A week after the Senate voted to extend until June 12th the date for TV stations to switch their broadcast signals from analog to digital, Congress yesterday followed suit. Even though broadcasters have said that they were prepared to make the switch on the previously mandated February 17th, lawmakers and consumer advocates have argued that citizens need more time to figure out which set-top boxes they'll need to ensure that they can keep watching their shows.

That sounds reasonable in theory. But in practice, the way that this delay has been structured could make this transition more confusing than it would otherwise have been. According to the Los Angeles Times:

TV stations will be allowed to seek a federal waiver to turn off their analog signals before the new deadline. So instead of nearly all broadcasters making the switch Feb. 17, stations now may do so at different times over the next four months....Several broadcasters have already stated their intention to make the switch Feb. 17, regardless of whether Congress moves the date.

Some stations will maintain their analog signals for a while; others won't. Some will switch early--in fact, 143 of the nation's 1800 stations have already gone all-digital--others will wait. All of this will only serve to befuddle TV watchers and frustrate TV stations, some of which are now facing added costs to maintain their analog signal for another four months. Only time will tell whether the cure was worse than the disease.

Google Book Search is no longer tethered to the PC. Earlier today, Google announced that its service, which provides free access to scans of public domain books, would immediately be available to users of iPhones and Android mobile phones. I tested it on my 3G iPhone by pointing my browser to http://books.google.com/m, where I perused William Shakespeare's play "Titus Andronicus" and Victor Hugo's novel "The Hunchback of Notre Dame."

As one would expect of Google, the service is quick and responsive. There's a dialog box that lets you search for new books, links to books that you've recently viewed; a short list of featured books; and a list of categories ranging from Adventure to Travel. Once you've made a selection, you'll be dropped into the start of the book. Each Web page contains 10 or so scanned pages' worth of text; you can advance Web page by Web page, or navigate via a table of contents. You can even click on individual paragraphs to load in the original scanned image of that paragraph.

Even so, Google Book Search mobile isn't perfect. It would have been nice if Google had reformatted the text to better suit the iPhone screen's dimensions. Or let me change the size of the fonts. Or download the entire text for offline reading. Nevertheless, it's a nice first step, and I'm curious to see what Google will do next with it.

I was a late convert to Facebook, the social-networking site that turned five years old Wednesday. I joined about a year ago at age 47, swept up in the massive wave of people turning the corner to the back nine of life, and pitifully trying to do what comes so naturally to our sons and daughters. My own 16-year-old, Grace, literally cried from embarrassment when I told her I was signing up, and she begged me through her tears not to do it. When it was clear that I was serious, she made me promise never to "friend" her. Since I didn't know what that meant at the time, I agreed. Last week I redeemed myself in her eyes, because I signed off of Facebook forever--or at least until Tuesday.

I had one of those Hallmark movie moments. I was sitting here at work thinking up my next pithy "status update," which is where you broadcast to all your online buddies in a few words what you're up to at that very moment--and finally came to my senses. "What the hell have I become?" I cried.

So goodbye 157 Facebook friends, 75 of whom I wouldn't recognize if I saw you on the street. Goodbye super nifty "Pieces of Flair" application, and the 1,332,359 members of the "I Don't Care How Comfortable Crocs Are, You Look Like a Dumbass" Crocs-hater group. Goodbye, William and Mary alums I barely remember from 25 years ago. Not you, Tom, the other Tom. Hello to actually working at my job again. Well, a little anyway. I wouldn't have been able to write this story about quitting Facebook if I didn't quit Facebook because I wouldn't have had the time.

READ THE FULL STORY HERE.

1. They're annoying.

2. They're really annoying.

3. I'm referring, of course, to "25 Random Things About Me" -- those self-cataloguing Facebook notes that everyone is clogging up my News Feed with.

4. If you've been mystified to see yourself tagged in one of these notes, then you know the rules.

5. "Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you."

6. They're spreading virally, a cross between chain letters and HPV.

7. At least a dozen, probably more, have slid down my News Feed in recent days.

8. They recall earlier Facebook irritants like the "If 100,000 People Join This Group, Then _____" groups, which promised payoffs like "...My Girlfriend Will Have A Threesome" and "...My Wife Will Let Me Name Our Child Spiderpig" and "I'll Eat Every McDonald's Value Meal #1-12."

9. None of those things ever happened.

10. "25 Things" is uniquely pesty, combining navel-gazing with obligation.

"Google is an avalanche and it has only just begun to tumble down the mountain," Jeff Jarvis writes in "What Would Google Do?", a new book that advises pretty much everyone -- you, your company, entire industries, the U.S. government -- to study and ape the online juggernaut, or risk getting buried.

The Unofficial Apple Weblog is a great place to stay absolutely current on absolutely everything about Apple -- if you can put up with a bit of cheerleading, that is. Only occasionally do the site's bloggers acknowledge the shortcomings of anything coming out of Cupertino. (Posts like this one, on Steve Jobs's health, are more often the case, and I just prefer my news to err on the side of skepticism.)

That tendency makes one of today's posts, "MobileMe Renewal: Yes or No?" all the more remarkable. It's a frank list of pros and cons about Apple's cloud computing service, similar to a recent item of mine. When even the true believers at TUAW start to waver, you know the product in question really is spotty.

I emailed Dave Caolo, one of the lead TUAW bloggers, for his thoughts. He writes:

What is the opposite of an ad campaign? Thanks to Microsoft, I think we've found out.

Ads, of course, are meant to encourage people to buy or use stuff. That's Microsoft was hoping when it released a video touting SongSmith, a software program that creates a whole song around your original vocal track. It's a cool concept -- but the ad was so lame, it drew a deluge of attention for all the wrong reasons. In addition to being cringeworthy, the commercial also made it clear that Songsmith just doesn't work all that well. It spits out mostly cornball Muzak, hardly the stuff Microsoft needs to close the coolness gap with Apple.

This weekend, my colleague N'Gai Croal forwarded me a list of "Songsmith remixes" that have cropped up on YouTube. From Britney Spears to Nirvana, seminal hits have been fed through Songsmith to hilariously awful result. (Although one -- a rendition of Li'l Wayne's "Lollipop" that turns the oral sex anthem into a piano ballad -- is actually kind of hypnotic. College a cappella groups, take note.) You can find a bunch of them here.

One ad that drew parody was bad enough. Now Microsoft is suffering a whole series of derisive videos -- an entire bizarro ad campaign, uncontrollable and spreading. Its unmistakable pitch: Songsmith is junk, and Microsoft is tone-deaf.

Microsoft has shown real verve with its "Project Experiment" advertising, which is attitudinous and convincing, and early reviews of Windows 7 are promising. The company should get out in front of this Songsmith fiasco prestissimo.

What do dumpsters, frisbees, and teleprompters have in common?

They're all products that are victims of their own success. They do what they do so well, becoming synonymous with a certain practice, that people forget their names are trademarked and use them interchangeably with their rivals. This brand leakage means that for a lot of people, any kind of tissue is "kleenex," and Canon makes great "xerox machines." I can recall 3M's plaintive advertising in the Columbia Journalism Review several years ago, politely reminding copy editors that "Post-It" needs to be capitalized.

Now the same thing is happening to BlackBerry. I got confused today after reading multiple articles and blog items with the same basic headline, "Obama Keeps His BlackBerry," followed by examinations of the device that the new president will reportedly use, a Sectera Edge. Which, you'll notice, is not a BlackBerry. It's manufactured by General Dynamics, not RIM, and it runs a version of Windows Mobile, not the BlackBerry OS.

RIM has reaped great p.r. during President Obama's public 'Berry battle -- between $25 and $50 million worth, according to some guesses. Some fraction of that will be lost if the takeaway message for consumers is that the president needs a smartphone, any smartphone, and not necessarily a BlackBerry.

There is some solace: at $3,350 a pop, the Sectera Edge probably isn't going to take away much market share.

By Dina Fine Maron

Trying to bring the Roman Catholic Church to the kids, the Vatican launched its own YouTube channel today, following the lead of other global figures such as Barack Obama and Queen Elizabeth II who have successfully employed the video sharing technology to get their message out on the cheap (actually, free of charge.) Pope Benedict XVI’s page highlights the Church’s effort to tap into their youth base with footage and audio of the Holy Father. The Pope explained in one of his first YouTube videos that launching the site was an effort to be available in “those spaces where numerous young people search for answers and meaning in their lives”

The Pope made a first foray into the youth digital sphere when he (or his office, anyway) texted thousands of young Catholics on their mobile phones during World Youth Day events in Sydney this past summer.

Bu the Church started making official YouTube appearances in 2007, when Cardinal Justin Rigali, the Archbishop of Philadelphia, made a video offering gospel reflections for Lent. There was so much traffic to his video that within a week his first video was rated #5  in one of YouTube’s subcategories. The success with that video inspired the Philadelphia Archdiocese to inaugurate its own channel which is now sporadically updated with video content.

Signaling change in how the Vatican thinks it can reach the public, the new interactive Vatican Channel will update daily with content from the Vatican’s television and radio channels. It offers news in four languages, and allows users to comment, share videos with friends, and even directly contact the Pope’s office (though there is no promise on what the response rate might be.). In March the Archbishop of Washington, D.C. plans to post his own YouTube video, inviting youth to come back to the Church for lent, and depending on the traffic, might opt to create its own channel as well.

Morbid news from TV land--the big network news operations have started working on their obits for Apple CEO Steve Jobs. They’re shooting interviews now so that they’ll have their stories ready to go, if or when the bad news hits. You can’t blame them for trying to be prepared. But it does say something about Apple’s credibility on this issue. The company insists Jobs is simply taking a six-month medical leave, and will be back in June. Then again, until last week, the company was insisting that that Jobs was fine, even when it was apparent that he was not.

Earlier this month Jobs published an open letter claiming he was suffering from a “hormone imbalance” that was “relatively simple and straightforward.” Nine days later, however, Jobs said his condition was more complex than he’d originally thought and he would be taking a leave of absence.

The matter reportedly has prompted the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate whether Apple misled investors about Jobs’s health. Apple’s stock has bounced up and down for months as different reports have surfaced about Jobs. Last June he appeared on stage looking frail and gaunt, which aroused fears that Jobs might have suffered a recurrence of pancreatic cancer, for which he underwent surgery in 2004.

In December, after a blog called Gizmodo reported Jobs’s health was “rapidly declining,” a reporter from CNBC claimed sources at Apple had told him Jobs was fine--and Apple shares jumped on the news. Who were those people at Apple claiming Jobs was fine? The SEC may want to know.

 Walt Disney Pictures' "Bolt"

For those early adopters and PlayStation fanboys who believed that Blu-Ray would triumph over HD-DVD, the spoils of that format war are starting to come your way--sort of. According to Blu-Ray.com, Disney has announced that last year's computer-animated movie 'Bolt" will arrive on Blu-Ray on March 22nd, two entire days before it comes out on DVD. That's not a whole lot of difference, but it does suggest that studios are looking for low-impact ways to maximize the share of their home video revenues that come from higher-priced Blu-Ray discs. If videophiles cruise store aisles on a Sunday afternoon and only see the Blu-Ray version, they might be more inclined to pick it up immediately rather than wait two more days for its cheaper DVD counterpart. Sneaky, Disney. Sneaky.

 The Canadian flag as seen through a microsocope. Photo courtesy of wisforworlddomination.

It's no secret that certain Internet service providers have made a practice of 'throttling' broadband access--reducing the bandwith available to heavy users, especially during periods. What's often more challenging to figure out is which ISPs are doing this and when. That's because the negative PR associated with throttling makes many ISPs reluctant to disclose such activities.

 A link to photos of the new First Family mistakenly leads to a gallery of Presidential pets

Change certainly came to Washington Tuesday, but change.gov did not. President Obama's former transition Web site is now defunct, with a note sending visitors to whitehouse.gov. The official presidential Web address relaunched as a shiny social-media hub at 12:01 p.m.—even before Obama took his delayed oath into office.

Immediately, the twitterati and tumblr set were abuzz over the site, noting how similar it looked to the campaign's previous sites (with its twilight blue background, Gotham font and a YouTube video highlighting the president-elect's train journey this past weekend) and marveling at the new chief executive's continued technological prowess. But it's worth wondering how many of these observers had ever actually looked at President Bush's site. It also had news updates (much like the blog on Obama's White House site), an "Interactive White House," a newsroom-like "Setting the Record Straight" feature, and slideshows—and oh yes, that famous Barney cam.

So the real difference is that the new site glosses with the buzzwords of social media and pristine politics: transparency! Participation! RSS feed! All these look good on paper (or, in this case, on screen) but delivering on the many promises won't be easy—making the Web site a near-perfect metaphor for the entire Obama presidency. The premier blog post, written by the director of new media, Macon Phillips, introduces a framework full of features, few of which are ready to use. Things that do work, like the slideshows, are rife with bugs. Early Tuesday evening, Obama's new site still referred to him as the president-elect in some places, and a link to a gallery of first families shows you pictures of presidential pets. "[Phillips's] first message was just about openness," says Rex Sorgatz, an online media consultant who runs fimoculous.com. "But you can't just crack open a wiki and say, 'Go at it.' Even forums or comments won't produce anything meaningful. You need to have a filter in order for productive discussions to rise to the top."

READ THE FULL STORY HERE.

 A purported image of visual voice mail on the BlackBerry Bold. Photo courtesy Boy Genius Report.

If the folks at Boy Genius Report are correct, it would appear that sometime this year, visual voicemail will be coming to users of the BlackBerry Bold on AT&T's wireless network.As one of the signature features of the iPhone since its debut--it allows you to select and play back individual voice messages rather than forward through your entire list of voice mails--it's a welcome addition to non-iPhone gadgets like the Bold. The only reason that I'm not more ecstatic is that I have a BlackBerry Pearl, with no intentions to surrender the diminutive device anytime soon. So if anyone from AT&T and RIM is listening, don't forget about us Pearl users. We like up-to-date features too.