Wow. That was fast.

"At Apple, our philosophy is 'create products that are simple to use. And nothing's more simple than a single giant button."

Isn't it cute?!

Apple rolled out the iPad this afternoon, and people are freaking out. Mashable has a really good breakdown of the device, complete with specs, options, etc., if you care about that. But you've got to wonder if this thing really has the ability to be the market force that so many seem to think it will.
"The new Amazon Kindle DX has a few weeks to live—and the magazine and newspaper industries may not have much longer." - Sascha Segan, PCMag.com

People who say things like this have never seen a Kindle. The E ink and electronic paper format is immeasurably easier on the eyes than any of the backlit stuff we've been dealing with in the history of this kind of technology. And you've got to figure that eventually, someone is going to devise that kind of technology in color, which will kill backlighting across the board. When you hear someone trash the Kindle, ask them if they've ever actually seen or held one. Some of the backlash against this technology by traditional book people is understandable -- there really is something satisfyingly tactile books -- but don't buy into any of the garbage you hear about it being tough on the eyes. The visual technology that kindle brings to the table is not going to be outdone by anything Apple will roll out until it develops its own proprietary version of what the Kindle has to offer.

I suppose it could ultimately kill off the netbook, but there really is something to your eyes and fingers approaching the whole thing at different angles. Yeah, they've got the keyboard dock for that, but if it's all the same, why not just have a much cheaper netbook and a smartphone?

"The iPad itself seems less svelte than many fans expected-a blogger at Gizmodo estimates that 20 per cent of the surface is bezel. The device's home screen features weirdly spaced-out icons. The overwhelming early response among those live-blogging the event, and reacting to the live blogs online, is that this thing looks like a really big iPhone," - Newsweek

There's a host of notably important things that it does not do. Per the New York Times liveblog of the event:

• No ability to play Adobe Flash animations, widely used on the Web.
• No camera, still or video
• No non-Internet phone function
• Unclear whether you can bundle your AT&T iPhone plan with an iPad data plan
• No removable battery for a device that can suck a lot of power
• No removable storage

Once someone figures out how to produce the Kindle's visual technology in color and integrate it into a device that doesn't look like a children's toy from the 80's, we can talk. Until then, this isn't particularly impressive.

"I'm sorry, but this idea is weak sauce. I can see shrinking a laptop down to make a netbook....but increasing the size of an iPhone/iPod touch to that of a netbook seems like a sign of a company really desperately trying to scrape the bottom or the nearly-dry barrel of the whole iPod/iPhone concept." - PC World

Amen.

[Insert your own feminine hygiene product joke here].

Week two

Why, when we search using keyword-based engines, do we often not look at results past the first page or two?

As the internet grows, how does the way we search it evolve?

How long before the volume of extant information outgrows the current popular search algorithms?

Boolean searches are more accurate, but difficult to construct, and many different databases have specific or proprietary string languages.

Do databases like LexisNexis structure or restructure themselves to prevent or encourage specific kinds of searching or data mining?

Book recommendation of the day: Everything Is Miscellaneous

Tylerism of the day: "I like Turner's."

On the idea of the content curator.

Week Two: In the room

Class attendance is encouraged. We're going to be using APA style for this class, unless we decide that there's another style we might like better. A grading rubric exists, in theory.