I triple-dog dare you to go into Barnes & Noble and not look at the Nook display. You won’t be able to do it. Though the device is all but sold out until early 2010, the monolithic in-store displays have fancy paper-cutouts in the shape of a Nook with features and specifications on them which I’m sure will be just fine wrapped and under the tree this Christmas, thank you very much.

The Nook (Technologizer’s great review here) is part of the latest gadget bubble to take hold of the elder and technorati set, the e-book reader. Like the Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle before it, the Nook allows you to buy books from the Barnes & Nobel store, download them via 3g nearly instantly, and begin reading. The Nook brings not much to the discussion that the other two devices haven’t covered; E-Ink screen, fancy keyboard, books and newspapers. The killer features on the Nook that are supposed to wipe out the Sony and the Kindle are, well, two.

You know what’s awesome? Groupthink.

From the Oxford American Dictionary:

groupthink |ˈgroōpˌθi ng k|
noun – the practice of thinking or making decisions as a group in a way that discourages creativity or individual responsibility : there’s always a danger of groupthink when two leaders are so alike.

But dictionary people are always so … clinical. This definition doesn’t address — doesn’t even touch — the sense of warmth that comes from a good session of groupthink. You all know what I’m talking about; it’s that sense of calm that settles on a meeting once everyone has realized that the solution doesn’t offend anyone. In the room. So it must be right. Right?

So, you’re thinking about groupthink. Now, think about Tiburon, California. Tiburon sits on a peninsula on the northern end of the San Fransisco Bay. From there, looking south, you can see the city of San Francisco jutting out across the water. There are only two roads leading in or out of Tiburon. It’s idyllic. It never rains, the people are always happy, and being surrounded by water on three sides, the lapping waves drown out the sound of the poor coming from Oakland.

If you want something that is ugly and hard, which may be used in some fashion to eviscerate a ripe banana, then you’re the perfect candidate for a Motorola Droid. I think they were going for edgy on this one, but what this ad does is continue the string of puzzling positioning ads for what may have been a promising phone. Until parts started falling off of it.

I went to high school with a kid just like Comcast. He was a big kid, with big, giant, black hair. He’d spouted some story about how his long ago distant cousin was related to Russian royalty, a tzar or Rumplestiltskin or some such.

One day, this great oak of a boy shows up in a shiny new car. He says his divorcee mom has agreed to buy liquor for his high school parties because, he says, “she says that if she buys the booze and my friends come to my house, that will keep us all out of trouble.”

Of course, so will prison, largely.

After yesterday’s tome of a post, I had a few questions hit my inbox looking for details on my own shooting equipment, specifically on which lenses I use most often.

I love my D300 and was wondering what glass you shoot with most often? For people it looks like maybe an 85 1.4? Great depth of field. Do you use any tilt-shift lenses?

Thought I’d answer this one as a continuation of yesterdays discussion on picking out your first DSLR.

It wasn’t long ago that I set up my fancy Google Profile. If you haven’t set up your own, it’s a privacy advocate’s nightmare. This is a system whereby you willingly inject Google with your personal information to “improve search results” when people search for you. I didn’t give them the Full Monty, but you can find own everywhere I’ve lived, which may or may not be useful for … whatever.

The point is, last night, for the first time, I received an email through my Google profile from a friend. A friend who didn’t know my email address, and found me through Google. Profile. Man, this system is rock solid. He wanted to know if I had any thoughts on picking up his first digital-SLR camera. Well, I’ll let him tell you.

I want to get a DSLR camera for Christmas, but I do not know much about them. I was hoping that you could shed some light on what would be a good first DSLR camera for a first time user. I am interested in Nikon or Canon, but that is only because of name brand recognition. I am looking to keep the cost around $500.00 for body and lens. Any thoughts?

Do I have some thoughts? Sure I do. This one’s for you, Dave.

(more…)

The first photowalk of the holiday season. We ended up on Mississippi Avenue at The Rebuilding Center, one of the coolest, most eclectic home remodeling stores I’ve ever seen.

I’d called Chris at the Rebuilding Center the day before — I know they’re sensitive about class-type things going on in the place, and wanted to make sure there were no hard feelings about shooting on a crowded Saturday. No problem. Downright appreciative that I’d called first, in fact.

We were focusing specifically on camera function this time. With so many people carrying professionally capable DSLRs around their necks, sporting inequitable skill in using them, I thought it a good opportunity to look at the top 3-4 things to do with your camera that can improve your photos and your confidence when working quickly and taking advantage of natural light.

So many wonderful trinkets and bobbles and textures make for a great photographic playground. If you’ve never been, take the time to stop into this treasure of other peoples’ trash and soak it in. I’ve posted the full gallery here and, as always, comments are appreciated!

From diveintomark.org this morning:

And you can trace that all the way back, 17 years, through the Great Browser Wars, all the way back to February 25, 1993, when Marc Andreessen offhandedly remarked, “MIME, someday, maybe,” and then shipped his code anyway. The ones that win are the ones that ship.

It’s fascinating. Go read the whole piece if you’re into HTML nerdery: Why do we have an IMG element? [dive into mark]

Here are a few horrifying stats from bookstatistics.com:

• 58% of the US adult population never reads another book after high school.
• 42% of college graduates never read another book.
• 80% of US families did not buy or read a book last year.
• 70% of US adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.

To be fair, I don’t go to bookstores often anymore, but I’m a Kindle guy. The rest of this stuff? So much for respondents inflating their answers to look smart…

I’ve been in sunny California the last week and missed some good stories. Trying to catch up with a hat trick to my man Dane at strike10media.com who notes this piece on the Intuit acquisition of web 2.0 darling Mint.com. I’ve already lamented the acquisition, since I think Intuit is at best confused right now.

Mint.com’s chief marketing officer, stunned a room full of digital marketing pros by noting that she really didn’t have much of a marketing budget. Mint.com has gone from zero to 1.5 million users in two years with no ad campaign, save a mid-five-figures sum spent on search engine terms. Rather than purchase traffic, it has pursued the same type of strategy that food trucks and online magazines do: Using free social media and piggybacking on popular new communications technology. Mint.com has more than 36,000 Facebook fans and 19,000 Twitter followers, a well-traffickedblog, and a popular iPhone application.

Great article. Worth checking out in more detail.

I absolutely love this video. It’s crazy in every way that Steve Balmer isn’t.

This day for me is like an Oreo cookie — if you aren’t really crazy about the creamy center, but you are a hooligan for crisp chocolate cookiness. Best presentation of the day for me goes to the day’s closer, Tyler Sticka. Presentation slides below:

This from Aaron Patzer today:

As outlined in today’s press release and my blog post, after the acquisition closes, the Mint.com team will contribute to improving the financial lives of tens of millions of consumers and small businesses. I’ll personally be taking on the role of GM of Intuit’s Personal Finance group responsible for online, desktop and mobile consumer personal finance offerings. Joining Intuit enables us to bring our vision of helping consumers understand and do more with their money to millions of Intuit customers. This is a compelling combination of our innovative product, technology, and industry leading user interface design with one of the most trusted brands in software.

This is good news for Intuit — not sure they can get any more disorganized than they are now. It’s probably good news for Mint, though they’re hitching their wagon to a brand that needs desperate help, putting themselves in the position of floating quality for both brands.

I left Quicken this year after being a user for over a decade. The software is less stable than it was when I joined the Intuit bandwagon and there is little evidence of evolution or rigorous development over time. In fact, several of the features I used regularly in those early versions have been taken out of the software today. I’ve moved to MoneyWell and have been able to make a remarkably easy transition to the package.

Just to follow up the Pre article from earlier this morning, if I were walking in to a Sprint store for a phone, which is unlikely for me, but if I were going to do it, I’d be waiting for the HTC Hero.

Widely praised by reviewers as well as users who can already buy it in Europe, the Hero could give Sprint a much-needed boost. This will mark the second recent attempt—following the sale of the Palm Pre—by Sprint to use an exclusive deal for an anticipated phone in hopes of stemming a long stretch of losses.

via Sprint to sell Android phone in October.