Reference: iPhone Web Clip Icons

WebClipMe!

On the iPhone iCon Bandwagon

One More Time: Apple And Ebooks

I came across this article on the Net: Read it and weep: why eBooks must change the record. And it had this paragraph that set off a light in my dim mind:

EBook stores will need to recreate the experience of browsing in a book shop by developing visually stunning websites where customers can appreciate cover art, browse virtual shelves and flick through 3D copies.

Hey, that’s Apple’s Coverflow!

I’m ashamed to admit it, but I will. I’ve been stuck in the world of the alphabet. This is how a library is organized on the Sony Reader:

That’s rather grim when compared to Coverflow!

Whenever I mention what I’m reading, I always make it a point to show the book’s cover too. I think a cover can say something about a book (at the very least whether the designer or artist was excited by the text). It’s also what I’m used to, having lived in the pre-e world and bending to its restrictions.

Looking at those two pictures above, Sony’s in even greater trouble than I thought, should Apple enter ebooks. Especially with something like an iPod Air!

In Praise Of The Cynic

I had an opportunity to send this to someone in email (yes, that’s the kind of email people can sometime expect from me) and went to find where it lives on the Net.

I couldn’t.

It’s been disappeared. Probably sent to the Guantanamo For Ideas, where it is enjoying being waterboarded.

Ordinarily it is the style of this blog to use blockquote, but this is so long, I think it would dissuade people from reading it (except for Cynics!). To save your eyes from a big box and all italics, I reprint it below as regular text. I didn’t write this. But I carry it in my PDA and have since I first came across it on the Net years and years ago.

===============================================

CYNICISM. One of the strangest movements in all of philosophy is that of the Cynics who held that we attain happiness and tranquility by denying established convention. Known as the “dog philosophers” for living like dogs, Cynics denied conventions of wealth, reputation, pleasure, property, family duty, and religion. They were typically ascetics since they viewed money as an artificial convention. Of all the Eudimonean schools, Cynicism was the least systematized, having no official treatises; the descriptions we have were authored by people outside the school itself. Rather than making their points in written argument form, the Cynics themselves attempted to teach by example through their lives, which often involved deliberately shocking speech and conduct. Their goal was to grab attention and vividly illustrate the problems with established convention. Cynics used several metaphors to describe their self-appointed task. For example, they considered themselves as messengers of God, the watchdogs of humanity who would bark at illusion, and surgeons whose knife sliced the cancer of pretentiousness from people’s minds.

Antisthenes and Diogenes. The founding father of the school was an Athenian named Antisthenes (440-370 BCE), who first studied rhetoric under the Sophist Gorgias. Dissatisfied with Gorgias, Antisthenes soon gravitated to Socrates, bringing a several of Gorgias’s students with him. While a student of Socrates, he wore tattered clothes, had a matted beard and carried around a bag like a beggar. According to one anecdote, Socrates commented to him, “Why are you so pretentious? Through your rags I see your vanity.” Nevertheless, Antisthenes continued with this manner of appearance. After Socrates’ execution, Antisthenes started his own school, which captured some of the flavor of Socrates’ teachings in extreme form. Following Socrates, he focused on moral concerns and taught that virtue is needed for true happiness. Achieving virtue, though, involve mental and physical toil. In our quest for virtue, we need to exercise self-control, deny pleasures, and study the names of things and their definitions. Also like Socrates, as suggested by the above anecdote, Antisthenes saw foolishness in the established views of the many, and was bold in exposing his discontent. Antisthenes’ attacks on conventional politics were so strong that his school became increasingly unpopular, and many of his more scholarly students abandoned him.

The second great Cynic was a loyal pupil of Antisthenes named Diogenes (4th century BCE). Nicknamed “The Dog”, Diogenes followed Antisthenes manner of appearance and contempt for convention. A highly visible ascetic in Athens, Plato went so far as to call him as “Socrates gone mad.” Events of Diogenes’ life are sketchy. He was exiled from his home country of Sinope when he and his banker father defaced a coin. He arrived in Athens and sought to be a disciple of Antisthenes. Annoyed by Diogenes’ persistence, Antisthenes hit Diogenes with a stick, to which Diogenes replied: “Strike me, Antisthenes, but you will never find a stick sufficiently hard to remove me from your presence, while you speak anything worth hearing.” Impressed by this, Antisthenes accepted him into his school. Diogenes’ behavior was no less strange than his teachers’. He once embraced a cold statue in winter, illustrating how even our perceptions of pain are conventional. During the daytime he carried a lit oil lantern, holding it up to people, illustrating his search for a virtuous person. Another anecdote, of questionable historicity, describes how Alexander the Great sought to meet the strange Diogenes fellow that he heard so much about. Finding Diogenes living in a tub, Alexander said, “I am Alexander the Great” to which Diogenes replied “I am Diogenes the Cynic.” Alexander then asked if Diogenes needed any special favor from him. As the sun was shining brightly that day, Diogenes replied,” You could stand between me and the sun.” Alexander then said, “If I wasn’t Alexander, I’d want to be Diogenes.”

===============================================

Sick of this world? Have a rest here.

01/25/08 Reading

Why I still love shelves of printed books. The NYPL allows me to trip over something with this irresistible title:

You Will Make Money in Your Sleep: The Story of Dana Giacchetto, Financial Adviser to the Stars by Emily White

White doesn’t seem to have a site or blog.

But her book is available as an ebook. Get it.

Will Eisner’s The Spirit To Be A Movie

That looks very Sin City-ish.

To be directed by Frank Miller, who is doing a production blog.

Uh-Oh. Suits Invading Net Video Space.

DIGITAL DREAMERS

Under the deal, Vuguru, in partnership with Cyber Group Animation and online entertainment company Big Fantastic, will script out 50 two-minute Webisodes that will feature the same characters as “Foreign Body” and serve as a prequel to the book’s plot.

Set to debut on May 27, a new Webisode will air every Monday through Friday for 10 weeks, with the finale premiering on August 4 and the book hitting store shelves the next day. Advertising will be sold against the Webisodes.

And get it wrong from the start:

Michael Eisner

Last year, Vuguru, Eisner’s new media studio, helped launch an 80-episode series called “Prom Queen.” The 90-second episodes were a mash-up of murder mystery and soap opera, and they generated more than 15 million views on MySpace and Veoh. Vuguru also sold the Japanese and French rights to “Prom Queen” and a spinoff series, “Prom Queen: Summer Heat,” to distributors in those domains.

Uh, what?

I was very deeply into Veoh in the slack time between my last and this new blog. I discovered some very good things on Veoh. The one thing I never discovered was Eisner’s Prom Queen series!

Oh, you say, but there’s so much out there, you just might have missed it.

In addition to backing Vuguru, Eisner has put money into Veoh Networks, a San Diego-based video-sharing site that purveys a blend of user-generated videos and professional-grade content, including some full-length CBS shows.

No, it would have been promoted.

What I noticed instead were micro-series from people with just about zero budgets but limitless imagination and true creativity.

That first item is about an adaptation prequel-spinoff from a Robin Cook book. I’ve never read Cook’s work, but to me he is someone from the 1970s. I’m not enticed to see this. Immediately, I am prejudiced against it. It smells like dead bell-bottoms.

There are many writers out there who could do with a Net video push of their work: Tito Perdue, Victor Gischler, M. Dylan Raskin, Christopher Fowler, Richard Perez, Ken Bruen. These are all 21st-century writers who do exciting and innovative work that would appeal to people on the Net. But Robin Cook? Sorry. The name makes me snore.

See, this is the Suit Mentality: Grab onto a brand name. Don’t innovate. Don’t create. Don’t try something new. Try something that’s already been tried. Grab onto someone who’s become a brand name, like a box of detergent.

Let’s do it just like TV.

And when they fail — and they are guaranteed to do so! — they will pass the blame onto the Internet instead of their fossilized strategies that people have become thoroughly disgusted with.

My advice to Michael Eisner: Retire. You don’t belong here on the Net. Your time has passed. Go away now. Kthxbai.

(Oh, you can bet he’ll need someone to explain that last term!)

Cloudbook: Very Last-Minute Delay

Software ‘tweaks,’ Chinese new year delay Everex CloudBook

January 25, 2008 (Computerworld) Everex said today that its highly anticipated ultramobile CloudBook PC won’t make it into U.S. consumers’ hands for another month or so, as the Taiwanese vendor makes last-minute changes to its Linux-based software.

CloudBook was supposed to be available from Wal-Mart Inc. stores and the Walmart.com Web site today.

But in an e-mail, Everex’s director of marketing, Paul Kim, said that “a couple of last-minute software tweaks” prevented the CloudBook, a competitor to rival Taiwanese AsusTek Computer Inc.’s successful Eee, from reaching stores just three weeks after its debut at the Consumer Electronics Show.

Emphasis added by me.

–via JK on the Run

Is there a lesson here? Maybe don’t use an OS sourced from a 22-year-old? I joke. Get it done right, is what I have always said.

You Can’t Haz Me Yet!

iPod Air Has An URL Already

iPod Air

And I’ve got the WordPress one.

(Thing is, I’m not sure if I’ll use it. Therefore last night I had some bad sleep as it seemed to me I engaged in the kind of rotten greed I’ve been excoriating herein. But then maybe there won’t be an iPod Air and I can sleep easier. Or there might be a way to transfer it to someone who will use it …)

I Have Today’s Hawt Post

I sign into WordPress and am presented with this:

The next one? The Diamand Guide To Oral Sex — which reminds me I’ve got some, uh, reading to go do …

The iPod Touch Question I Didn’t Have To Ask

Over at the MacRumors forum, hashing over that Oppenheimer quote, someone asks the question that’s been on my mind:

I can’t see the point of the Touch. Why not buy an iPhone? It saves having to carry a separate phone as well as an iPod.

Or am I missing something? Is there something the Touch can do that the iPhone can’t?

The answer:

Not cost $2000 over 2 years.

Simple, elegant.

Still, no microphone, Bluetooth, or camera …

The other answer:

Perhaps for the 5.5 billion consumers on the planet who cant buy an iphone as El Jobs refused to release an unlocked phone worldwide. At least the ipod touch is a satisfactory device to tide me over.

And then there was a list!

1) slimmer

2) more memory (for now… that will obviously change)

3) some people (believe it or not) don’t need or even want 24/7 phone coverage.

4) AT&T isn’t the right carrier for some.

5) some people prefer not to run down the battery on the gadget that people use to get into with you, just to play music (or other stuff)

6) by having separates you can go on the net/read a mail/document what-have-you while on the phone.

7) If chosen carefully, you get better quality overall by having dedicated equipment.

As for the lack of microphone, it turns out some EEs have hacked together a mic they’re selling for using VOIP with the iPod Touch. They have an entire blog about it — and it even has interesting and exciting YouTube videos demonstrating everything!