Blogs

Look at the historic progression of popular personal written information containers over the past 10+ years:

Home pages > Blogs > Lists of Links > Tumblr > Twitter

I see two symbiotic trends. First, I see a reduction in the average size of a piece of information. I see information that feeds our short attention spans. Second, and more important, I see our tools increasingly removing barriers from producing information. Remember when you needed a nerd friend to set up a weblog? Did you have any issue figuring out how to publish a thought with Twitter? I hope not.

via randsinrepose.com

Except, I actually think we begin to hit a point where the tools allow us to more easily go in the opposite direction.

Last week, we opened up speaking submissions for Northern Voice, the social media and personal blogging conference I help organize.

The conference, by the way, will be held out at UBC on May 7 and 8, 2010. Why so late this year? We didn’t want to schedule it during the Olympics, and, preferring to keep it out at UBC, we needed to wait until classes weren’t in session.

The deadline for submitting a talk is March 9, 2010. I’ll be one of the people filtering through the submissions. We get more than 100 now, and the amount grows every year. As such, I thought I ought to brainstorm some topics that I’d like covered at this year’s conference:

So let's just agree that:

1. Apple could do to movie downloads what they've done to music downloads
2. iTunes is a likely place for this functionality to live because it's the one app that's already on Windows

But watching things on your TV where you have to walk your iPod Photo across and plug it into your TV (without a remote) isn't really an ideal interface. It would work, but it's not ideal.

Same thing goes for the Airport Express. You can now have all your music on your Mac, and beam it across to your stereo. Except, when you're not actually in front of your computer, you can't control iTunes.

This is where the Mac Tablet comes in. Steve probably poo-poos the Tablet as your main computer (that's what high-end PowerBooks are for). But, a Mac Tablet as media remote, as second computer in the home? Maybe good enough for students, replacing/augmenting the iBook line? Sounds like extra computers being sold.

The funny thing is, if Adobe does not take the steps to make tools to address a future with HTML5, what we’ll be left with is tools others create. And chief amongst those others will most likely be Apple. Flash’s stance here reminds of Microsoft’s during the creation of Blackbird and later their migration toward Visual Interdev and Frontpage. When you build the walls so high around your garden, the fall will just kill your plants.

[From Flash, iPad, Standards – Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report]

We’re really excited about Apple’s iPad, and we want to make all of our products available for it as soon as we can.  Yes, we already had a big year planned for 2010, with several long-anticipated major product releases—but we think iPad is really important:  important enough to spend some time juggling our plans to figure out how we can introduce five new iPad apps.

Yes.  Five.  We want to bring all five of our productivity apps to iPad:  OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, OmniPlan, OmniFocus, and OmniGraphSketcher.