This is priceless.

While they were fueled in part by a comment in The Wall Street Journal that was attributed to me, they are not an accurate depiction of what we’re currently seeing. In fact, we see some shifts in consumption patterns, with tablet sales being an incremental opportunity. And as we said during our recent earnings call, we believe that computers will remain a very popular gift this holiday because of the very distinct and desirable benefits they offer consumers. That’s why we intend to carry a broad selection of computing products and accessories, to address the demand we anticipate this season.

So, this is, of course, based on Dunn’s comments that the iPad was cannibalizing netbook sales by as much as 50%. First, whatever. Lest we forget that a computer is a computer and a netbook is a crappy computer. You get what you pay for.

The CEO doesn’t come out with a retraction like this without being hounded by stakeholders. Somewhere, down some dark hallway in the darkened executive corridors of Best Buy corporate, a VP of PR ran with hair ablaze to remind the CEO whom he actually serves: the manufacturers who shell their products. You think HP was happy for the press that Best Buy just gave netbooks? Acer? Asus? Not likely.

As a side not, based on my rigorous empirical research, I’m sitting in the audience a WordCamp Portland with about 150 developers. Based on the rough count in the room, seems like it’s broken up one third pen and paper, one third MacBooks and PCs, one third iPads. That feels notable to me.

Apple – iPad – iPad in Business

Apple has posted four new profiles of businesses that have adopted iPad in operations. Obviously these are expertly produced videos once again highlighting the importance of telling the story of how the tech can affect the operation.

I’ve been a long-time fan of GelaSkins as the perfect sort of protection for my iProducts. They give you the perfect stickiness so the damned things don’t fly out of your hands when you use them. Today I received the first batch of shots using my own photos, and they turned out great and delivered faster than I imagined they could. Here’s a quick look at what you get in the envelope.

A Review of Verizon and Google’s Net Neutrality Proposal | Electronic Frontier Foundation

It’s tough not to get myself worked up when I read things like the recent Google-Verizon proposal for a framework around network neutrality. Invariably, it feels like power is amassing to limit freedom, and that tends to cause people to run around like their hair is on fire. Mine included.

The initial emotional response appears to be that Google has been on a long path of selling-out to corporate partners, even though experience may be saying something else. This is a reflection of cognitive dissonance as in general, Google has done good, smart things for this industry. If there’s anyone I’d like to see at the table discussing net neutrality, it’s probably them.

Time will tell. A wise man once said, “I’m not cheap, but I can be bought.”

The EFF has posted their response, and their hair is not yet on fire at this point. That’s a good thing, because it makes the issue far easier to parse. If you haven’t read the full statement, you should. And then you should read Cindy Cohn’s well-though response.

On Monday, Google and Verizon proposed a new legislative framework for net neutrality. Reaction to the proposal has been swift and, for the most part, highly critical. While we agree with many aspects of that criticism, we are interested in the framework’s attempt to grapple with the Trojan Horse problem. The proposed solution: a narrow grant of power to the FCC to enforce neutrality within carefully specified parameters. While this solution is not without its own substantial dangers, we think it deserves to be considered further if Congress decides to legislate.

This has been a thinking vacation. We’re here on our annual pilgrimage to Chautauqua, New York, and the Chautauqua Institution. It’s a place of learning and investigation, teaching and debate. And last week, as it happens, great introspection.

Each week here at Chautauqua is measured in by a different theme. Here’s the description of last week, week 5, the first week of our time here:

Picture This: Photography

In collaboration with Kodak and George Eastman House, this week will celebrate the history of photography, its contribution to and relationship with surrounding culture, its place in the art world, and its reflection of technological innovations that have reshaped the industry. We will meet photographers practicing their craft and SEE this nexus of art, science, culture, biography, and history.

So, that’s the set-up. As a photographer, obviously, I have some interest in this stuff so I was looking forward to getting schooled by these whomever they invited to take the stage.

Publish Your Own Book With WordPress and the Anthologize Plugin

Years ago, living with the brilliant @curtsiffert in California, I got to play with his little pet publishing project Storysprawl. It was a terrific web app for writers to collaboratively build choose your own adventure stories. Some of my most fun writing was on Storysprawl. At one point, I think I even made up some banner ads for it when we were talking about releasing it as a tool for schools and publishers to use it white-labeled for building their own books online and prepping them for publication. No, Storysprawl isn’t live right now. But I hear rumblings that it might be on the way back. Rumble… rumble… rumble…

While the Anthologize plugin for WordPress 3.0 doesn’t appear to do the choose your own adventure thing, it sure does nail the prep-for-publication angle. I haven’t tested it yet, but I think I’ll test it to release my latest novel on my own site. Definitely worth checking out for all you would-be self publishers out there.

Anthologize is a free, open-source, plugin that transforms WordPress 3.0 into a platform for publishing electronic texts. Grab posts from your WordPress blog, import feeds from external sites, or create new content directly within Anthologize. Then outline, order, and edit your work, crafting it into a single volume for export in several formats, including—in this release—PDF, ePUB, TEI.

As an aside, this project comes out of the One Week | One Tool project, which is one of the coolest initiatives going to support smart, open source development for the humanities, critical angle, that.

Generously funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, One Week | One Tool is a unique summer institute, one that aims to teach participants how to build an open source digital tool for humanities scholarship by actually building a tool, from inception to launch, in a week.

AppleInsider | RIM, Nokia respond to Apples “Antennagate” press conference

Clearly, Steve Jobs is pissed. I would be, too. You pour thousands of hours collectively into a project like this and you want people to just use the damned thing, enjoy it, and have it change their lives on some level. That the media has churned up such a storm over this issue has got to be not-a-little-bit frustrating.

Apple’s media materials are always top notch, and what they produced highlighting the antenna design process at Apple, the tour of the inner sanctum of antenna design on campus, meet the standard. They included videos on apple.com and in the conference demonstrating the exact same signal loss on previous generation iPhones, along with phones from Nokia, Blackberry, HTC, and Samsung. Hold the phone in just the right way, signal drops. In fact, as Josh pointed out in the linked piece over at Apple Insider,

In June, Nokia’s official blog poked fun at the iPhone 4 “death grip” issue. The post included a variety of pictures showing a range of grips, encouraging consumers to feel free to hold their Nokia device any way they like without suffering any signal loss.

Users of the site then posted links to videos showing signal loss on several of Nokia’s handsets, as well as instructions from a Nokia manual warning users “to avoid touching the antenna area” and that “contact with antennas affects the communication quality.”

I waxed sarcastically on Twitter that Verizon’s cheeky attitude toward this antenna thing would bite them in the ass. I’m bummed the prediction isn’t wholly accurate in that I didn’t use Nokia as my case point. That would have made me far more prescient. At least someone looks foolish here. It’s never really smart to publish material dragging your competitors through the mud on untested, unconfirmed reports.

Which is why I’m on the fence about Apple doing just that in this case, dragging these other manufacturers into the ring with them on this issue.

As uncharacteristic as it is, I’m not sure they had another choice. This is a PR disaster. It’s a disaster specifically because it’s a nominally interesting story that has been spun out of Apple’s tight control, not because there is any more or less scandal to it. Their response strategy of choice is clearly to soften by deflection — get us all thinking about these other guys so we’re not so focused on the iPhone 4 soft spot.

Apple’s biggest issue in this mess is completely self-created, and it’s not that they created a phone that has a major antenna flaw (we know there’s a flaw, I’m just saying that’s not the biggest problem here). It’s that Steve Jobs stood on stage for the iPhone announcement and choose to point out that the antenna design is legendary, revolutionary, incredible, and then showed the world exactly where the antenna is. The fact that the world media has been so focused on the antenna is a problem of Apple’s own making. Given the tone and timbre of the press conference, it’s clear that Apple knows this. Their own duct tape solution is to give out the bumpers for free. It’s payola for those who bought the phone, love the phone, and want to keep the phone in spite of their problems with connectivity.

The other manufacturers have come out pissed. Rightfully so, but it sure is hard to defend indignation in the face of video evidence. Apple knows this. So does Nokia, RIM, Samsung. Best case result of Antennagate is that we all get the phone of our dreams because of a renewed focus on better, smarter, clearer antennas from all these manufacturers. At least we know from their responses so far that the intent may be there to do it, if only because Apple just made the target in Cupertino that much bigger.

In TechCrunch’s follow up, Arrington makes an ironically apt comparison. Job’s coming on stage to give all this data of the reality of the ecosystem, that 30-day returns at AT&T is about 1.7% — down from 6% for the iPhone 3GS, is akin to Facebook execs coming out to talk about how people really aren’t jumping off the service as a result of Facebook Privacygate 2009-10. But for all those affected — punditry, gadget hounds, privacy advocates, the works — those affected are not likely to change their opinions based on reported data from the company. People who feel betrayed by Facebook will not come back to the service as a result of a press conference. And folks like Arrington will continue to be as venomous as ever of the iPhone.

Anandtech has been leading the charge with data-driven coverage of this whole mess. After the iPhone iOS 4.0.1 update which mixed up all the bar data display across iPhones, they posted some terrific graphs which compare the dBm mapping to bars displayed to cover just what has changed on the phone and how it will help to convey more clearly what level of coverage you might be able to expect in a certain area.

So then, as long as Apple is trotting out the dog and pony show about their antenna labs, where was this data from them? If Anandtech is able to produce such terrific analysis as an external party, it seems only natural to have even greater expectations of Apple. Just because the Blackberry or Nokia drops two bars has no effective comparison to the iPhone dropping two bars without those dBm comparables — they’re just bars, tiny pixels that (as far as I understand it) have little relation to actual connectivity at all. On TWiT 255, Jerry Pournelle and Spencer Webb remind us that on digital phones, bars mean little; that a more effective indicator would be a lightbulb. If it’s on, you have signal. If it’s off, you don’t.

[UPDATE: Dammit. Gruber and Aaron Swartz beat me to this little bit of wisdom. I hate being late to the party.]

I got my iPhone 4 the day before it launched. I’ve dropped one call. I was talking to my dad, and driving through an area at the top of Sylvan Hill on highway 26 in Portland. With my iPhone 3Gs, I’d drop calls there every single day. With the iPhone 4, I’ve dropped only one, in spite of regular use in that area. Other than that, the phone has absolutely out-performed all my previous iPhones. I have a bumper, but I rarely use it. Yes, I’ll likely go get the refund Apple is offering for it, just cause, you know, 30 bucks.

Still, my impression here is not that Apple has perpetrated some kind of crime on consumers. I really do believe that Apple is learning as they go along based on data they’re collecting in real time. This is a monster of their own creation and is more a result of the death grip they have on their own communications, testing, and public relations policies than anything else. It’s a trade-off, and if you’re going to build policy around secrecy, this is the no-win scenario you have to be willing to confront. Kobayashi Maru, indeed.

Here’s a quick snap of the front of a postcard I did for a client this year. It’s to announce their participation at the National Association of College and University Business Officers conference in San Francisco this month.

Just a quick bit of commentary on this one that I found interesting. When I first stumbled on the tree image on iStockphoto, I was really moved. There’s something about the life that is communicated through such a stark bifurcation of the tree that hit home for me. Seems only a little trite to apply such a cool image to a tradeshow postcard, but it works.

In any case, we got our first bit of direct feedback on the card from a recipient on the mailing list. The list is made up of college and university business officers — predictably, I guess — and this particular respondent’s title is “Vice President for Business & Finance/Treasurer” for a major east coast university. The line that struck me from his response:

The half-dead tree is a rather graphic thought-provoking device and illustrative.

The original of the image has the tree dying from left to right. I flipped it because I thought the metaphor worked better simulating growth rather than death over a simulated left-right timeline. I wanted folks who looked at it to see that transformation, that growth.

There’s this concept that never fails to flip me. When creating a piece, you want your reader to either feel the pain, or see the hope. In this case, we were shooting for hope. The response illustrates that we may have hit the pain more squarely.

How to Install Adobe Flash V10.1 with VoiceOver– The Mac-cessibility Network – News [Lioncourt.com]

Last week, Adobe released version 10.1 of their Flash player plugin for both the Mac and Windows operating systems, which included a large number of security fixes. Much to the frustration of visually impaired users, the installer application, which had previously been accessible, was rendered inaccessible with screen readers on both operating systems. This, of course, means that many visually impaired users are stuck using an older version of the plugin, along with all its known vulnerabilities.

I can’t pretend to know what’s going on with Adobe that they’re so tied to this installer monkey business. The accessibility issue above is just one symptom of larger trouble that serves to confuse those of us who — admittedly — think maybe-too-deeply about this stuff. Nonetheless, this is puzzling.

When you download an installer from Adobe, you get this fancy, flashy wrapper that comes up, and then calls the real installer which is buried in the thing you just downloaded. That hidden, real installer is everything you need to install the software on your Mac. Everything else is just cruft.

Think of it this way. The buried installer is the bar of soap you will use to wash yourself. The primary Adobe installer is the sock in which you will place the bar of soap so that you may more effectively beat yourself with it.

Pegatron lands Acer notebook orders for 2011

Even the rumor of a CDMA phone in 2010 is going to piss people off. Q4 isn’t that far away, and with all the fervor over iPhone 4 sales this week — and all those freshly-minted 2-year AT&T contracts — that there’s even a remote chance for a Verizon CDMA iPhone on the heels of launch will spark that good, old fashioned spirit of entitlement all over again. Get ready to let yourselves feel all wonky and let down by the man, people.

Still, this is a bit of old news. Apple’s put an awful lot of weight behind GSM and to go to Verizon with essentially a custom phone seems oddly uncharacteristic of their behavior in the market.

There’s that, plus DigiTimes’ loose relationship with accuracy, too.

Pegatron will also start shipping a CDMA version of the iPhone 4 to Apple in the fourth quarter and is currently using its plants in Shanghai, China to produce the products, the sources noted.

The Legendary Tales of Old Uncle Scrubby

“… It’s also brought to you by this book. ‘Success’. If you want to have any success, you should read it. … Looks like a good one.”

There’s just nothing that’s not funny about Uncle Scrubby.

Wonderfully clever little tool here, this Google Search Story Creator. What’s a search story? It’s the story of your business as told through Google’s search results. Simply enter search terms that are representative of your business or brand online and Google will craft a clever little commercial for you.

Whether it was a lifelong talent, a desire to be your own boss, or a great idea at 2 a.m. that kick-started your business, there’s a Search Story about your journey just waiting to be told. And with just five minutes, a keyboard and a mouse, you can create a video of your own!

They do a handy bit of lobbying in the email announcing the Search Story Creator:

In 2009, Google generated $54B in economic activity in the United States – one business at a time. See how Google helped small businesses in your state at www.google.com/economicimpact.

In looking at the Oregon economic impact, I see that “Google generated $512 million of economic activity for 29,000 Oregon businesses, website publishers and non-profits in 2009.” Even better, the map linked me to this profile, highlighting Clive Coffee in Portland through a Google Doc whitepaper. This is a terrific use of absolutely free tools to get your stories out there into the broader web. From a data-enabled Google Map to a PDF in Google Docs, this company has done more to integrate small business communication tools for the masses for free than any other I can think of. If you’re not taking advantage of all the ways you can tell your story in this space, find someone who can help you do it.

It serves as a funny reminder, if you stand back a bit, that so much of the story of our existence on the web is inextricably linked to Google’s presentation of that story. Yes, it’s a wide open web. But if your place in the wide open web doesn’t exist in the Google sphere, you’re not really taking part in the discussion, are you?

Think about that. In the meantime, here’s my search story. Took me about three minutes.

Mark Zuckerberg – From Facebook, answering privacy concerns with new settings

Speaking up for the first time since f8 on the privacy mess.

Simply put, many of you thought our controls were too complex. Our intention was to give you lots of granular controls; but that may not have been what many of you wanted. We just missed the mark.

Facebook and Others Caught Sending User Data to Advertisers

Wow. Tough to say you really care about user privacy when you’re handing really private data over to advertisers. As an advertiser? I don’t even want this kind of information.

The Journal found that Facebook went farther than most in sharing identifiable data, by sending the username of the person clicking the ad as well as the username of the profile they were viewing at the time. This news could hardly come at a worse time for Facebook, a company that currently faces a privacy backlash potent enough to make the cover of Time Magazine this month.