Richard Scoble of Microsoft asked:

“Mark: tell me what you can do on a Mac that you can’t do on a PC? Give me, say, five examples. Here’s your chance to do some great advertising for Apple. The kind they can’t buy.”

While I don’ feel the zealous need to defend my choice of personal computers, it didn’t seem like it would be bad as an intellectual exercise. It does make me articulate the reasons I prefer Macs to Windows PC’s. They are:

1. System-wide spellchecking (services)
2. Syncing/802.11/Bluetooth that works
3. Media Creation, Manipulation & Organization
4. UNIX/Scripting/Developer tools
5. Lower Maintenance & Trouble-free Operation Continue Reading »

Apple is offering Volume Discounts for purchases of iTunes songs. A new program allows companies and educational institutions to offer song downloads from iTunes for promotional giveaways, incentive programs, sweepstakes prizes and other valuable customer offers: ‘Through this program, Apple provides the ability to purchase a batch of individual codes, good for redemption of song downloads at the iTunes Music Store. Your customers who receive song codes can download any one of the available songs from over 1 million at the iTunes Music Store. In addition, best of all, you may purchase these volume song codes at a discount.’ The minimum volume purchase is 25,000 songs for commercial entities and 10,000 songs for colleges and universities and the songs are available for U.S. iTunes Music Store usage only and must be used from within the US.

This is an interesting toe in the water, but what I’d really like to see is some kind of Rhapsody like subscription service. Perhaps implemented over a local University network much the same as the current iTunes Library sharing feature.

Overdue debtors beware: You may not be able to rely on Caller I.D. to screen out those annoying bill collectors much longer. A California entrepreneur has a plan to bring the hacker technique of Caller I.D. spoofing to the business world, beginning with collection agencies and private investigators.

Slated for launch next week, Star38.com would offer subscribers a simple Web interface to a Caller I.D. spoofing system that lets them appear to be calling from any number they choose. ‘It creates an extra avenue for them to have someone pick up the phone,’ says founder Jason Jepson.

Newspapers haven’t been killed off by the Internet (at least, not yet!). The reason for this is that when we buy a newspaper, we’re not buying the news. These days the news is free (gratis) – we can go online and read newsfeeds from organisations like Reuters or the Associated Press, or original reporting from an organisation like the BBC. When I buy a newspaper like ‘USA Today’ or ‘The Independent’, I am actually buying an editorial style. The editor-in-chief for the newspaper sets the outlook, and then the editors and other staff select the news stories, phrase the reports, position them in the publication and perform the lay-out in support of that editorial outlook. If I go online to get the news, I have to do the work of selecting and filtering the news, and I may not always be aware of the biases of the source I am using. To get an aggregation of the news I want delivered in a style that helps me and with biases I understand, I subscribe to a newspaper.

HP’s version of Apple Computer Inc.’s (AAPL.O: Quote, Profile, Research) wildly popular iPod digital music player has unofficially been dubbed the hPod, analysts said.

The two companies earlier this year struck an agreement for HP to resell the iPod under the HP name, which will boost both companies’ exposure to consumer electronics markets.

‘The expectation on the iPod is that HP’s version will probably outsell Apple’s version relatively quickly,’ Enderle said, due to HP’s broad distribution at electronics retailers. (emphasis added)

Considering the number of sales Apple has been racking up recently, and the relatively wide distribution of the iPod already, I’m not sure about that last conclusion. It doesn’t look like HP is going to be able to underprice (or really differentiate themselves at all) from Apple, and while I could see a strong market for iPod’s as an add-on at the time of computer purchase, I’m not sure how successful they’ll be “adding-on” an accessory that costs 1/2 the full price of the computer.

National Digital Forecast Database (NDFD) Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a service providing the public, government agencies, and commercial enterprises with data from the National Weather Service’s (NWS) digital forecast database. This service, which is defined in a Service Description Document, provides NWS customers and partners the ability to request NDFD data over the internet and receive the information back in an XML format. The request/response process is made possible by the NDFD XML Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) server. To see the details of the NDFD XML SOAP service, go to the following URL and click on the NDFDgen link:

This is a fantastic service that seems like just the thing governmental agencies should be pushing for. I can’t wait to try to use this somehow.

EFF’s investigation revealed that ‘This Land is Your Land’ appears to have been in the public domain since the early 1970s. Woody Guthrie wrote his classic American song in 1940, when the copyright laws granted a copyright term of 28 years, renewable once for an additional 28. According to EFF, the initial copyright term was triggered when Guthrie sold his first versions of the song as sheet music in 1945. The copyright on the song then ran out when Ludlow failed to renew its registration in 1973. Ludlow believes its copyright — initially filed in 1956 and renewed in 1984 — remains valid and disputes EFF’s claims.

In a sign that Google’s contextual ads might not be nearly as useful to marketers as its search advertising, the company removed contextual placements from the tops of pages served by its free blogging tool Blogger. In the ads’ place is now a Google search box designed to increase search traffic.

The contextual ads ran over pages that Google’s servers deemed were relevant to the ad. Launched with great fanfare and hope, the contextual placements have not yet proved to be as targeted as paid search placements, where users have already self-selected themselves.

Seems to me that given the generally sprawling (and personal) nature of the content covered by blogs, Adsense would be a poor fit. Google searching however, could be an excellent match, since blog entries often prompt additional inquiries regarding specific topics.

The next major release of the Mac OS X operating system will include technology that will eventually grant users more control over the way application windows are displayed to the screen.

According to reliable sources, Apple Computer’s Mac OS X 10.4 ‘Tiger’ OS will introduce developer support for resolution independent user interfaces (UI), breaking the software assumption that all display output is to be rendered at 72 dots per inch (DPI).

Reset and Cancel Buttons (Alertbox Apr. 2000)

Most Web forms would have improved usability if the Reset button was removed. Cancel buttons are also often of little value on the Web.

It is one of the most basic heuristics for interaction design to support user control and freedom by allowing users an ‘emergency exit’ out of any situation they may have entered. Undo was truly one of the greatest advances in usability.