It’s too late to sell your Apple stock. If you sold it yesterday, you are a genius. But today? You’ll be the biggest loser. Why? Apple has the best team, the best distribution, the best supply chain, the best management in the business. Everyone, from Palm to Microsoft to Google wants to be like Apple. Hint: They can’t.
This week Microsoft didn’t get much hype for its three major announcements. Certainly it didn’t stay on top of TechMeme as long as, say, if Steve Jobs gets a sniffle. But don’t miss what they did.
The topic of blogs and their authors and owners and what exactly defines their place on the ladder of the journalism industry never quite fully goes away. That’s because there’s always something or other that drives the commentariat to reflect on the present, compare it to the past, and try to forecast the future.
I’m a noise junkie. I used to be a news junkie, but I’ve hung out with the world’s top journalists enough now to see that the good ones are noise junkies. They are the types that head into a crowded party and listen to pitch after pitch (noise) and drunken story after drunken story (noise) to find something that their audiences will find interesting (news).
The fans of microblogging service Twitter, led by head cheerleader Robert Scoble, were all aflutter Monday with the sense that in speedily passing along word of this morning’s earthquake in China, they have participated in a news reporting revolution. Seems Scoble started getting and forwarding tweets from China even as the ground was still shaking, an entire minute or two before the USGS posted preliminary data on location and strength, and more minutes before the bulletins started moving on the news wires.
Yahoo is a bleeding animal. Left lying, gasping for its breath, after a larger animal (Microsoft) struck and then walked away after it proved too difficult to eat.
How will Yahoo heal?
Four weeks ago I had 5,250 emails in my inbox. Today? 10.
What’s the difference? I’ve been on lots of airplanes in the past month. Why is that important? Because in airplanes there’s no Internet. Nothing to distract you. I find I can answer about 10x more email in a plane than I can on the ground when the Internet is there to distract me.
That taught me an important lesson.
Want to get something done? Turn off Twitter. Turn off Facebook. Turn off blog comments. Turn off FriendFeed. Turn off Flickr. Turn off YouTube. Turn off Dave Winer’s blog and Huffington Post. Turn off TechMeme.
Turn off the distractions.
I just switched all my home pages off of Techmeme to FriendFeed.
I find that Techmeme has become a Google News killer. All I see on it is big media companies (including me, who works at Fast Company).
On top of my FriendFeed right now are people I don’t know. No A-listers. I’m not there.
On a week when Microsoft landed a big deal to put Silverlight on Nokia phones, Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs, tells Adobe that there won’t be Flash on the iPhone. This is a real bummer for Adobe and many users and developers, because most of the world’s casual games are written for Flash. Just go over to game site Kongregate. Or, look at the world’s video like that on YouTube (or any other video site like the Qik one that I use on my cellphone). Almost all of it is done in Flash. Now developers at those sites will need to find some other method to get those games and videos onto the iPhone. This is a HUGE opening for Microsoft to take momentum and mind share away from Flash/Flex/AIR with its Silverlight set of technologies (which, based on my Twitter conversations, is winning developers over at a pretty good pace).
Francine Hardaway is here and we’re talking about obsolete skills. Things we used to know that no longer are very useful to us. Here’s some we came up with. How many can you come up with?
The Data Portability Workgroup (DPW) announced Tuesday that Google, Plaxo–and the big surprise–Facebook, will be participating in discussion on how users can “access their friends and media across all the applications, social networking sites and widgets that implement the design into their systems.” This couldn’t have come at a more perfect time, especially given the flap over Robert Scoble scraping Facebook.
The great revolutionary activist of our day, Robert Scoble, is battling for the ideal of data freedom with the evil forces of Facebook. At issue, writes Kara Swisher in a post titled “Free the Scoble 5,000!!,” is “how much control you should have over your own information online.” Mathew Ingram chimes in, saying “there’s no question that the information itself should belong to Scoble.” Sounds black and white. Scoble: good. Facebook: evil. But it’s not quite that simple.
Dec. 15, 2000. That’s when I started blogging. In seven years a lot has happened. The first two years of my blog have disappeared. They might be on a hard drive somewhere, I’m still trying to track them down. Dave Winer first linked to me on Dec. 29 (sent me about 3,000 people, if I remember my stats right). The term “weblog” is 10 years old on Monday. So lots of blogging birthdays.
This is a section of the All Things Digital Web site featuring posts from around the Web, from other Dow Jones properties and also original pieces we solicit. The section is now explicitly labeled that it comes "from other Web sites."
We are fully aware of the controversies around how linking and aggregating is done on the Web and we, in no way, are attempting to "scrape" original content created by others. Instead, regarding third-party posts, we are trying to point readers of this site to other posts from around the Web that we admire and are trying to do so in the quickest manner possible.
The Internet is full of terrific content that is not ours and we want to help our readers find it by making editorial suggestions--Look, Mom, no algorithm!--of posts we think are worth their time.
That is why we have made even more changes to Voices to ensure we do this in the most transparent and timely way. While we don't expect that everyone will agree with our policies, we have made changes that reflect our intent in pointing to content outside our site.
So here is exactly what we do: Read more »
Because the site is wholly owned by Dow Jones, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, we aim to adhere to the journalistic standards of the best of the mainstream media. But, because it is run autonomously as a small online startup, we aim to exhibit the fresh thinking and nimbleness of the best of the new media. We want to be first, and sassy, but also well sourced and accurate. We will offer lots of opinion and analysis, but plenty of fact as well.
D is unlike any other executive conference. Since its debut in 2003, D has brought to life the energy and excitement of the digital revolution in an unscripted, upfront and unparalleled way. Read more »
Don't miss a post! Sign up for our Daily Email and get AllThingsD.com delivered each day.
Get columns, blogs and video from D and All Things Digital on your iPhone. Download now »
