Killer App?

Consider this idea from TWIT:

Schools today are giving $1100-$1300 white Macs to incoming students. Now, hand them a $500-$800 device. Multiply the savings.

All your text books, on the iPad. Now, all your media guides as well.

If the market of college athletic recruiting is the same rising student who is likely to be handed a iPad, all the new formatting heading straight there.

iPad as Advertised

The Kindle killer with 3G no contract coverage and a $499 price tag plus HDTV resolution.

Oh, I think so.

ESPN on ESPN

Highly recommended: Don Ohlmeyer's lengthy dissection of the Alamo Bowl. As ESPN's ombudsman, it's his job to be critical and take to task the network on behalf of the consumers when necessary. He's got plenty to say on Leach, Craig James and the overall actions of the world wide leader.

You don't have to go much further than the story subhead to get the point:

ESPN's Alamo Bowl treatment of Mike Leach controversy more biased than balanced

You read, you decide.

Conan Strikes

OK, it took a minute, but Conan O'Brien gets the last laugh. The soundtrack to his retrospective of his seven months as the Tonight Show host: Cheap Trick.

At 40-plus million in the settlement, he's hardly cheap. But the chorus, of course:

Surrender. Surrender. But don't give yourself away.

Message Boards Dead?

Interesting idea posed by a college administrator who has not been a fan of the message board phenomenon -- is Facebook killing them?

Follow his logic: message board membership and numbers are artificially inflated by the casual account (low posts counts, got either his anger out or bored with the board); the real chatting is happening among friends on Facebook.

May be something to this as I certainly see an uptick in conversation among groups on wider subjects, including sports, but I'm not sure you can assume the anonymous nature of most message board situations will be trumped by the very open Facebook world.

Curious of others thoughts. Sounds a lot like the similar points that blogs are dead.

The End is Near

Get out your R.E.M.

Jan. 27, the CoSIDA world hits the new millennium. Link. Link. Link.

Forget 2009-41 or 2009-42 [quick aside, 2009-41 is dangerous and foolish], this is 23:23, as in the Book of Numbers.

The Growing Unpublishing Trend

When you decided to remove less than flattering items from your website or blog, it has an official name: "unpublishing." Some argue the practice is not worth the effort -- Google already has a copy -- and gives the impression that there may be more to hide than was originally there.

Common Sense Journalism is a blog by Doug Fisher out of University of South Carolina. Along with being a good overall read, he recently gave thoughts on the trend.

Reminds me a bit of the Regret the Error info we've had in the past of seeing mistakes in copy mysteriously disappear rather than note the corrections.

Am I Going to Hell?

As I reached down to type out a note to myself again on my iPhone before church began, I'm struck once again by the oddity of having such a device readily available in the sanctuary. Then again, if the Book of Common Prayer were available as a e-book -- imagine how much more our church could save both in cost and paper for those bound editions and printed bulletins.

So instead, I'll holster for later and reach out to my ready standby -- the children's doodle cards and the little golf course pencils. I go through two or three a service. Is note taking of thoughts during the service bad? Well, of course not. God speaks to you when you are in quiet contemplation, and usually for me that happens in two places -- service and the shower. And until they come up with a really reliable waterproof notepad, at least I can jot down my Sunday ideas -- like this one -- on purloined kiddie cards until I can get to a keyboard.

Anyone else cause nervousness with their iPhone in church?

On-Line AP Stylebook

Best $25 you could spend. Since virtually everyone in the audience of this blog uses AP as their default style or as the basis for their organizational style book variances, the resources there are far greater than the hard copy.

Notable is the database of "Ask the Editor" entries. I've learned a lot in the last 48 hours tinkering with the system.

Like on-line subscriptions to Websters or other references that can be critical real-time resources, I'm not sure how I functioned without it.

To subscribe, click here.

The Under Media

Podcast catch-up listening to Andrew Breitbart sub on Dennis Miller, and almost his whole time was spent beating this phrase to death. He's referring to himself, a new media entity with conservative bent, in relationship to the "mainstream media."

Considering Breitbart is bankrolling a lot of investigative work -- notably those ACORN videos -- and was carrying on about some new bogey man that he was working against. Not sure how he's stacking up a lot different from George Soros' websites -- other than providing nice point/counterpoint which the average news consumer seeks.

What it did make me consider is that more and more, that investigative role is falling to networked media or prosumer media. Interesting follow-up take on that from Craig Silverman of Regret the Error fame in the Jan. 1 edition of On the Media.

Breitbart's agenda websites present a point of view, but also fund investigative work. Same to be said of where national sports investigative work is moving -- Yahoo Sports' unit is gaining fame but how long until someone (Knight Commission, perhaps) decides to put Big Sports in the cross hairs like Breitbart's Big Hollywood or Big Journalism.\

Be ready to engage.

Black Eyed Peas?

Knowing that my old favorite, Piccadilly, is on the road that I've traveled repeatedly between downtown Memphis and east Memphis for press events, I had supreme confidence I could pick that Southern tradition -- black eyed peas for good luck on New Year's Day.

As my daughter would say, this was an epic fail.

I was surprised the go-order area was closed, but at 2:15 in the afternoon -- a tight schedule between media conferences and getting back downtown -- surely the line inside won't be long.

Wrong. Alright, let's ask the cashier at the end of the line. Excuse me, could I get a go order since the take-out is closed, I just need some black eyed peas to go. "You can get them from the line." So, I head for the line that is unusually long, and moving very slow. After five minutes, I've moved two people and simply can't wait.

Shocked that my Piccadilly has let me down. I grew up with Dilly Dishes back in Monroe, and this seems like a betrayal. Oh well, certainly some place in this town of traditional southern food will have the peas.

No. Not a one. Checking at one spot, the hostess agreed with me -- you know, you'd think some place would have the peas on their menu for today. The manager nodded, yep, after all, it's New Years.

I take this as a bad sign for the all that is Southern-ness. I had every intention of hitting the road late tonight for a grocery store to solve the problem, but the hard drive of this week has taken it's toll. I'm just too tired to secure that good luck tradition.

And believe me, I've made that move in the past, convincing a grocery store trying to close early on a weekend New Year's Day in Provo, Utah, to stay open long enough to buy a can, take it back to the hotel and microwave them enough to eat a couple of spoonfuls.

But not tonight. I hope this doesn't bode for a crappy start to the 10s. I really hoped to put the last crappy decade behind me.