One of my favorite podcasts is WebbAlert, a technology news show hosted by Morgan Webb, highlighting daily tech news and social media memes. It’s daily, no more than about six minutes per episode, and Webb does a good job of covering the geek news I need with a ripe sarcasm I crave.

For the last few weeks, WebbAlert has had a compelling new sponsor: DeVry University. It’s a perfect match — while I know very little about the place, I know they have technical and gaming programs that fit the market of the show. But more important than that, it shows that the adult education industry is dipping its toes into some more progressive waters.

Here’s a wonderful piece showcasing the purity of art taking place in online media. Think of it as “Johnathan Livingston Seagull: Redux”.

Leo’s Song from impactist on Vimeo.

Senator Barack Obama
Originally uploaded by Stephen Voss

I saw the “Yes We Can” video (in the “Featured Video” box on the front page) for the first time a day or so after it hit the net. Until that point, I had passed on this election cycle’s rhetoric. After eight years of a declining quality of voice in our administration, I found little point in hitching my attention to pundits looking to tackle the center of American low-brow.

The video is a haunting homage to Obama’s New Hampshire concession speech which went largely uncovered by mainstream press. Black Eyed Peas’ Will.I.am opens the piece in stark black and white. He’s familiar, but not household. And when he opens his mouth, it’s not his voice that comes out.

Watch this video. It’s a presentation cast of Laurence Lessig giving what I believe is one of the best summaries of why we should be considering Obama strongly, particularly those of us who were Edwards supporters, as requested by Lessig supporter. It is not only a great talk, but a wonderful example of effective presentations, by one of today’s master orators.

Maybe it’s because I’m a child of the 70’s and 80’s that I have a deep personal affinity with actors and celebs I’ve never met. I’m a Reagan-era kid, after all, the actor-politician cemented for me a sentiment that the most important work of all is that of telling stories, pressing enthusiasm, fueling emotion.

It’s why I get to say things to myself like, “Man, if Will Smith only knew me, we’d be buds. Best friends.”

Apollo Group leadership thumbs their collective nose at the courts, saying that the $277.7 million verdict against them “will not have a material adverse affect on its business or cash flows.”

While it’s thrilling that the company has enough cash to cover the bond and the finding, investors should note: the company has likely learned very little from the experience.

My daughter Sophie is currently enrolled in a Chinese language immersion school. She’s in kindergarten now and her teachers have started introducing the kids to simple oragami projects for crafts time. Then, in a sweet bit of synchronicity, her godfather received a book on some creative origami projects that you can make out of dollar bills for Christmas and brought it over for dinner a few weeks back. We were both schooled handily when we tried to make a Klingon Bird of Prey out of a greenback.

Interface Design and the iPhone

I found this thanks to John Gruber at Daring Fireball and have been waiting days for the video to come back on line. It’s Edward Tufte performing a superficial dissection of the iPhone’s human interface design choices.

It’s a treat to hear someone as adept in the field pulling apart the elegance of the iPhone and finding — largely — very little fault in the choices the design team made. He makes an point between the iPhone’s use of “image resolution” and “Cartoon resolution” that I don’t get completely — that it’s somehow a bad thing that the Stocks widget looks cartoony compared to his example of a stock chart, which looks more like Excel. His re-imagined Weather app compared Apple’s elegance to something you might see on a screen at NIST.

It’s short, and worth watching if you’re an iPhone aficionado.

Just caught this on TechCrunch via Daniel Burka on Pownce — not sure how it slipped by me! Pownce, the long-compared-to-Twitter micro-blogging tool, comes out of beta tonight. Great news for Daniel, Leah Culver, and Kevin Rose, who’ve worked hard to build a great tool for social aggregation.

I’ve been using Twitter and Pownce for the last six months, on and off, and I’m torn between the two. Which is a whole lot better off than I was before, when I was torn between just how stupid I thought they both were in the first place.

Twitter, Pownce, and legions of tools that have adopted the “Status” function, all appear to address the question, “what are you doing right now?” With Twitter, I didn’t really care at first. The public posts range from invites to meet-ups to updates on bathroom performance, to shots at sports teams, to cries for help.

Then, I ran into some folks on both services who know how to actually use them. Take Alex France, for example, who goes by the Pownce moniker dignews. Alex posts tech news and links with short headlines, and has become one of my favorites to follow, because he seems to share my interests. Alex is 16-years-old, from Manchester, England.

Or how about Thomas Hawk, president of photo-sharing site Zooomr, who is using Pownce as part of his photographic jihad to share a half a million finish, corrected images with the world. Every day I’m greeted with a handful of gallery-quality photography.

For me, where Pownce takes the hands-down lead is in offering the ability to group my friends into sets. Close friends? Co-workers? Each can have their own group, and you can ensure that messages you send to one group don’t clutter up the inboxes of others, who might find the message inappropriate.

Look at it this way: I set up a new “Clients” group. I can use the tool to send quick status updates to my clients who might need to know timely information about our work together. In a recent software launch, the client group served as a key lynchpin in delivering timely information to the people who needed to know it. And that, after all, is the key to employing a tool that actually fits the job.

This is the biggest hurdle, still, and I hope the Pownce launch drums up enough mainstreamish press to get the message out: these social aggregator/micro-blog services aren’t just for tweeners and programmers — there’s a business use, too. Finding the sweet spot where tool and utility intersect will help us all be more productive, and efficient.

If you use either tool, find me here on Twitter, and here on Pownce. And don’t forget to find me here on Facebook, and here on LinkedIn, too!

Jens Alfke writes a great insider post on his decision to leave Apple and move into life as an independent developer. The whole thing is worth reading, but the part that gets to me is this:

It’s deeply ironic: For a company that famously celebrates individuality and Thinking Different, Apple has in the past decade kept its image remarkably impersonal. Other than the trinity who go onstage at press events — Steve Jobs, Jonathan Ive, Phil Schiller — how many people can you name who work for Apple? How many engineers?

Mr. Mailer belonged to the old literary school that regarded novel writing as a heroic enterprise undertaken by heroic characters with egos to match. He was the most transparently ambitious writer of his era, seeing himself in competition not just with his contemporaries but with the likes of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.

Axia College of University of Phoenix MySpace PageI haven’t posted much about my experience at University of Phoenix. It’s a big place with many challenges and, even with nearly a decade under my belt there, I’m ill equipped to comment on most of them. But I find this one downright funny.About six months ago the director of marketing called me in to a meeting with the MySpace folks. They were evaluating alternative media for marketing purposes and had been approached by MySpace with an advertising package. For over $100,000 they’d set up Axia College of UOP on MySpace and give them ad space on the MySpace internal site network, driving clicks back to the Axia MySpace page. This, for something like three months. (note: I could have that backwards — it’s been a while — but it could be $300,000 for a month. Either way, it’s ridiculous).

I just thought the only ONLY thing that defined the Red Sox was that they couldn’t win the world series. So then they won, and they’re not really the Red Sox anymore. They’re just some anonymous team that players leave so they can go cut their hair and join the Yankees.

– Curt Siffert

Today, the WSJ reports that Apple has reduced prices on all their DRM-free tracks to $.99, making the per-track price equal to that of tracks with DRM throughout the store. In addition, they have launched a wide new selection of indie artists and labels under the iTunes+ moniker, making Apple the new champ in volume of DRM-free music, buy maybe one or two tracks. Amazon recently launched their MP3 store, with over 2 million tracks and $.89 per track pricing for most songs to widely positive reviews from industry. 

Wow. Did I ever misjudge this band. I hereby take it back — almost everything I said about them a few weeks back.If you’re not following the Radiohead saga, several weeks ago, the band made news when they announced they would not sell their new album on iTunes because the store refuses to sell albums as albums, and instead requires artists to agree to sell at least a few tracks track-only, at $0.99 each.I still contend that shunning track-only sales is silly. But in the context of my hyperbole, I said I’d ignore the band entirely as a result. Then, I went on trying to ignore them.I tried hard.