Apple iPad Announced: Oh My God, It Doesn’t Have a Rubber Baby Buggy Bumper!

I love CNET. It’s one tech news source where I can find everything from straight tech journalism to flawed editorials on the latest things happening in the tech world. Take the overhyped announcement of the iPad a little bit ago, CNET provided the following excellent straight news reporting on the event:

Then there’s this excellent example of the tech news analysis by Tom Merritt and Rafe Needleman in CNET’s “Real Deal” podcast. The two put the iPad announcement into the historical context, looking at many of the previous, mostly failed, attempts to popularize the tablet/handheld class of computer. Make sure to visit the podcast website, these guys have excellent show notes and links to all of the gadgets mentioned in the video/podcast.

Then there’s this speculative editorial that wants to pass itself off as news reporting. Molly Wood is a smart, funny journalist, but she’s definitely from the media personality school of thought where snarky strong opinions are pushed to the front, generating huge positive or negative responses. I can’t watch this video without getting pissed-off. Ack. Moving on.

Discounting the noise being made by those who flat out hate all things Apple, iPhone or Steve Jobs, I’ve noted at least two trends between the fanboys and the haters. The first trend seems to be that pretty much none of the haters have actually touched the device and are making their vitriolic pronouncements based on the videos and the device spec sheet. This leads to the second observation: all of the haters are freaking out about all of the things the device doesn’t have. Oh my god, it doesn’t have a walk-in closet! Perhaps you missed that opening slide in the keynote where Jobs placed the device between a smart phone and a laptop. The idea is that the device will have things missing in the smart phone and won’t have things found on the laptop, like a three-car garage (crap, now I’m sounding like Molly Wood). Moving on.

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TWiT Reflection into the New Decade

I’ve been watching Leo since the early ZD-TV days. It feels like it was early Internet, but it really wasn’t. Here was a guy and a show that was part of this tech world that I was a part of, that no one else understood. So for their last podcast for 2009, TWiT 228, they got a bit nostalgic (and funny). Good times. This was not the case several weeks ago when Leo and John C. Dvorak made fun of the NASA Tweet-up and totally forgot about what Twitter really means. Basically they took the low road and made jokes about what the hell are you going to say in 140 characters except, “I just peed in my diaper.” Twitter isn’t about the 140 characters or what one has for lunch. It’s about the community and connections that happen over time. So, sometime Leo gets it, and other times he goes for the cheap shot. Surprise, he’s human.

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Digication Revisited

As I continued to explore online teaching/learning platforms for my LMS course (Learning Management Systems), I revisited Digication, a platform that I used my last year teaching middle school technology and media classes. The following are my notes that I passed along to my students to study before our weekly online session. The last portion are three examples of the Udutu teaching module that we’ve been studying.

Digication Revisited

In between large-scale enterprise level learning management systems imposed upon educators and roll-your-own systems like moodle are many smaller online options such as Digication (http://digication.com/). I heard about Digication from an interview of one of the founders, Jeffrey Yan, on Leo Laporte’s "Inside the Net" podcast. Digication’s founders recognized the need for something more than just another place to post content, something that would cater to educators’ special needs that aren’t being addressed by overly-generalized web-portals, and at the same time be as simple to manage as an email account. Following is a Behind-the-Scenes tour of Digication and the "Inside the Net" interview of Digication founder, Jeffrey Yan (NOTE: the interview is a bit long…). Please review these items before our wimba session.

Inside the Net 35: Digication (http://www.twit.tv/itn35)

One of the things that attracted me to Digication was that it had all of the features of a full CMS but didn’t require that I code it myself or try to get the assistance/permission from my district IT. Only limitation for the free account was that there couldn’t be more than 1,000 users at my school. I’ve written about my experiences with Digication a few times on my blog:
* Digication Gets My Vote
* Classroom Website on Digication

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Voice Mail to the World: AudioBoo

One of my earliest memories of podcasting, back in the days when there only was the Daily Source Code with Adam Curry and the Evil Genius Chronicles with Dave Slusher, was something Adam Curry liked to do called a Sound Scene tour. Just like early videographers, who discovered that it takes a lot of money to duplicate in a studio what one can do in a colorful alley with decent sun-coverage, early audio podcasters discovered that they could take their portable MP3 recorders and let the sounds of the environment become part of the “show.” Todd Cochrane in his book, Podcasting: Do It Yourself Guide, noted that one great place to do a podcast is in one’s car. So quite a few took to recording on their commute to work.

What brings these memories to mind is that the current piped-piper of New Media, Leo Laporte, has ventured away from his beloved TWIT Cottage studio, going on a working vacation to China and because the man cannot stand to be away from his audience for longer than 24 hours he’s employed an iPhone app/portal called AudioBoo, to record short snippets from his travels, that gets automatically posted to a website and announced on his Twitter feed. The first recording that I caught, 26-seconds that he recorded during a in Japan, felt like he was leaving a voice-mail message to the world.

As with all things web, one can subscribe to Leo’s AudioBoos through iTunes, RSS and at his profile page. A much simpler “unproduced” audio podcast tool? Something worth looking into, I’m sure.
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Kevin Rose & Leo Laporte Song “Diggnation Tech Nerd” by Questpoetics

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After 3 Year They Still Line up for Their iPhones

… But not nearly as crazy as the previous two years. To recap, last year Apple released a faster iPhone to take advantage of AT&T’s faster network (3g) and mega-podcaster, Leo Laporte did a 24-hour marathon run-up to the phone’s release. Before that, in year one, it seemed like the whole world was lining up three or more days early to get what some were calling the “Jesus phone.” And even though I’d sworn myself to wait until version two I couldn’t resist the gravitational pull, walked in after the lines died down that night and bought my iPhone (see my iPhone Unbox! Pls Sign Me Up for a 12-Step Gadget Program blog post. Good times. Funny, I miss hanging out in the lines of happy apple-fanboys, even when I wasn’t intending on buying anything. It was just fun to be there, catching the happy vibe. Sigh.
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Crap, Time to Redesign de’ Blog

Crap. After listening to Leo and gang talk in net@night 101 about landing pages, fresh “what i’m doing” widgets and the virtues of a new website system called Square Space, I realized that they were right and I needed to do something to beat back the barrage of words on the front page of my blog.

Last year I’d switched from three separate blogs to a single “magazine” themed blog with multiple categories/embedded blogs (love the Revolution Media-Pro theme by Brian Gardner). But, much like the problems mentioned by Sarah Lane, I found that because I wasn’t writing for all of the categories consistently that there were sections that grew more stale and what I was working on only pointed out the sections that were more neglected (I’m talking about you “sex & the single brain cell”!). So I went back to Gardner’s new theme operation, Studio Press, to upgrade the visual look. At the same time, I started looking at re-organizing certain sections so that what appears on the front page is more flexible to highlight what I’m working on without forcing me to write articles just to keep some sections from looking old. I also need to continue working on making it so that there’s a little different feel for the different sub-blog/category pages. Onward and upward.

Music: C’mon C’mon from the “C’mon C’mon“ CD by Sheryl Crow

Source:
history of my blogging by Hugh MacLeod of gapingvoid.com retrieved on 6/6/2009

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Just Say “NO!” To Landing Pages!

Do you remember the static Welcome pages that were popular in the early days of the web. Just a smiling face and the word “Welcome” in giant type. Then you had to click somewhere to get to where you wanted to go on the site. Fortunately Welcome pages went away, along with frames and irritating animated GIFs. Then during a recent episode of net@night (101), Amber MacArthur, Sarah Lane and Leo Laporte, commented on how adding streaming elements to a “Landing” page might help keep their blogs feel more fresh in spite of long stretches between written blog entries. Nooooooooooooo! Then I started looking at some of the more “successful” sites on the web. Damn.

Damn.

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Palm Pre Launch… So What (UPDATED)

If it weren’t for the tech media to stir up the hype, the launch of the Palm Pre would probably go unnoticed. Of maybe more truthfully, even with the hype it’s going unnoticed. Sad.

UPDATE: Just when it was safe to ignore the little device, the nicest tech-journalist, Leo Laport, unplugged the ongoing “Gilmore Gang” podcast that he was hosting, when Tech Crunch founder, Mike Arrington, insinuated that Leo got his demo Pre because he was expected to give a positive review. Arrington said that his question was meant to be in the spirit of full disclosure, but in his follow-up Tech Crunch post, he hinted that he was “investigating” who was getting preview units when Tech Crunch didn’t get their promised demo Pre because Tech Crunch hadn’t been favorable to Palm in previous reviews. Wow. Roll video:



sources:
“Photo: iPhone Launch Versus Palm Pre” posted by Keander Kahney on Cult of Mac blog (http://cultofmac.com/photo-iphone-launch-versus-palm-pre/11437) retrieved 06-06-2009

image by Peter Yan (peteryan.net)

Thanks to iJustine for the heads-up on the Cult-of-Mac article via twitter (http://twitter.com/ijustine)

Thanks to Bwana (http://twitter.com/bwana) for the youtube link & leo statement, http://bwana.posterous.com/leo-laporte-responds-via-arringtons-statement retrieved 6/6/2009
Arrington follow-up comment: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/06/ouch/ retrieved 6/6/2009

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My Year with the OLPC – NR4PT

Around this time last year I was very excited to receive my OLPC (One Laptop per Child), called the XO-1. Having drunk the Negroponte gatorade I was endlessly frustrated with Dvorak and other tech journalists who kept their criticism of the XO-1 focused on either Negroponte’s eccentricities or the fact that the creators made it specifically to not be a Windows PC. The concept, begun at MIT’s Media Lab, that technology in education is not about training students to be little MS Office drones but to use computers to teach programming in order to teach thinking and communication seemed to waft past the XO-1’s dissenters. Leo Laporte and David Pogue got that the little green XO-1 wasn’t about attacking an untapped technology market, but was an humanitarian cause to bring the gift of technology to Third World classrooms.

In the ISTE Keynote address that I heard Negroponte introduce the XO-1 he quipped that they must be doing something right to have raised the ire of Intel and Bill Gates. Alas, maybe the joke in the end was on Negroponte when Intel promised to play fair but couldn’t resist the temptation to undercut Negroponte’s “humanitarian cause” and sell their competing kid-size ultra-light laptop, the Classmate, to the same countries Negroponte was trying to reach. So the Gospel according to Negroponte fell on deaf ears because the Win/Tel hegemony couldn’t hear the words for the vastness, opportunities and profits presented in possibility of harvesting the Third World educational/government technology nickel.

This holiday season the OLPC foundation is repeating their give one/get one campaign that I participated in last year to get my own XO-1, only this time they’re working with Amazon.com to get the word out and do the distribution. The commercials are very cute. My own XO-1 sits on a top shelf in my bedroom, part of my shrine to sentimental technology I’ve previously invested in (I really wish I had kept one of my old Kaypros to put in the shrine). I hate to think that Dvorak and the others might have been right after all.

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