comments

  When worlds collide... More from the Mac vs. PC debate: Rumors are going around saying that Apple is going to introduce its own office suite to compete with MS Office. Is it just me, or have we entered a time warp? The last time I remember a meaningful debate between operating systems and office suites, Microsoft had just released Windows 3.0 and the really cool Apple was the Mac IIfx (which was a truly awesome machine, y'know, if you had an extra twelve grand laying around). In fact, I think that one of Apple's truly major missteps back in the early '90's was not recognizing the coming age of commoditization, or at least not responding to it in a meaningful way. Maybe they were ahead of their time, treating the Mac as a high-end consumer electronics product instead of a commodity computing device, but it cost them dearly in terms of market share and consumer mindshare in the ensuing decade.

Now, however, things have changed. Apple seems to be using its resurgence as a high-end consumer electronics company (think iPod, iTunes) to make more of a play for market share as a commodity computer manufacturer (iMac, iBook). If I more well-read, I might say something like "Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose", but, you'll pardon my French if I say instead, "Ain't that a kick in the pants?"  ¶ 12:46 AM 0 comments

  One more comment about the new laptop... OK, so I just had to create a share on my old laptop (14" screen) so that I could connect to it from the new one (17") and move some files. Jesus, but 17" screens are big on laptops. The old one made me feel like I was using a Blackberry by comparison. The size of the new one is stunning. I don't think I can fit it into my briefcase (which is fine, since I didn't really buy it to travel with), but holy-schmoly is it big! To quote Ferris Bueller, if you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up.

No. Seriously.  ¶ 9:41 PM 0 comments

  My wife misses me... Because my new Dell is here. OK, I looooove the 17" screen. The one on the Apple was a little crisper, but this is still pretty rockin' and kicks the crap out of the little 14" fella that I was using previously. What a bad-ass little (OK, not so little) computer this is. The keyboard is a little squishy, but nice in its own way. Everything worked right out of the box without any difficulty, it found my network nicely, and here I am blogging away like the fool that I am. I'm glad to be back, and can't believe that more of you didn't complain about missing me. Now back to our regularly scheduled griping.  ¶ 8:32 PM 0 comments