Aside Archives

Exclusive: Microsoft and Nokias Plans for Marketing Windows Phone in 2012.

I dont want to reveal more, and Ive been sitting on this information for weeks so that Microsoft can make its big announcement at CES this coming week. But with these leaks, as with the equally inaccurate LTE leaks last week, I felt the need to set the record straight. The way tech blogs work these days is that any information, no matter how inaccurate, is simply parroted between all the gadget blogs and then, inevitably, to the increasingly lazy mainstream news as well. So lets at least get it right.

Mr Thurrott, perhaps if you didn’t sit on stories for so long other people wouldn’t break them. Your responsibility is to your audience, not Microsoft’s CES launch plans.

Matt is turning 28 I’m turning 28 next week on January 11th. My friends and family always complain that I’m impossible to buy for, and it’s true, I don’t need any more stuff. (Exception is a mixtape / playlist, I eat those up.) The most important luxuries in my life are time, friends, and time with friends. The thing I covet is impact. So this year going to try something different: I’m giving up my birthday to raise money for charity: water and provide clean water to people that need it. 100% of money donated goes directly to projects in the field. Please donate — let’s build some wells. 🙂

If I were going to start a gadget site, it’d look and work just like The Wirecutter from Brian Lam. Review sites like CNET review stuff when it comes out, and don’t update old reviews when new stuff comes out, so the best printer in March when they did the review might not be still the best printer in December when you want to buy one. Wirecutter picks one thing, and one thing only, and constantly updates their recommendations to keep the context of new products. And, of course, they’re powered by WordPress. 🙂

“Apple Lossless, also known as ALAC, is a lossless audio codec Apple developed some time ago for digital music. The codec compresses music files anywhere from 40-60 percent of their original size with no discernible loss in audio quality or fidelity.” — Apples ALAC codec is now open source. About a year and a half ago I started re-ripping all my music in ALAC, it’s fantastic, especially now that iTunes can down-convert when syncing to iPhones / iPods.

ReadWriteWeb covers the WordPress.com / Federated Media deal which will give high-end bloggers access to run advertising from FM, which is significantly higher quality than alternatives like Google Adsense, which has been declining in quality and is no longer a great choice for bloggers. Proud to be part of the empowerment of the Independent Web, which is the dark matter of the internet.

The official URL for Amazon’s new browser, Silk, is amazon.com/silk which right now redirects to amazonsilk.wordpress.com. This is not a VIP deal or anything, it’s just a free blog on WP.com which Beau noticed from their press release. I’m guessing they just wanted a quick and easy way to make a functional and beautiful website, which is kind of the whole idea of WordPress. 🙂

I’m somewhere in the middle of the Arctic Sea right now, approximately 78°05’N, 28°45’E, but even through the thin pipe of an intermittent satellite connection the ripples were felt of the announcement that Steve Jobs resigned as CEO of Apple. Jobs, or the idea of him, has had a profound impact on innumerable founders and CEOs. My own tribute to him (and Apple as an organization) is in the essay 1.0 is the Loneliest Number, where reviews of the original iPod punctuate a story of the messy act of creation. Moments like this give us an opportunity to take a step back and contemplate the bigger picture, so take a moment to read the post and think about what you’re launching next.

The past two days I’ve been at WordCamp San Francisco and the presentations have been amazing. For the first time ever for San Francisco we’ve had a really fantastic live video stream going from both rooms. It’s a pretty economical way to get all of the content of the conference without the cost of coming to San Francisco. We even had someone streaming from Pakistan! My talk on the State of the Word, will be tomorrow at 11 AM PST so get a ticket on the WordCamp SF site.