One more thing you won’t see Wednesday – The Treo iPod: Here’s a product I guarantee Steve Jobs won’t be introducing at the big Apple product announcement Wednesday at 10 a.m., PDT. It’s a nano-hack I doubt you’ll ever see on any reputable gadget weblog or on the pages of Make magazine.

It’s something I call the iPod Treo. It’s designed to allow you to put a Treo and an iPod in the same pocket without having them scratching up against one another. It allows you to have a cell phone with camera, web browser and a thousand MP3s, photos, podcasts or audiobooks all velcro’d together.

Here’s what you’ll need:

An iPod nano
A Treo (my 600 is pictured)
Veclcro® Sticky-Back® fastners (black pictured, white available, a $1.79 for a package of 12)

Attach as shown and slip into coat pocket.

Strengths: Feature packed and funky.

Weaknesses: Redundant features and weird looks from strangers.

Warning: If you’re crazy enough to do this, you’ll not want to display it in public as it will void any cool-factor you perhaps may garner from showing off your iPod nano.

Note: I’m not seriously suggesting anyone do this.

Titans blogging, sort of: On, NFLplayers.com, Jarrett Payton is “journaling” and so is Drew Bennett. The website has a page for players called a “journal,” and occasionally, it will post a first-person message from him.

Equal time: After my post congratulating Patrick Ruffini on his new RNC post, a close friend and rexblog reader sent me an email suggesting I do a Google search of the word “failure.”

It’s a joke that doesn’t work on Yahoo!.

Update: Another rexblog reader says that Danny Sullivan has the details on this re-run of the 2003 “miserable failure” Googlebomb.

Yahoo! blog search: Hang on. I’m freaking out here. I saw it and then I didn’t see it.

Om Malik reports it’s hard to find. He points to Niall Kennedy who points to a results page. The Yahoo search blog post I pointed to in an earlier version of this post was, indeed, about the Yahoo! news search including results from blogs.

Now, I’ve just to figure out how I got there again.

Okay, now I remember what I did. At the bottom of the sidebar box on a Yahoo! News search results page, you can click on the “more blog results” link. That takes you to a page like this one for Pacman Jones.

Quick review: I’m with Om. Not much there there.

(Blogger) Patrick Ruffini named RNC eCampaign director: While I’m not a political blogger, and, frankly, don’t read political blogs, I always enjoy following anything Patrick Ruffini does as I find fascinating his understanding of what can be revealed by listening to RSS feeds and the blogosphere.

Last night, he blogged the announcement that he is assuming the role of eCampaign Director for the Republican Nationial Committee.

For the record, Patrick is a young guy and his climb to this position began when he started a pro-Bush weblog. That led to his being tapped to be webmaster of the Bush re-election website. The rest, as they say, is history.

(So, while we’ll continue to read those “fired because they blog story,” add this one to the “hired because they blog” list.)

Patrick is one of those individuals I met on the blogosphere and who I then made it a point to get to know offline. I don’t think we’ve ever talked about political ideas (he pretty much covers that on his blog), however we have spent hours discussing the blogosophere and conversaton and community.

I always figured whoever is the next GOP presidential nominee would have Patrick running his or her online campaign.

I guess the RNC decided it too.

Here’s the RNC press release:

RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman today announced that Patrick Ruffini has been selected to assume the role of RNC eCampaign Director.

Patrick Ruffini will return to the RNC where he previously served as Deputy Director of Online Communications until June of 2003. Patrick left the RNC to serve as Webmaster for Bush-Cheney ’04 where he was responsible for managing President George W. Bush’s reelection campaign website.

“We are very happy to welcome Patrick back to the RNC as eCampaign Director,” Chairman Mehlman said. “He has been at the forefront of innovative political communications and he will enable the Republican Party to become even more effective at communicating our positive vision for the country.”

Patrick also developed the official website for the 55^th Presidential Inauguration.

Okay, that’s the end of my political blogging.

You mean they don’t? (From Adage.com) “A study released yesterday by Starcom USA found that 65% of the consumers believe that advertisers pay for editorial mentions.”

Don’t get me started.

Blogging is not not a Web 2.0 thing: I promised myself (fortunately, not publicly) that I’d refrain from using the term Web 2.0, but I feel the need to jump in with an “Amen” to David Weinberger’s explanation for why “blogging” is not a Web 2.0 thing and why it’s important not to misunderstand that “voice” and “conversation” were part of the great impulse of the Web from the beginning.

Quote:

“But blogging as an enabler of individual voices talking together is (IMO) a great example of Web 1.0. The ability to talk in our own voice about what matters to us and to do so in conversation is exactly what got hundreds of millions of us onto the Web in the first place.”

Side note: I don’t use the term Web 2.0. because whenever a term starts being used by any one to mean anything, it suddenly means nothing to no one.

New search things I like: I like how Yahoo! News is incorporating blogs in the search results (see the box on the right hand side of the page of this search on the term “Pacman Jones.”) That’s search with mojo. (Note: “mojo” is not a word I use except in a tongue-in-cheek way when referring to anything Yahoo! does that is clever.) By the way, if you really want to search the “world live web” (a Doc Searls term), the Yahoo! news search “Advanced Search” page just moved to the head of the class as you can place time-parameters on search results and it incorporates both news and blog results on one page and you can obtain an RSS feed of a search with those parameters. That’s lots of toys for one low price of free.

Update: Dave Winer is trying it out also and sees some things I don’t. For example, he’s not sure the time parameter feature applies to blogs. I agree with him on the “index more blogs” suggestion, but unlike Dave, I personally prefer blog results and news results to be separate. I value (often equally) what I learn from bloggers and what I learn from traditional news channels — but I also appreciate their differences. (Another topic for another post. However, for the record, I think Scripting.com is a news site as well as a weblog and perhaps should be indexed both as a “news” and “blog” source.)

Upate II: A Forbes.com article focuses on the “demarcation” between news and blogs on the Yahoo! News search results page.

On another front: I also like the simplicity of Gada.be. If you have web access on a cell-phone, you’re going to have a favorite new search solution. It’s also a wonderful display of how to unlock the power hidden in RSS feeds, but that’s a wonkish discussion for another time and place.