Just doing research for a country song she is writing titled “I’m a Redneck Courtney Love” : According to AP’s Joe Edward’s, “troubled country singer” Mindy McCready, 28, was supposed to appear at a court hearing in Williamson County today, but is in a Florida hospital after an overdose after being found unconscious in a hotel lobby after being charged in Arizona with identity theft, attempted fraudulent scheme and artifices, unlawful imprisonment and hindering prosecution. Her hearing today was regarding her violation of probation from last year when she pleaded guilty to fraudulently obtaining OxyContin and was fined $4,000, sentenced to three years of probation and ordered to perform 200 hours of community service.

OK, enough already: Gee, and I was just thinking to myself, what America needs is another weekly star calvacade magazine.

Are they talking about us? Newsweek magazine now has a “Blog Roundup” feature that shows, “The top 10 Newsweek stories generating the most discussion on Weblogs within the past 7 days.”

While it’s not quite like they’re engaging in a conversation with the blogosphere, it at least displays they acknowledge that the conversation doesn’t stop when the article appears.

(via: Doc Searls)

I wish this were reality: On Virtual Earth the twin towers still stand. (via: NorthwestNoise.com)

Update: However, the Apple campus is gone. (via: BlogSpotting)

AP explains the newsreader thing (sort of): I hope most people who read this weblog already know about the phenomena covered in the AP article, “Consumers of Online News Becoming Their Own Editors, Rarely Relying on One Organization,” but it’s worth noting. (Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite explain how one can use the magic of RSS to aggregate feeds on the desktop. Here’s how.)

Quote:

“The old idea of surfers coming to your Web site and coming to your front door, that’s going away,” said Lasica, a former editor at The Sacramento Bee. “People are going to come in through the side window, through the basement, through the attic, anyway they want to.”

Is the iPod doomed (someday)? At the end of last year, I wrote a long post about why the iPod was not going to “be killed” any time soon. I wrote it because I was tired of reading about MP3 players that were “iPod killers.” While I don’t see those articles as much anymore, here’s an article from the August Fast Company that has as its first sentence, “The iPod is doomed. Not this month, not this year, and maybe not the next. But soon enough, Apple will lose its hold on the marketplace for both digital-audio players and digital songs. It’s inevitable.”

John J. Sviokla bases his prediction (well, if you can call “soon enough” a predication) on an “economic ecosystem” of companies that will cooperate and compete at the same time, but undermine the “closed” nature of the iPod. While, no doubt, the iPod will go away one day (my Mac Classic went away), Sviokla misses an important aspect of the iPod’s success, the point I tried to make in my earlier post: The iPod’s success is based also on iTunes and the myriad of features cooked into it that foster an ecosystem of users. (iMix being among the many examples I point to in the earlier post.)

Frankly, I don’t care if the iPod is doomed. If Apple stands still and lets that happen, they have only themselves to blame. But you can’t ignore the ecosystem of customers and not explain how exactly manufacturers and marketers can undermine the relationships and communities that are facilitated by some of the “sharing” aspects of iTunes.

Analysts tend to miss the whole community thing when focusing on iPods/iTunes as a technology and consumer product.

What Jason Fried said: “Forget the enterprise market. Forget the mid-sized company market. Build for the smallest of small companies and you’ll find a thirsty, neglected market waiting for you.”