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I have always been a voracious reader, since I was a child. If you go to my parents house, my mom recently organized all the books and there are at least two copies of nearly every one. Hard back and paperback, or multiple paperbacks. Why? I destroyed the originals, or often we lost them and had to rebuy them.

Books to me was a sure way of staving off boredom. I’d read during classes, on trains, in the car with my parents, on airplanes, wherever.

And books are a huge pain in the ass.

They weigh a lot, they fall apart, dogs chew on them, they take up space and they are in general not attractive to have around a house. We in fact, have no book shelves in our house for this reason. Dusty, chew toys and ugly.

Enter the Kindle 2.

The Kindle 1 was an embarrassment, I felt. I knew quite a lot of people with them, but they didn’t show them off. They hid them. They apologized for its very being: “Yes, it’s ugly, but I get a lot of reading done. It wasn’t a device you displayed proudly. It was like lugging a Commodore 64 around with you and explaining why you need to play Commander Keen in its original glory.

I got the Kindle 2 however, and it is one amazing device. It looks good, feels intuitive, is easy enough for my dad to use and “Just works.” And not only that, it has me reading a lot more. A few notes on it:

1. The device fits into an average computer bag very nicely. It takes up as much room as a bigger moleskin, the charger is nice and small and it you don’t notice it’s weight. With the leather case, it is durable.
2. I read faster on the device. True: without the overhead of turning pages, keeping the book open, ink and hard covers, I can blaze through a book at about 1.5x the speed I used to.
3. It works really well on airplanes. United Airlines, in their infinite stupidity don’t have three prong power on most of their planes, except PS flights. This limits me to about 1.5 to 2.5 hours on the MBP, but a whole flight + some on the Kindle.
4. It is the ultimate boredom machine. Hospital waiting rooms, meetings, whatever. My iPhone is still the go-to for this, but the NY Times and KindleFeeder + some books on the Kindle also works really well.
5. I’m rediscovering discover of books again. I have a habit of rereading books ad infinitum because I don’t like the time, space and money investment of having to buy something that might not be good. Now I only have time and money to be concerned with, which for me is easy to deal with.

Now what can be improved? The screen could be better, benefitting from more contrast. It is also prone to having hotspots in certain types of direct lighting (ie, on an airplane). A color screen would be amazing provided the resolution and contrast where high enough. The thumb controller is a bit too imprecise for my liking, and often I will press up instead of inwards to select. The overall speed of the device is sometimes wanting, but it is fine for the most part.

I also really wish Amazon had an “upgrade” program of sorts for books, so that I could get books I already bought on the Kindle for a small fee even.

And one more thing. What can the Kindle teach the music business?

The fundamental thing I think it teaches us is that the user-experience matters just as much as the user’s desire for the content. If the Amazon store and method of getting content to the device wasn’t as good as it is, there would be an MP3 problem. I also think that for the most part, people will put user-experience for themselves as high as a commodity as the device itself.

“The newspaper paradigm is executed in such a way that growth into the new media industry is hampered by lack of resources and funds. However, with the use of a common database subsystem and a minor alteration of newsroom and newspaper development workflow, the execution of a standard print media version of a newspaper, as well as a new media (i.e. Internet) version of a newspaper could be seamless and indistinguishable from each other.”

And this makes me sad.

And more from this same essay:

“Evolution of Work Flow

When the Register on the Web was first created, the workflow was extremely simple. An online editor, technical director and an online assistant constituded the web team, so task delegation and work flow management was simplistic, as it only involved three people.

After the departure of The online editor, Val Cohen had responsibility for content and development of the site. In June of 1996, Nan Bisher was given the position of Deputy Editor, New Media.

Bisher, from then on was responsible for the task management of our web site. In addition, the web team received additional members, Mark Uyemura from the newsroom and Reuben Guerrero, Kirk Williams, Dawn Kusick, Ginger Neal, Tracy Williams and Lelani Blumer from Ginger Neal’s New Media Marketing Group.

Subsequent to this merger of sorts, the work flow of the web site has become rather convoluted and inefficient. We only have roughly 4 people capable of writing and implementing complete web packages, two people who are capable of implementing CGI scripts and only 4 people capable of uploading data to the web site.

This limitation of resources causes severe bottlenecks in our desired workflow, as the burden of web development is concentrated on only a select group of people. Furthermore, these people are not in the same department, or in the same cost center, causing conflicts of responsibility to arise.

Aside from the New Media division, the entire workflow of the Register is an exercise in redundancy and inefficiency.”

The utility of any service, I am thinking is directly proportional to the slope of the degree distribution of its network.

To explain:

When Twitter was first getting popular, it followed a power law in its degree distribution. A few people at the head, the rest distributed in an asymptotical curve downward, with fewer and fewer connections. In this type of power structure, retweeting made sense. It was a tool to progressively bubble discourse up the network to reach a wide distribution. A way of taking discourse out of a closed and small network, and open it up for seeding through the larger connectionist networks at will.

But as the power-law curve of connections on Twitter has now started flattening out, with more and more at the head, and more in the middle and a lot in the tail, retweeting is only serving to echo discourse that more and more people have already seen.

Today, nearly three quarters of the tweets I received were retweets. And most of those retweets I had already seen the original of. Just tonight, Facebook reverted their terms-of-service, and Mashable immediately tweeted it. Then four people on my follow list retweeted Mashable. Why? They have nothing to add, nothing to contextualize it, nothing to inform and nothing to say. They just say it.

I understand twitter is casual conversation, but it should be conversation. It should be people saying things, not resaying them. I understand the “collection” mentality that drives this. Here is something interesting: please also find it interesting. It’s the same culture that creates mix-tapes, makes DJ’ing such an amazing experience, makes us want to teach and inform people of things. But there are better ways of doing this.

It used to be people would curate links, provide meta-commentary and then drive quality content through that. Some people (Andy Baio, Jason Kottke) do this to great effect. But more and more, I’m seeing people that used to be noted for the quality of meta-discourse devolving into mirrors. And it’s mirrors upon mirrors.

Mirrors don’t add anything unless the quality of the glass is bad. And I’m afraid its becoming a veritable funhouse in Twitter land.

What I am most afraid of is what will happen during SXSW. I’m pretty much afraid to even look at Twitter:

@blah1: RT: @blah a party at Stubbs!

@blah3: RT: @blah1 RT: @blah a party at Stubbs!

@blah4: RT @blah3 @blah1 @blah a party at Stubbs!

I have a feeling while 2007 was Twitter’s coming out party at SXSW, 2009′s SXSW and the plague of retweeting is going to kill its utility for a lot of people. Me included.

Here are my suggestions then:

1. Twitter – please add a retweet filter at the software layer, like how we choose notification methods
2. Those that feel the need to retweet everything they find interesting, compile them instead into a twice-daily updated blog entry that you then tweet the URL to
3. Anyone who has a retweet ratio greater than 50/50 people should unfollow. Or said people should setup a separate “retweet” account. Make it opt-in.
4. People need to start being original again.

Rant over.

I have a feeling CNN’s Terms of Service (specific clause) below is going to get tested in a nice lawsuit.

[From Apple Denies Steve Jobs Heart Attack Report: "It Is Not True"]

Users are solely responsible for anything contained in their submissions, message board and/or chat sessions. iReport.com does not verify, endorse or otherwise vouch for the contents of any submission, message board or chat room. Users may be held legally liable for the contents of their submissions, message board and chat sessions, and may be held legally liable if their submissions or chat sessions include, for example, material protected by copyright, trademark, patent or trade secret law or other proprietary right without permission of the author or owner, or defamatory comments.

Web site user submissions to iReport.com do not represent the views of iReport.com, CNN, or any individual associated with iReport.com, CNN, and we do not control this content. In no event shall you represent or suggest, directly or indirectly, iReport.com’s endorsement of user submissions. iReport.com does not vouch for the accuracy or credibility of any content submitted by users on our Web sites, and does not take any responsibility or assume any liability for any actions you may take as a result of reading user published content on iReport.com.

and from the privacy policy:

We may disclose personally identifiable information in response to legal process, for example, in response to a court order or a subpoena. We also may disclose such information in response to a law enforcement agency’s request, or where we believe it is necessary to investigate, prevent, or take action regarding illegal activities, suspected fraud, situations involving potential threats to the physical safety of any person, violations of our terms of use, to verify or enforce compliance with the policies governing our Web Site and applicable laws or as otherwise required or permitted by law or consistent with legal requirements.

This is not the first time someone has manipulated news to short a stock, but CNN could now be forced to turn over the PII on this user to authorities for investigation into securities fraud.

Like ebay, etc…please email me. It was taken from the stage after R.E.M.’s show in Helsinki this evening. A huge loss for Peter Buck and the band.

Anything that kills the Internet Explorer hegemony is a good thing, and I think the default “window” into the Internet releasing a browser will go a long way toward that. The fact that it’s WebKit is a double good thing. And the fact that its probably a bit easier to use than Firefox is even more so.

As a guy who’s entire day and life and business life is spent making experiences for people to enjoy, millions of them, I want IE6 and even 7 OUT OF MY FUCKING LIFE.

More IE6 than anything.

To set the stage: I was up in Marin County for the day to meet with a company and give them some advice. Anyhow, on the way to Marin from Oakland, I was listening to KFOG (which I do love) and they played back to back: Golden Paliminos “Boy (GO)” with guest vocals from Stipe, and a song I hadn’t heard in a while that Shazam on my iPhone confirmed was “Forgotten Years” by Midnight Oil, from Blue Sky Mine, which was a record I really like when I was younger.

The song is immensely catchy with great minor keyed jangle and some awesome lyrics. I had it in my head all day.

When I got home, I wanted nothing more than to buy the song, or find it on Rhapsody and play it on my good stereo system.

And so the Odyssey began:

iTunes, didn’t have Blue Sky Mine, nor the track.

Amazon Mp3 Store, didn’t have Blue Sky Mine, nor the track. They only have it covered by a Gangsta Rabbi. No shitting.

The band’s website: no dice.

Columbia or Sony Catalog? Nope.

The band’s site had the video, that was it.

I hunted the Internet up and down, back to front for this song in a format I could get legally. I can’t find it. I refuse to pirate it because you know, I do believe in the value of music and all that.

So in the end, I think I’m going to have to donate money to Peter Garrett’s next political campaign and hope he sends me the CD as a thank you or something. Either that or nag Rick Rubin to get Columbia to rerelease the record in some sort of “Legacy Box Set” or what not on Amazon MP3 Store.

I think its sad that the space between desire and actualization is so frustrating sometimes, especially with music, but lately equally with television, movies and books and even news. We are so used to an “instant on” media-scape, that when something has even a 30 second latency between the thought of “want” and the actualization of “have,” our tendency is to find the shortest path to fulfillment regardless of what that means.

I really wanted to buy, for 99 cents, a track by a band today. I could not do that. I couldn’t even give that band the sync-license fee by playing it on iMeem, LastFM or Rhapsody.

I believe that the ultimate challenge for media providers is to make systems of actualization which narrow the gap from desire to the fulfillment of said desire. The only true way to fight one form of ubiquity is with another form of ubiquity. Unfortunately that concept in theory is easier than in practice, but with the pace of adoption of ultra-highspeed broadband on both home and mobile increases, and the ubiquity of connectivity likewise increases, people are going to find anything less than instant intolerable.

The space between instant and annoying will also narrow, and when it narrows to near 0, those that impose artificial barriers because of poor engineering, bad contracts, in-fighting, politics, stupidity or arrogance will find themselves bypassed in a cliff-effect pattern.

Will you suffer through an experience on an airline site, with slow pages, bad Javascript and what not, or will you go to a more “web++” era site that operates cleanly? Or MLS sites for that matter?

Will you tolerate the awful, heavy-weight, advertisement saturation experience of a newspaper site, or go to Google News?

Will you install Silverlight or go to bittorrent for Olympics clips?

And who will hunt for 6 hours for a track from 1988 and in the end be content with just the video?