Freyburg

The New Yorker has a great article about how the iPad my exact some serious change on the publishing industry, not exactly known for their future embracing tendencies.

I think that while e-books via the iPad will at first be regarded as a novelty, given time the tablet/pad form factor will become a competitive if not dominant medium for the book and variations thereof that couldn’t be accomplished without digitization. And just like music and television, publishers will fight the future as long as they can, only to be taken out of the loop completely. The internet eliminates the middleman, and I can see a time when authors sell directly to their readers in a million different niches, simultaneously destroying bookstores but making our culture much richer.

Back in 1960, a state of the art computer cost millions of dollars, weighed thousands of pounds, and was slower (by an order of magnitude) than an average chip in today’s cellphones. Physicist and science popularizer Michio Kaku (whose BBC series “Visions of the Future” is awesome, btw) breaks down where computing is going in the next ten years. Computers will be ubiquitous, mostly invisible, and profoundly shaping and transforming our civilization. Sounds good to me.

The Moustache of Understanding likes to talk in aphorisms and oversimplifications, but sometimes he gets things just right. His latest column details a new way of bringing products to market drawing on newly arrived smarts, network technology and prototyping based all over the world. He also points to the new model of manufacturing; financed and invented in the West, developed in the East, rolled out in both markets.

Yep, my new article on Mac and iPhone/iPad security is live at Mac | Life. There’s more stuff in the pipeline, tech and gaming related, for different outlets, and I’ll let all you wonderful people know about it as soon as they’re a) written and b) posted. 🙂

Mashable gets it exactly right. The Streamy Awards are an annual event meant to celebrate the best in web video, but this year they did so with a crude, juvenile ceremony, for which they soon apologized. More to the point, the entire exercise heralded web series done by B-list celebrities and wannabe types who haven’t made it into Hollywood’s inner sanctum (but surely desire to, more than anything.)

As Mashable points out, all of this entirely misses the point. Media has become democratized, with the ability to mount a compelling, great looking production within the reach of anyone with a laptop, a DSLR or higher-end camcorder, and talent. But for some reason a lot of the web video world’s supposed luminaries want nothing more than the supposed legitimacy of recognition from old media. That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, and in the end it’s really a fool’s game. Why jump onto a sinking ship?

Haven’t had a chance to post anything for the last little bit, so to make up for it here’s some pixelated destruction.

PIXELS by PATRICK JEAN.
Uploaded by onemoreprod. – Independent web videos.

A torrent of iPad reviews have left the land of the embargo to emerge blinking in the light of day, and the verdict is that the iPad is indeed “revolutionary” and “magical.” The two best reviews I’ve seen are Xeni Jardin’s take on Boing Boing and Andy Inhatko’s live demo on Twit.TV (which I’m trying to track down as an embed and will post when it eventually shows up.)