Tuesday, November 29, 2005

8:50PM Pacific: Plugged the video iPod into my desktop computer in Berkeley, and watched very carefully as it erased the contents of the iPod without confirmation. I didn't accidentally click OK giving it permission to erase all the content on the iPod, it did it without asking. Amazingly bad user interface. 

3:30PM Pacific: Arrived safely in San Francisco. 

Lance Knobel on Tom Friedman and the invention of podcasting. Analogously, who wrote Tom Friedman's latest book? No one, it just popped off the printing press.  

Interview with Josh Kinberg on the origins of video blogging. 

I know what Rex is saying about Apple and its likelihood of success as the digital hub for the home, but I can't overlook the likelihood that this product will suffer from the same attitude that causes iTunes to delete all my music without a way to get it back other than getting on an airplane and flying across the country. 

On the other hand, there's always a silver lining. Once your memory is wiped clean and the backup is far away, you can always use the Internet to find new stuff to distract you. This time my discovery was Amanda Congdon, Rocketboom, and the stuff they sample. There's an active creative community around video blogging, Steve Garfield's stuff is great (and visible through Rocketboom) and Amanda is funny, irreverent and charming in a weird and nice way. At times she's almost like Chaplin, she's trying (a little too hard) to be Jon Stewart. But they know when to shut up and let the story take over (like the video of the Halloween parade in NYC). I watched all of November's podcasts over the last few days. Now I find myself looking forward to the daily installation. I'm subscribed. And the video iPod, flawed marvel that it is, got me to look. So Apple continues to have the power to focus attention on things worth focusing on.  

Sorry no pointers, but Sun and Microsoft look so irrelevant squabbling with each other. Like two fat over the hill wrestlers trying for a revival. Meanwhile Apple is busy creating new user experiences. Has Office jumped the shark? Yes, around 1990 or so. No one cares. Except you guys, of course. I know why Sun keeps trying to bait Microsoft, but one wonders why Microsoft keeps taking the bait. Maybe they both yearn for the old days when the press covered every salvo in the great Java Wars of the 90s. But the users moved on and the reporters lost their jobs. It was a bad investment. Would have been better to stake out new user experiences made possible by ubiquitous networking, like Apple did, like we did.