It’s frustrating being a part-time blogger.

It happens again and again - I get interested in a bit of news, I think to myself “I should write something on that”, I make a few notes, and I plan to get back to it in a day or two when I’m less busy.  Meanwhile, though, the story continues to evolve, and one of two things happen:

• What I intended to write actually pans out (in which case  my remarkably insightful observations come off reading more like “I knew that would happen…” than the pearls of digitalmissive wisdom they could have been)

…or…

• What I intended to write turns out to be exactly wrong (in which case I guess I’m lucky to have not gotten around to writing anything in the first place).

Such is the case with the iPad.

We first reported on the device over a year ago (here) - but since the device has become a reality, we haven’t had the the time to keep up (other than to make a quick observation on how the launch-day twitterati predicted how short-lived the immediate bump in Apple’s stock price would be here).

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San Fransisco’s  somafm.com (along with Jersey City’s own WMFU) is one of our favorite internet radio destinations.

Both offer consistently good (although quite different) music - but during Space Shuttle missions, somafm also streams “Mission Control” a mashup of the live NASA communications feed mixed over ambient electronic music.   The effect is  remarkable - minutes of ambient music will go by, and suddenly some mundane communication between the shuttle and Nasa will occur, rendered somehow strangely poignant by the underlying music.

The classic argument against space exploration - that there are more than enough problems down here on Earth to invest in fixing first - has sadly never seemed more compelling.  The topic was brought into focus again this week by the Obama administration’s call to increase NASA funding while switching the focus away from moon trips and towards longer-term technologies that could make a Mars expedition a possibility in our lifetimes.

Not surprisingly, this has since become the political argument/outrage of the week rather than the scientific discussion it probably should be - meanwhile, somafm’s “Mission Control” remains a great example of the kind of innovative niche programming the “long-tail” of the internet makes possible - and an interesting blurring of the lines between art and  science.

For those of you who are interested, tune in Monday morning May 19th, as Discovery is scheduled to reenter the Earth’s atmosphere at 7:43 AM EDT…

Ground control to Major Tom - it’s now official, Planet Earth has found a new religion.

First the iPod. Then the iPod Touch. Next, the iPhone. And now, voila, in comes the iPad! At least throughout the Western hemisphere, the iGospel seems to have taken solid hold.

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I used to write a fair amount of music for television commercials.  It was interesting to have a glimpse into the workings of the advertising industry for a few years, even from the ‘gun-for-hire’ sidelines - for example, I was once called back in to do some minor revisions on a previously approved music track for an aerosol carpet deodorizer because of last-minute changes required by legal at the ad agency.

In this particular commercial, the product’s effectiveness was illustrated by an ‘odor-smelling wand’ prop waved over 2 pieces of carpet recently sat upon by the family dog - one carpet treated with our deodorizer, one with theirs.  After the post production was complete, though, it was discovered that the number of (fake) beeps coming from the prop didn’t accurately match the (real) numbers coming from the underlying focus group testing - so the spot had to be reedited with the correct  ratio of fake beeps  - hence my (and the voice-over talent’s) call-back.

Such is the attention paid to potential litigation arising from directly comparative advertising…

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I remember moving to the U.S. in 1993 exactly because it appeared to be a country certain the glass was half full. Fast forward, 17 years later, things seemed to have changed along the way – it is as if a growing lack of self confidence started replacing this country’s long-held trust in the power of risk-taking and go-getter success.

Where am I going with this you ask?

No, I won’t discuss the state of national health care here. Nor is this the place to ponder over where exactly US education stands, or whether immigration reform is getting a fair shake.

But the telco guy in me can’t help but notice — even broadband is getting the evil eye these days.
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I got a mass email from one of my city council members the other day.

Where I live, there’s a pretty good chance that any news coming from city hall could have something to do with the latest mass FBI indictments, city officials arrested for being drunk and disorderly, or 25% property tax increases - but this email instead concerned one of our more forward-thinking council person’s plans to apply on behalf of the city to take part in Google’s experimental 1 gigabit fiber-to-the-home network trial program.

1 Gbps internet access - imagine web apps running as crisply as locally-installed desktop applications, HD video streaming at lower compression rates, 30 frame-per-second Skype video calls, and lastly, as computing cycles move from the CPU on your desktop (or your lap) up into the cloud, ever-thinner operating systems.

And that’s where Google comes in.  You may not have heard much about Chrome OS yet, but you will soon.

Because Google has …A Plan.

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Received my cell phone email bill the other day.  I never go over my voice/text limits and I have an unlimited data plan - so unless I’m traveling, my cell phone charges tend to be very consistent.  I couldn’t help but notice, though, that this bill was $10 higher than usual.  While I’m no fan of AT&T’s network quality (more on that here), I’ve found them to be pretty on top of things, billing-wise - so I was a little surprised.

Off to their website I went, looking for whatever annoying new fee, tax, or disputed charge that was surely there waiting for me - with that familiar old feeling of cell-phone-company-fear-and-loathing already coming on, I logged on to my account….

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Here in the west, innovation and individual expression is such an ingrained ideal that it’s sometimes easy to take it for granted. Not so in Asia, where the imitation of (and often, let’s face it, the improvement upon) successful products is the sincerest form of flattery.

This is especially true when it comes to popular culture and technology.  Twitter has been so phenomenally successful that it’s now arguably equal parts both - so it’s worth taking a look at a few of the Asian clones out there.

The first thing one notices is that most of the knockoffs use the same shade of turquoise blue and the same style of font used in the original.  Again, to western eyes, the choice to copy the graphic design so closely might seem somewhat shameless, almost to the point of adding insult to injury - yet it’s just another example of the Asian mindset.

Intellectual property and copyright issues notwithstanding, the lack of ego that makes these near-exact replicas of Twitter possible is somewhat refreshing - and  sites like digu (below) demonstrate that they’re certainly keeping up with us over there - this Chinese Twitter clone features a Google Maps-powered mashup that pops up real-time geo-located balloons of posts as they occur - just like similar western sites such as twittervision.

It’s an increasingly interesting dynamic, this difference between the East and the West.

It’ll be interesting to see what digu does for an interface in the event Google does in fact pull out of the country….

Avid digitalmissive readers know, I have long considered the New York subway my prefered ad-hoc “test tube”, to get a read on the adoption status of the latest available digital devices and services. Turns out, when it comes to eReaders, I am really not seeing much excitement among my fellow straphangers these days.

Apart from the occasional Amazon Kindle, Big Apple subway riders don’t seem overly attracted (yet!) to the burgeoning world of portable electronic book and magazine devices.

How come?

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…maybe not.   But we’re going to write one anyway - because we feel there are still at least two interesting things left to say about the new Apple device unveiled last Wednesday:

Point #1. Technically, the new Apple new iPad device was disappointing on several levels (still no Flash support, still no multitasking, still no video partnerships, still no AT&T alternative).  But while the storm of negative Twitter reaction had already begun while while Steve Jobs was still on the stage, it was not until the next day that the negative reaction was reflected in the stock price.  Take a look at the chart to your left - the iPad event started at 2:00 Eastern Standard Time and was accompanied by a clear immediate spike in Apple’s share price, due as much to the sheer momentum of pre-event buzz as to superficial (”isn’t Apple the coolest?”) mainstream media coverage of the event itself.  Despite an army of bloggers and tweeters continuing to bash the iPad for its disappointing feature set throughout the day, the price remained elevated - in fact, it was not until the market open on the next day (Thursday January 28th) that the stock suddenly pulled back, ending up lower than it was pre-announcement (with knowledge of the twitter traffic, shorting Apple at about 4:00 that afternoon would have been a good move).

To me, this lag time between the (misguided) initial spike and the next day’s eventual retreat represents the disconnect that still exists between the technorati and investor classes.  That there was such a disconnect even in this case was surprising, though - because Twitter coverage of the event was fueled by an unprecedented number of tech websites serving live video streams of the event (surely a record for a product launch).  Potentially, it’s one powerful symbiotic relationship: the reach of internet video combined with the immediacy of Twitter- yet still, it took a day for the widespread disappointment in the iPad to register in Apple’s share price.

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