Dowd and Dirty

Maureen Dowd gets paid for complete crap. Thoughtless, stupid crap. But look, if she has an audience that likes to read what I think is crap, so what? I don't like Danielle Steele books or Stephen King's work either, but the world has plenty of space for their work as well as things I prefer. Even for things I make myself.

It's really smarmy self-importance I dislike. Like Maureen Dowd's.

The iPhone SDK

It seems to me that the Apple SDK announcement has one big piece of good news for end users, and probably several pieces of news, good and bad, for developers. The good news for end users is that you'll be able to have a simple, on-the-iPhone way to get a new application. It will probably be some degree of revision to the iTunes store currently on the iPhone.

The more functionality they add, the better -- I find the iPhone version of iTunes to be a little too iCrippled. I'd prefer to see podcasts available, for example.

For more about what the news means to people in the development business, have a look at Michael Mace's analysis.

ImageLinkUSA

This is a plain and simple plug. I've used ImageLinkUSA as a site hosting company for years, and they're great! The domain management software is web-based and works very well, uptime is as close to 24/7/365 as you can ask for, and their service has always been fast and helpful. If you need a place to host your domain and websites, I can't recommend them highly enough.

Traffic

I'm having a "be careful what you wish for" experience. My iPhone webapps have spiked the traffic on my website so near the bandwidth quota it makes me nervous. This is all free stuff, so aside from any Adsense revenue (which is very, very little at this point) and a PayPal "donate" button it's just an expense.

Still, it's pretty nice to have so many people visit and try these things.

Even though I'm complaining, of course, I'm still linking to these iPhone ebooks:
Five Weeks in a Balloon
Life on the Mississippi
Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz
Treasure Island

And Cubetry, the daily Cubicle Rhyme client.

Location, Location, Location

Here's a new location-oriented web service: Verve Earth. It's still in beta, but seems to be working pretty well. It's a world map (from Google Maps, I think) that pinpoints the physical locations of websites, blogs, aggregators, and the like. Nice interface, and could be a cool way to do two things: location websites that have some relevance to their physical location, and add a physical dimension to social networking. The SXSW conference is a long distance away from here, but when the VerveEarth map gets populated enough to see websites and bloggers nearby physically as well as topically, it would be pretty easy to set up some sort of "drop in" session.

Consolidation

InformationWeek has suggested that there are reasons Nokia should buy Yahoo!. Five reasons, in fact. They suggest that Nokia needs a stronger desktop presence, that Yahoo would somehow combine with Navteq (recent Nokia acquisition) help cement Nokia's dominance of mobile location services, and that Yahoo could help Nokia grow its market share in North America, which is one of the few markets where it hasn't had much success lately.

Doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Nokia doesn't need any help in mobile location services, for one thing, and they're trying to build out their own desktop presence with Ovi. Nokia very much wants more success in the US, but I don't see that Yahoo would be that much help.

And the final reason I think it's a non-starter is that a Nokia-Yahoo combination wouldn't make any tools available on mobile devices that aren't already available. It just wouldn't do anybody any good.

Anyway, I'd be astonished if Nokia makes a bid for Yahoo. You read it here first!

TOC Conference

Although I'm not attending O'Reilly's TOC Conference, I'm following the news, blogs, and other coverage. There's plenty of food for thought if you're actually a publisher, although none that hasn't been around for at least ten years.

I picked up a link to, of all things, Harlequin's eHARLEQUIN site. Harlequin publishes romance novels, which are frequently dismissed with a bit of derision, but which lots of people really love. The interesting thing to me is that right on the front page -- this is a publisher's website, remember -- you can choose traditional books, audiobooks, ebooks, "mobile phone", and podcasts.

The mobile phone category is a service; you get stories and some other content delivered to your phone. Not sure yet what the format is, but the screen shot on the site shows a graphic book cover on a mobile display, so it's probably MMS. The "serialized stories" are, I suspect, quite brief. But given the class of devices and service in the US, probably a good choice; at least SMS and MMS tend to be available on many phones, even here.