I just thought of a way that Knol could make it. Google tracks our searches. This is common knowledge. If you don’t regularly clear out your cookies Google knows a lot about what your search habits are. Heck, they probably track IP addresses, so they know anyway. So, yeah, it’s a fact and you can get over it now. Google could use this, though to recruit authors for Knol. Thing is, what the internet needs are the very, very niche topics written about. You want to know a good couple-page bio on G. W. Bush? Wikipidea. That place is great for shit like that. You want to know about Singular Value Decompositions and how that could be used to approximate multi-dimensional data on a 2D plane? Good luck, Tonto. I tried that a few months ago and nearly went crazy doing so. Anyhow, now I know the answer. Google can probably guess what very niche topics you know something about (based on your niche searches) and what niche topics need to be filled out on the internet (based on unresolved searches). Heck, Google can probably even gauge your intelligence (especially if they do some semantic analysis of your Gmail emails). If Google can guess this, then they could, theoretically invite you to write Knols on things they’re pretty sure you may know and things that they know they need knols written on. They even know how valuable knols are to them and could maybe pony up some of that adwords cash up front, hear me? Holla.

Google’s new Wikipedia competition misses several at-bats. The three draws the Knol team has for the site that I’ve heard mentioned are:

1) you’ll get credit for writing the article.

Okay, how is that different from just putting something on your own website?

2) you can get money from the AdSense ads on the page.

Okay, how is that different from putting ads on your website that now hosts your article?

3) People will have an altruistic urge to benefit humanity.

Uh, no, they won’t.

And my final reason why Knol will fail is that there’s no obvious reason to use it. Either contribute to Wikipedia or post your own article on your blog.

If Google really wishes to aid search, they’d bring back Google Answers. There if people had really specific questions they could place bids and though they paid for the answer, the answers were then publicly available.

I’ve added the people who post most on my blog as “users”. So, when you leave a comment, be sure to use the email that we normally correspond with. Don’t worry, this email won’t be published to the internets.

I didn’t do it. I didn’t get the new 3G iPhone. Now I had planned to and even a few days before I was actively talking about getting one. Then, last Thursday, the App Store was activated and that changed everything. App Store is the gateway you use from your iPhone to get new applications. Before last Thursday an iPhone could only have about 20 applications. Now you can get almost 600. That’s 30 times the functionality with the same phone. It made me think, do I really need these new features? Is it worth $200 up front and a phone bill with an extra $15 a month (now $75 for a base plan) for faster wireless internet and more precise GPS? Answer: not right now at least. Let me finish playing with these new applications and get back to me.

The new apps, by the way, essentially make your phone an instrument of magic. I can use it as a remote control for my iTunes. It can listen to whats on the radio and tell me the song playing. I can even sing to it and it will (even with my voice) do a pretty good job of guessing the song. I’m looking forward to what will come out over the next year.

Dear Brian,

I understand that you are concerned about applications being deleted, I can understand your concern that you may have. I would not want you to lose any of your applications. Please email me back and let me know what if any applications have been lost.

Reset iTunes and try to sync your iPod again, if any applications are lost please email me and let me know what ones were lost and I will let you re-download them for you.

If you have any further questions or concerns, please feel free to email me back.

Have a great night!

Sincerely,

(name removed)
iTunes Store Customer Support

Thes apps… they aren’t huge. I don’t know exactly what is being backed up when iTunes tells me it is “Backing up ‘iPhone’”, but it is taking an elephant’s age. If it’s not the apps, is it the sql lite database? Whatever it is, if you install a few apps on your phone, have something else you can be doing while it syncs up.

Update: the iphone is synced and now none of my downloaded apps work. Awesome!

This is easy enough to believe for MySpace… that place is horrible, but Facebook I also have a better time using on the iPhone than the web. Facebook even gets mail so right that it (along with contacts) is better than Apple’s installed contacts. Why? They put faces along side of names and mail messages. This feature has been with us since 1.0 social networking apps. Mail clients never seemed to do that and when social networking apps did it the face icons were so huge that if you got any decent amount of mail your inbox would span for pages. Now that the social apps have to use small icons for small screens they have finally hit on the perfect combo of personality and space economy.

So I apologize in advance if I start sending you more messages on Facebook.

if you get that error, that means you have two keys in your keychain with the same name. Delete the older one.

I just got an email that a general base converting algorithm I wrote eleven years ago is going to be in Orielly’s Web Security Testing Cookbook

Got back from Cape Cod last night. The cape was great and unexpectedly productive. NearFlix is coming along. I’ve got most of the toughest components written. Apple is already accepting submissions for applications. I hope to have it ready in time to give them enough time to get it into the App Store by opening day. Guy says:

i think it was john lennon who some time prior to being assassinated and losing his ability to add further to the planet, said something like, “nearflix is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” i may be misquoting. i think it might have been, “life is what happens to you while you’re busy making nearflix.”

Jonathan Ive - Apples design guru who’s iconic vision for the iMac breathed new life into Apple and who’s iPod exploded Apple onto the general consumer goods scene. He’s British which will bring a touch of class to the keynotes, but he hasn’t exactly been given a lot of opportunities to speak at keynotes which implies he’s not really being groomed for the task.

Scott Forstall - The Senior Vice President of iPhone Software has clearly been studying old Job’s keynote addresses. Everything from his timing to his transition sentences says that he’s clearly trying to give presentations as inspiring as Steve. At the announcement of the iPhone SDK the camera panned to show him sharing a private little joke with Steve. Oh, ha ha, Scott, aren’t you the darling?

Phil Schiller - The veep of worldwide product marketing is often called upon to help with product demonstrations for keynotes, but am I the only one who finds him entirely annoying?

Al Gore - Sticking with the trend of vice presidents being in line for the throne, why not an actual Vice President? Al is both on the board of directors and has given Oscar-winning presentations, but is he a visionary worth of the mantle? Have you ever heard of The Internet?

Let’s take the “who” out of the picture for a moment and think about Apple’s future regardless of the CEO. The iPhone was in development for 3 years before it was released (longer if you take iPods as the precursor). It was 5 years before the first version of OS X was released. Apple has a long pipeline of projects in the works. Even if the next CEO is a flop, Apple will have a couple of years to coast.