Ideo considers three aspects of the digital book’s future. It’s a nicely done video and it takes some features I looked at in my Multi-Layered iPad talk to a whole new world (a dazzling place, for you and me). Below is the video and some interesting points about each of the interfaces.

Nelson

• It provides a view into what your friends and other important people think about the content you’re reading.
• I like how easy it is to scan through a book and find passages that are important. These would be a great research tool.
• Showing debates that started from a particular passage is interesting. It’d be nice if you could actually respond to the discussion inside the app. Bringing in outside content is a great start, but no one has built a reader that lets you discuss the media inside the app.

Coupland

• It’s designed to show you what your colleagues, or social network, are reading.
• In theory, you can have a discussion about something inside the app, but you’re not actually reading the app here (I think), so it’s still not a direct link between consuming and creating.

Alice

• It turns the written word into a game.
• For example, if you’re in the right location or if you tap on your device with a secret code. It sounds like Condé Naste and Activate’s Gourmet Live might be the first real app to attempt this.
• The idea of contributing to a story is pretty cool. I’d love to see my friend’s version of a particular passage or see a photo of my own house instead of a generic one when I’m reading a scary story.

Here's how Apple wants us to buy computers.

Typical consumer family:
1 iMac for everyone, 1 MacBook for travel, 1 iPad for the couch and 2 iPhones

Professional user family:
1 Mac Pro for home/office, 1 Macbook Pro for the road, 1 iPad for the couch and/or clients and 2 iPhones

And when they're better, an AppleTV in every room.

My friend Adam, and others I'm sure, are concerned about this being a peripheral. While you clearly need a computer to sync the devlice, but I don't think there's reason for concern. If it's not true already, most homes will have one computer that acts as home base. You'll keep your music, movies, contacts, etc. stored there and everything else will sync with it. If you already have a laptop and a desktop, the laptop is as much a peripheral as an iPad would be.

Sure, the iPad is more geared towards consumption, but so what? As I've read a few times lately, the vast majority of time that most users spend on a computer is consumption, so it only makes sense to optimize towards that. If you don't want a consumption device, there are plenty of other options at your disposal.

Sidenote: I tried to keep this short, since I've already complained about the amount of interesting content being produced. My apologies if I added to your pile.

After outlining my thoughts on the tablet, a few folks have noted that Apple has never made a modular device because they're clunky and harder to produce, but I don't think that means they never would. While I'm not positive it will be a laptop, I am quite confident the tablet will act differently in different environments (see Pogue's explanation of Droid docks).

After writing the last post, I found some examples, new and old, that showed similar ideas.

Two years ago, Popular Mechanics envisioned a truly modular tablet. I think this is further than Apple would go, but is most similar to what I discussed above.

I couldn't find the source of this image, but I see something like this as a distinct possibility. Tim Van Damme posted a thoughtful piece yesterday that struck a similar cord. "Combine this 'shell' with our tablet, and you get a fully functional desktop computer".

Finally, here's a real product. Lenovo is coming out with a hybrid laptop/tablet that is pretty ugly, but is theoretically identical to what I proposed.

I think I'm done prognosticating (for now), but I'm growing more and more excited about this device. I've also started thinking more about how content will be displayed. More to come on that later.

Sippey believes the iTabletSlateTab will be a laptop with a touchscreen where the screen can fully wrap around. I almost agree, which means it's time for me to stake my claim in the tablet sweepstakes.

The Apple Tablet will actually be the second generation of the MacBook Air. The screen will be 10" (as predicted by many), touchscreen, have very high contrast and will be detachable. That is right friends, the screen will be attached by a magsafe-like connector that keeps the screen attached to the keyboard.

The last time I blogged about the tablet, I thought there'd be some docking station so you can use it as a computer at home. Instead, it will just be half of the computer. I could imagine some kind of stand for watching on the plane or just for around the house, as well.

As for price-point, I think it will indeed be $800-1000. I think they'll add editorial content to the iTunes store using web technology similar to the iTunes LP format (as John Siracusa has predicted). I think it will be based on OS X and not another new operating system, but it will likely require a new 10.6.x version to operate properly. I also think it will be awesome.

Further Reading

Gruber's take on the Tablet
Nick Bilton's take
Marco's take
David's take, which is similar to mine (I think)

There a number of gestural ways for readers to indicate interest in content on the web. They all go by different names and representations, which makes it difficult to determine the right solution for your community. Below is an examination of the available options and, hopefully, answers to all of your burning questions.

Earlier this week, I was reading Gothamist and became engulfed in an article about EMTs letting a pregnant lady die. It’s an insane story and there are a ton of comments. There are also three “likes”. This disparity—one amongst many that exist on the internet—shows that there’s something broken with “liking” content.

When you find a piece of content that excites you, you probably want to do one of these things:

• Respond to the article with a comment of your own
• Bookmark the article for later
• Share the article with someone else
• Let the author know that you enjoyed the content

When a user “likes” a piece of content, they could be doing any of the final three actions, depending on the service. In the case of Gothamist, my instinct is that people “like” content because they want to tell the author and other readers that it was interesting and that they’d like to see more like it. Assuming this, why didn’t more people “like” this entry?

Before I answer that question, it’s worth noting that these gestural responses are very different from other reactions to content. Commenting, replying, sharing and even reblogging all involve content creation, which is a higher level of engagement and worthy of its own discussion. I also won’t really touch on flagging (e.g., spam, offensive content) or ratings.

Language Matters

Gothamist, as well as another small site called Facebook, use the word “like” as a way to note enjoyment, but it’s conflicting for a person to “like” an article that’s about a pregnant lady dying. Am I saying I like the article or that I like killing pregnant women and their fetuses? It’s clearly not the best phrase here, even though it works in most contexts.

There are certainly other options. Here are the ones I’ve seen the most and what they might imply. These are illustrative examples that cover many, but certainly not all, use cases (if a service has a word and a symbol, I just mentioned the word).

Type	Services	Definition
Like	Facebook, Vimeo, Google Reader	As discussed, it can either mean I liked reading the content or I agree with the content. Essentially, I feel happy after reading this. It’s more often used as encouragement than as a bookmark.
Favorite	YouTube, TypePad, Posterous	Similarly, this is something I enjoyed reading, but it tends to lean more towards a bookmark.
Recommend	Movable Type, NYT	I enjoyed reading this and I think you should enjoy reading it too.
[Up/Down]	Reddit	This is essentially recommend and not recommend.
[Star]	Twitter, Google Reader	This is mostly synonymous with “favorite”, but because there are no words it’s more open to interpretation.
This is good	Vox	I’ve only seen this on Vox, but I love it so I’m including it. This is back to a happy feeling and closest to “like”.
[Heart]	Tumblr	Very similar to “This is Good”.

The interpretations may give you some insight into what is appropriate for your context. In the case of the Gothamist article, “recommend” may be the best phrase since they use this data to calculate their popular article rankings. This isn’t everyone’s goal, though.

What To Do

There’s certainly no magic bullet, but how you implement this feature should depend on what you want to get out of the data. In the end, most publishers are looking for increased page views, but the path there relies on added value for the site’s community. If you’re keeping them engaged, they’ll keep coming back, which leads us to our final list. These are the benefits of using favorites:

• A list of popular content: In addition to comments, page views, etc., you can use this to determine what content is most read on your site. This is an example of data that the publisher parses to add extra value (as opposed to the user).
• A measure for the success of your articles: You can use this metric to refine the type of content on your site and gauge the success of your writers. This is another example of publisher-driven data.
• A curation tool for users: People often just want a way to bookmark content, but it’s more often used as a way to represent who you are. There are millions of Facebook users whose identity is based solely on the items they “like” and share. This is an example where the community is making use of the data.

Really, all three use cases are valuable to publishers and users, just in different ways. The first and third are most valuable to sites that rely on user-generated content and the first two are more valuable for editorially-driven content. In the end, you should focus your efforts on what will improve the quality of and access to your content, because that’s why people visit your site.

Some Additional Notes

If your site is very upfront about its purpose, the language becomes less important. For sites where the homepage is a list of most popular content (e.g., Digg, Reddit), most users will click the button with the intention of promoting content to that list.

It’s also worth mentioning that sites often have two ways to provide gestural feedback, which can cause confusion and frustration. If you look at Twitter’s new retweet functionality, the inability to add your own comment essentially turns this into another way to favorite. It may show up in your user stream instead of a separate page, but it’s the same feature. Google Reader has two gestural responses: like and star (in addition to share and share with note). It seems like they’re just throwing the kitchen sink at the problem.

Finally, there’s the issue of site-specific jargon. Digg is the only site I can think of that does this with any success. Creating a new verb is not worth the overhead I would never recommend this unless your name is Kevin Rose.

I encourage you to comment with additional use cases and examples of usage in various services. I’d love to see as many examples as possible.

For the last couple months, I've been following Chad Ochocinco's tweets (he's a wide receiver on the Cincinnati Bengals). Chad is known as a bit of a clown* but is a really hard worker and an excellent receiver. He's known for his inventive touchdown celebrations and desire to be loved by everybody. He's definitely succeeded in converting me as a fan.

Unlike Terrell Owens, a fellow clown who is a phenomenal talent but toxic in the locker room, Chad is liked by his team and loved by fans. Since joining Twitter several months ago, he's started to give back to his fans. For each of the home games, he flies one of his Twitter followers out to watch from the stands. Originally the idea was that they would tweet in his stead, but that didn't seem to happen.

He's also not afraid to announce his location (especially when he's at a mall, which is often). In fact, he'll often ask fans to give him a lift or meet him for dinner when he's out of town. When he's at home, he often offers to bring 100 fans to a movie (and they show up!).

You could argue (accurately) that's excellent at marketing himself, but after following along for a bit, I just think he's a good guy. He seems to hang with fans and work hard on he enjoys it. To me, it's a typical case of a perosn putting in hard work at something they love and having the success follow.

* See: his last name, which used to be Johnson, but is now officially his nickname, a poor Spanish translation of 85

When all of the augmented reality apps started shipping for the iPhone, I started thinking of the most useful applications of the concept. While it's entertaining to see subway stations all around you, I have a harder time remembering people.

I want an app where you can hold your iPhone up and point it at a group of people, it will recognize the faces of those in your contacts list (iPhoto already has facial recognition) and show their names. You would also be able to go back and look at previously taken photos to see who is in them for a reminder. And maybe, in some future world where privacy concerns aren't an issue, I'd be able to see the names of friends of friends with links to some of their profiles on the web.

Writing this, I remembered I thought of something similar for DVDs. Then I found this Nokia video below (via Nick Bilton) that shows something pretty similar to the app I want. I do like Nokia, but it's funny they're calling this the technology of 2015 when we could probably do this today.

On occasion, I buy things. Since I am lazy, I like it when companies come to me and inform me of their new or cheap wares. This is why I check that box on their site that lets them send me newsletters.

It's a fair deal. They send me information I want and in return I trade them money for goods. Everybody wins, except most of the time.

Oh really? I can now get a $25 discount on a future purchase of swim trunks if I buy $175 worth of linen pants? Is the 15% discount on all striped pantwear you mentioned on Saturday still applicable? Too bad the buy 3 children's AFC North hats get 2 NFC South ladies earmuffs deal is over, because that was doozy.

I'm being clever here, but I would like to tell every manager of every newsletter everywhere to never send me more than 2 emails a month. I signed up for info on new products and sales, not an email carpetbombing. This may have worked with catalogs when that was the only way to access your products from home and they were highly disposable, but I have a computer that maintains a consistent connection to the internet and it's usually within arms reach. Reminding me you exist on a near-daily is annoying, useless and puts you one step closer to my spam folder.

So please, tell me when you have something new or something awesome or something cheap, but do not send me four emails a week about anything. I will unsubscribe and then I will not hear about anything you're doing. And then no one wins.

This Volkswagen factory in Dresden is beautiful. The outside is almost completely glass, the floors are made of hardwood and the parts are transferred by robots that move along thousands of magnets embedded in the ground.

When the production process is a work of art, it makes the end result feel more impressive. Some companies, like Apple, focus on beautiful packaging, but it doesn't say much about the craftsmanship. Unlike the iPod, the Phaeton — the luxury car built at the Transparent Factory — is not an impulse purchase.

Seeing the care put into its creation makes dropping $75,000 (minimum) on a car an easier pill to swallow. More importantly, it makes you believe, or at least hope, that they put the same effort into producing their more affordable cars.

Know Your Meme is my favorite video podcast. Even for someone like me who probably knows a little too much about the internet, I'm constantly learning new things. This site is also great for anyone who is confused by "The Twitter" and "FaceSpace".

The video above is my newest favorite episode. I suggest you watch it.

I am becoming obsessed with the iPhone game Canabalt. In the game, you run and jump for as long as you can before you die. Maybe not revolutionary, but it's damn fun.

My biggest problem with the game is that the only way to share your scores is to tweet them. You have a leaderboard on your phone, but it's not global. And since I'm so awesome at the game and Sippey asked nicely, I built a public leaderboard based on people's tweets.

That's right, the world now has a Canabalt Scoreboard.

For those who are technically minded, I have a script that hits the Twitter search API every few minutes and grabs people's scores. I went back as far as Twitter would allow to grab old data and I'm ignoring scores from people (cheaters) who posted from the web and not the API (which sucks for me as I've gotten 16k+, but didn't tweet it).

That's it! Good luck, Canabalters.

I'm doing a poor job catching up with my New Yorkers as I'm now 5 months behind. The good news is that you've probably already forgotten about this article.

In the 2/23/09 issue, there's an article about weaponizing robots that focuses on one of the best gun-makers and his efforts to sell his inventions. The robots he has built, the ones with the guns, can only fire their weapons when the operator presses a button.* Quoth:

"Automating firing, that's taboo," [Adam Gettings of Robotex] said. But, with a little programming, "you could definitely do targeting and tracking. You could have it identify targets, A, B, and C, put squares around them. Then just hit a button and decide which person to take out."

Immediately, I thought of the Madden football games. In Madden, after the play starts, each player is assigned to one of the buttons on the controller. When you're ready to pass, you press that button and the quarterback throws the ball.

The problem is that I often press the wrong button. Not a big deal when you're playing a video game, but it becomes a bit more of an issue when you're choosing whom to shoot. Here's hoping they have someone controlling this device who's better at video games than me. I suggest they look to Madden Nation for recruits.

* I'm glad people in our government are fearful of autonomous weaponized robots. No one wants another Skynet.

Today, this may seem like gibberish, but our children will consider this the moment in which language changed course and a new breed of linguists was born.

If others can smell you, u gotta be able to smell yourself
Pfffffffffffff
I farted
Aggggh
Can u smell dat
Lol

THE_REAL_SHAQ, 12 minutes ago from TwitterBerry

Apple's developers conference begins today and we're all fairly confident they'll be a new iPhone and a release date for Snow Leopard. They'll probably be some speed bumps to hardware and some exciting new iPhone apps, but I'm not expecting a "One more thing..." Still, I think there's a "One more thing..." right around the corner — I'm convinced Apple's building a tablet.

There have been rumors floating around for a while, but I think everyone's got it a little wrong. Instead of a tablet, I'm envisioning a tablet-sized iPod. Something with a 5-7" screen that's focused on playing video and games. Instead of bringing your laptop on planes to watch movies, you'll bring the tablet. And despite Apple's insistence that people don't want to read books on their computer, it'll be the perfect size to compete with the Kindle. I also imagine they'll be a fancy dock that will charge and service as a USB hub.

It'd be great if Steve Jobs rode in on a unicorn holding this new iProduct above his head, screaming "Kneel before me, peons!" but I think this will get its own event. Anyway, if this comes to pass today or if any tablet is ever released by Apple from this point forward, be sure to credit Matt Jacobs, creator and proprietor of Capn Design.

Flipping through ma tweets, I found this one from Jeffrey Zeldman (which I presume came from Jared Spool at An Event Apart Seattle):

1 in 1,300 purchasers writes a review. With a standard 2 percent conversion rate, you need 3 million visitors a day to get useful reviews.

Reading that made me think about how I almost never write reviews, especially for products. The only times I do write reviews is when I have something to gain.

For others, respect provides enough motivation, which is why Amazon implemented badges. Having 'Real Name' and 'Top 500 Reviewer' beside your username commands some respect and ensures authenticity. This is really helpful for those seeking reviews, but not for most who should be writing them.

Currently, there is not much for me to gain by writing reviews on Amazon. My friends run in other circles and there's just not enough time in the day. Now, if there was a financial motivation, this would be another story.

Amazon Reviewing Associates

Amazon runs a successful referral program that allows you to generate money when people buy products from your links. I don't have any numbers to back this up, but it's safe to assume that the money Amazon loses in referral fees are made up in a reduced advertising and marketing budget. My dad, a car dealer, used to say it takes $250 just to get someone in the door. Amazon's number is probably significantly less, but they also have significantly more customers.

If driving traffic to content is this valuable, shouldn't accurate reviews of a product be rewarded as well? Getting a customer in the door is an important step, but closing the sale is just as crucial.

I propose that Amazon rewards users whose reviews are deemed most helpful and the people who find those reviews first. Mr. Spool, the man who inspired the tweet above, made the case that helpful reviews account for $2.7 billion in revenue. Even if this is high, it's obviously in Amazon's best interest to encourage these.

If I could make $5-10 a month writing reviews for Amazon products, I'd be writing a whole lot more of them. Even if that number petered out after a while, I'd likely still continue once I got in the swing of things. In fact, it seems that an outside company could make money with their own recommendation engine using this system. If they were to share the referral rewards and place some subtle ads, there'd probably be a pretty good business.

The thing I like best about this idea is that everybody wins. Amazon sells more products, active community members get rewarded and I'm more likely to buy the best beard trimmer.

Last Friday I attended the second half of the Times Open conference. The NYT put on the event so developers could "spend the day with industry leaders, learning about applications, data resources and the trends that will shape the way you work." Our hosts were incredibly gracious and I had a chance to see the tour the art floor (thanks Khoi and John!). Unfortunately, the event itself was disappointing.

While I can't speak to the morning sessions, the afternoon was spent getting an overview of the various APIs and attending "breakout sessions" with the other attendees, save for Jacob Harris' interesting talk about the interactive newsroom. The overviews would have been more useful if the breakout sessions had some structure. Instead of going to various rooms (that went unused) to discuss a specific topic, folks milled about, chatting with each other. If you consider the breakout sessions as just breaks, the 8 hour conference had only 4 hours of presentations.

My goal at the conference was to get my hands dirty with the APIs, discuss the implications of a news organization opening up its data and to meet some interesting people. I did get to meet a few interesting folks, but the conference didn't help me on the first two points. The lack of small group breakouts meant I walked away with fewer practical concepts and interesting questions in my head than I would have otherwise.

I don't feel too bad about being a debbie-downer because the NYT developers all were quite interesting and I am genuinely excited by the stuff they're building. In fact, I've got a couple more NYT-related posts floating around in my brain. Still, I do hope they'll take my advice next time and provide some more structured breakouts. An active backchannel may appear to be a positive, but I'd much rather the attendees be focused on the event and engaging with each other in real life.

For anyone who has fallen in love with blogging, you remember those early days when writing 5,000 words a week was like breathing. Of course, back when I started, I wasn't nearly as poignant as Roger Ebert.

Ebertt is following a trend I see of established writers who finally get blogging. Their first few months of posts are filled with topics that have been sitting in a large pile — similar to my pile of New Yorkers — of information waiting to be shared. Yesterday's post from Ebert is a good example of something he's probably thought about a lot but hadn't found the right outlet to share.

Frank Bruni's Diner's Journal started the same way. Now that he has gotten all of the long held tidbits off his chest, he's invited other writers to keep up the output.

This is certainly not a revelation, but it is fun seeing well respected writers following the same trends we've seen from bloggers since the beginning. Unfortunately for all of us, Ebert and Bruni have never written blog posts like this.

After putting together Simply Structured and years of hearing people gripe about the dearth of style in feed readers, I've realized my biggest request for NetNewsWire, or any reader for that matter, is customized styles for each feed. Even more, I don't just want the end-user to be able to customize styles, but for the author to be able to push styles alongside their content.

Styles on a feed-by-feed basis isn't a huge stretch, especially in NNW where style packages already exist, but pushing styles with your feed is something RSS and Atom don't support. But so what? In the early days of HTML, Netscape Navigator went beyond the HTML spec and added unsupported styles that developers wanted and the web is a better place for it. I'm not advocating for every feed reader to require its own custom flavor of RSS, but if they could add one line that was easily ignored by other RSS parsers, it would make for a fantastic experience. If we're already designing custom versions of sites for our iPhones and other mobile platforms, why not feed readers too?

You could argue custom styles unnecessarily complicate a feed reader, but I don't think it effects how most people consume feeds. The primary benefit of feed readers is having a device that notifies you when there is new content. The second largest benefit is having all the content in one place. Individual styles don't diminish these facts and help bring some individuality back to the web. In a time when we all have custom homepages and visit fewer and fewer sites, it'd be nice to inject a bit more personality into our daily lives.

I'm an avid NetNewsWire user and was ecstatic when they announced it is now free. I don't know if the announcement inspired me, but I decided the release of NNW 3.1 would be a good time to create a custom style. I've been a longtime user of EAB - Gray, so I used Eduardo's code as a base to get started.*

More than anything, I wanted a design that stayed out of the way. Reading posts via feeds instead of actual sites lets me consume more data. Having a simple, highly legible style makes it much easier. Here are the problems I hoped to solve and I think this new style does a good job with it.

• Highly legible type that squeezes as much content as possible on a page. Helvetica, Verdana and a base font size of 11px helped make this possible. I think short posts, long posts and image-heavy posts look good, if I do say so myself.
• Feed metadata that's easy to process. I like having the data at the top of the screen, but NNW defaults to putting it all in one line. Simply Structured adds labels and makes everything a little more orderly.
• Images that float right or left when they're supposed to. When an image style is not embedded inline, the style won't come through. I fixed this by adding styles for some common image style declarations. (If you end up using Simply Structured and find styles I haven't included, let me know and I'll put them in.)
• Even though I don't use it, I also adjusted the style to work with the widescreen view. You can see an example at the bottom of the entry.

Putting this together was a lot of fun. After years of worrying about IE6, Firefox 1.5 and who knows what else, it was refreshing to work in a closed system. I've never used :before before!

The style still isn't perfect, but it suits my needs. The biggest concession was cutting off long URLs in the feed metadata box, which only bothers me a little. If you do find any other problems, feel free to leave a comment and I'll do my best to fix it.

Installing Simply Structured

1. Download this: simply-structured-nnw.zip.
2. Unzip it and place "Simply Structured.nnwstyle" in the folder you keep your NNW stylesheets, which defaults to USER_NAME/Library/Application Support/NetNewsWire/StyleSheets/.
3. Open up NNW. If the style menu is not visible in the lower right corner of the application, click "Show Styles Menu" in the View menu. Then select Simply Structured and you're good to go!

More Screenshots

Widescreen view

All text

* Expect a post later this week about creating your own style and another one with my biggest feature request for NNW.

This was going to be a quick post, but there were too many amazing facts to include. Before I list through them, the air car's engine was built by a French engineer and runs on compressed air. There is no emission and the car will cost $7,000 when Tata Motors releases it. While the list below is enlightening, watching this BBC video will tell you the story in 80 seconds.

• In the single energy mode MDI cars consume less than one euro every 100Km. (around 0.75 Euros) that is to say, 10 time less than gasoline powered cars.
• When there is no combustion, there is no pollution. The vehicle's driving range is close to twice that of the most advanced electric cars (from 200 to 300 km or 8 hours of circulation) This is exactly what the urban market needs where, as previously mentioned, 80% of the drivers move less than 60Km. a day.
• The recharging of the car will be done at gas stations, once the market is developed. To fill the tanks it will take about to 2 to 3 minutes at a price of 1.5 euros. After refilling the car will be ready to driver 200 kilometres.
• Because the engine does not burn any fuel the car's oil(a litre of vegetable) only needs to be changed every 50,000Km.
• The temperature of the clean air expulsed form the exhaust pipe is between 0 and 15 degrees below zero and can be subsequently channelled and used for air conditioning in the interior of the car.

They'll initially come to market with the MiniCat and the CityCat. This first generation technology sounds amazing. I can't wait to see where this is going to go.