Archives » Wednesday, December 17, 2008
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N'Gai Croal
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Dec 17, 2008 09:35 AM
- SAYONARA: We don't need no stinkin' Macworld, says Apple,
which revealed yesterday that a) Steve Jobs would not be delivering the
keynote at the January 2009 conference (senior vice president Phil
Schiller will, um, fill in); and b) Apple would no longer be
participating in Macworld following that event. And if Valleywag's Owen
Thomas is correct, the way the news came to light was interesting.
He says: "When [BusinessWeek's Arik] Hesseldahl published a story on
Monday with the headline 'Steve Jobs Will Be at Macworld,' all hell
broke loose. Kent called back, saying he meant that the show would go
forward, not that Jobs was a sure thing. Hesseldahl changed 'will' to
'may' in his headline and updated the story--but Kent's PR firm kept
calling to backpedal. The story spread, and the drumbeat of speculation
grew ever louder. Then, late Tuesday, came Apple's announcement that
Jobs would not deliver the keynote address at Macworld, a tradition
he's maintained since he returned to the company a decade ago." Oh, and
one more thing: The cover story was plausible enough: Trade shows were
an outdated way to sell Macs and iPhones. But Apple investors didn't
buy it, sending the stock down in after-hours trading."
- IPTV: Phone giant AT&T crosses a major threshold with
its U-Verse online television service: 1 million subscribers across 79
major markets in 16 states. Writes Ars Technica's Nate Anderson:
"The numbers remain below those of competitors like Verizon, and much
further below those of cable companies like Comcast. But getting to a
million subscribers for AT&T is a remarkable achievement given its
use of new technology (it's the only true IPTV operator among the big
US players), the regulatory and legal climate (the company got state
laws changed across the country), and the fact that's it's all
happening through DSL on twisted-pair copper wiring over which AT&T
continues to sell Internet and phone access."
- SERVED: If you've got legal woes, you may want to consider ditching your Facebook account, in Australia, anyway. As Canberra Times legal affairs reporter Noel Towell writes of a couple that had defaulted on its mortgage,
"[A]fter 11 failed attempts to find the couple at their Wyselaskie
Circuit home between November 8 and December 6, the lawyers tried a
change of tack. Lawyers Mark McCormack and Jason Oliver convinced the
court the Facebook profiles for the defendants were those of Ms Corbo
and Mr Poyser. 'The Facebook profiles showed the defendants' dates of
birth, email addresses and friend lists and the co-defendants were
friends with one another,'' a spokesman for the firm said. This
information was enough to satisfy the court that Facebook was a
sufficient method of communicating with the defendants." Gives a whole
new meaning to the relationship status "It's Complicated."
- WEEZY: Can Lil' Wayne (and Merge Records and Kid Rock) save journalism in the Internet era? That's the argument being made by Alissa Quart in the Columbia Journalism Review.
Quart says, "The first thing that writers might copy from
musicians—even more than they do already—could be called the Free
Culture Method. In music, one prong of that is mixtape giveaways.
Despite recent miseries in the music business, Lil Wayne, the
rap artist, sold more copies of his CD in one week than anyone this
year, having built an audience by sending free mixtapes into the ether.
Mixtapes, at least these days, are pressed CDs or downloads containing
demos or raw mixes of tracks, as well as collaborations. Lil Wayne’s
mixtape method is the musical equivalent of writers who give away
original material on their blogs, writers like Alan Sepinwall,
otherwise just another television reviewer at a mid-size metro—The
Star-Ledger in Newark. Sepinwall writes an elaborate, trenchant, and
heavily commented-upon blog (check out his 2,023-word analysis of the
television show Mad Men’s 'Maidenform' episode) in addition to his
print column, and the blog has extended his reach. Or consider Andrew
Revkin’s sharp New York Times blog and vlog on global warming, through
which Revkin made himself a brand."
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