By all accounts I can find, Apple has sold roughly a million iPhones since it launched on June 29. That makes a million people setting up the new phones in the US alone, and what is likely a healthy percentage using the Gmail email service.

Personally, I have about six Gmail accounts including those through the Google Apps for your Domain service, and I’ve recommended and installed a number for clients. So, given the popularity of the new phone and the email service it was something of a stun to find just how completely insane the two work — sort of — together.

About three months ago, I ripped the shrink wrap off my monthly WIRED magazine and found a note from the publisher. They were doing a special run in partnership with XEROX around a piece on hyper-personalization on the web. If I was one of the first 5,000, the note said, to send in a picture of myself at the appropriate resolution, I’d get my face on the cover of the magazine. Of course, I’ve always wanted to see my face on the cover of WIRED magazine.

So, I shot off the first pic that came up — a scruffy-looking, vacationing Pete shot through a mirror in a get-away hacienda in New Mexico this year. Very vacation-chiq. Still, my face, my WIRED.

I think it’s a befitting example of the kind of personalization we’re capable of now, that even a publication the size of WIRED can reach out and touch us readers so personally, and it’s something all small businesses can take a note on: how many of us have 5,000 individual clients in our rosters? How long would it take to reach out and touch them each so personally?

I was one of those people. I was one of the who-knows-how-many standing in line at the Apple Store for a brand new iPhone. And, I did it on vacation in Buffalo, NY, meaning I got it a full three hours before all my peeps in Portland.

Was it worth it? Now that I’ve had three days with the thing, was it worth the money, the time, the sales tax?

First things first. The Apple Stores were — I have to imagine I can speak generally here, extrapolating my experience in the NY store — awesome. They were managed impeccably. Lines were bled into the store at around 4 customers every few minutes, ensuring no logjams on the store floor itself. We were shuttled all the way to the back of the store and asked the simple question: “What do you want — 4 or 8?”

David Marash is one of those Emmy-winning journalists who trucks in a different kind of celebrity than the name-trotting sort headlining newscasts today. He’s a genuine article, deep in voice and language, the rare breed of television media personality who believes in the strength of long-format journalism, reporting stories to conclusion, rather than fatigue, and he’s got the resume to back it up.

He’s most known for his 16-year stint with Ted Koppel on Nightline, winning awards for his coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing and TWA Flight 800. But, when that show was cancelled, he made an interesting move: Al Jazeera English.

He’s lead anchor over there now, charged with the western hemisphere. The network strives to be the first non-western international news network, diving head first into deep waters heavily patroled by CNN, Fox, MSNBC. They aim to compliment the others, to shift the balance of the international news mechanism, he says, and they do that by becoming a compliment to existing coverage, not a competitor.

“Where other agencies spend 80 percent of their coverage in North American, European, Japanese, and Israeli stories,” he says, “Al Jazeera, on the other hand, does 70 percent of its reporting everywhere else.”

And of course, he opened with Iraq.

“One thing every Iraqi knows,” Marash said, “is that they don’t want to be dominated by outsiders. The country has a long history of domination, and the Americans ignored that history. Instead, they went in with distinctly American ideas of good governance, inconsiderate of what the Iraqis want.”

Marash contends that we wrote our own book. That we ignored volumes of data in the world indicating that what we were planning would end badly. That the Middle East has played host countless times to invading bodies and without fail, the conflict ends badly. That, given all this, we should have known better.

It’s hard not to get into a discussion of conspiracy theory here. And it’s difficult, by the same token, to contradict Marash, who himself has spent years in the region covering these decades-long stories. But boiling down the current situation in Iraq to misunderstood objectives might just be too simple, ingnorant of administration objectives beyond stemming conflict in the region; objectives likely to take years to uncover.

More detail means richer communication, Marash says of journalists. “Reporters must represent reality with fidelity.”

And that’s what Al Jazeera English aims to do. By reducing the number of stories reported in any given half-hour segment, the network aims to drive up the quality and depth of coverage across all stories. It’s a challenge, he says, as the staff of the network comes largely from mainstream media, and breaking bad habits is an ongoing fight.

Dave Marash is a smart guy. Put him on the podium and he’s your wise old grandfather dutifully illumniating the world for you, one race at a time. He’s been everywhere, seen it all, and has the breath left in him to talk about it at length. But in an era in which major media news is losing ground to infotainment, Marash’s vision of Al Jazeera might just have arrived in the nick of time.

The Q&A brought out the question that most were undoubtedly thinking: “What’s a nice Jewish boy like you doing working for Al Jazeera?” Marash was ditifully diplomatic and long-winded with a response that ended up having quite a fine point on it.

There were sort of two responses among my colleagues. The majority of the responses were, “Well, that’s Marash. If there’s a brick wall, he’ll put his head into it.” And the second response was, sort of, “How dare he.” And particularly, “How dare he, as a Jew, work for the Arabs.” In many ways, it’s the same mentality as the Dubai ports case. “How dare we contract for port security with a global firm that happens to be based in the Arab world?”

Al Jazeera is a funny network. In the West, it’s the voicebox of the terrorist arm, heavily criticized for displaying Al Quaeda beheadings and desert manifestos. But what we don’t see, Marash contends, is the network’s diligence in reporting both sides of the conflict, as graphic as those sides may be. That’s what happens when you have a boss “whose bottom line is not the bottom line, is not share-holder value, but is the product itself.”

For those interested, I’ve started a flickr set of pictures from around the institution, including some larger pictures of the guest lecturers so far. Yes, most are family pics, OPC (other people’s children), but they’re cute children — what can I say.

Click here to head to flickr!

National Public Radio’s Juan Williams is funny.

No, you can’t tell from the picture. Here he looks angry. Brooding. Somber. Morose. He came out on stage and sat in the chair awaiting his introduction for nearly a full minute looking just… like… this.

Scarey.

But then, the humor came, delivered secretly in that NPR monotone taking us all by sweet surprise. Jokes about drugs and penises. Jokes about Chautauquans and good manners. But mostly, he joked at the expense of the media.

In an IM earlier this morning, I told my friend Curt that I would be heading into the Chautauqua lecture by Arianna Huffington. He said, “Heh… make sure you slap her for me.”

I admit. I had the same thought. I’ve always sort of ascribed Huffington with the Ivanna Trump vibe — funky accent, firey speech, not a lot there. Now that I’ve seen her up close, I know that two out of those three are correct. I’m just not sure which two.

Obviously, she was here to contribute to the discussion on media, new media, ethics in media, and media bashing. To be sure, there’s been a boatload of each. But while the other folks in the discussion were from inside the fold, working in traditional media newsrooms and desperately trying to wrap their arms around this non-traditional whatnot, Huffington is coming at it from a different angle. She founded HuffingtonPost.com in 2005 and while she contends hers is one of the highest trafficked sites on the net, she doens’t hold much of a candle to the other representatives who’ve shared the stage with her so far this week. Click on the graph below to see Alexa.com’s rankings comparing her site to ABCNews.com, WashingtonPost.com, and nytimes.com (she’s at the bottom).

More on this lecture after I actually see it. But there was a Huffington editorial in the local paper today and she had this comparison regarding traditional media converging with new media:

The shifting dynamic between those two forces is exactly like the relationship between Sarah Conner and the T101 in the “Terminator” movies. At first, the visitor from the future(digital) seemed intent on killing Sarah (print). But as the relationship progressed and the sequels unspooled, the Terminator became Sarah and her son’s one hope for salvation. Today, you can almost hear digital media (which for some reason has a thick Austrian accent) saying to print: “Come with me if you want to live!”

Am I the only one who finds that … funny?

Let me start by saying that, as far as executives inside major corporations go, my experience heretofor has been that company lawyers are about the last folks you want to invite to the big chair, to Presidencies and Chief-Executiveships. That’s not to say that savvy business people can’t be lawyers too, but those folks who specifically exist to protect the organization by managing relationships vis the law have a strange and wonderful perspective on growth and development of initiatives. They say “no” a lot.

About two years ago, before I joined the communications department, we were approached by an agency pushing us to have their bloggers for hire go out and start blogging positive mojo about our then-new educational asset, Axia College. The original pitch was just that: bloggers, who aren’t our students, telling the blogosphere, MySpace-dom, Facebook-hood, and the rest of the world just how great it is to go to school with us.

I joined and was handed the contract. We’d spend a boatload with this agency specing out this contract that no one in the department really knew what to do with, so they passed it off to the only guy who had any skin in the game.

I had a huge problem with the arrangement, and I have the same problem now that it’s evolved and reared it’s head from Microsoft and Cisco. Valleywag has a good summary. Here’s a snitch:

Break

John Battelle’s ad network has roped in some of its star writers to an ad campaign on behalf of Microsoft’s “people-ready” catchphrase. In the ads, and the companion site built by Federated Media, Michael Arrington explains how his Techcrunch site became “people-ready“. “When is a business people ready?” asks Gigaom’s Om Malik. “The minute you decide to strike out on your own…” Other writers who’ve been paid to repeat Microsoft’s slogan include Paul Kedrosky and Matt Marshall of Venture Beat, as well as Fred Wilson, the blogger-investor.

The evolution is fairly obvious — in this case, these lassoed bloggers are shilling, and making it clear that they’re shilling, for an advertiser. On the surface, that should be the end of the discussion if you hang your hat on the “Truth in Advertising” mantra. Nick Chase tries to paint this issue with spit and polish in the Valleywag comment thread.

So the next step, naturally, is for marketers to want to join the conversation. It can be done in ethical, responsible ways, and FM’s authors are among the first to figure out how to do it.

Duh.

Then why do I still have such a problem with this mess? In my own situation, I tried to make this work. The first proposed change was to use our own stable of bloggers — current students of Axia college who might happen to have had blogs at the time. We couldn’t find enough of them, and the ones we did find couldn’t blog for beans.

Then we thought about having the agency stable of bloggers go back to school with Axia to legitimize their shill. Of course, they wanted to be paid hourly for their time in school, their time studying, their time writing papers, their time thinking about school, and so on.

As you can imagine, the whole pitch was suddenly loosing its luster. I cancelled the program.

I cancelled it because the methods did not meet the objectives of the program. The pitch was all about creating a discussion with our prospective students. But no matter how you spin it, there’s no way to create a legitimate, authentic discussion when that discussion starts from the voices of those who are not students, are not experienced, are not authentic.

Commenter Filament nails it far more eloquently than I ever did:

This is only “conversational” in the sense that a chat with Tony Snow about Bush’s record is a conversation: only technically. What you’re doing is creating the false appearance of conversation to make money.

This whole mess smacks of a key learning that so many companies are failing to learn. Companies formerly accustomed to building relationships through the brute force of advertising dollars don’t know how to translate their wares into anything more transparent than tin foil. You can’t blame Microsoft for giving it a shot. They’re not architected to know any better.

It’s harder, as with all things, to do it right. It’s harder to actually build an army of flag-waving maniacs sreaming from the rooftops about your organization. Leaders have to shake the trees, clear out old-media thinking and build the army the right way, from the beginning. Otherwise, you’re building a Potemkin Village, and your conversation is nothing more than vapor.

John Harwood was an interesting choice to have kick off the Chautauqua season, and the week one series of discussions on ethics and the media. His focus, in a sort of round-about way, was that political party polarization both feeds, and is fed by, the drive for viewership of a sensationalism-hungry media.Harwood refers to parties as “brands”, and says that in the political sphere, these brands have done nothing but solidify, cementing public participation in a binary system. This simplification is driven by the notion that people, by-in-large, want to know what they’re getting in a particular candidate or party.Historically, Harwood contends that this calcification in the party systems stems from Barry Goldwater’s opposition to the Voting Rights act in 1964. The dems became the pro-civil rights party and the republicans the anti-civil rights party. From then on out, you knew what you were getting. If you wanted smaller governement, fewer services, larger civil defense, and focus on waning deterioration of social values, you were a republican. If you favored increased federal services and gun control, enironmental protection, and abortion rights, you’re a democrat.

Does Harwood have his real hair? Yes, he says, demonstrating his answer to what may be the most important political question of the morning.Decline of the political party system? Hardly, he says. We’re just on the cusp of a new party system. “The new one hasn’t ended the parties; it’s changed the way people think and understand them, and I think they’ve actually emerged stronger, because people know what they’re voting for.”Do they really? There’s some data to support it, at least to support the assertion that when it counts, the public steps up to the plate. In 2000, only 105 million people voted. In 2004, that number went up to 122 million, largely attributed to strong sentiment one way or the other toward the Iraq war.And yet, in spite of this solidification in the party system as Harwood proports, the American public is becoming less and less easy to pin down on some more traditionally divisive social issues. According to a recent study by the Pew Foundation, we the people skew right on gay marriage and gay adoption, left on embryonic stem cell research, and straight down the middle on abortion. We’re not moving further apart, we’re moving closer to center, according to the study.Harwood is on the community line in this speech. I’m hard-pressed to find a scholar of media that doesn’t support the assertion that the search for viewers and increased circulation drives desperation reportage across news outlets; a drive to cover sensational and salacious that trumps – intentionally or otherwise – reporting stories to their conclusion. Dare we bring up Duke LaCrosse?On the other side of the fence, political pundits are better now than ever at taking control of the conversation, themselves trumping newsgathering with talking points and spin.But I’m not convinced Harwood made a clear and compelling connection that the media is complicit in the on-going bifurcation in the party system. Instead, I’d submit that media is reporting less adeptly on social issues, taking the easy — and cheap — out on hard reporting decisions, and the result is the appearance of a media role in goosing outrage and salaciousness for fun and profit. That the parties are better at this game than the media doesn’t make it news.

A bit off topic, he brought up one of the best points of his speech in the Q&A.

Q: Let’s focus on newspapers for a second. One question has to do with what is the consequence of the reducation of newspapers, the reduction of staff, on journalism, and is there a ripple affect of reducing commitment in journalism in newspapers that will then have a consequence in the overall delivery in news beyond newspapers?Harwood: That’s a very smart question, and it’s absolutely true for this reason. The most important piece in television news everyday is what’s in newspapers. One of the interesting things that I’ve noticied going from, you know, people you keep their foot in both camps: Television people don’t have a lot of self confidence about their own judgement.

This is the paper of record connundrum. I fully contend that much of the market for broadcast doesn’t consider their medium as important as traditional print news. This fuels the more symbiotic relationship between print and broadcast: news begins in the papers, is supplemented the next day in pictures, and is investigated to conclusion in print. The rise in cable outlets and their 24-hour coverage has had some affect on the practical application of this relationship, but it’s certainly there. Fewer reporters trained in print newsgathering will most certainly have a negative affect on quality and quantity of reportage.I had the opportunity to meet Harwood after his talk. Turns out, he’s joining the online discussion and starting a blog this week through his role as a political reporter with CNBC. He stopped short of supporting the assertion that the rise of citizen media fueled by David Gilmor and his ilk was leading to a new middle-media. I told him I thought it was great, his journey into the blogosphere, and welcomed him. Where could we find him online?He couldn’t remember the URL.Tomorrow, David Westin, President of ABC News.

On June 29th, Apple will launch their next great evolution. The iPhone will hit Apple and AT&T Wireless stores with great hoopla at 6:00 p.m. and the world market for handheld devices will change again. This is what Apple does — change market dynamics.

But there’s raw beauty in the iPhone campaign that comes from lessons learned over the last decade of Apple advertising. This is as unadulterated a product marketing mix as I’ve seen in the market in very long time, and the point it serves to prove is thus: EB White had it right — “Simplify, simplify, simplify.”

The “Switch” campaign was considered (mostly by me) to be a critical success and a business non-starter. But it was the first time that Apple attempted to tell their story transparently, and that was an important move. It taught them the power of the unadulterated user’s voice, the untarnished message. They were already making powerful, beautiful products. The “Switch” campaign sold the experience, sort of.

The iPod “Sillouhette” campaign drove the message further, selling the outcomes of the experience, linking the product to the feeling you get when you use it. It was beautiful and compelling and engaging, and sold the experience, sort of.

The iPhone capitalizes on everything the first two campaigns delivered so well, and drives the messaging completely naked. The broadcast advertising is nothing more than a screencast on using features of the product. Their print and outdoor focus on dates. Their 25 minute introduction to iPhone uses Young Steve Jobs to deliver transparent, real world use cases to demonstrate the device.

All this is to say one thing: tell your story. Rely less on agency steerage and paranoia and more on your own instinct. You’re the only one that knows your customer the way you know your customer. The closer you get to mirroring their experience in your messaging, the closer you’ll get to communicating your product or service to the unititiated.

Stick to the simple truth.

John Harwood was an interesting choice to have kick off the Chautauqua season, and the week one series of discussions on ethics and the media. His focus, in a sort of round-about way, was that political party polarization both feeds, and is fed by, the drive for viewership of a sensationalism-hungry media.Harwood refers to parties as “brands”, and says that in the political sphere, these brands have done nothing but solidify, cementing public participation in a binary system. This simplification is driven by the notion that people, by-in-large, want to know what they’re getting in a particular candidate or party.

Historically, Harwood contends that this calcification in the party systems stems from Barry Goldwater’s opposition to the Voting Rights act in 1964. The dems became the pro-civil rights party and the republicans the anti-civil rights party. From then on out, you knew what you were getting. If you wanted smaller governement, fewer services, larger civil defense, and focus on waning deterioration of social values, you were a republican. If you favored increased federal services and gun control, enironmental protection, and abortion rights, you’re a democrat.