Here's how Blogger progenitor Evan Williams reacts to a wordy put-down from a member of the Live Journal community:

"Blogger is a commercially funded pre-IPO dotcom," with, "money stashed away to pay salaried employees for quite awhile, and they have a budget to afford professional marketing expertise." Cool! I had no idea this was the case. I feel much better now.

Got me interested in what LiveJournal is up to, though. Looks pretty cool.

Fight suckage by programming the media with AND logic

That headline is my brief summary of Deborah's excellent response to stuff Dave and I have been saying about blogs as news sources.

FWIW, most of what I write in Linux Journal comes from a mix of email, personal interviews and research on the Web, at least half of which involves blogs of some sort.

My mind was first blown on this subject when I walked into the press room at an early LinuxWorld Expo and saw nearly every browser tuned in to Slashdot. Not CNet.com, NYTimes.com, MSNBC.com or other usual suspects. A real I-opener.

We're about 2-for-10 here, but an hour or two of digging should get you most of the facts

Buzzmaven Deborah Branscum raises ten questions your Web site better be ready to answer if you want your company covered by The Media (which doesn't include fellow bloggers, who mostly don't give a shit).

It's good advice. Go dig it.

Think of it as the laptop most likely to make Spielberg's pubes catch fire

In a New York Times piece, David Pogue calls Apple's new Titanium laptop a personal IMAX theater.

But beware: It's also the hottest Macintosh laptop ever; whatever the other qualities of titanium, it's an excellent conductor of heat between, say, a powerful microprocessor and the human thigh. The PowerBook G4 will not be the first choice for people who wear shorts.

Exiting Reality Distortion Field

Ah well. I can't seem to make iTunes do what (as I remember, but maybe I was still hypnotized) Apple made it do in the booth where the company was showing off how well it worked with the Nomad Jukebox.

It can't seem to copy (excuse me, add) MP3 files except to its own library, which is on the local hard drive. Meanwhile, SoundJam can add files into the Jukebox from any accessible directory. It can also see and modify the Nomad's playlists, which are the only way to make sense of the 800+ files on the thing. Unless I'm missing something here.

No baloney

Apple wants to be Sony. That's what I took away from Steve Jobs' keynote at Macworld on Tuesday. The whole idea now, he said, is to make the PC the central device in one's "digital lifestyle." It's the multimedia device that sits in the midst of your collection of monomedia appliances — hand-held, CD player, DVD player, camcorder, MP3 player, etc.

The big problem, he said, was complexity. All the MP3 players from Real, Microsoft (and, presumably, WinAmp, SoundJam, etc.) were complicated and hard to use. So Apple created iTunes and iDVD as companions for the easy-to-use iMovie. They're also putting CD/RW drives in all their new desktop machines, and a CD/DVD burner/player called SuperDrive in the new top-of-the-line 733MHz Mac. They've come up with a compression method that lets you burn that DVD at just 2X the time it takes to play the result. And they've made burning CDs as easy as copying files to a disk drive.

Of course, the entertainment industry doesn't want you to burn DVDs. But they also don't want to piss off Steve Jobs, the guy who gets insufficient credit for driving some of the toughest bargains The Industry has ever seen. (Witness the Toy Story deals he got for Pixar.) Steve is also the one Entertainment Guy who sees the whole MP3 phenomenon for what it is — a popular movement that The Industry would be smart to enable rather than fight — and also has the power to make happen in a big way.

This burn-your-own-DVD thing looks huge to me. One reason is the dealmaking that got the SuperDrive in Apple's gear first. Another is how simple Apple is making its software.

I downloaded iTunes and immediately put it to use. What a nice piece of work it is. It took what had been a useless mess — the Creative Nomad Jukebox — and made it the sweet machine it was meant to be. And that's not a knock on SoundJam (my incumbent MP3 ripper, player and burner), either. It's just that iTunes has a much cleaner, more intuitive UI.

I kept saying to myself, "Steve wants to be Sony." All doubt was removed when he unveiled his Vaio killer: the new Titanium Powerbook G4, and then ran a promo video in which all the testimonials were from entertainment industry types.

I think he's on to something. We'll see.

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