Steve Jobs, salesman: In news that Mac addicts (hey, I can quit, really) will cheer, Steve Jobs has successfully undergone surgery to remove a rare form of pancreatic cancer. In this case, being rare is a good thing, as it is curable, unlike most forms of pancreatic cancer. I hope he quickly and fully recovers. Ever a salesman, Jobs’ e-mail to Apple employess regarding his cancer, ends with a mention that he is writing the memo from his hospital bed with a 17″ iBook PowerBook and Airport Express.

Blogless Monday On Monday, I’m traveling in the morning and then when I get where I’m going, I’ll be doing what I’m traveling there for, and then I will be traveling home in the evening. So, unless it’s via my Treo, I won’t be blogging until Tuesday. (And then on Wednesday, I get to repeat Monday. But I’m not complaining.)

Custom publishing & vaporzine update: Monday’s NY Times has a vaporzine story (without a David Carr by-line) regarding a new magazine to be published by Groundbreak Publishing (link?) in a “joint effort” with the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists. It is called Plum and is intended for women who are over 35 who are pregnant. It will launch this fall, according to the story.

Quote:

The 200-page glossy, to appear annually, may have the right advertising market. The publisher expects a circulation of at least 400,000 readers who are typically well-educated and affluent. But demographics may be against Plum. Although pregnancy rates have risen to 51 percent over the last decade for women 35 to 44, others suggest that it may have peaked. “Baby boomers are leaving the child-bearing age group,” said Joshua A. Copel, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the Yale School of Medicine. “Most are reaching menopause rather than actively having children.”

I won’t get into a debate over whether or not this is a custom published magazine. I have a guess where it would fit along the magazine continuum, however.

Great time to be a news junkie: While I’m impressed with the new MSNBC Newsbot, I think the new interface and RSS-options on Topix.net still make it my favorite. (Gary Price has a good overview of new Topix.net features.) I’m partial to the news-alert feature of Google new, however.

observation
<b>Whatz the Buzziest?</b> The Tennessean today has <a href=”http://tennessean.com/local/archives/04/07/55243417.shtml?Element_ID=55243417″>a story</a> about radio stations fighting over the use of the word “buzz.” Made me think of <a href=”http://www.buzzmachine.com”>Jeff Jarvis</a>.

.blogs? .not! I usually agree with Steve Rubel’s observations, but his suggestion today that a .blog domain would help elevate the awareness of and help define the category is a bit premature.

First, blogs are still pre-first-generation and an attempt to define what they are (or what they even look like) is presumptuous.

Second, no one will use what he or she considers a “second-class” domain to pigeon-hole themselves. (For example, how many small businesses jumped on to the .biz band wagon?)

Third, does it really matter what these things are called and who or what recognizes them. I am in the custom publishing business and for the past two decades, people have been trying to define what is and what is not a custom magazine. I pointed to a story last week about the most recent attempt to define the category, or to display that the category is not really a “category,” but a continuum. (A metaphor I agree with, by the way.) Bottom line, however, people are spending billions on custom publishing but still don’t know what it is or what to call it.

Back when AOL introduced their blogging tool (does anyone use it?), they tried to run from the “blog” term and tried to redefine blogs as “journals.” Now the “About Journals” page has, as its first sentence, the following: “You can think of a journal, often called a “blog,” which is short for “weblog,” as a kind of dynamic home page.”

My point: The “conversational-participatory-dynamic-citizens medium” we call blogging spans too wide a continuum to attempt to label it or relegate it to a .domain.