When I attended Macworld in February, I wrote, “The least impressive thing about the iPhone is that it’s a phone.” Several times, I’ve suggested that getting an iPod with all the iPhone features except the phone” would be a good thing. So, yes, I like what I’ve heard about the iPod touch. I guess, I’m just not a “phone” person, as I primarily use the iPhone in every way possible, but don’t really talk on it that much. Again, that may just be me.

Even better than the iPod touch or iPhone/ATT would have been the iPhone/wifi/voip device Dave Winer suggests as an alternative version of what could have happened over the past few months:

“Suppose Apple had never done the deal with AT&T and they were announcing the iPod Touch today. If they hadn’t announced a deal with Skype or their own software to connect the new iPod to the phone network through wifi, we’d all be speculating about it widely. It would be the obvious next step. And suppose they had announced it. At the same time they could have said “Okay, we know wifi isn’t everywhere yet, but 17 billion Starbucks outlets have them, and you can use your new iPod at every one of them to call anyone, for a very astonishingly low price.” So intstead of propping up the old over-priced locked-down phone system, they’d be like the runner in the 1984 commercial, throwing the torch in the face of the oppressor.

I agree with everything Dave says, except I think there are now, officially, 18 billion Starbucks.

Here’s my alternative to Dave’s alternative. Suppose that software hack that opens the iPhone actually works and someone hacks a bridge to Skype or some other VoIP provider. Since the price of an iPhone dropped to, roughly, the price of an iPod touch (16 GB iPod touch and 8 GB iPhone are priced at $399), wouldn’t that be about the same thing? I agree with Dave, however, it would have been much more elegant and radical and under-warranty had Apple done it.

In reality, for business purposes or many other reasons, some people will always want the stability and infrastructure of what an AT&T can bring to the iPhone. But for many, an iPhone/wifi might be a great alternative (for a $60 a month-savings trade-off).

Sidenote: On Twitter, @SteveRubel twitter.com/steverubel said that Apple was “horrifically rude” to drop the iPhone price $200 nine weeks after the launch. I responded, “We now know the market-value of nine weeks of iHipness.”

Travel good news, bad news: According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, airline delays are setting records — like the government needs to tell you that. The good news is this: Southwest, the official airlines of the rexblog, had the highest on-time arrival rate at 75.2 percent. (They also have the best blog — however, that’s not a government statistic yet.) As I’ll be spending several hours on Southwest planes this month (starting tonight), I’m happy to note the on-time arrival statistic, as it will provide a basis for comparison that I will also note on this blog. Observation: For business travelers using Southwest, this week is the beginning of a short period of time when the chaos settles down a bit, as the family vacationers stay home.

Technorati Tags: swa

While there is a big, big difference in consumer magazines and business-to-business magazines, I’m sure this research of how “American Magazines” use the web from the Blivings Group will be mis-applied to mean all magazines. However, the research just covers consumer magazine websites. (The list of magazines they looked at is in the appendix of the study.)

Here are what they believe are some key findings:

More magazines are using reporter blogs in 2007 than in 2006. Fifty-eight percent of the magazines researched now offer reporter blogs on their sites, compared to just 40 percent in 2006. Ninety three percent of these blogs allow reader comments, while just 31 percent use blogrolls, or links to external blogs.

Newspapers fared better than magazines in nearly every category in 2007. The only exception is the use of tags; four percent of magazines use tags compared to just one percent of newspapers.

The usage of required registration increased since last year from 38 percent to 42 percent.

Video usage nearly doubled in 2007, with 60 percent of the magazine websites we researched now offering video content. In 2006, just 34 percent of the websites offered this feature.

I’m not sure if the findings will be that significantly different if applied to Business-to-Business media-owned websites. However, I do know that media companies who supply mission-critical information online used by businesses all day, everyday, do not view the web through the prism suggested by this research.