Opinion

So the unenlightened folk who say Amanda [Congdon] takes it all with her, well they don’t get what Rocketboom is.

This is something I echoed on a Digg post about this whole mess, to a certain degree. According to scripting.com, Andrew Baron “says that today (a weekend day on which RB doesn’t run new content) there were 1,390,661 successful page requests. That’s a bit of flow.” No shit!

Rocketboom is the vodcast equivalent to Digg — it’s about highlighting the really good stuff and then moving on. Despite what Amanda brought to the show, that’s why people will return it. Hell, just the curiosity around the new host will keep people subscribed (no such thing as bad publicity right?). Keeping the views up keeps the good submissions coming in. Keeping good content keeps users. Keeping the users keeps the funding coming in. It’s all very cyclical. Truth is, even the people who say Amanda was Rocketboom didn’t immediately unsubscribe from the feed when they heard the news — they’re just as interested to see what happens next as we are.

It’s certainly Andrew’s ball to drop, but unless he’s wholly incompetent, that’s not going to happen. RB has reached a certain institutional status like Fark and BoingBoing, and it takes some seriously bad decisions or an overwhelmingly better competitor to truly undermine something like that.

I just made the decision to buy the PEBL. I’d been eyeing it for a while as a great-looking but possibly-too-outdated-tech-wise phone, ranking it just below wanting the RAZR V3i (if T-Mobile were to carry it).

It wasn’t until Jason spoke up so loudly about it that it made me remember this is exactly what I was talking about earlier in the year: the PEBL wasn’t less tech, it was less “not-phone.” I’d preferred the RAZR for all the things I’d said I’d wanted to get away from (like its iTunes app) — it was time to look closer at the PEBL…and sure enough, I liked what I saw.

And judging by a few of the voices that followed, like Anil’s and David’s, it turns out this “Less Not-Phone” thing may just be a new trend. Viva simplification!

There’s a bunch of people who have switched to Macs that are getting a lot of coverage for doing so. I do enjoy seeing long time PC fans discover the Mac, and it’s interesting to see the backlash that typically comes out of this.

Oddly enough, the backlash isn’t happening, and Daring Fireball’s got some good coverage of the switching that’s happening..

There’s two things that finally clicked into place for the PC folks — The first is obvious: the switch to Intel. While comparing a PC to a Mac is still an apples-and-oranges scenario, there’s less ambiguity. The hardware can be profiled on more equal terms now, and people can see that Macs are, in fact, not any slower than PCs in a general comparison. What’s left over is a much clearer comparison of software, style and ease-of-use.

The second is that the ubiquity of the iPod has removed the elistist image that used to cling to Apple. This is what I’ve called the “Fanboy Factor” — where an overpassionate enthusiast base actively turns-off those interested in joining. It happens with all consumer items, be it a computer or a car or a television series. Apple fans were only the “cult of Mac” once, and very, very anti-Microsoft and anti-Windows. But it’s much easier now to find an Apple fans (thanks to the iPod) that also use Windows, and that balance allows people to consider using a Macintosh without feeling like they’re joining some snobby clique that keeps crowing how they’re better than all of you.

Make no mistake, it’s a good time for Apple and Apple fans — so long as they don’t start acting like selfish rock fans by “blasting the band for selling out.”

We just might be drowning in tags. I know I am.

By the way, I’ve had to patch Drupal rather heavily to support categories in the RSS feed. I haven’t yet seen my post/subjects show up under Technorati tags yet, but I’m keeping my eyes open. A huge flaw with Technorati is that you can never see your site as it sees it, so you can never tell if it’s getting pings properly or indexing posts properly.

I like the aesthetic Josh Davis went for with the Worms World Party mini-site for Nokia’s N-Gage, but it’s giving me a headache trying to read it and block out the rotation going on in my peripheral vision. Seriously… it’s really quite elegant in design and metaphor, but reading text on a perpetual 45° curve? Killer on the eyes.