Death of a vaporzine: The departure of James Truman from CondeNast means the arts magazine planned for 2006 is not a vaporzine anymore, rather, just vapor.

Death wish, II: Remember yesterday when I said there is a new in-car rolling wi-fi that “people are dying to have.” Well, Delphi and Comcast are also working on another death-inducing technology, sort of an in-car cable TV.

And you thought people talking on their cell-phone were dangerous. Just wait until the guy behind the wheel in the car (or 18-wheeler) next to you on the Interstate is talking on his cell phone, blogging and watching ESPN Sports Center, all at the same time. (Come to think of it, except for the driving part, I do that all the time.)

(via: Rafat Ali, who has returned from his wedding and honeymoon just in time to attend the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which is exactly the situation that someone had in mind when he or she came up with the phrase, “that’s going from the sublime to the ridiculous.”)

Apple kool-aid hangover: Those who know me best would suggest if the only place one could use a Mac was some small encampment in Guyana, I’d likely pack up and move. They know how much it pains me to watch the company I’ve toasted with garbage cans full of kool-aid sue a website devoted to servicing the crack-addict-like need those like me have to learn every sliver of rumor we can about the future of products we not only love, but ponder and defend and take pilgrimages to worship.

Here is a small sampling of what the macosphere (and discerning observers of it) are saying tonight about Apple vs. the weblogger:

Dan Gillmore:“I ‘m fairly sure of this: If the party leaking information to Think Secret had sent it, say, to the San Jose Mercury News or New York Times, and had those publications run the news, Apple wouldn’t be suing them. Both have deep enough pockets to defend themselves. I hope the EFF or some other organization will defend Think Secret. I don’t know if there’s counter-suit potential for interfering with freedom of the press. But I do know that if citizen-based journalism is to have a prayer of making headway, we need to deter, not just counter, moves like Apple’s.

Om Malik: “MacWorld (Magazine) or other official mac pubs don’t do much enterprise reporting because Apple can turn the advertising spigot off and throttle them. The indies, who are getting sued do a lot of hard work in digging up stories. They are a combination of Bob Woodward and Dick Tracy. Think Secret, in my opinion is a good site, with a track record that resembles that of New York Yankees. I am amazed that Apple decided to sue them? I think their rumor-reporting creates a certain buzz for Apple’s forthcoming products.”

John Gruber: “Shutting down individual rumor sites won’t do Apple any good; dozens of new ones would replace them. But by making harsh examples out of whoever leaked these rumors, Apple stands a good chance of discouraging other would-be leakers from unsealing their lips in the future. And if Think Secret coughs up their sources without a fight, you can be sure that such cowardly disregard for confidentiality will be widely publicized. I’ve never understood what motivates someone to risk their job to supply rumor sites with upcoming product info, but you’d have to be an outright moron to do so if you knew that Think Secret will reveal your name to Apple upon request of their attorneys. Apple doesn’t need to shut Think Secret down; they just need to make it known that Think Secret is unwilling to protect sources’ confidentiality.”

Developing. Or, perhaps a better word, fermenting.

The Scene’s test blog: Nashville nightlife blogger Mr. Roboto is apparently getting his request for Nashville media to start blogging granted. He blogged this pre-launch test blog of the Nashville Scene. Apparently there were some posts up earlier, but apparently Mr. Roboto is still recovering from his long weekend in New Orleans and apparently didn’t think to record a screen grab.

“Markets are conversations” lesson: This morning, I whinned that Technorati’s under-reporting of my inbound links was crushing my ego (although I didn’t admit to the vanity implications of my rant). Anyway, on the comments of that earlier post, some dude named Dave Sifrey posted this comment:

I’m sorry about that. We’re working on it, but have been having some glitches lately - and this is a totally different part of the system than the keyword watchlists. We’ll get you hooked back up asap. And sorry about the problems, we’re working really hard to correct them.

Dave, for those who may not know it, is founder and CEO of Technorati. Impressive.

When lovemarks are clueless, Part II: As I blogged last month, I just hate it when one of my lovemarks files a lawsuit against one of my cluetrain sources.

Quote from cnet’s news.com:

Apple on Tuesday sued the publisher of Mac enthusiast site Think Secret and other unnamed individuals, alleging that recent postings on the site contain Apple trade secrets, according to court documents seen by CNET News.com.

I guess those rumors must be true.

(via: NorthwestNoise.com)

Southwest expanding into Pittsburg(h): For someone like me, who spends many hours of each year on a Southwest jet, the news being reported by the WSJ this afternoon, is significant. However, I never really travel to Pittsburg(h). Dear Southwest, please fly into Newark or Kennedy…and then into a city along the pan handle of Florida, anywhere from Mobile to Panama City would be just fine.

Update: What the “h” with my spelling of Pittsburgh?

Cannibalzine: The owner of the circulation-free-falling TV Guide is planning to launch Inside TV, a mass-market magazine devoted to TV shows and their stars. Wow. I guess this should shut-up all you so-called experts who claim there’s no more out-of-the-box thinking at big media companies.

(If you crave a steady stream of this sort of earth-shattering magazine news, I suggest you subscribe to the RSS feed of my link blog, del.cio.us/rexblog)

Yet another misguided “moral & monetary” equivalency exercise: I would have ignored this psuedostatistic from the blogger psuedorandom had it not be Boing-Boing-alanched and, therefore, given some sort of blessing of authority. The comparison of the Iraq war budget with the amount of funds committed by the U.S. government to date for tsunami relief is, yet again, a misguided attempt to politicize (and make partisan) something we should all support.

Start down this path and you can “put things in perspective” about anything you want. (The value of pirated music vs. how much those who listen to pirated music have contributed to tsunami relief, How much Americans spend on hair gel compared with how much they contribute to tsunami relief.)

Please, 150,000+ people have been killed. As much as you hate him, George W. Bush didn’t cause the earthquake. Let’s save that argument for another day.

Technorati adds features, but I have a complaint regarding an old one: While Technorati keeps adding features (here’s a new pubsub-like one via Joi Ito), I wish they’d fix an old one. My “links from sources” cosmos statistics have been stuck on the same numbers for months. On the back of an envelop I can count up more incoming links and sources. Even the cosmos of my weblog’s defunct address continues to grow faster than its current one and it’s been a dead end URL since July.

Death wish: Wednesday’s WSJ is reporting that RaySat Inc., in Vienna, Va., says it has developed a satellite antenna that can turn a moving car into a rolling wi-fi “hot spot.”

The key quote in the article is the following (perhaps prescient) remark from the company’s president:

“The people who want it are dying for it,” said Samer Salameh, RaySat’s president and chief executive officer.

Talk about dying for it. Just wait until they have it and try to blog something outrageous they’ve just heard on NPR while heading down the interstate at 80 mph.