I think it’s fair to say that Amazon is a bellwether for things to come in the swirl of holiday purchases. This year’s announcement that the company fulfilled more ebook sales than paper book sales seems like an appropriately big deal, even if it’s guaranteed to give my mother-in-law palpitations.

Likely the biggest culprit at Amazon is the Kindle, and while we don’t know how many were actually sold this year, Amazon says it was the highest-selling product in the company’s history. It beat the iPod touch — historically top-seller around the holidays. This is all well and good, but remember that Amazon is the only place you can buy the Kindle; clearly not the case with the iPod, or any other top sellers at Amazon.

Still, according to this, if you’re not reading an ebook now, you will be soon. Prepare for the robot uprising, people.

I was a skinny kid. Through elementary school and middle school, I was the tallest in class, and the scrawniest. I wasn’t very athletic, and dealt with some gross motor coordination issues that kept me from being anything terribly graceful. When I was 11, my dad brought home our first computer, and Apple II in 1983. When I was 13, EA released Bard’s Tale I: Tales of the Unknown. I was 11 when I discovered computers. I was 13 when I fell in love with technology.

And, since I wasn’t naturally good at moving around, and had some internal spark of talent at the keyboard, that’s where I stayed. I was, by in large, sedentary through highschool, unless by act of grade hijack. Luckily, my metabolism was on my side, and I managed to stay the skinny kid through college. When I got married, at 26, I was still at my fighting weight of 190.

All this is coming back to me tonight because of Alex Fuka. Alex married Lily, a good friend and client, less than six months ago. Alex is the love of Lily’s life; they have been blessedly perfect for one another.

A few hours ago, Alex suffered a massive heart attack and died while out walking in the cool afternoon air.

And tonight, my friend Lily is alone. She’s surrounded by family, her daughter, her friends, her chaplain, but she is alone. When she started today, she was of a pair. This evening, she is deserted.

As much as I could try to post something pithy, some link to a fabulous new tool, all that seems to matter today is this cold reminder that I — that all of us — need to take better care. As technologists, we need to move more, eat less, and stay strong.

I don’t know the details yet about Alex’s condition that lead to his heart attack, but I know mine. I’m no longer at my fighting weight. And I’m still not very graceful in dancing shoes. But every day that passes the stakes on my health go up just a little bit.

So tonight, I offer this bit of grist for the mill, since it’s where my heart and head will be: hug your loved ones, and may your rest tonight be sound. And as your days fill with business, step back and muse carefully on the things that matter more.

The great thing about the vast majority of musicians is that they are at the same time gracious and generous people, and hungry for attention. That means, if you point a microphone at them and turn on a little red light, by-in-large, they start singing.

So it was when Curt and I started Acoustic Conversations a few years back. The first show was a convoluted mix of stunning flamenco riffs lovingly gifted to us by our good friend John Carlson and poorly mic’d wannabe talk radio. Still, that conversation sparked something cool, and posted a stitch in time that leads to today, the last show of our second season, and our newest addition to the family, James Jeffrey-West.

James is a stunningly warm person. I say that as a point of contrast, I think. He’s a contrast to jokers who try to own a room with ego and pomp; he’s a contrast to yahoos who enter a room with jokester hippery; he’s a contrast to crooners who slide into a room with sticky smug insincerity. When James came into the AC lounge, well, we wanted to give him a hug.

In his bio, James says he plays “good, honest acoustic” music. Insofar as we couldn’t see the allusion when we kicked off the interview, we were wrapped up in it by the end. His songs are gracefully simple packages, easy on the ear and difficult to shake. His song-writing is at once worldly and approachable; he weaves his broad life experience into tales that are most often too short to be completely satisfying.

We talked a lot in this show. So much, in fact, that we didn’t actually get to all the music that we’d intended. It’s a shame, too, because for my money, the best tracks of the evening were those recorded after the show had ended. Take a special listen to Sacramento International, a haunting lullaby to congested air travel; and Half a World Away, an anthem to bifurcated love in ticklish harmonics. You’ll find the show, as well as all six of the tracks we recorded with James available free in iTunes. Please subscribe to support the show.

I deeply hope you enjoy the music of James Jeffrey-West. He’s a new favorite of ours and we’re thrilled to bring him to the show. As ever, comments welcome, but mostly, just go buy his CD. It’s in iTunes, CDBaby, and just about everywhere else music is served.

As much as I love Google products, and use them daily, here is a perky brick to the ethical head. The following quote is from Google CEO Eric Schmidt in the current CNBC Google Blockbuster.

If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place, but if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines including Google do retain this information for some time, and it’s important, for example that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities.

When Google was founded in 1998, the company hung its proverbial hat on telling the world that they would be successful without mucking things up in the process. Specifically, number six in the company’s own manifesto:

6. You can make money without doing evil.

This is all well and good until, for example, you’re a global titan with $12 billion and change in the bank, competing for telcom spectrum in an industry as messed up as wireless. What’s that they say about laying down with dogs?

So many cool things floating around the internet, I must have been hyped up on sneezing pandas when this most exquisite piece of work bubbled to the surface. It’s “Panic Attack!” by Uraguayan filmmaker, Fede Alvarez. Head over here to watch it for yourself.

The news that surrounds this short film is interesting all alone: Alvarez has been signed to Sam Raimi’s Ghost House Pictures to develop and deliver similarly themed freaky flicks. All I can think is “Cloverfield” — which has A) already been made and B) was super-excellent. Too bad it’s already been made. Still, the deal reportedly starts in the 6-figures with points if his films get made. All this after Alvarez made his YouTube opus on a reported budget of $300 (yeah, likely not including person hours in that budget, but whatever).

All of that is great for Alvarez, whose talent is deserving of a career in the field of moving images, however he ends up there. But it’s not the point of this post.

Google, sometimes you are water to a drowning man. With your fancy, model-breaking free services, your forever-beta attitude, your kicking font. So many services, so many configurations, so many thoughtful ways for a simple man like myself to divulge my personal information.

But this month, you have showered me with useful things. So man, in fact, that I have to shout it from the rooftops.

For Google Apps Users

I’ve been a raving lunatic for Google Apps since they launched. For those not familiar with the service, Google Apps allows you to take your domain name (like fifthandmain.com) and map all your familiar Google services to it. Use the nearly bulletproof Gmail service for your business’s email using your own domain, and have calendars, documents, internal websites, and more all hosted and shared across team members. There are three tiers of Google Apps: Education, Standard, and Premiere. At this time, only the premiere level of service has a fee associated with it — $50/user per year.
That’s all backstory nonsense, though. The big news is here. (more…)

A quick post and a tip today, and a letter to my friend Tony, a Flash guy.

Dear Tony,

I think about you often when I work on the web. It starts out fondly, and quickly turns to rage when my browser crashes thanks to over-abundance of Flash advertising which destroys my favorite sites. I think of you, Tony, because, since you’re a Flash developer, this experience makes me hate you, just a little bit. That’s why I’m writing to let you know about ClickToFlash.

Anyone want to know how much I love this photo? Anyone? Seriously, ask and I’ll tell you. I love it with the white hot passion of a star gone super nova. I love it, because it’s a picture of rocks. It’s a picture of rocks about sex and God, with a dash of good humor and a pinch of humility.

I love it because the man who made it is a man who loves more than anything to work with his hands. You can feel it when you pick up one of these rocks, the surface so smooth it’s as if nothing is there. And yet, the messages are at once salient, and impossible — it’s a burning bush argument: am I really getting fortune cookie karma from a river stone? Yep. From a guy who has a singular focus on what he’s doing, and has just the right tools to get the job done.

So, this is a post about tools. I have a lot of them, the digital kind, and I’m often asked what I recommend and could I teach them, and should client x buy Illustrator or Photoshop or InDesign or Final Cut Pro so they can make quick edits on files and on and on. And I’ve worked up a bit of my own burnished stone wisdom that may help someone other there in the Interworld. Here goes.

This is a picture of a scorpion embedded in plastic. I’ve had it for about 30 years — grandmother gave it to me when I was a kid — and I have since passed it on to my 7-year-old daughter. Because, you know, nothing says little girl like scorpion embedded in plastic.

I like this scorpion because it reminds me of just about every service provider relationship I have. In these relationships, predictably, I am the frog, and they are the scorpion. You know this story, right? From Wikipedia:

The story is about a scorpion asking a frog to carry him across a river. The frog is afraid of being stung, but the scorpion reassures him that if it stung the frog, the frog would sink and the scorpion would drown as well. The frog then agrees; nevertheless, in mid-river, the scorpion stings him, dooming the two of them. When asked why, the scorpion explains, “I’m a scorpion; it’s my nature.”

When I logged into Facebook this morning, the scorpion hit me in the face like the hot kiss at the end of a wet fist. New privacy settings. Terrific. Because Facebook has such a stellar reputation with managing privacy. Nothing could possibly go wrong here.

Technology blog Techcrunch.com has long held the banner that there will one day come a “Google Phone” — a phone branded by Google itself, bearing the Android operating system, not offered in partnership with a wireless provider.

This is sort of big news. See, currently, in the United States, if you want a cell phone, you start at a wireless provider, like AT&T or Verizon Wireless or T-Mobile, and you pick out a phone that works for you. That phone will be locked to that provider, meaning that the wireless company will be subsidizing the cost of the phone to you, making it a cheaper purchase, in exchange for your 1 or 2-year commitment to wireless service.

This model was shaken with the release of Apple’s iPhone two years ago, which was offered in partnership with AT&T, but was initially sold unsubsidized — meaning that early adopters paid the full price for the phone, $599 for the high end model back then — and then paid for service with AT&T on top of it. Today, the iPhone is like most other phones, subsidized through AT&T to bring the price down for end users in exchange for the 2-year commitment on service.

When Google launched their Android operating system for handhelds, they did it with the promise that they were not in the hardware business, that they were in the OS business to make phones better across the board. From Android chief Andy Rubin, “‘We’re not making hardware,’ Rubin said. ‘We’re enabling other people to build hardware.'”

Technically, that may still be true. What came out of Mountain View this weekend is a report that Google has handed out a new handset dubbed the “Nexus One” to employees at the Google holiday party. It runs the latest unreleased version of the Android operating system and is manufactured by HTC, long-time manufacturing partner to big wireless. Note, it’s not manufactured by Google.

Subtle. Very subtle.

What Google said publicly is this:

We recently came up with the concept of a mobile lab, which is a device that combines innovative hardware from a partner with software that runs on Android to experiment with new mobile features and capabilities, and we shared this device with Google employees across the globe. This means they get to test out a new technology and help improve it.

But reporters being who they are, we now know the news seems to be somewhat different. We’re hearing that this new phone will hit the market in January of 2010, on the heels of Verizon’s foray into the Android smartphone market with the Droid, and that the phone would be unlocked for a GSM network. That means customers would be able to choose their wireless provider, compatible with AT&T and T-Mobile in the US. Unfortunately for Verizon, early pics of the new Google phone seem to indicate that it is much better looking, and there appears to be no battery door to fall off. Tumultuous times indeed.

Buying advice? January 2010 is right around the corner. If you’re hot for a smartphone and can’t switch to AT&T for an iPhone, wait. What Google is hopefully doing with their Google phone is fixing what’s wrong with the iPhone ecosystem. The Google phone will allow customers to buy closer to the center of the ecosystem, with access to an application store not mired by the hotly debated approval process employed by Apple. As long as you’re diving into the Googleverse, you might as well dive into the deep end.

Tiger Woods lay down his clubs today. From TigerWoods.com:

I would like to ask everyone, including my fans, the good people at my foundation, business partners, the PGA Tour, and my fellow competitors, for their understanding. What’s most important now is that my family has the time, privacy, and safe haven we will need for personal healing.

After much soul searching, I have decided to take an indefinite break from professional golf. I need to focus my attention on being a better husband, father, and person.

Again, I ask for privacy for my family and I am especially grateful for all those who have offered compassion and concern during this difficult period.

As much as I’d love to talk gossip, there’s just so much about Tiger I don’t care about. I don’t actually like golf. I detest the sport. It’s designed more to enrage than challenge whenever I play. But there are a few points in here worth noting for posterity.

First, the PGA is crying in their big fancy beers. Sure, it generally sucks that Tiger was playing around. But this guy has made a lot of people rich. When he shows up in his fancy black golf sneakers and vertigo-enducing striped shirt on Sunday afternoons, Nike, PGA, Accenture, and his other sponsors just see dollar signs. That he’s taking this break is likely frustrating and humiliating to those who pay the bills. Let’s be clear: this is the era of Tiger. No one watches golf without him.

Speaking of Accenture, they’ve since pulled the plug on their relationship with Woods. He’s somewhat less useful as a non-golfer.

Second, Tiger Woods and his management have proved time and again to be savvy media managers. Yes, it was likely a misstep to avoid talking about this situation in a non-trivial fashion. His silence so far has been deafening in comparison to the statements of his associated lady friends. When the women come out of the woodwork first, you’ve waited too long to speak up.

But, as if we need a reminder of dethroned pro-atheletes on the comeback trail, Michael Vick is playing football again. And he was involved with dogs.

Woods will be back, sooner rather than later. Because, if there’s a moral in this for handling scandal in the media it’s this: the public has a notoriously short memory for illicit affairs. We want our winners, and will take them battered and bloodied if we have to. Tiger Woods has been a role model and teacher for years, but the comeback from self-destruction may be his biggest triumph yet.

I’ve never really worked on the whole “time-to-market” thing with my photography. It’s always just been slogging along there, coming up the rear as I’ve taken on other creative projects for clients.

Case in point this picture from a recent family portrait session. The three shots of this sweet little girl came from the first lighting test shots of the session, but somehow unlocked her inner model. She knocked out the “Three Monkeys” poses in succession and, with photoshop magic, we suddenly have triplets.

But the inspiration for a shot like this is pretty easy to track down. Apart from being an iconic original image of the maxim “do no evil”, it’s a tepid fever on iStockPhoto.com, where a quick search for “Hear no evil” uncovers 179 images riffing on exactly the same theme.

And yet, as with all things artistic, a riff is just a riff, and what matters is your ability to capture an idea in a new way, unique to your vision and principle. For me, this picture is fun and frivolous. It’s unpretentious. Most importantly, it captures exactly the vision I had in my head as I was snapping away in our session together.

For me, this such a photography thing. There are very few pictures that truly have yet to be taken. But with each setting and subject comes an infinite number of combinations of photographers with an equally infinite number of ideas and concepts for capture. And then I think about my friends Curt and Sam and Justin and Tyler and Matt and so on and so on, all musicians working to capture the same images through music, with the same challenges, and the same rich bed of opportunity. Stephen King, Cormac Macarthy, George Lucas, J.J. Abrams, all documentarians of the unoriginal in uncannily unique voice.

The challenge I work toward beating, then, is not to struggle to find the best idea. It’s to find my uncannily unique voice, and apply it to the old, the broken, and to build new connections where none existed before.

The last year has brought a flurry of activity in the project productivity circles around the concept of Social Media. It’s buzzword-heavy discussion, rife with recommendations on using so-called Web 2.0 tools to streamline information sharing, centralize data storage, and build communities online. To be sure, the latest suite of net tools in this basket range from revolutionary, all the way to downright nifty. But the question remains: will your projects benefit by simply embracing fancy new tools?

It’s safe to say that up to about two years ago, what we call social media was exclusively the domain of artists, teens, and the technorati. The idea of Facebook as a mainstream communication platform was just gaining momentum, and services such as Twitter still required a lengthy explanation in cocktail party conversation. Things have changed in the last few years, however. Now, The New York Times is discussing these services regularly, and Nielsen Online has been tracking explosive growth in the space; from February 2008 to February 2009, Twitter grew 1,382% — from 475,000 unique visitors per month in ‘08 to over 7 million unique visitors in ‘09. Facebook had 20 million unique visitors in February 2008, today boasting more than 65 million — a 240% leap. And 65 million is a fraction of the reported 150 million registered users of Facebook.

Project management is, of course, making it’s way to the social media universe. Tim Kendall, Facebook’s director of monetization, tells me that Paramount Pictures asked all employees to communicate with one another on Facebook exclusively for one week as a way of getting teams to understand the importance of online social interaction on the tool.

In 1983, when the video game Dragon’s Lair was released, I was 11.

The video arcade was on Nevada Avenue. It was next door to Fantasy Adult Video. While the video games in the arcade were not of the adult nature, the dumpster behind the facility certainly was. In a related story, a Canadian university has been unable to track down men in their 20’s who have not been exposed to adult content. I’d like to thank the Fantasy Adult Video dumpster and my friends Dogan and John for making me ineligible for that particular study today.

On Saturday mornings they had four-buck all-play at the arcade until 1:00 in the afternoon. We’d be there at 8:00 sharp, armed with our $4.00 in quarters and pockets full of LemonHeads and Cherry Clans to see us through the morning. Even today, it’s not hard to remember the menu for those long Saturday mornings. Burgertime. Moon Patrol. Robotron 2084. Those were warm-up games. Dig Dug and Joust were appetizers. For me, a good round of Q*bert would find its way into the morning, but Tron and (amen) Pole Position were meat and potatoes.

Today, I’m using this bully pulpit to talk about a website you should not visit. It’s called Tweeteorites.com, and briefly, it is a collection of the most favorited tweets in the past 24 hours.

Now, let’s figure out all the wrong in that last sentence:

1) Favorited – this is a poor excuse for a word. No one who speaks to me in their outside voice would ever use this word for fear of me telling them how silly they sound using it. It is a bastardization of favorite which, to be honest, was just the result of the word favor trying to one-up meteor in 1969. And we all remember how that turned out, do we not.

2) Tweets – to get this one, you have to be either a) a bird, or b) a user of the service twitter.com. According to my analytics, most of you are the latter, and 90% of the former are using IE6, which I don’t acknowledge.

3) 24 hours – As if there are actually that many hours in a day. Whatever.