I’ve blogged about the “on demand” jet service, DayJet, several times. The “world’s first ‘per-seat, on-demand’ jet service” was a great concept but, unfortunately, the thinking behind it was too far outside the box for it to work at this time. On Friday, it ceased operations. The company was facing daunting financial challenges but apparently — at least how the spin seems to be taking shape — was finally pushed over the edge when a congressional report released on Wednesday said the FAA’s certification of the type of jet the company is using — the Eclipse EA500 — had been “rushed.”

Despite its demise, I still recommend listening to the podcast Jon Udell posted a year ago in which he interviewed Ed Iacobucci, DayJet’s co-founder and CEO, regarding the logistical challenges of such a jet taxi service — and how the Internet can one day help overcome the challenges. The interview explores, at depth, the peer-to-peer metaphor as it was being applied to matching up the needs of travelers with the availability of the company’s anticipated fleet of aircraft. This is of significant importance to the hundreds of smaller communities in the U.S. that have airports capable of being served by such services — but that today are completely cut off from any commercial aviation.

Personally, I believe the concept of DayJet was incredibly visionary and I’m sorry it didn’t work. I think in about 10-15 years, we’ll look back and say Iacobucci played a Preston Tucker role in an idea that, one day, will find its time.

(via: twitter.com/hyku)

Technorati Tags: aviation, dayjet

Backward time-travel Item #2: When it comes to tech news and punditry, my news in-box (primarily, the RSS newsreader, NetNewsWire), often contains “news” items that make me think I’ve gone to sleep for 20 years. But unlike Rip Van Winkle, I’ve awakened to discover nothing has changed.

For example, there was a weekend item from the former Forbes reporter, former fake Steve Jobs and former blog-basher Dan Lyons, who kicks off his new career as a fake Newsweek writer by lobbing this link-baiting bomb at Apple fan-boys. In essence, the piece suggests that Apple has started appropriating technology and approaches that are first developed and proven successful by little guys. According to Lyons, such a practice is turning Apple into the new Microsoft.

But anyone who has even casually followed Apple since its inception knows the company has always viewed as “fair game” to compete with (translation: rip off) anything in its ecosystem. The examples of what Apple has appropriated over the years is legendary: for example, the notion of “scripting.” Or look at the former Apple channel retailers who have been crushed by Apple Stores — and who developed a class action lawsuit against the company, dispelling Lyons notion that, “In the old days, stuff like this didn’t matter. Apple was such a fringe player that nobody really cared how the company behaved.” Bottomline: Apple has always been a company that develops very cool products, but there have always been controversies swirling around the ideas that did not come to them in some a priori fashion. Even the iPod was inspired by a real guy who didn’t work for Apple.

Almost all of Apple’s features have come from their observation (and occasionally, their acquisition or licensing of) what innovative individuals have hacked together to make their Mac run better or cooler. After that, Microsoft takes Apple’s best and includes them on some future update of their products. Finally, Google takes the best of what Microsoft does (unless it’s search) and turns it into a web-application. It’s what makes the world go around.

What you end up with is a Google web-application adaptation of a Microsoft adaptation of an Apple feature that Apple adapted from an innovative individual.

I don’t like it. But that hasn’t kept me from using Google docs.

Backward time-travel Item #2:

e-Newspapers: The New York Times is a sucker for any story about devices that replicate the way people over 40 think a newspaper should look and that keep alive the notion of an obsolete news distribution channel. I still love the notion that one day we’ll all have flying cars. But I at least understand it’s not the flying car I want but the ability to be transported from anywhere I want to be to another place I want to be. The e-Paper people are so obsessed with trying to create something that “looks like” print, they’ve lost sight that it’s knowledge and information and connectivity and entertainment that people want — not something that “looks like” a newspaper. And unfortunately, the closer we get to the future, the less impressive e-Paper appears. Twenty years ago, e-paper concepts could be folded up and put in our pockets. Where are those devices? I’m waking up 20 years later and the concept technology is less cool than what was predicted back then.

I’ve been trying hard this year not to link to items that fall into the shiny object chasing category I’d call “tech-blogger meme-of-the-day.” However, I can’t help myself on this one. Mozilla Labs (the folks behind the Firefox browser) has a concept project called Ubiquity that utilizes an interface concept that will be very familiar and compelling to users of the software called Quicksilver.

I’ve never tried to explain Quicksilver, but here goes: It a light-weight utility that I use on my Mac that allows me to navigate and operate pretty-much everything on the computer in a text-driven way so that I can by-pass all the clicking I do when using the “finder” and all the metaphors related to the desktop. Of course, writing that previous sentence and recognizing that it makes no sense, whatsoever, is why I don’t try to explain Quicksilver.

So I won’t attempt to explain how or why I find Ubiquity so compelling either (watch some of the video and maybe you’ll see why). One day, perhaps in about 10 or 15 years, people who live on the Internet will migrate to a web interface that Ubiquity points to — one where users can navigate among websites and web-apps using “verbs” or “language-driven” methods of controlling the browser and content and services they want to collect, store or share. In the old days, I would have predicted 3-5 years, but about 15 years ago, I predicted such a life-span for the fax machine — and I hear one whirling in the background.

I’m not recommending you become a lab-rat and download an early version of Ubiquity. It’s cool to use, but not yet something ready for prime-time. However, if you’re already someone who uses Quicksilver, you may want to check it out.

(via: waxy.org)

Technorati Tags: ubiquity

How long has it been since ten years ago? Here’s a hint: Ten years ago was when you first heard a President say, “I did not have sex with that woman.” Here’s another hint: Ten years ago is when I purchased the car I’m still driving. In other words, ten years ago seems like a lifetime ago — but not that long ago, at all.

Ten years ago, Fortune Magazine sent a reporter to Nashville in search of how middle-America was being changed by the Internet. Writer Eryn Brown spent three weeks here working on the story — and did what I thought was a great job capturing those early, innocent days of World Wide Webness. Back then, only 12% of Nashville’s population was online (compared with around 26% in San Francisco at the time) but we were one of the first 20 markets to have cable-based Net access. Reba McEntire told Brown how her company’s Music Row studio had, “ISDN lines, fiber-optic lines, ‘the kit and kaboodle…We do teleconferencing, satellite feeds all over the world.’ McEntire can even do real-time remote recording, singing over ISDN lines while her session musicians and producer are in the Starstruck Studios back in Nashville.” In other words, it was a lifetime ago — but not that long ago, at all — especially if you change the initials ISDN to DSL.

I had a small role in Eryn’s article:

To people on the outside, Nashville’s all about country. Most people who live here, though, aren’t hooked into “the business.” They’re working regular jobs, caught up in the same everyday concerns as everyone else. Like the weather. On April 16, publisher Rex Hammock and his Webmaster, Will Weaver, stood at the plate-glass window in Hammock’s office and watched two tornados plow toward their building from downtown Nashville. “That probably wasn’t so smart,” Hammock laughs. The two men snapped some digital pictures, waited for things to calm down, and then hopped up the street to grab a few shots of Nashville’s Parthenon (a full-sized replica of the real thing in Greece), which had been damaged in the storm. Hammock and Weaver then posted the photos on their corporate site, along with phone numbers for the Red Cross and other relief organizations. MSNBC and CNN found the snapshots almost immediately and linked to them. Within a week, www.hammock.com had a million hits. (Hammock Publishing’s site usually gets about 3,000 a month.) “When I took my daughter to school the next day,” Hammock says, “I had little kids telling me they had seen my pictures on the Net.”

Hammock Publishing has been creating Internet content for five years now. Business is chugging along: Revenues should go up 25% this year, to $4 million. Even though he’s 44 years old, Hammock’s part of what passes for Nashville’s Internet community. He knows the guys who run the city’s handful of Gen-X Net startups. He works with Telalink, an Internet service provider started by a couple of Vanderbilt University grads in 1993. (The company’s principals, now 28 and 29, still work out of the condo they lived in when they graduated. Their dress code: shorts and inline skates.) Hammock also teaches night classes about the Net at Montgomery Bell Academy, Nashville’s tony boys’ school. Most of his students are budding hobbyists in their 50s and 60s who want to use the Net to read up on gardening, fill in family trees, or find that perfect ski resort in Colorado. Jake Wallace was in Hammock’s class for a little while.

Hammock doesn’t think Nashville’s quite there yet, when it comes to the Net. “We haven’t had our defining moment,” he laments. The tornados could have been it, he thinks, had any of the official disaster-related organizations taken full advantage of the medium. They could have used it to match volunteers with people in need of help, he thinks, or at least to build a sense of community after the calamity. “If it’s something of importance, of immediacy, people reach out to the Web. I don’t think the media here, or the government, understand what a useful tool this can be.”

Geez. That was ten years ago. And I was already getting the “even though he’s an old guy” caveat. And I was already complaining about no one doing anything about the weather — or, at least, the way the Internet can be used after a weather catastrophe. Fortunately, the use of the Internet after a disaster has begun to change, but re-reading that story, I’m convinced there’s little new thinking that was not at least roughed-out a decade ago. Things are smaller (with more capacity), faster, hipper, cooler — but most of the technology we are using today was around in the 1980s — it was just clunkier and slower.

As far as Nashville goes, while I’m not sure Mr. Wallace has increased his usage of the Internet, the son he mentioned is definitely a member of the Nashville geekorati — as I was communicating with him yesterday afternoon via e-mail he was reading on his phone. I was asking him if his dad was out of kindergarten. On the business end of things, there have been some genuine success stories among Web-based startups in Nashville. And plenty of setbacks, er, lessons along the way. Last week, Jackson Millier, a Nashville friend I met through the blogosphere, wrote about what he’s seeing in Nashville these days:

“I feel like I know a million geeks in Nashville now, and I meet more all the time. There are lots more people out there that are doing cool things who have not yet been brought into the fold. I honestly think that the more cohesive and supportive the Nashville tech culture gets, the more likely Nashville will be recognized as a national tech hub. It is amazing how this city has changed over the last 3 years and I am very grateful to each and everyone one of you who have helped make it happen.”

While I’m not so sure Nashville will ever be recognized as a national tech hub, I do know it’s a great place to live, raise a family and grow a business — geek or not.

Over the years, it’s been fascinating to watch the light turn on for certain people regarding what’s taking place in the marketplace of “content” (excuse me, Doc). For example, today, Paul Krugman writes an “a-ha” piece after using an Amazon Kindle for a couple of months.

Quote:

“Indeed, if e-books become the norm, the publishing industry as we know it may wither away. Books may end up serving mainly as promotional material for authors’ other activities, such as live readings with paid admission. Well, if it was good enough for Charles Dickens, I guess it’s good enough for me.

Whenever I read something like that, I have to take a deep breath and admit to myself that not everyone has spent the past 20 years obsessed with this topic. Whenever I read something like that, I wish I had a place to point people to a few seminal writings that have provided similar a-ha-moments to really geeky folks (like me) — but a long time ago.

If you have some more writings that provided an a-ha moment to you, please add them to the comments.

Here are a few of my go-to ones:

1. The Esther Dyson essay, “Intellectual Value,” written in the July, 1995, issue of Wired magazine. (Krugman quotes Dyson in his piece today, but does not link to it.) Go ahead, commit it to memory. It’s like the Gettysburg Address.

2. The book, The Cluetrain Manifesto, grew from this now “read-only landmark website.” (Here’s a place to read the book for free.) It pretty much foresees everything that marketing is becoming. It’s like when Luther nailed his 95 theses to that door in Wittenburg.

3. While not a specific article, I find myself referring often to the concept Paul Saffo coined “macro-myopia.” It relates to forecasting the impact of new technology and means, roughly, “in the short term we overestimate, in the long term we underestimate” the impact of new technology. This is an idea I’ve written about several times over the years (on the Cluetrain listserv in 2000, here in 2002 and in 2004 when Paul explained his role in adding to a concept developed by Roy Amara, Ev Rogers and others. The importance of the concept today is this: When those of us who are obsessed with technology see something that we know is going to change everything, we delude ourselves into thinking the change will be overnight. Technology adoption has a very predictable cycle and even those technologies that look like instant hits are likely catching a wave that was two-decades in the building.

Two bonus long reads for those who find comfort in realizing all these new ideas have been around a long, long time.:

4. The 1945 article, “As We May Think,” by Vannevar Bush (synopsis).

5. The Machine Stops, a 1909 science fiction novella (12,000 words) by E.M. Forster.

Today, I’m officially declaring — after eight years of denying it — that this a geek blog. If you read it because I write about magazines and marketing and social media, that’s fine. Those are the topics I write about, but you need to know that this blog is not really about those topics, it’s about technology.

This is a geek blog, okay.

To prove this, I’ve decided to display my "wikio" badge that says this blog is "ranked" #180 among the gazillion technology blogs in the world . I must confess, I was somewhat surprised when Lisa from Wiko e-mailed me to encourage me to display that badge as I’ve never really thought of this blog as being a "technology blog." As I said, I thought it was more of a marketing blog, but it’s only ranked #118 in that department. Heck, in the industry I actually work in (an industry now being called "content marketing"), my blog is only ranked #60 . Actually, that’s a good thing, as it means there are now at least 60 better blogs about a topic no one was blogging about but me for most of the years I’ve been blogging — and I’ve always known I was doing a terrible job "covering" it.

For years, I’ve known that I was confusing people who need to pigeon-hole blogs into a specific topic. That’s why you’ll never find my blog ranked high on services that try to designate a cluster of "top blogs" on a certain topic.

But it’s getting to the point where, if you blog, you have to declare a major .

So, today, I’m declaring a major: technology.

Knowing that technology is the most blogged about topic there is (except, perhaps, knitting), I figure being #180 provides me with enough geek-cred that I can wear my badge proudly.

But I must admit, the real reason I’m displaying the badge is a column in the New York Times today by David Brooks .

Brooks is at his best when he weaves cultural threads into trend tapestries that can be understood by those who may know something is taking place, but can’t quite figure out, "the big picture." (His book Bobos in Paradise is a great example of his skills at this.) Today, in his Times column, he takes on the task of trying to interpret for a general audience why geeks are now cool.

Quote:

"…new technology created a range of mental playgrounds where the new geeks could display their cultural capital. The jock can shine on the football field, but the geeks can display their supple sensibilities and well-modulated emotions on their Facebook pages, blogs, text messages and Twitter feeds."

Hey, that’s me.

I’m a geek. This blog is about geeky things. I now have proof.

I’m sorry. The title of this post is a joke. I’m merely referring to Kara’s post in which she talks about informally polling some friends outside the bubble of Silicon Valley (where she lives and works) regarding their awareness of Twitter and some other services that, well, a few of us use obsessively but that haven’t reached a level of awareness — even a level of obscurity — among “real” people.

Says Kara:

“I conducted a little experiment among the more than 100 folks gathered for the wedding (in Washington, DC), all of whom were quite intelligent, armed with all kinds of the latest devices (many, many people had iPhones, for example) and not sluggish about technology. They were also made up of a wide range of ages and genders, from kids to seniors. And so I asked a large group of people –- about 30 — and here is the grand total who knew what Twitter was: 0

As I’ve blogged here before, I’ve given up on trying to explain Twitter. I know how I use it and why I like it. But, as with most of the social media or gizmo-technology I experiment with: I really don’t care who uses — or doesn’t. I’m not going to attempt to convert anyone — although, I guess adding my Twitter account to my business card is an implicit act of network-effect evangelism and endorsement.

Over the years, I’ve learned that when it comes to certain types of new media, the gap between geek adoption and “real people” adoption is typically wide.

I’ve mentioned on this blog that in 1996, I gave a presentation about the Internet to the 300-member Downtown Nashville Rotary Club. I asked for a show of hands from the audience filled with civic and business leaders: “How many of you have your e-mail address printed on your business card?” I recall precisely that six people raised their hands. Six.

Two years later, I gave a similar presentation to the same group and asked the same question. Nearly everyone in the audience raised their hands.

One of the reasons (one among several) I register on new “social networking” services is to watch their adoption rates — often there is no adoption rate, but almost always there’s a long lag time between geek and real-world registrations. For example, I registered on LinkedIn on February 3, 2004 — over four years ago. For a year or so, I had a grand total of 3-4 contacts, all geeks, and probably all of them personal friends of the creators of the service.

I had nearly forgotten that I’d registered on the service when, a couple of years ago, I started getting a few more connection requests when they added a feature that allows users to upload their contact list and bounce it against a database of LinkedIn users. (I’ve written before about this use of e-mail as a means to assert identity and serve as a rudimentary precursor to some way in the future where we can all easily migrate our “connections” from service to service. In the past month, I’ve received more LinkedIn connection requests than in the previous 3 1/2 years combined — and they’re all coming from my off-line connections. But still, a poll of my offline friends would probably still reveal that few of them have heard of LinkedIn.

So, as for Kara’s friends. Mine are the same. I regularly ask people if they’ve ever heard of Twitter. I then work my way up to services like Flickr. (They’ve all heard of Google, for the record.)

Kara is correct. No real person has ever heard of Twitter.

Sidenote: About two months ago, I spent a 30 minute cab ride from Baltimore (BWI) to DC explaining my use of Twitter to a commissioner of the FCC. Later that day, I spent 15 minutes in a similar discussion of Twitter with 12 CEOs of business-to-business media companies who were perplexed by my use of the service — as they were with my early blogging many years ago.

As I listen to myself explain Twitter, I’m surprised anyone uses it. However, as I discovered just yesterday, using Twitter makes solving problems a snap if you happen to ask a question that someone who’s following you can answer.

Frankly, I think it’s a good thing that Twitter has not gone mainstream yet. But that’s another post for another day.

Later: I believe that Twitter — or something like it — will go “mainstream” one day. It’s just not going to be “soon” in geek-time.

Note: I’m stepping on a plane and will check back in later to edit this post.

Back in October, while moderating a panel at PaidContent.org’s “Future of Business Media” conference in New York, I asked IDG CEO Bob Carrigan about the rumors that The Industry Standard would be relaunching online as a dejazine (although, I feel 100% sure I didn’t use that term). Bob indicated that it would be launching last December as a “very innovative social media platform” that aggregates input from the community in a prediction market thing.”

While the site didn’t relaunch publicly last December, it has now.

Bonus link: PaidContent.org’s David Kaplan’s interview with Bob Carrigan.

I guess it’s theme week. And this week’s theme is all about magazines and the web.

Yesterday, I pointed to an interview with the business editor of Wired magazine regarding magazines and the web. Today, the Wall Street Journal has an article on the same topic, focusing primarily on the web strategy of Wired’s parent company, Conde Nast.

Quote:

“Web revenue for magazine companies is about 5% of their total revenue, says Martin Walker, chairman of Walker Communications, a magazine-consulting company. “While [online ad revenue] is growing quickly, it is not replacing lost print revenue,” he says. “None of them can compete on the Web in terms of traffic.”

While I’m sure Mr. Walker knows what he’s talking about, I sometimes think I’ve heard that statement said so many times by so many magazine industry people that it — to me, at least — has risen to the level of a tenant of faith — or an accepted myth. Again, I’m not singling out Mr. Walker — most of the people I know in the magazine world would say the same thing: Revenues from online operations are growing fast, but can only, ever be a fraction of lost print revenues because, well, magazines websites will never be able to compete on the Web for traffic (which translated, means: “with Google”).

I’ll skip the whole economics of the two different business models — economics that include the overhead of marketing, production and distribution in magazines — that make a mere comparison of top-line revenues irrelevant.

I’ll go ahead and jump to my challenge of the core belief represented in the quote: “None of them can compete on the Web in terms of traffic.” I don’t understand that theory. What does it mean, exactly? Who can Conde Nast not compete with in terms of traffic? (Again, those are rhetorical questions: The implied message is that magazine companies can never compete with Google for traffic.)

I believe a more important question to ask is this: Is traffic the the only — or the universally definitive — competitive metric of the web? Will traffic always be the metric used by advertisers to determine where they should invest their marketing dollars? Obviously, if I sell widgets online and search engines deliver me customers who are in the process of buying widgets, I’d place an extremely high value on the traffic metric. But what happens if (or, when) advertisers who aren’t driving online transactions decide “time spent” on a website is a more critical measure of engagement than unique users or pageviews? Or what about when they realize that massively-traffic’d web services and applications that are utilities and tools, rather than media one experiences — or engages with — are perhaps not the right environment for brand-building marketing?

Or what if some types of advertisers (i.e., consumer brands that aren’t using the web to drive online transactions, but to support a brand) realize that a better means of determining where to advertise is something like the Techmeme Leaderboard that ranks which websites tech-niche bloggers are pointing to. Can magazine companies compete for a top spot there? Well, one could easily dominate it if it they purchased a few properties like TechCrunch. But even today, there are plenty of print-centric brands represented on the list. Moreover, once you move outside the world of technology news, I’m sure one would find that the “leaderboards” of online media are already print-centric brands. Want one example? Here is the leaderboard for a sister “memetracker” of Techmeme, the politically-focused Memeorandum. Do print-centric brands compete there? Answer: They dominate it. (Hypothetical question: If a leaderboard of food bloggers existed, where would Epicurious rank?)

Obviously and without a doubt, Conde Nast will never compete with Google in terms of traffic. But is utility-oriented traffic what a Conde Nast’s goal should be? Google is a search engine. People use it to find what they are looking for. If Conde Nast’s web properties are what the searcher then clicks to — and engages with and blogs about and develops conversations and relationships around, isn’t that “engagement” what brand marketers want?

In the end, raw traffic will be the competitive metric of search-oriented advertising — a massive and powerful new form of advertising that leads directly to decisions and transactions. However, another form of online advertising that’s focused on brand-building and lifestyle-association will gravitate to those places on the web where people engage in their passions and loves.

And that’s an arena where magazine companies should be able to compete rather forcefully if the people who run them would get over believing in the myth that such a competition is over.

There was a time when I thought I had to fill this blog with insight that was actually produced in my very own brain — or, at least, in how my very own brain reacted to what I read on the web. But that was before I knew Scott Karp. Now, the rexblog is more about pointing to his great insight, like this post from Scott about the enhanced NYTimes.com’s Technology section:

Quote:

“The New York Times joins what I expect will be a rapidly expanding list of media brands that aim to create value for their readers by aggregating the best third-party content from across the web and thereby take an important step towards transforming media into a dynamic, collaborative, and fully networked endeavor.”

Sidenote (i.e., something from my very-own brain): The most unfortunate aspect of the new Technology section’s launch is the characterization of a new feature it has (a news aggregator) as a “Techmeme-killer.”

As a longtime observer of the -killer meme, I can pretty much guarantee that whenever something is described as a -killer, it rarely kills. Also, as a longtime observer of Techmeme (as in, observing it from the day it launched and from knowing Gabe even longer), I can recall when Digg was going to kill Techmeme and, well, about 100 hundred other things were going to “-killer” it since then. I have some beefs with Techmeme (it’s Valley-centricity, for example), but it’s not going to be -killered by anything that tries to -killer it by being “like” it, but different. (Maybe one day, my very-own brain will explain what that means.)

The opinion-leaders who obsess about what other opinion-leaders are saying about breaking tech stories will still be obsessed with what hits Techmeme.

Another thing: Anyone who is obsessed with Techmeme has got to know (or, at least greatly suspect) that it’s more than just “a machine.”

What Dave says: “Maybe someday these conferences could host real-time development, where media hackers put together new communication systems and deploy them before the conference is over. The moon mission approach to development, if you want to get something done quickly, make sure you know where you’re going and are excited about it. Sometimes it’s amazing how quickly these things can bootstrap.”

There are lots of different kinds of conferences and conventions — everything from the kind where organizations get together to elect officers and decide on by-laws to others that are more like training-academies where people get “certification.”

However, the type of conference I enjoy most are those where people get together to push around ideas and concepts — to challenge each other with provocative ideas and new approaches or new products. While Dave is focusing (in my simplistic interpretation) on conferences that explore the social, political and economic impact of new technology and new models of networked media, his ideas could as easily be applied to any group focused on the exploration of any “idea” — be it a group of plumbers, a group of brain surgeons or a group of academics — any group, that is, that is willing to embrace the types of conversational-enabling technology that Dave alludes to — and that are widely available.

I’ve often said on-the-record that the most valuable part of any conference or trade show are the conversations that take place in the aisle-ways. I believe any technology or approach that can help elevate to the main-stage such “back-channel” communication will, in effect, help get rid of the “lame parts” (i.e., panelists and presenters who only know how to promote their own pet project*) of conferences.

*Obviously, if they’ve been invited to present their pet project, that’s okay. Many presenters don’t know how to talk about any thing else, however.

Bonus link: From Doc Searls, on another topic, but related: “Here’s my big idea for the Times: Hire Dave Winer to come in and take the paper to the next level. Dave had Martin’s ear, and those of some other folks at the Times, way more than three years ago. And to some degree they listened. The Times did some good stuff with Dave’s advice (such as taking the lead with RSS). But the Times has otherwise ignored outstanding ideas such as the ones Dave demonstrates with nytimesriver, an application I often use on my cell phone. Nothing to lose, Times. Lots to gain. Trust me.

It’s official: Wearing an iPod in a thunder-storm is not a good idea. Quote: “Although the use of a device such as an iPod may not increase the chances of being struck by lightning, in this case, the combination of sweat and metal earphones directed the current to, and through, the patient’s head.”

Next month the New England Journal of Medicine will look into whether or not one should use a Blendtec blender in a thunderstorm.

At times, my blog has drifted into becoming a Paul Saffo fan-blog. That’s due to hearing him say things 20 years ago that I’ve later noticed have become reality.

Recently, I re-posted a clarification of something Paul said many years ago. That led to some off-line conversations with Paul that helped me fill in some blanks. Earlier today, he sent me a link to an article he wrote for the current Harvard Business Review that, and I thank them, is “free” and available for reading if you click through a few “acceptance” buttons. (And it’s probably just a temporary “free,” so hurry.)

The article is Paul’s examination of what he calls, “The Six Rules for Effective Forecasting.” I highly recommend it to anyone who is in the business — or hobby — of spotting trends and trying to figure out what will stick.

It’s easy, really easy, to maintain a blog — or be a columnist or reporter — and spout off predictions on whether something will succeed or not — typically based on about ten-seconds of hearing about it. Think back to the six months of hype before the iPhone went on sale. In addition to the hype, consider how many blog posts, news articles, podcasts and TV shows were devoted to forecasting whether or not the iPhone will succeed — that were totally focused on reasons that seem so lame now. Whether it succeeds of fails has little or nothing to do with its keyboard, for example. Yet millions of words were devoted to that subject by people who had no way to understand how the keyboard actually works.

Reporters are the worst forecasters I know. They make their living reporting on what’s happening today. However, forecasting — and true trend spotting — requires a 40-to-60-year horizon. You need to know what has happened during the past 20-30 years that leads up to today, and you need the wisdom to weigh the considerations necessary to determine if the “new thing” will have an impact 20-30 years into the future. Paul’s article examines what those considerations are.

I heard Paul talk about a 20-year horizon, strangely enough, about 20 years ago. Whenever I hear experts telling me how rapidly things are changing, I tend to ignore such conventional wisdom — things don’t move as rapidly as we believe they do, and often, in an historical context, things move remarkable — and frustratingly, achingly — slowly.

For example, about a year ago, I pointed back to a 20-year-old concept video Apple (during the Sculley-era) produced on a “futuristic device” called the Knowledge Navigator. Twenty years ago, they were describing a device that is very iPhone-like: but with more features. I’ve been waiting for the Knowledge Navigator for two decades and if they increase the size of the iPhone to 8X10 and put a camera facing the user, they’ll have it: just 20 years later.

When it comes to forecasting, never confuse your opinions with forecasts. Opinions are like looking up at the clouds and saying, gee it looks like rain. Forecasts are like having a network of satellites, a bank of computers and the training to crunch real-time data with historic data — and then saying, gee it looks like there’s a 50 percent chance of rain.

Here’s just one of the great quotes from Paul’s must-read article:

“Even in that hotbed of rapid change, Silicon Valley, most ideas take 20 years to become an overnight success. The Internet was almost 20 years old in 1988, the year that it began its dramatic run-up to the 1990s dot-com eruption. So having identified the origins and shape of the left-hand side of the S curve, you are always safer betting that events will unfold slowly than concluding that a sudden shift is in the wind. The best advice ever given to me was by a rancher who reminded me of an old bit of folk wisdom: “Son, never mistake a clear view for a short distance.”

Tech media company, O’Reilly, has started selling and site-licensing books in PDFs by chapter — or in their entirety. O’Reilly today rolled out this new feature on 714 books. All these titles are also part of a program called the “Copyright Clearance Center RightsLink” project, that will give customers “the option to purchase reuse rights of book content for their Intranets, newsletters, course packs, and websites,” says O’Reilly.

According to the press release, using Scott Raymond’s “Ajax on Rails” as an example, the new plan offers the following options (see the links along the right hand of the page):

Purchase the printed book for $39.99

Purchase the entire book in a PDF format for $27.99

Purchase a chapter for $3.99 each

Purchase reprint rights for portions of the book

Purchase a site license for the entire book or a portion of it

Also, you can read it online through Safari, an electronic reference library for programmers and IT professionals. (No relation to the Apple browser by the same name.)

Observation: This is not exactly from the “content wants to be free” school-of-thought. However, as I recently purchased an entire O’Reilly book for something that was contained in one chapter, I can see how I would have chosen another flavor if this vending machine approach had been available. Also, I like it when authors can sell more stuff. If this helps them do it, great.

I know, I know. Tech startup companies outside the Silicon Valley are not cool. (Note: that was an inside joke that goes back a few months) However, I’d like to give a shout-out to the first-round financing received by my young serial-entrepreneur friend, David Mason and his team at StudioNow.com. Their’s is a clever concept: To consumers, they offer an online, low-cost means to outsource video production. “Individual customers or small businesses interested in transforming digital photos and videos into high-quality content can now do so easily and affordably rather than investing resources in learning time-consuming and complex video-editing software.” The company, in turn, serves as a market=maker for those with video editing software and skills (”from novice editors to high-end professionals”). In other words, they are providing individuals who may be spending time creating “user-generated-content” with the means to make some money applying their video editing skills to a profitable dorm-room or home-based business.