By Ray Richmond
I've finally figured out what it is that Apple Computer Inc. and its chief executive, Steve Jobs, wants from us: all of our spare time, and then some. Using only Apple products -- particularly the iPod and new video iPod -- we can successfully tune out our families and keep the harsh realities of our daily lives at a distance.

Don't get me wrong. iPods are cool. I mean, I don't have one, but I hear they're terrific. Every song you've ever heard can now be with you at all times and be called upon at will. It's the ultimate in instant and complete audio gratification. You can tell by the zombie-like expression it tends to induce on its users.

And now here comes the iPod with a newfangled visual component. Not that we haven't already had Watchman-style TVs around for decades already. But with the new gadget, you'll be able to download last night's edition of "Desperate Housewives" or "Lost" for $1.99 off of Apple iTunes, because we all know how much we've been clamoring for video on demand on a 2.5-inch screen.

We can't be away from our music for even a second, and now we can't be separated from our TV sets. It isn't enough that people are yakking incessantly on their cell phones while simultaneously trying to go about their daily lives; they're also taking in snippets from CNN and ESPN and Comedy Central and the latest cool music video on a wireless screen that's smaller than a Post-it note.

Welcome to the 21st century, ladies and gentlemen, where your eyes and ears must always be occupied with something other than what's actually happening around you. Please start this particular revolution without me, if you don't mind.

Here's the deal with the whole micro-mini screen TV thing: It's doomed to fail, I believe. It's a gimmick and not a whole lot more. The iPod audio edition has become a must-have product because it allows audiophiles music collection portability. By contrast, we don't want or need the same convenience in our TV given that watching shows on a 2-inch screen isn't quite commensurate with viewing them on a 42-inch LCD monitor with SurroundSound.

Network affiliates need not worry that this new technology is going to siphon viewers off. They're already being pulled away by everything else, of course, from Internet use to DVDs (blissfully free of commercial breaks) to all of the other usual suspects. But this one's not going to fly, unless consumers have a pathological attachment to their TV content that has somehow escaped my notice.

Would I plunk down two bucks for last night's "Lost" if I missed it? Maybe. But it isn't just the $2. It's also the $300 for the device itself. And besides being another significant expense, it also represents a new distraction -- from the road while we're driving, from the clerk at the checkout counter, from our lives in general.

It feels like the day is fast approaching when they'll simply implant a chip in your forehead and you'll be able to watch and listen to whatever you want just by thinking about it. It will be something like schizophrenia, except that the voices in your head will come complete with pictures.

Conventional wisdom tells us that if the technology is there, it will be exploited whether viable or not. This seems to be what's going on with downloadable TV that fits in the palm of your hand. It's not something we need or even asked for, simply another revenue stream for those who can tap it being modestly embraced by those who demand the latest gadget-driven experience.

As for me, my cell doesn't even take still photos. All I ask from my phone is that it make calls. When they create one that'll do the laundry, however, I'm there.

 Filed Under: TECHNOLOGY
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The Internet connects us with people we might otherwise never meet—and may be leaving us lonelier than ever.

By Scott Sleek
Monitor staff

A clergyman discovered the professional benefits of the Internet when he joined an online discussion group with colleagues in his denomination. There, he got advice on subjects for sermons and effective ways to deal with congregants.

But the clergyman also noticed that he was spending less time talking with his wife, whose verbal moral support had once been just as beneficial as—perhaps even more than—the advice he received from his online peers.

Psychologist Robert Kraut, PhD, of Carnegie Mellon University’s Human–Computer Interaction Institute, points to the case of the clergyman—whom he talked to as part of his research on computer use—as an example of the paradoxical role that the Internet has come to play in our lives.

The technology that has allowed people to keep in closer touch with distant family members and friends, to find information quickly and to develop friendships with people from around the world, is also replacing vital day-to-day human interactions. A computer monitor can’t give you a hug or laugh at your jokes. And some psychologists worry that the Internet’s widening popularity will lead to further isolation among a population that, although gravitating toward virtual communities in cyber-space, seems to have lost a genuine sense of belonging and connection.

In fact, Kraut and his colleagues, in a study to be released this month in American Psychologist, report that greater use of the Internet leads to shrinking social support and happiness, and increases in depression and loneliness. The study is the first to look specifically at the impact that Internet use has on general emotional well-being.

And the findings were unexpected, Kraut says, given that most people use the Internet for chat lines and e-mail, not just to isolate themselves in mounds of electronic information.

'We were surprised to find that what is a social technology, unlike the television, has kind of antisocial consequences,' Kraut says.

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Hey everyone - I found a new cool web app called library thing. You should check it out - www.librarything.com. It is a way online to compile, tag, share and explore your book collection and other like yours. It would be cool if we all set it up for ourselves and we could see what books we all have. You can review and recommend as well. Plus you can code your collection into your blog... can we set this up here?

 Filed Under: TECHNOLOGY
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Check out this press release from the Religious News Service: http://www.religionnews.com/press02/PR091205.html Prior to seeing this story I had been reading about the debate on Open Source Biblical Studies. I love seeing the push towards all of these areas. I believe that the area of Biblical studies will be enhanced to the same degree as the other worlds that are being affected by the open source movement... software, general knowledge, social networks. I would love to see an online Bible with full wiki'd tagged commentary.

 Filed Under: BIBLE STUDIES | TECHNOLOGY
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Birth of a Salesman
Google is just the beginning. The Internet is finally reaching its potential as a selling machine. And advertising will never be the same.
FORTUNE
Monday, July 25, 2005
By Daniel Gross

From the moment consumer-products companies started placing ads in mid-19th-century newspapers, mass-media advertising has been about making connections. But while the modern world knits itself ever more closely together, advertising is becoming increasingly disconnected—from its historical base, its business models, and its audiences. Thanks to the Internet, advertising is going through its first true paradigm shift since the advent of television half a century ago. As a result, your average executive in the ad or media business is feeling as lonely and unstable as a 30-foot sailboat with a broken keel foundering in the swells of a Category 2 hurricane. Pass the Dramamine.

Spending commitments for network TV’s fall schedule fell slightly during the recently concluded upfront sales period—for the second year in a row. Sales of magazine ad pages are roughly the same as they were in 1998, even though the economy is some 30% bigger. And so poor is the state of newspaper advertising that the Wall Street Journal—long a reliable profit maker—lost money on an operating basis in the first quarter. But the Internet is expected to attract close to $8 billion from national advertisers this year, still fairly modest but up 15% from 2004. So "offline" media companies are redoubling their online efforts, and Madison Avenue is scrambling to cope. "The traditional creative agencies have absolutely lost their way and their relevance," says Joseph Jaffe, former director of interactive media at TBWA/Chiat/Day and author of Life After the 30-Second Spot. Add it all up, and you have the ingredients for a supersized angst-burger. is advertising dead? wondered the cover of Media magazine in March, self-consciously echoing Time’s 1966 cover is god dead?

Well, it’s not dead yet—the urge to advertise remains an enormous economic force—but it is morphing into forms that patriarchs like David Ogilvy and Leo Burnett would scarcely recognize. Advertisers are spending more than ever. Universal McCann forecaster Robert Coen projects that U.S. advertisers will spend $279 billion this year, up 5.7% from 2004. But much of the growth is occurring far from Madison Avenue. You’ll find it in California, on decidedly unchic Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, headquarters of Google, where it speaks the dorky language of search algorithms and text-based ads embedded in e-mail. You’ll find it at Yahoo in nearby Sunnyvale, where it has begun to speak the silky patois of brand image and high-concept multimedia campaigns. And you’ll find it sooner or later at telecoms like SBC, which are pioneering a form of Internet television that just might save the TV spot. Give it ten years, say the tech gurus, and everything you watch will be high-definition, interactive, and brought to you via the Internet—you’ll love it! But today’s big ad agencies might not. As descendants of the firms that invented modern advertising, they face the buggy-whip-manufacturer problem: the fact that full-on paradigm shifts are rarely kind to incumbents. In this special report, FORTUNE checks out all those trends to help you make a connection to advertising’s bright future. Shades not included.

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Fortune Magazine:

Remembering Netscape: The Birth of the Web
By Adam Lashinsky

Picture a world without Google, without eBay or Amazon or broadband, where few people have even heard of IPOs. That was reality just a decade ago. The company that changed it—bringing us into the Internet age—was a brilliant flash in the pan called Netscape. For the tenth anniversary of its IPO, FORTUNE recruited dozens of players to tell the story of the startup in their own words...

It was the spark that touched off the Internet boom. On Wednesday, Aug. 9, 1995, a 16-month-old Silicon Valley startup called Netscape tried to go public, but demand for the shares was so high that for almost two hours that morning, trading couldn't open. The stock, which had been priced at $28 a share, zoomed as high as $75 that day and closed at $58. Measured against the market frenzies that came later, its rise might have seemed predictable. But it blew the minds of people in the tech world like Sun Microsystems co-founders Andy Bechtolsheim (now back at Sun) and Bill Joy (now a venture capitalist).

Until then, Silicon Valley was just a place where microchips were made, not the fountainhead of global commerce. The public was oblivious to the Internet; "surfing" meant catching a wave in the ocean or mindlessly flicking the TV's remote control.

But Netscape mesmerized investors and captured America's imagination. More than any other company, it set the technological, social, and financial tone of the Internet age. Its founders, Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark—a baby-faced 24-year-old programmer from the Midwest and a restless middle-aged tech pioneer who badly wanted to strike gold again—inspired a generation of entrepreneurs to try to become tech millionaires. Executives with old-economy experience thought they could stake a claim to startup riches by quitting their jobs and following the example of Jim Barksdale, the former McCaw Communications chief who came in as Netscape's CEO. And Netscape's practice of openly sharing technology so that other programmers and their companies could build upon its ideas helped give rise to a global technology community, the open-source movement.

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By Mark Baard

Story location WIRED NEWS: Jul. 14, 2005 PT

Privacy advocate Katherine Albrecht, an opponent of the use of radio tags on consumer goods and in ID documents, is a woman any X-Files fan could love.

She's youthful-looking and attractive, with fair skin and cherry-blonde hair. A former schoolteacher, Albrecht also has a master's degree from Harvard, where she is completing a doctoral degree.

Albrecht is suspicious of the government and big business. She's been an electrifying guest on Coast to Coast AM, the cult radio show featuring talk about aliens, ghosts, conspiracies and cryptozoology.

As director of the consumer privacy group Caspian, Albrecht is a darling of the mainstream news media too. In hundreds of interviews, in a list of publications that includes Business Week and Times of London, she has warned of privacy risks posed by RFID tags, the radio devices that retailers plan to use as a replacement for bar-code labels.

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Blogging While Browsing, but Not Buying

By BOB TEDESCHI

EXT on board the blogging bandwagon: e-tailer.

Online merchants are starting to test Web logs, which are akin to online diaries, in hopes of giving their stores more personality and giving customers a reason to return even when they're not in the mood to buy. But for companies like Bluefly.com, eHobbies, Ice.com and others, blogs are so far afield from typical retail functions that they will take time to master.

 Filed Under: TECHNOLOGY
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Source: tallskinnykiwi
"PODCASTING. I was just thinking how different technologies connect with different denominations and church streams.

2004 - WORDS
Although the emerging church people were well into blogging by 2004, there was a huge upsurge of blog publishing that year which attracted the Reformed folk who love to write and read words. Creating your own RSS feeds and aggregating others was the rage. Blogging became respectable. The PDF file became a stable form of publishing. Technology for layered PDF's with multimedia (including movies) was available but no one in the church really used it.

2005 - SOUNDS
By the end of this year, Podcasting may have won over the Baptists and others who love preaching and sermons. If the podcasting movement goes from word based sermons to music based tracks and experiences, then the Charasmatics might kick in. The emerging PodJockeys might not necessarily be the most famous preachers. Maybe a few conference speakers will sell their "enhanced podcasts" with chapter breaks (now enabled in iTunes 4.9) as audio versions of their books. Or replacements for their books.
Here's an interesting convergence: The DJ's have been adding words to their sounds. Now the Podcasters will be adding music to their audio. Somehow, the two will meet in the middle.

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Geekiness has given way to consumer activism, so the major corporate players are having to learn the weblog game, says James Cherkoff

27 June 2005 Independent News
Imagine a room with tens of thousands of your customers talking about your company and your products. That's one way to think about the blogging community (the blogosphere). The choice for companies is whether they want to be in that room or not. And increasingly, staying out is just too risky.

Weblogs or blogs have been around for some time and are generally regarded as a highly geeky pastime. But in the US they have hit the mainstream. Technorati.com, a respected blog monitor, estimates that the blogosphere is doubling in size about once every five months. Today, the company tracks more than 11.7 million blogs (and 1.2 billion links), double the number of weblogs tracked in October 2004.

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The Power Of Us
People are not only sharing songs and movies -- legally or not -- but also creating content themselves and building sizable audiences. The threat comes from more than the 10 million-plus blogs. Overall, 53 million Americans have contributed material to the Net, from product reviews to eBay ratings, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

The most breathtaking example: Wikipedia. Some 5 million people a month visit the free online encyclopedia, whose more than 1.5 million entries in 200 languages by volunteer experts around the globe outnumber Encyclopedia Britannica's 120,000, with surprisingly high quality. "Our work shows how quickly a traditional proprietary product can be overtaken by an open alternative," says co-founder Jimmy Wales. Unlike Britannica, Wales is not aiming to generate much, if any, revenue. But "that doesn't mean that we won't destroy their business," he notes. Britannica spokesman Tom Panelas says sheer volume of articles isn't a measure of quality and may be overload for most readers and researchers.

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