this is sippey.com

Nokia’s introduced a limited edition version of the 3300 music phone, with a preloaded version of Jay-Z’s Black Album. Never mind that the phone would be much better if it came preloaded Prince’s Black Album -- this is something like a marketing strategy for the iPod I wrote about in July…

An iPod that’s shipped with, say, 250 pre-loaded tracks offers rich opportunities for market segmentation, channel diversification (sell the country iPod in the guns and ammo section of Wal-Mart?), device customization (through store.apple.com) and price point differentiation.

(I’m just quoting myself all over the place today.)

John Paczkowski publishes my “first computer” story in today’s Good Morning Silicon Valley…

My first computer was a Texas Instruments TI-99, complete with cassette tape drive for storage. I think it was a gift for my 12th birthday, but I honestly can’t remember what year it was. Bless my parents for their prescience, and also for their nearly hands-off approach: my Mom simply sat me down, showed me what the “home row” was on the keyboard, and left me to my own devices, which included TI-Basic and a couple of really basic console games. Who knows where that old machine is…

Contrast that “early” computing experience with my three-year old daughter’s, who can’t get enough of the Flash “lapware” games at sesamestreet.org, and vaguely understands that when daddy goes to work he “does email.” Somehow I think I’ll need to be a bit more hands on with her than my parents were with me…

As if we needed confirmation that the Hollywood Foreign Press is completely out to lunch: Pacino got the miniseries actor nomination for Angels in America instead of Justin Kirk. Pacino’s Roy Cohn was very Pacino – bugeyed, raw, vocal and engaging, to be sure. But Kirk’s Prior Walter was masterful; you couldn’t ask for more subtle, nuanced and emotionally rich acting. His soliloquy address to the continental principalities (“addicted to life”) and the final scene in Central Park will stay with me for months.

How completely cliched, a post about Radiohead, but I just have to note this somewhere. Hail to the Thief is their first record since The Bends where the second half of the album is just as strong – stronger even – than the first half. OK Computer, Kid A & Amnesiac all suffered from second-half syndrome, where after the first five tracks or so you had absorbed the “gist” of the record, and could pretty much just tune out all the nearly pointless frippery that would follow. This ain’t the case with the new one, where the record really just starts getting going around track 8.

I know we’re only at 0.3, but is someone mapping adoption of Atom, so that we can look back and determine just where the tipping point was, and what helped push the format to critical mass? In this classic chicken & egg, feed producers are obviously taking the lead – in addition to the 0.3 spec, Mark Pilgrim’s published a Movable Type template, there’s Blosxom support from Rael Dornfest, and Jason Shellen announced on the blogger-dev list that support for the AtomAPI is coming soon. Things are also heating up on the feed consuming side: Newsgator supported the 0.2 version of the spec with their 1.3 release, and Bloglines just added support for Atom. I’m unclear on FeedDemon, since it supposedly went “gold” on Friday at midnight, while the Atom 0.3 spec was released on Saturday.

Way back in July I posted a bit at the old place titled “why who needs echo?” where I wondered aloud just how the benefits of this new syndication format are going to be explained in terms that make it worthwhile for end users – either as publishers or consumers – to adopt, either through an informed, transparent choice (“I’m switching to a new syndication format because…”), or through a more opaque, reasonably uninformed choice (“I’m switching to this new aggregator because look at all this whiz bang stuff it supports.”). I still don’t really understand the answer to that question…

In other words, will Atom cross the chasm? If so, why? And when?

Tom Coates posts a nice response to Jason Kottke’s shazizzle about metadata, with a meditation on the sheer quantity of “metadata” that’s wrapped up in a simple piece of (snail mail) post…

Over and above the obvious data, there are textures, sensations, handwritings, stamps and fragments of information that all have a bearing on how we read the almost trivially information-sparse chunk of scrawl that’s actually supposed to be ‘the message in itself’. A single romantic letter dribbles metadata out of every flat, folded, ink-inscribed surface, and we assimilate it and operate with without the slightest concern for the amount of contextual information that we’re being forced to ingest.

Coates goes on to lament that the problem isn’t too much metadata, but rather a paucity of tools to help us manage it…

We’re stuck in a middle-period between the emergence of useful computer processing power and the computer’s upcoming ability to self-annotate, transcribe and create metadata simply, elegantly (and in vast amount) in the background all the time.

While we’re definitely lacking decent user interfaces for creating metadata (where the perfect UI, as Coates points out, would be hardly any at all), the thing that struck me about Jason’s post was the sheer lunacy of the information design of those metadata overfizzled screencaps. The struggle to organize one’s work doesn’t need to de-emphasize the work itself; instead, it becomes a presentation issue – how to create user experiences that focus the reader on the content at hand while presenting appropriate options for metadata usage in the appropriate context. Skimming, reading, responding, connecting. This is easier said than done, of course.

It’s not necessarily that we’re writing love letters in Excel. It’s that sometimes we’re stuck reading them in Access.

Why I just opted out of Amazon’s “share the love” program: I’m tired of receiving “look at how smart I am for purchasing this book, I thought I’d share this fact with the rest of the world!” messages gussied up as 10% off promotional offers. Like “George” actually cares enough to send me a 10% discount on The History of Iraq*. Puh-lease.

* Names and book titles changed to protect the guilty.

Useful Tip #2 of the day (where Michael realizes his new role in the blogowhatever). If you’re using a Treo 600 on Sprint, go download Handspring’s beta email app. It’s free, and overcomes a significant limitation in the otherwise more fully-featured Snappermail; Handspring’s app allows you to attach photos directly from the Treo’s in-memory picture database, instead of requiring you to first move the photos to an SD card, a step that pretty much killed the spontaneity of emailing off a pic.

Tomorrow, maybe some cooking and house cleaning tips. I’m on a roll, here.

Because I know people love Useful Tips, and because I care about you and your productivity, here’s a Useful Tip for professional services folks or unprofessional services folks that need to keep track of their time. If you’re using iCal from Apple or Outlook 2003 from Microsoft, it’s fairly simple to set up an additional calendar. View them side by side, and use one as your appointment calendar, the other as an activity journal. For me, it’s easier than keeping a time log, it’s visual, and it gives me a good indication of whether I’m spending my time in short bursts (bad) or in long, thoughtful (even leisurely!) stretches (good). Do this for a while, and you’ll start to have flashbacks of the Day Planner days of old, before all these touchscreen Bluetooth thing-a-ma-bobs were cluttering my desk drawers.

Plus, if one were enterprising, and one were required to actually bill their time, one could write a script to slurp an iCal file or an Exchange database and auto-feed those into a time-tracking and billing system. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves now.

Note to self: is this what your publishing life has been reduced to? Time management tips? What happened to all the big ideas? The high falutin’ talk of the future of new media? The commentary on the fascinating interplay of technology, business and culture?

Dick Costolo – always on the cutting edge ot set theory – is at the vanguard of a growing movement to bring back the Venn diagram. In the comments, Marc Rettig has posed a most excellent question: “are all assholes really irrationally disconsolate?” And I have an issue with his labeling of the set “the intentionally evil or ignorant,” but not with one of the set’s members.

Also mapped: Fred Durst, Gator, people who say ‘nucular,’ people who drive corvettes, Dale Peck, Cocoa Puffs, Britney Spears…and more!

Paul Ford (sooper genius) on the launch of a new website for Harper’s Magazine:

The best way to think about this is as a remix: the taxonomy is an automated remix of the narrative content on the site, except instead of chopping up a ballad to turn it into house music, we’re turning narrative content into an annotated timeline. The content doesn’t change, just the way it’s presented.

And this…

I finished coding the first draft of the site by annotating printouts of XSLT code with a pencil, by propane light, in a 100-year-old log cabin in West Virginia, while muttering.

For those of you following along at home, Paul just changed the game.

Wow. Maureen Dowd tees off on the memorial designs for ground zero, in an aptly titled op-ed: Unbearable Lightness of Memory.

The ugliness of Al Qaeda’s vicious blow to America is obscured by these prettified designs, which look oddly like spas or fancy malls or aromatherapy centers. It’s easy to visualize toned women with yoga mats strolling through these New Age pavilions filled with waterfalls and floating trees and sunken gardens and suspended votives. Mass murder dulled by architectural Musak.

The designs are reflections of our psychobabble culture, exuding that horrible and impossible concept, closure. Our grief and anger have been sentimentalized and stripped of a larger historical and moral purpose.

(The site so desperately needs and deserves Maya Lin. Not something from Lin herself, but rather from this generation’s Lin, that transforms the space and the discussion about the space the way Lin did.)