One sign that Steve Jobs is back to his old self: He’s already sniping at rivals.

After Apple’s (AAPL) iPod launch event on Wednesday, the New York Times’ David Pogue asked the CEO whether he has doubts–as he’s expressed in the past–about the market for e-readers, especially Amazon’s (AMZN) Kindle.

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The council of elders that runs Wikipedia confirmed last week that, sometime soon, the unwashed masses will no longer be able to directly edit the profiles of famous living people. The proposed policy, first reported by the New York Times (NYT) and later clarified by the Wikimedia Foundation, would require an ordained Wikipedia editor to approve changes before they become visible.

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You might argue that Sony (SNE) was visionary. In the fall of 2006, it introduced the first eBook with an E Ink screen–long before Amazon’s (AMZN) Kindle rolled out with the same technology. The Sony Reader also connected users to an online store, solving a problem that had long bedeviled the e-book market–how do you get books onto your new device?

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Twitter went down last week, and the world got very quiet. People didn’t know what do with themselves; they wanted to tweet the news that Twitter was down, but that was out of the question. Entire overheard conversations went unremarked upon, and mini-reviews of recent episodes of “True Blood” withered on the vine.

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Seeking. You can’t stop doing it. Sometimes it feels as if the basic drives for food, sex, and sleep have been overridden by a new need for endless nuggets of electronic information. We are so insatiably curious that we gather data even if it gets us in trouble. Google (GOOG) searches are becoming a cause of mistrials as jurors, after hearing testimony, ignore judges’ instructions and go look up facts for themselves.

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Back in March, I asked people to quit whining about Facebook’s redesign. It wasn’t that I liked the radical changes the site had made–they were unquestionably terrible. In the past, Facebook would roll all of your friends’ recently added photos, notes, and status updates into a few new posts a day; now the site shows you an ever-changing “stream” of activity, with new stuff from everyone in your network popping up as it happens.

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Is Google (GOOG) too powerful? The Justice Department’s Christine Varney thinks so.

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There’s a video on YouTube of the world’s greatest basketball player getting humiliated at his own basketball camp. He takes the defeat with dignity, explaining that “in your life, in the game, you get dunked on, you get crossed over.” The other campers proceed to laugh at him, having been egged on by Damon Wayans.

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Whatever happened to the revolution in personal transportation promised by the Segway?

In the eight years since the upright, self-balancing “personal transporter” first debuted, this question has become a perennial during speculative-future parlor games, on par with queries like “When will soccer finally supplant football in the hearts of Americans?”

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“Look at this fucking hipster” was a universally recognized gibe before it became a Web site. Anyone who’s ever taken a stroll with a friend down Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn or accidentally veered into San Francisco’s Mission District on a Saturday afternoon has had occasion to whisper these words. Look at this fucking hipster with the 1985 New England Patriots Super Bowl T-shirt and forearm tattoo of Ralph Nader.

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Your average journalist usually begins his career with a pop, like a big bottle of champagne. He effervesces about his profession, intoxicating all who encounter him. The party goes on for years as the young journalist conquers deadlines, corrupt politicians, and hidebound editors.

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Lately I’ve been worried about Firefox. Ever since its debut in 2004, the open-source Web browser has won acclaim for its speed, stability, and customizability. It eventually captured nearly a quarter of the market, an astonishing achievement for a project run by a nonprofit foundation. But recently Firefox seemed to go soft.

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To find a Web page you wanted in the pre-Google (GOOG) era, you often had to guess at its address. Was General Motors generalmotors.com, general-motors.com, or gm.com? This led to all kinds of trouble—a speculative bubble in domain names, huge legal battles over valuable addresses, and unseemly attempts to benefit from the confusion.
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Later this week, Kyle Wiens will travel to an undisclosed European country, stand in line for hours to buy Apple’s new iPhone, and then find a comfortable, well-lighted place to take the phone apart. Wiens, the co-founder of a site called iFixIt, does this sort of thing for a living.

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I didn’t go to Apple’s (AAPL) Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday expecting a revolutionary new iPhone. That’s a good thing, because I didn’t see one.

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