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I just happened to be reading some Twitter posts and one came screaming at me. Social media is in it’s infancy at the moment and while folks are calling it a game changer in terms of delivering opinion or information to the masses, one really should look to the past for how other game changers have fared.

Now the tweet in question posted an opinion, if the platform was bought, the bandwidth paid for, why should the content be free. So effectively, old school brick and mortar econonomics are being rehashed and being delivered by a free service.

So what is content. Kinda dumb question because it’s either an opinion or it’s a factual dissertation. A movie review is content, the score of the baseball game is content, pros and cons of universal healthcare is content. Content for all intents and purposes is a deliverable.

The sixty-four thousand dollar question, the holy grail, the whole encilada has been to convince people to fork over dead presidents to keep food on the table and pay the rent, in exchange for this content.

For the most part it won’t happen.

The difference between a professional news journalist and the average blogger is really style, consistent type setting, and years of experience pulling off deadlines. They are two separate animals, with the only thing in common is publishing an opinion.

Take me, just a highschool graduate with some vocational training in welding, no where close to being a journalist. Yet here I am publishing an opinion post on a domain that I own, with a host that I pay ten bucks a month for, and typing this as I speak on an iPhone.

After I click save, google will index it and display it on it’s search pages for you the reader to enjoy and the spammers to do what they usually do. What exactly am I saying differently than the professionals, bearing in mind that we are talking content, not gloss, that I should shoot for this being a paid deliverable.

Not that my site is going to give a professional a case of stress, but there are a lot of folks out there just like me giving you an opinion if you want to read it. Add more bandwith, a few more tools and some curious people and we become the fourth estates sum of all fears.

Will some folks get paid for opinion, I would have to say yes. Some things can’t be quantified by the average person, but a select few can. But my guess is that they will not be delivering content per se, but will be a brand that people want their content from. Stock market ouigi boards for arcane financial dealings, I’d have no problem subscribing to the WSJ. Sports picks for the office lotteries, again special content from ESPN would be worth money.

Other than that, Darwin rules the roost.

Information wants to be free, has not changed since it was coined those many years ago and it won’t change in that many years into the future. What will change is how people want to change the way money is made.

How, no idea.

But if there is justice, the person that ultimately finds that holy grail and becomes a billionaire, was laid off in the past year and had an epiphany.

If you have for some reason following Perez Hilton on twitter, then you have been graced with epic rending screams regarding his cell service.

Back in the day, a company called Danger brought out a device called the sidekick and the most recent incantation of the device known as the sidekick2 is probably one of the first cloud devices. Stuff that any other phone would have on local drive is stored in a central server location, some where in the clouds and can be accessed at anytime.

Well what should not have been able to happen, happened. Who knows at this time what actually happened, but Microsofts servers deleted everyones data and folks that know are saying that it’s gone, simply gone.

Hopefully for those customers of T-Mo this is still early and that their data can be recovered, but it’s a faint hope at best. T-mobile has gone into damage control mode, allowing disgruntled customers to opt out of contracts with no fee, providing regular cell phones to others that are staying and halting sales of the device in question.

Other than expecting a class action lawsuit against T-Mobile and Microsoft, the owner of the sidekick, this one is going to send a shockwave through the computing industry.

This should in no way absolve the owners of the sidekick who lost data from any blame. To keep personal and business data on any device, without backing it up to a local hard drive is criminal enough in itself. Perez Hilton replying to one tweet, stated that T-mo assured him that he would never need to do that, and naively he believed them, the result for him is over 2000 contacts of email and phone numbers gone, and in his industry that’s a huge loss.

This is a clarion call for everyone, no matter who you are or the type of data you have, email contacts or recipes , cloud computing is the next generation of personal computing and it’s your responsibility to back up your data to a secured secondary location or burn it to a DVD, it may even spark an industry spin off that provides a means of doing this.

Tux

Today two people passed away, two very different people and yet in their own ways they came to epitomize their generations.

I speak of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett. The former a singer and the latter an actress. I was never old enough to really appreciate Mrs Fawcett, enough pictures of her have adorned the walls of many boys in the seventies and she and a handful of other ladies set the standards for beauty.

Michael Jackson on the other hand, I was very much of an age to appreciate his music and his effect on my generation. In all honesty I would have to say that as an artist, he was ever present, yet he was never a favourite.

What he was, was part of a musical mosaic that formed the sound track of my burgeoning teen life. Just recently I was reading the top 100 songs of the eighties, the song I was looking for was I have been to me, by Charlene, just because a lyric had gotten lose from the attic of my history and I had to track down the artist.

It dawned on me that when looking through all those tracks, a snippet of the music started playing in my mind, be it Africa by toto, Axel F, Our House, Dont you want me, human league, funky cold medina, an many more. It was a trip through space and time, and I was the cliched pimply guy that worked in McDonalds.

Just out of curiosity, I went through the same top 100′s of the nineties an the aughts, it was a downwards spiral, yes some of the songs I recognized by that little snippet, and others by just the name and no more. It was not my music.

People will write about MJ and their thoughts on his life, I can’t. The man simply ceased to exist as a factor in my life once I grew up to be a man, and he was relegated to VH1.

But like Freddie Mercury, give the man his due. He lead and others followed. As in life, shall be in death, he just went first.

Tux

If you own any of the family of iPhones or touch’s, then you will have already downloaded or made plans to download the new OS version.

Other blogs will have more information about the special features and what to expect, or simply how to enable features that your carrier supports.

If your a customer of AT&T, tethering and mms will be delayed for technical reasons regarding mms, a block has to be removed. Tethering is more of a billing problem, unlike using a rocket stick or a pmcia card, your not using any more data than you would by using safari in the iPhone, however AT$T wants to price it with a data plan for more money, the only thing that I would say in their defense is that they at least were more or less upfront with that, I would be surprised if more carriers did not do the same thing or at least have plans for it.

Now on to the upgrade itself.

In a word it was horrible.

When you visit cellphone or technical blogs and forums, a lot of what you hear is going to be rumor and happenstance, with a few nuggets of real information.

Anyways one of these bits of information was that the upgrade was going to go live at midnight pacific time on the seventeenth, which would make it 3 am on the east coast. That never happened, so I waited like everyone else for 1pm eastern.

It was actually 1:11 when iTunes finally decided that, no, 2.1 was not the actual up to date software and would I Ike to update. Duh, click yes. Up to this time, everything had gone well, the software had been downloading and I was about to start the actual update process, when everything came off the rails.

My iPhone would not back up to the computer , the new OS was sitting on my hardrive with no way of manually installing it. Apples help , diagnostics and google were simply of no help in diagnosing the problem and any kind of solution.

I did have one option, the nuke and pave method, which eventually got invoked, but I wanted to avoid that till I had no other alternative. Changed USB ports, tried a different computer and cable, all to no avail. The iPhone would sync with my laptop, which ruled out the cable. I was faced with the possibility that something was corrupted and finally hit the restore button.

In good conscience I can’t blame apple for this predicament, in truth I had known about this problem for several weeks and did not believe that it would stop an upgrade in it’s tracks.

Since the iPhone had no problem syncing, all I had really lost were my notes and Internet settings for wifi. I think what really hurt was the notes, it never really dawned on me that a native app for the iPhone would not sync, it’s a greyed out area in iTunes.

So far the only new item that I have not tried is tethering, for Rogers customers it’s supported at the moment. Look in settings/general/network about two thirds of the way down, to enable it.

Bluetooth, more or less was a snap, I just had to remember how to set the headphones to seek other devices and the iPhone paired them instantly. From there I went to the iPod setting and picked a song at random, stereo Bluetooth was probably the one item that’s the bees knees for me with this update. Obex is not supported at this time, that I am aware of, and if I had to guess won’t be for sometime. This will probably one of the reasons to jailbreak the phone in the future, after I can asscertain that this build will be stable and won’t have patch updates in a couple of weeks.

Copy and paste worked like a charm, I ended up doing it without realizing it, since the notes were scrubbed, my password for the router was only stored on my computer and I had to boot into Linux. Typed in the password and tapped the number string in notes and the copy function came up.

Just found out, copy and paste does not seem to work with the facebook application.
MMS worked easily, both sending and recieving. Even the saving picture worked like a charm. SMS has a new feature that apart from texting in landscape, let’s you delete individual text messages, not something I need at the moment , but should be a huge hit with cheating spouses.

Spot light is one of the new applications that came out with 3.0 , unlike other applications, you don’t swipe to the left, but either to the right or the home button on the first page. Simply put, if it’s on your iPhone, spotlight will find it. As well as being an onboard search engine, it will also launch apps, so we are no longer limited to a certain amount of apps corresponding to pages.

That’s it for this installment, look here for more information as it becomes available.

Your humble scribe is stunned, simply stunned at this development. At one o’clock I am on twitter awaiting word on the newest addition to the iPhone operating system, and the gleeful shouts of users who have downloaded or curses from the backlog of waiting for a download slot to open up.

What actually happened, for those that may have had better things to do , is that the new OS wont be available till June 17. Bwwwwwwwwwwwahhhhhhhhh ??????????, I can just see Steve chortling away, foolish minions us. It even gets better with the deathstar crew. Otherise known as AT&T, see MMS , only one of the things thats been long awaited will not be available till some time later in the summer, a software switch that tells the network not to forward an MMS or multi media message to the iPhone has to be manually deleted.

Tethering , locked right from the get go on AT&T until they come up with some way of making our American cousins pay for it. I am awaiting word that Rogers , my Canadian carrier is going to do the same thing. Hopefully the brains of that operation are going to be going with what brung em, and tethering will be free.

The only other thing of note is that a new iPhone called the 3GS is going to be released two days after the software upgrade for $299.00 for a new contract signup. Dropping the price of a 16 gig to 199 dollars and any remaining 8 gigs to 99 dollars. Now I hear that Rogers is bringing back the 6 gig data plan for 30 bucks a  month , so this will bear watching for me personally .

So instead of listening to my iPhones ipod function with the bluetooth headphones, I am going to have to wait a further week. IF there is a bright side to this debacle, its that at least the release date is now firm, instead of waiting on someones whim in cupertino.

With the Palm Pre finally out and no longer in the vapour ware  category, the days of apple leading this little dance are coming to a close, make no mistake , the iPhone will rule the airwaves for some time , but its going to have to work for every unit sold now. I only await a gsm version of the pre, before I give up and place the iPhone into iPod mode full time.

Okay here is the deal folks, yesterday, which was June 04, depending on when you read this, I was reading a review of the palm pre which has finally been slated for release, and the techno scribes have been doing their pre launch write ups.

So there I was,this is no shit.

Going through the review and they happened to compare something to the iPhone, and then threw in an Easter egg in brackets (coming on Monday). Ya , way to perk my nipples dudes.

Engaget being a review site will publish both fact and what ever is coming down the grape vine, ie rumors. For the past several months at any rate, this has been nothing new and I was consigning it to the rumor mill.

A few minutes later, I am looking at an upgrade to wunder radio, a streaming application for radio stations on the Internet and clicked on the download button. This begins like normal and then aborts with a cryptic message that mentions iTunes. Twice more I attempted this, after first verifying my password, as I believed that to be the problem.

The third time, I looked at the upgrade and it was specifically for 3.0. Hoho, so my Easter bunny at engaget may not have been shovelling rumors after all.

Later that evening, I pass the word on to the folks on hofo, while I am typing up the post, I go back to engaget and what the heck, the little Easter egg is no where to be found, no cite, no cred, I’m just posting rumors like everyone else.

Screw it, I posted anyways. Even without the cite, no way would the einsteins at apple release 3.0 updates for apps, unless the launch was iminent.

So I’m calling it here folks, sometime on Monday June 08, OS 3.0 will be available.

Fair warning to the jailbreaking community, as with the 2.1 update, you have to wait a few days till the JB developers bring out the updated software to jailbreak the phone.

For those new to the jailbreak scene, if you have downloaded the new version of iTunes, 8.2, the drivers are different enough that you won’t be able to sync your device. A restore should bring back the device to factory, allowing you to download the new update OS without any major interuption in service or bricking your phone.

Anyone who does not restore their phone, downloads the update and ends up with a paper weight, refrain from posting your woes on message boards, you will be mocked merciliously.

You have no excuse this time.

Tux

So far the majority of my blog entries have been done with the wordpress iPhone app. Since they are simple text entries with no multi-media content as of yet, the app is perfect for my needs.

The ability to create blog posts from where ever I am has allowed me to reclaim time and post in the nook and crannies of my day, and home time is for what I want to do.

The App supports multiple blogs and allows you to upload pictures, which is extremly handy when doing iPhone app reviews. Simply hold down the power button, hit the d pad and watch the screen blink. Add the picture via the photo library or shoot a live shot.

Most peope that I have talked to, do not advocate posting a live entry, prefering instead to write the content and then save to local file, and format their blog at home or work in a more conventional way, me I hit publish and go.

As I wrote in a post several months ago, the app now supports landscape mode for text entry, comments can be viewed and marked as spam or approved as needed. Regarding comments, my site is set up to moderate comments, the blizzard of spam that comes through, notably the kind that have ??????? In the body of the comment makes this nessecary if you do not have the askimet widget activated (strong suggestion, for those that don’t)

I may go to an unmoderated format soon, as the spam has litterally dried up, but it’s not a major issue at the monent.

If the wordpress app has any flaws, it’s saving a post as private. This happened to me several days ago and other than blaming myself, I don’t know what went wrong, or more litterally where the post went.

I have 2.7.1 rev, with admin privilges and it’s gone. Anyone wishing to post as private, I would heavily suggest that you save it to draft and then classifiy it on the fullsite rather than upload it through the app.

The app is useful and has been updated several times, plus it’s free. If your just a casual blogger or wish to create content for future blogs the app can be very useful.

On the downsides, it can throw you some curveballs regarding the private posting.

8/10

If you have a wordpress blog and an iPhone or wish to make your blog entries relevant to the mobile communities, the ansewer is a widget thats available on the wordpress site.

Go into your widgets section of the admin section and an option should be there to search for more, type iPhone into the search box and it should produce the widget, I can’t think of the name off hand, but will edit the post later tonight.

There is an automated process that allows the casual wordpress blogger to upload widgets and all thats required from the user, is to activate the widget. Activation is simply by clicking on the activate hyperlink and your golden.

The results of this activation will change the look of your site, at least as tested on the iPhone, but for text only blogs, it distills the useful from the wasted space of a full fledged website.

For multi-media blog sites I would advise that you do not use this widget, without experimentation on your site, the deactivation process is just as easy, however it’s not a solution that fits all sites

I downloaded this app several weeks ago and while I have not actually used it yet, it has kept me occupied with what it can do.

Quite simply it takes every movie thats out or coming out and presents it in a nicely formatted way. Movie title, brief blurb and rating, art work and a hook to tie it into YouTube if a trailor is available.

As well it also lists which movies are coming out on DVD or blu-ray, with the same information the new release movies advertise.

Take all that, then add in the closest theaters that the new movies are playing in, plus show times. For those wanting any sort of outside rating system, the app uses among other good folks, rotten tomatos.

I’m not one to require someone elses opinion to see a movie, so it’s up the user to see if that’s helpful or not. While the app also supports netflix, alas Canada does not. Someone else will have to chime in on how useful it is.

This app gets a 10/10, stable, focused on what it does and it’s free.