When Apple introduced the new iPhone 3G on Monday, they changed more than the hardware. They changed their deal with AT&T, giving up the cut of monthly revenue from iPhone users. Instead, AT&T will “buy” iPhones from Apple, and then sell them at a lower price to customers to get them into a 2-year contract, and (hopefully) hooked.

This is, after all, how it’s usually done in cellular-land. But Apple had gotten a lot of press for their “game-changing” deal with AT&T (and AT&T had gotten a lot of criticism). So did AT&T suddenly gain the upper hand? Did they outsmart El Jobso? Did Apple stumble here?

Hardly.

According to this Marketwatch piece, the iPhone 3G subsidies are expected to cost AT&T around $1 billion this year.

The new entry price point for the 3G iPhone - $199 - is killer, and is going to move a lot of the devices to customers who’d been unable or unwilling to part with $399 or higher before. And a lot of that difference is coming out of AT&T’s pockets. AT&T, for their part, has a plan here; cellular companies have this game worked out pretty well, having subsidized cell phones nearly since their introduction in order to lock-in long-term revenue.

But back to the original question: was Apple willing to give up their monthly cut of all those locked-in customers just to move more hardware? Did they give up on trying to carve out a recurring revenue stream from their ground-breaking phone?

No, they just moved on to the next phase of their plan.

The key is the App Store. Apple has created a new market for software applications - the iPhone - and has made itself the single retail outlet for selling software into that environment. There are some exceptions - you can deploy apps within your own organization, or to a hundred or so iPhones ‘ad hoc’ - but for pretty much everyone else, if you develop an iPhone app, you’re going to sell it through Apple’s App Store or not at all. And there are going to be a lot of iPhone apps sold.

Steve Jobs spent twice as long during his keynote talking about the App Store, and applications available for the iPhone, as about the new iPhone itself. Including the enterprise elements and the SDK, it was almost 4 times as long. Clearly, this is a big deal to Apple.

Having unleashed the iPhone as a target platform for 3rd-party developers, and then set themselves up to take a cut of every application sold for it, Apple wants as many iPhones in the field as possible. So they’re letting AT&T keep all the monthly revenue in exchange for subsidizing the rollout of the new iPhones to millions of new subscribers (I predict they easily beat their 10-million-iPhone target for 2008), all of whom will be hungry for new apps for their new toys.

And Apple stands to profit from every single one.

“Skate to where the puck is going to be,” indeed.

Update:Reuters reports that “some estimates” put the impact of the lost monthly revenue from AT&T at 3c/share.

But Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster projects hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for the Apple Store, which would dwarf the lost revenue from AT&T, even by his “conservative” estimates.

Why are people so disturbed by the occasionally remarkable relevance of Gmail’s ads? It seems the better Google (and advertisers) get at matching key phrases to context ads, the more it makes some folks think something scary is going on.

I saw this on a mailing list recently (paraphrased to protect the worried):

I like gmail too, but lately they’re starting to scare me lately. The amount of information they collect and how they use it is startling.

I e-mailed a friend talking about some symptoms of a medical condition, and Gmail served up a sponsored ad offering a diagnosis and selling a solution for the condition.

So this puzzles me a little.

First, GMail has done this since day 1. And people have been worried about this since before it launched.

But why is this so troubling to people? This recent email was just one example; I read lots of people who seem bothered by this. It’s often occasioned by an ad that seemed to “know” about a recent email conversation the user had.

I don’t know what nefarious things Google may be doing with my Gmail behind my back; I can’t say that they’re not doing something wrong.

But all they’re doing with the ads is keyword-matching, just like they do with Adsense on a web page.

Companies “bid” on words and phrases, and when those show up in a context where Google serves ads, by some magic algorithm (Google for “how does adsense select ads”) Google serves up matching ads from its pool of bidders.

If an ad appears on your Gmail page, it’s not because Google is matching your *identity* and then notifying some other company that “Hey, Ryan was talking to Joe about spontaneously erupting super-vision-itis” so they can jump in and prepare an ad for you personally, cackling maniacally. It’s because the magic matching key-phrase is somewhere in that web page, and that ad was automatically chosen from the pool of available ones that matched *some* text in your current page.

Keep in mind that the page loaded by Gmail is huge; there’s a lot more text transferred to your browser than what you see on your screen at any given moment.

Gmail pre-fetches a lot of stuff to make the Javascript-based navigation smoother and faster. So just because you don’t see anything about that message you just sent on your screen doesn’t mean
that message is not in the window.

Now, for all I know, Google may be wiretapping our cell phones and selling the content to the North Koreans to kill puppies with. But highly relevant contextual ads on Gmail don’t seem to me very strong evidence of anything alarming.

Or maybe I’m just insufficiently paranoid.

My friend Keith told me something that’s helped him write more lately:

[...]for the past few days I’ve really tried to write at least 15 minutes every day. Once I get started, I just crank it out. [...] In the past month I’ve thought about it and opened Marsedit over and over, looked over my drafts, and not wanted to write on any particular one, so I didn’t that day. But when I have to do 15 minutes, I find that I can pick any of my drafts, and when I force the words out, suddenly I do want to write on that topic. [Emphasis mine - rew]

The idea that simply committing beforehand to write for X minutes creates the desire to write more seems counterintuitive (to me, anyway). Yet there are certainly a lot of good writers who say that’s the secret (or the main part of it). Yet it seems so hard, if you’re not doing it right then to believe that it could be so simple. I guess it’s because, while simple, it’s not easy. It’s doubly pernicious because the whole reason I can’t seem to get started is that I don’t want to right now. The fact that if I’d get started, then I’d want to is sort of beside the point.

There are other things besides writing that work that way for me. For instance, some days I really, really don’t want to work out. Yet even on those days, the moment after I start, I no longer want to quit until I’ve done every single rep of every single exercise. It’s not some great expenditure of will power at that point; finishing every step is what I want to do. The critical moments all are in the lead-up to the one where I actually begin.

Right up to very first step on the stepper or first lift, my brain is all abuzz with excellent reasons this would be a good day to skip it.

Now there’s no reason at all why the first rep of the first exercise should change my state of mind. If it was a good day to skip before, it should be a good day to skip after the first step. I’m not jacked up on endorphins, I’m not tired or sweating yet, not pumped up or let down or anything. Yet the moment I’ve started, I no longer want to quit. To get finished, sure, but not to quit.

Now, it’s possible that’s deeply-ingrained training from way back in some day when I had coaches who beat that into my head. If so, I’m grateful (again) for having had people teach me that. But I think it may be something more fundamentally human and psychological. I don’t think I’m alone in it, and I don’t think it’s purely the outcome of someone yelling at me regularly not to quit many years ago. I dunno.

The thing that seems to change is whether it’s hard to do something. Keith said that once he gets started writing, the desire to keep writing follows on its own. I find the same thing with my workout. The fact that I don’t want to right now doesn’t mean that I won’t want to once I get started.

The trick seems to be training my rational mind enough to force my emotional mind to just have a little faith that once I start, I’ll be doing what I want to do if I’ll just dive in.

Mack Collier’s Are You Curious was uncannily timely for me. I’ve been thinking a good bit lately about fear and new trends and the pace of technology.

It feels like things move so fast that there’s simply not time to take a week, or a month, or a year, off. We worry that we’ll get left behind if we slack off for a bit, that technology will move on and we’ll never catch up.

Even if we’re trying to keep up it can feel like things are moving ahead faster than we can move ourselves. But it’s not true; there’s always room for good work and good observations.

Pick something and start talking about it. Say something stupid: it’s okay. You’ll find out more by getting involved in the conversation (even by being clueless) than by sitting on the sidelines wondering if you know enough to contribute anything.

Talk to people, learn stuff, get on board and move. You can always catch up, you can always contribute. You just can’t sit there on your butt, paralyzed by fear of irrelevance, and let the world move away from you and leave you behind. If you want to do the work, there’s always something new that you can become an expert in that no one else has done before and so no else has known before.

There’s always a new trend, there’s always a new revolution around the corner in technology or business. There’s never one last chance.

After the bubble burst in 2000, there were a lot of gloomy voices acting like that was the end. Technology was gonna be a commodity. The land grab was over, the dot com rush was finished, blah, blah, blah. There was a great malaise for a few years for a lot of people who didn’t know what to do.

Of course, some people just kept on working. Too young or too dumb or too focused on their work or plans or dreams to be put off, they were too busy creating interesting things to bother with joining the Malaise.

So they created the current revolution, and sure enough, a lot like before, the money and buzz have returned. This one will crash too, eventually, but there will be another one after that.

So don’t sweat it. It’s OK to miss out on things, especially if you’re doing other worthwhile things with your life. There will be another exciting train along shortly to hop aboard. In fact, one’s usually at the station just waiting for another clever passenger.

“Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil.” - Ephesians 5:16 (ESV)

“Are you reeling in the years? Stowing away the time?” - Steely Dan

Is the work you’re doing right now worth what you are getting for it? It’s not just a question of money; does your work reward you in all ways enough to compensate for what it costs you?

Is it worth the time that you spend on it? The parts of your life that you trade for it? What’s the impact on your family, or your friends? Is it worth it?

If it’s not, you need to sit down today and make a plan for finding other work that is. Life is far too short to spend doing work that’s not worth the time. It’s easier to contemplate the cost of changing your life when you see clearly the cost of keeping it the same.

Seth Godin wrote about Borders (referencing a post by John Moore):

It turns out that cutting inventory by 10% and facing books out (instead of just showing spines) increased their sales by 9%. This is counter to Long Tail thinking, which says that more choices and more inventory tend to increase sales.

I don’t think that’s what the Long Tail suggests. In fact, part of its premise means it can’t apply to a brick-and-mortar store, where display space is fixed (and expensive).

The key conditions are well-summarized in the Wikipedia entry:

The key supply-side factor that determines whether a sales distribution has a Long Tail is the cost of inventory storage and distribution. Where inventory storage and distribution costs are insignificant, it becomes economically viable to sell relatively unpopular products; however, when storage and distribution costs are high, only the most popular products can be sold.

Borders’ action here, instead of being “against Long Tail thinking” is actually perfectly aligned with it: they realize that their sales distribution does not have a long tail, because their customer base is too small and their cost of additional inventory is relatively high. So they have taken steps to increase the popularity slightly of a slightly smaller number of items.

Seth’s a very smart guy; it’s hard for me to tell if he’s misrepresenting the long-tail on purpose for something, or if he actually missed it on this one. I’m guessing the former, since the real point he seemed to be making in his post was a good one. Or am I the one missing the boat here?

While reading Dan Poynter’s excellent piece on storyboarding, I was struck by the resemblance of Gay Talese’s storyboard to _why the lucky stiff’s Poignant Guide to Ruby.

Maybe it’s just me.

Quoting a book review by J. Peter Pham in National Review, 31 Dec 2005:

Historian Robert Conquest recently pondered why so many of his fellow scholars had been for so long incapable of grasping the true nature of the Soviet regime. He concluded by blaming “a clerisy that has hardly heard of opinions other than those appearing to be…the acceptable expression of concern for humanity” and that has demonstrated “a strong tendency to silence those who disagree with one or another of the accepted beliefs.”

Can you think of an issue about which people pretend that there exists no “other” side, or that anyone who says, “Wait, I don’t think that’s what’s happening here, this evidence here suggests otherwise,” is a lunatic, or out to destroy humanity, the world, decency, puppies?

It’s so easy to slide into this kind of closed-mindedness. I believe what I believe, and I think I have good reasons for it. I enjoy finding other people who seem intelligent and well-spoken who share that belief. But from there it’s only a lazy little slip over into “ALL people who are intelligent and well-spoken WILL share this belief; everyone else is an evil slug.”

I suspect many readers not only thought of a great example of such narrow-minded idea bigots, but also assume that most smart, “good”, and well-informed people would agree.

So, for instance, if you believe “Bush lied, kids died” is an accurate and pithy explanation of the current conflict in and over Iraq, you thought “stupid/evil neocon warmongers”. If, on the other hand, you think “Global warming is a Commie plot”, you thought “stupid/evil Gore-cult worshipers”.

But the point I’m trying to make here is that if I (or you) begin to think that nobody in their right mind could disagree with my example “clerisy of narrow minds”, then I’ve slipped into the same mindset, thus joining one myself.

p.s. - I know that I’m a card-carrying member of about 14 different “clerisies” myself. But I’m working on escaping. Are you?

While looking for this Fast Company article, I ran across someone named ‘Miro Slodki’ asking for a link to this very article. Since I had the link handy, I pasted it into the ‘Comment’ field and hit ‘Submit’, and was sent to FC’s “Here, create an account and tell us lots about yourself, agree to our ToS, etc.”

I just wanted answer Miro’s question. So I googled ‘Miro Slodki’ and found his blog. “A-ha!” I thought. “I’ll just zip over and email him directly, and in less time than it would take to fill out FC’s ‘new user’ form. Take that, Fast Company!”

Only…I couldn’t find an email link. Now stubbornly in pursuit of my prey, I spent 5 minutes wandering around the site, even visiting his LinkedIn profile, only to by stymied. Nowhere on the site (that I could find) was there any way to just contact Miro directly (even via a web form), other than posting comments on actual posts.

I even found that Miro is looking for interesting work:

PS. At the moment I find myself seeking new challenges and contracting assignments. I would appreciate if you could extend a kind word on my behalf and send the referrals my way.

But how could I do that if I can’t find how to contact him?

I searched for a while, but Google and I couldn’t find him. I found other places that Miro had joined and commented, all of which jealously guarded any way to contact him directly. So eventually I gave up. We’ll see if, in an amusing irony, the linkback to his blog that Wordpress will auto-generate will draw him here to see the link he’d asked for a week or so ago.

Hey, I’m not picking on Miro, by any means. I don’t even know him (though I know him better than I did 20 minutes ago, that’s for sure). I’m just pointing out what I think are two serious problems companies and people share when trying to use the web to achieve their goals:

• Trying to enforce behavior on people that I have no relationship with, and to whom I offer no benefit. I wasn’t trying to get something from Fast Company; I was trying to help out one of their readers, on their site, by linking to one of their articles.
• Seeking visibility and opportunity without giving it a way to knock. I know spam is a problem, but being permanently incommunicado is worse. You don’t have to go as far as Scoble. But if you want contact, you have to throw me a bone.

Man, this has been a bad couple of weeks for influential people in my formative years. Gary Gygax, RIP, and happy adventuring!

“Good writing is partly a matter of character. Instead of doing what’s easy for you, do what’s easy for your reader.” - Michael Covington (slide 8, “The unselfish perspective”)

It seems the collective heart of the social media crowd has been stolen away by video blogging, which appears to them more or less The Ultimate Tool. I can see why some might think that. But I hate it, and you should, too.

With some great bloggers, like Jeff Atwood and Steve Yegge and Marc Andreesson and even Mark Cuban (who’s a great blogger w/o being a particularly good writer), I know what they do. Their ability to blog intensely interesting pieces is just part of the unfair measure of talent they’ve been given in a field other than their primary one.

But there are lots of people making lots of social media noise whose actual profession I cannot figure out. I enjoy reading Chris Brogan, Andrew Chen, Kevin Lim, etc. - I just can’t for the life of me figure out what they get paid to do, and by whom. (OK, I think Kevin’s a grad student, but the others - no idea).

And they’re the tip of the iceberg. There’s apparently a semi-closed system of maybe a hundred or more of nearly-A-level social media butterflies out there blogging and twitting and flickring and who-knows-what-else-ing each other, all while getting more and more excited about the “possibilities”. But possibilities for what?

My impression is that right now it’s sort of a blogorrheic derby, to see who can output the fastest, most nearly stream-of-consciousness flow of stuff, to “make people think” and “examine the issues in social media”. Right. Make noise, get attention. I have a 3-year-old. Some of this is not unfamiliar to me.

That brings us to video blogging. When someone sits down to write a blog, unless they’re just compulsive, they have to at least be aware of the idea of editing or re-reading before posting. They may not do it much, but at least the idea’s there. Most people, even in the blogosphere, still seem to at least recognize the notion that ‘better’ writing is something different than ‘first draft’ writing.

But this doesn’t seem to be the case with video blogging, where immediacy seems to be one of the Primary Virtues, and where editing, even cutting out sections altogether, is verboten.

Most video is like bad writing: lazy, self-indulgent, flabby, poorly arranged, flaccid and pointless. Bad writing used to be much easier to make than bad video. But suddenly it’s vastly easier to produce video than to write. After all, you only have to manage to get the button pushed to make video; you don’t even have to type words. But good video production is much harder than it looks. It’s tempting to confuse visual quality with content quality.

When I’m reading a great post, I don’t have to read through 47 lines of “um…um…um…um…” that were auto-generated while the author was gathering his thoughts. But when I’m watching (heaven help me) a video, all those stay in. Each little 3-second pause, or 2-second nervous laugh, or irrelevant aside that seemed funny at the time, but, well, you had to be there, is left in, and then you and I and every other poor sap trying to extract value from it has to sit through them.

Look, it’s no accident that Scoble, the human content cataract, has moved so eagerly from written blogging (which at least allowed him the *opportunity* to gather and edit his thoughts before publishing) to twitter/pownce (which actively discourages either gathering OR editing of thoughts) to audio (which lets you just conveniently babble) to video (which is just audio with more let’s-face-it-do-we-really-need-to-see-that video of the mugs of the babblers).

Just click, chatter for a while, and upload! Woot! I’m adding content, I’m creating value, I’m re-conceptualizing our paradigms! Except I’m not. What I’m doing is blowing out 20 minute chunks of crap with an occasional nugget of goodness buried inside. Then I’m asking thousands or millions of people who want the nuggets to go spend 20 minutes each to find it, rather than doing the work once, digging out the nuggets, cutting out the extraneous and self-indulgent stuff, properly framing the remaining pieces so that the nuggets are presented in a reasonably fair way, and saving (18 minutes) X (however many viewers) = a lot of time.

It gets worse with every shiny new VC-backed way for people to put up endless video streams of the minutiae of their lives. Think about this: how many live-action 24×7 streams of video can you watch? The answer is 1. Only one. And you can only do that by expending an exactly equivalent stretch of your own life.

And here we come to the fatal flaw of web video (and audio; let’s not forget audio, though it seems to be passing away as passe so quickly that it’s barely worth mentioning): you can’t scan or compress it very much.

Now, you have to understand, I read fast. Not as in “fast for a trained speed reader”, but much faster than an average reader. That includes many of you who think that you’re fast readers, but are really only high-functioning average ones. But while I read pretty fast, I scan like a demon. If it’s in text that I don’t need to absorb in detail, I can move through it at a scorching pace, and generally catch and either slow down and “zoom in” on, or revisit later, most of the important stuff. And it makes yummy things like Google Reader a veritable buffet of information and knowledge and (mostly) reading pleasure.

But what happens when I see a blog entry in Google Reader that consists of “Hey, this is great, watch this” and an embedded video (or worse, a link to a video)? What are my choices? For many of the various sucky video services on the web, it’s not even readily apparent how long this piece of crap is going to be before I start.

Apparently, it’s the purpose in life of a lot of the chuckleheads who write these players to keep you from skipping even one second of the Blessed Incarnation of Video that is this particular video. These brain-dead Flash-based players that can’t even do basic things like FF and REW usably. Pausing, while iffy, at least works more than not. But fast-forwarding or skipping to specific points in the video? Right. So it’s either press play and stare for however long it drags on and hope that somewhere in there is a payoff, or skip it.

So most of the time, I skip video posts to written blogs, and ignore “vblogs” entirely. And the more people post video instead of taking the time to write the #*&$#*&% essay so I can read it (quickly) or scan it (ridiculously quickly) and get what I need, the more I ignore them.

What’s needed is for people to compress and edit and excise and eliminate and then post it. Just like with your blog. Don’t make me watch what wasn’t useful. Only show me what was good. Cut it down to size. Then re-arrange it so it’s better organized. Then cut it down some more.

Do the hard work once, at your end, on behalf of every consumer of it. Don’t make your many viewers each duplicate the work or spend the time that you should have invested once for everybody. Don’t think that because you’re slamming out hours of video and audio that you’re adding any value to the world or the lives of those trying to pan through your stream of nonsense for the elusive golden nugget.

I may be in the minority. I suspect that I am, at least amongst a populace with a demonstrated affinity for “less reading, more video”. But I’m guessing that my view is more common among influencers or any people whose time is more valuable than pretty much any other commodity (note: I’m not claiming here to be an influencer, only that I suspect that we share this view of reading vs. video).

And that’s the thing video abuses: my time, and yours.

I wish I could see what sort of an obit he’d have written about a guy like him. But alas, there was only one. RIP.

This past weekend I finally got my hands on a MacBook Air. I wasn’t prepared. I thought I’d like it; I thought I’d be impressed; I assumed that I’d want one. But wow - I had no idea how utterly attractive the thing would be. I didn’t realize just how light 3 lbs is, or how thin the thing is, or how fantastically it all works together.

There are so many little, tiny design choices that are just sooo correct, and that I wouldn’t have known I wanted until I saw them, that it’s just amazing.

Now, I’m not about to give up my MacBook Pro for the little guy. I love screen real estate (lots of it) and while the MBA keyboard is spifftacular, it’s not the perfect laptop keyboard that the MBP’s is. Still, it was an incredible piece of hardware, and I want one. Or two. It’s much more impressive in person than in any ads for it, which is saying a lot. If you haven’t touched one, held one, then you don’t really know what the thing is like.

This morning I read Wil Shipley’s first impressions. They’re very Shipley-esque (read: funny and interesting), but the first one was exactly the feeling that I got when I saw it up close:

It feels really nice, like a pebble. A large, smooth pebble, from a stream. This shape speaks to me, like the MOTOPEBL did, except that was a crappy phone and not a really nice computer.

He also says this, which is not really MBA-specific, but certainly a problem I’ve love to see solved:

Jonathan Ive should design a laptop bag as beautiful as the Air, that just can contain the machine, a power cord, and a Wireless Mighty Mouse. I’d be in heaven. Nobody seems to have addressed the “I want a small, slim bag that can still hold a power cord without having a giant wart in the side” market. Like, duh, bag designers, STOW THE POWER CORD ABOVE OR BELOW THE LAPTOP, not STICKING OUT THE SIDE WHERE IT CREATES A TENT AND LOOKS UGLY AND BANGS MY KNEE.

To that I’d like to add a hearty “Amen!”

You may or may not have heard of the Laffer Curve. It’s a theory that decreasing tax rates may, under some circumstances, increase tax revenue (and vice versa).

Now, you don’t have to accept that the Laffer Curve is true if you don’t want. You don’t have to accept that the earth is round, or that the sun goes around the moon, or that the Washington Redskins are evil, no matter who coaches them. Facts don’t care if you believe them, and you certainly don’t have to believe them.

Still, it’s just willfully ignorant to go around trumpeting that you reject the “Laffer Curve Theory” if you don’t even know what it is. And most of the people I’ve heard take issue with it clearly didn’t know what it actually says. I’m not saying that, “They disagreed with me, so they were wrong.” I’m saying that they were busy disagreeing with some straw man they’d concocted that had hardly any resemblance to the Laffer Curve itself.

So, if you want to know what the Laffer Curve is about, Larry Kudlow pointed to this terrific video a few days ago, from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity. It’s only around 7 minutes long, and moves quickly, and is quite clear. Just don’t get distracted by the short appeal for a flat tax toward the end; the Laffer Curve is not connected to any particular means of taxation.

p.s. - I’m not a flat-tax proponent myself, largely for pragmatic reasons, namely, I don’t think it would remain transparently applied, and would quickly turn into a bureaucratically-managed VAT nightmare. But that’s another story.

Kids, if you’re standing in what our British cousins might call a “queue” - one of those setups where you’re waiting your turn in a more-or-less ordered straggling pile of people ahead of you - you are not “on line” or “online”. You are “in line”, as in “in line with the people ahead of you” or “in a line at the ticket counter”. You may be “online”, for instance, if you brought your iPhone, but you’re not standing “online”.

When it’s your turn, you are not “next on line”; you are “next in line”. It doesn’t matter that (1) all your friends say it this way, (2) you’ve never heard of “in line”, (3) you don’t get what the difference is, or (4) you don’t care. It’s still wrong, and you’re wrong if you talk that way.

One day, long ages hence, the language may have become so permanently mutilated that “online” will be the correct way to say “waiting in a queue arranged linearly”. But that day is not today, nor will it be tomorrow, and if I have anything to say about it, will be never.

I wonder sometimes where this abomination comes from. I don’t know, really, but I have a couple of guesses which do not exclude one another. The correct term — “in line”, in case you forgot — comes from the simple fact that you are, in fact, in a line with the people in front of and behind you. Even if that line curves or turns back (as around crowd-control barriers at an airport), it’s still a continuous line from front to back. It’s not a metaphorical line, it’s a real one, made up of people.

Now, to say that you’re “on line”, assuming that it’s not just completely stupid (let’s don’t rule that out, but perhaps there’s a quasi-sensible origin somewhere), must have originally meant something to the first bonehead to use the phrase to mean “standing in a line”. My current theories are these:

1. In some elementary schools, I have seen actual lines painted along corridors or in lunchrooms, presumably to give the little blighters a physical reference for what standing “in line” might look like. In their case, they would actually be “on line” when standing “in line”, and I suspect that careless or worn-out teachers quickly abandoned the pretext of a semantic difference, and just took to screeching, “Billy, get back on line before I put you in double-secret timeout for another 15 seconds!”
2. Some person whose grasp of the art of speech was only the barest, whilst grasping for the complicated phrase “in line” to indicate that they were currently “in a line”, stumbled upon the phrase “on line”, and since it had in their confused mental state a vaguely good association (after all, the cool kids are all online these days), they chose it as the best they could do and just went with it.
3. Others, either linguistically careless or semantically clueless, heard this usage and managed to go so far as to invent a metaphoric line on the floor on which all of the people “in line” were standing, thus making the “on line” a harmless, perhaps even clever, variation. Seeking novelty over clarity, or just not caring enough to say anything right in the first place, they, too, just went with it.

Hence, perhaps, is the language further debased.

I welcome other theories, or better yet, reasonably well-supported evidence, indicating how “on line” came to muscle out its correct cousin and perch now insolently atop the pile of juvenile misolinguism.

It’s been really interesting this year seeing how various sites handle liveblogging (or tweeting) Steve Jobs’ Macworld keynote. Twitter, naturally, handled it by going down for a while. What has surprised me so far is how badly Engadget’s liveblogging page has performed. Not only did Ars Technica’s equivalent consistently load faster, it had better updates, faster. C’mon, Engadget! But then, both of them were stomped flat by the excellent, auto-updating goodness of Mac Rumors Live (tip to @brainopera, to which I have switched and closed the other two tabs by halfway through.

It ain’t over yet; so far everything’s been pretty good, and I think the new Apple TV 2 is going to be big. I know the chances of us buying a big ol’ flat-screen HD box just went up a good bit. But we’re all waiting for the “one more thing”.

Chris Brogan and Clarence Smith Jr. (am I supposed to just say “@chrisbrogan and @dykc” to appear more ‘linked-in’ and whatnot?) just posted a collaborative piece about managing the (many, many) streams of information from sources like Twitter (or any aggregator, like Google Reader, I’d add).

My immediate thought is that this is a perfect task for adding intelligence on the client side. For instance, I would love to have more options in Twitterific for controlling the incoming tweetstream.

With a ‘pause’ feature, if @InterestingDude is temporary at ReallyBoringConfFest07, and will be until Thursday, I’d love to be able to put him on “pause” until then, so that I don’t see all his excited tweets about impromptu hallway meetings with ReallyBoringPeople and ReallyBoringProjects.

But I don’t want to quit following @InterestingDude permanently; I’ve just lost interest for the next few days. I don’t want to have to remember to re-follow him, either; I just want to skip the next couple of days (or hours or whatever) of tweets from him.

The problem Chris and Clarence are examining is how to get more of the info that’s interesting and less of what’s not, when the “interestingness” isn’t always determined by the person or the topic. The ability to follow tweets or blog posts by “interesting people” is a start, but only a very primitive one. There are lots of fascinating people doing fascinating work, but who have hobbies that bore me to tears (and vice versa). There are a very few people who write so well that it hardly matters what they’re doing, I just enjoy reading their writing. And there are many, many people who normally would not be of interest to me at all, except when they happen to have seen/talked to/read/bought/tripped over the very piece of information which is extremely relevant to something I’m working on or discussing with other people.

Perhaps I should just quote Chris and Clarence a bit:

The problem arises when the people you follow are initiating and participating in conversations that you do not find interesting at all. [...] Said another way: I might like YOU, but not be into every little thing you are into. [...] How can we catch your tweets about social computing but skip the tweets about being stuck at JFK for a 3 hour delay?

It’s not that YOU should have to twitter differently, but rather, we should have a way to adjust the lens on what comes through our “interestingness” gate. And of course, this is all relative to whatever you’re interested in, who, and often times where. For instance, if we’re visiting Seattle, we might want to get MORE about the area around us than less, in case something newsworthy is happening (like avoiding a traffic jam).

They also (briefly) consider the personal/social implications of such filtering:

How do we on/off the conversational flow of people in such a way that we receive more of what’s interesting to us (again, very relative), without it signifying anything negative about a person?

This I don’t find as compelling, partly (perhaps) because so far I only have an extremely limited scope of friends (in anything resembling the traditional sense) who are Twittr/Whatevr users. But I feel pretty confident that the notion of any social implications of being filtered or un-followed (is that a word?) will adjust with the tools. As people spend enough time swimming in the flow of social network infostreams, it will become more apparent that social standing with a person is largely disconnected from how much of your socnet output they’re consuming at any given time (perhaps it will always have more to do with which parts of our output they consume than how much).

C&C continue:

Why can’t we have a system that’s partly like Flickr’s “interesting” and “favorites” system, that helps train Twitter (and other networks) to predict which conversations will matter to us? Something more than keywords. How do we apply this same thinking to the people we currently “follow?” What if Clarence loves when Chris talks about data centers, but doesn’t care about Chris’s current trip to New York City? How could we “gate-on” based on information, and then “gate-off” when the interestingness vanishes? [...] How could we build tools that turn on and off our view of someone’s Twitter stream based on things like: location, context, content?

This is where I think there’s a big ol’ gaping opportunity for an interesting next-gen aggregator. How many different ways are there to arrange the panes in a blog reader? Well, OK, there’s a zillion, but the point is, how many of them are enough better to compel me to change to them? Just like with the mail client, the things that really are going to motivate people to change en masse will be the addition of “intelligence” to make managing the burgeoning information therein easier.

The “pause” thing would be cool; but man, a client that could determine what I was interested in at the moment, and help me find “more of this and less of that”, would really pique my interest. Whether it did it by reacting to explicit actions like tagging or even rating (3 stars or 4?) tweets or people, or by implicit observation of my behavior (in the same vein as how Google Reader’s “Select by Auto” works), it would be a great step in the right direction.

Plus, you know, a pony. And an aeroplane. And a perpetual motion machine. I mean, it can’t hurt to ask, right?

In the “well, that just sucks” department, Dan Fogelberg died today at 56 years old, after a long struggle with prostate cancer.

Dan Fogelberg, to me, was one of those artists whose great songs (”Longer”, “Auld Lang Syne”, “The Leader of the Band”) were just spectacular, amazingly poignant and brilliant, ones that just resonated with something already inside me, and whose other stuff was just this side of un-listenable. I think it was something about the ’70s, as Al Stewart (”The Year of the Cat”, “On the Border”), Gordon Lightfoot (”Sundown”, “If You Could Read My Mind”) and a few other of that era were the same way for me.

I actually sang “Longer” to my wife in our wedding, and at least she liked it. It’s just sad, and it makes me feel old, when artists I grew up with start dying of, well, natural causes, for lack of a better word.

And I have to say, with Keith Richards still alive, perhaps Billy Joel was right: Only the good die young. And speaking of old, you know I’m feeling it when I start talking about 56 as ‘young’.

p.s. - One of the funniest Bloom County strips ever (and yes, I know how much that’s saying) had Opus sputtering, “Who’s Dan Fogerburp?” after his girlfriend Lola Granola scandalized him by admitting to having a Dan Fogelberg tattoo. Alas, we never found out where it was, which was apparently more scandal than Opus could have handled.

OK, prepare to be astounded with my ignorance. And please, if you are, enlighten me.

Marketwatch reported today that Countrywide reported that mortgage loan fundings for November 2007 were down 40% from November 2006.

The market has peeled off another 5% from CFC’s price today, though CFC’s been so volatile lately that it might be a little imaginative to call it a “reaction” to the news. It could be “reacting” to a butterfly landing on some institutional trader’s window and causing him for some reason to remember to unload another 100k of the shares. I don’t know.

Still, it’s interesting that this is being reported is that “CFC reports mortgage fundings down 40%”, as though this is the real news. But didn’t we already know that things are worse than last year? That’s not news any more. The news - the thing that is unexpected (or was to me) and of immediate interest - is that its total mortgage loan fundings were up 5 percent from the prior month. Why isn’t that the headline? When was the last month that CFC saw mortgage loan funding up from the prior month?

Again, I realize that there can be seasonal factors that make some months stronger than others, and so normally, comparing year-over-year makes more sense. But given that we’ve seen a massive dislocation and an ongoing effort to reprice mortgage risk, the huge year-over-year decline is already priced in. It seems to me.

Really, this isn’t about CFC, but about how financial reporting, and maybe most reporting, has to fit the current template. “CFC Mortgage funding up” doesn’t fit the “We’re all going to die because the 4% of the mortgage market in sub-prime loans is going to have above-average failure rates for a while” template. So the news, whatever it is, has to be reported in such a way that the template remains undisturbed (at least, that is, until the next template comes along).

Disclaimer: As you may have guessed, I am currently long CFC (though not in a big way).