12 frogs read think get curious

Where’s my iMoleskine?

Before rumours of the Apple tablet hit fever pitch, I kept wondering who needs a tablet? Now that the iPad has been announced, I’m still wondering. I suspect tablets are a solution looking for a problem. This isn’t necessarily bad; I think you could’ve said the same thing about iPods. Slashdot thought they were lame, back in the day.

In three to five years, we’re probably going to say who needs a laptop? (Or a desktop… I’m pretty sure they still make them, but I haven’t owned one in years.)

I don’t think tablets will be good for specialized input or manipulation. Heavy-duty writers will still want physical keyboards; screens will be too small for visual power users with DSLRs or hi-def videos to see what is really going on in their images in post-processing.

Tablets and tablet-sized hardware (Kindle, Netbooks) are devices for media consumption. It is easy to imagine watching a tv show on a tablet, playing games, accessing magazine subscriptions, news streams, or following the flow of activity of all the people you are connected to online on a tablet. Derek Powazek hoped the iPad would be the device that created an environment such that “publishers like me might finally be able to sell something digital that people would actually buy.”

I can’t help it, I’m just not all that interested in a media consumption device.

Not to say it couldn’t change how we consume media — it might — and I do think it has revolutionary potential when it comes to education. Decent screen reading with full color/motion display coupled with smart note-taking overlays could be the end of textbooks. Tablets could be a boon to self-paced learners and enthusiasts — imagine a field guide that helps you identify birds by song, or can tell you the name of the flower you are looking at, or guide you back to the trail if you get lost. (The “as good as a book” reading experience on digital device for 100+ pages of text still isn’t here yet, but maybe that shouldn’t be the holy grail for these devices.)

Not that the iPad could do these things today, it can’t. I agree with Powazek’s assessment: “it’s a stumble in the right direction.”

I want a device that isn’t just about media consumption, but media curation and creation. The iPad is partway there. Add a camera, maybe a microphone, make lengthier text input easy, run multiple apps at once — lifestreaming really takes off. It’s a diary you can seletively unlock and share.

The tablet could be the 21st century notebook. It’s snapping a picture and quickly drawing notes on it, sharing that idea, and refining it. It’s never losing another napkin sketch. It’s a moleskine with infinite pages and search. That’s what I want.

I have always loved snow

It’s snowing here in Boston right now

Linchpin light

I finished reading Seth Godin’s new book Linchpin this weekend, and woke up thinking about it this morning.

There are quite a few diagrams in the book, so maybe that is why I came up with this as a way to describe what it’s about:

I want to write more about the book, but I want to do some rereading first, some giving it time to settle. I twittered a few quotes as I was reading that I’ll share again:

“Art changes posture and posture changes innocent bystanders.”

“lizard brain is the reason you’re afraid, the reason you don’t do all the art you can, the reason you don’t ship when you can”

“art is the act of navigating without a map”

It’s worth spending time reading this book, and worth even more putting the ideas in it into daily practice. As Seth reminds us, “real artists ship”.

lonesome animals

ghosts in my machine

I’ve seen too much
I know too much
I hurt too much
I feel too much
I dread too much
I dream too much
I’m caught up by the ghosts in my machine

I missed Annie Lennox’s last studio album in back in 2007, but I’m really liking Songs Of Mass Destruction. It came out a couple of years ago, but I just found “Ghosts In My Machine” and the other tracks on the album this weekend, on lala. Despite preferring to get music only as bits, I didn’t click with the service the first time around. I’m enjoying it now, because:

• listening to an entire song I’m interested in is so much better than a short clip (the 30 second snippets happen after you’ve played it once)
• the browsing is better than iTunes, and surprisingly faster
• playing a whole album is possible with one click

I like the pricing model, too: 10 cents for web-only listening, then usually 99 cents to download an mp3, with credit for web payment if you did that. Most of my songs weren’t DRMed, so I moved them to lala too, letting me play my music anywhere, even on someone else’s computer. It’s no wonder Apple bought them. I hope they don’t fuck it up.

I’ve been enjoying dreck I don’t really need to buy (remember Hall & Oates?) as well as poking around and discovering new to me things. There’s a visible activity stream in lala, so anyone who wants to could see specifics about the dreck I listen to. Repeatedly. The activity stream makes plain I have obsessive quirks, as I can listen dozen of times in a day — ok fine, in a hour or so — to the same one or two songs.

Anyone else using lala? Do you have any recommendations to make?

Left to my own devices, I wind up listening to a woman who appeared with an orange crewcut and black leather eye mask on the folded paper cover of a cassette I bought twenty five years ago. And I like it.