Dave Winer with some interesting insight into what Apple may really be doing:

I said it's a lot simpler and more insidious. Apple doesn't care about web standards, nor do any other large companies. That term, and "open" are just fig leaves that cover up what they're reallly doing. Instead of opening things up, they're doing just the opposite. Closing as many holes as they can as quickly as they can. Because they're doing what the media business wants to but hasn't been able to do, yet -- control and monetize user programming of content. Apple and many (if not all) of the tech companies want to get the control back from the users. Of course they can't say this, and they won't. But actions speak louder than words.

Winer's take is that Apple is trying to close as many open holes as it can so that it, with the continued blessing of the entertainment industry, can provide a tidy way to monetize digital content moving forward.  It's about closing the many paths that are now open and only leaving one road, albeit likely paved with gold, open.  It's a curious analysis, one that has baked into it a certain amount of (well placed) tinfoil-hattery.

Winer's opinion runs counter to John Gruber's, who states that Apple is closing the Flash "hole" in the iPhone/iPad platform to 'enforce web standards.'  I tend to agree with Gruber, because with Apple, it's all about platform control.  The quicker Flash gets relegated to wherever it is that Flash opponents wish it would crawl, the faster, the argument goes, open web standards like HTML5 and h.264 can become mainstream.

It will be very interesting to see what's in the middle of all of this, where the truth often lies.

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I'm a three-time (soon to be four-time) published author. When aspiring authors learn this, they invariably ask what word processor I use. It doesn't fucking matter! I happen to write in Emacs. I also code in Emacs, which is a nice bonus. Other people write and code in vi. Other people write in Microsoft Word and code in TextMate+ or TextEdit or some fancy web-based collaborative editor like EtherPad or Google Wave. Whatever. Picking the right text editor will not make you a better writer. Writing will make you a better writer. Writing, and editing, and publishing, and listening -- really listening -- to what people say about your writing. This is the golden age for aspiring writers. We have a worldwide communications and distribution network where you can publish anything you want and -- if you can manage to get anybody's attention -- get near-instant feedback. Writers just 20 years ago would have killed for that kind of feedback loop. Killed! And you're asking me what word processor I use? Just fucking write, then publish, then write some more. One day your writing will get featured on a site like Reddit and you'll go from 5 readers to 5000 in a matter of hours, and they'll all tell you how much your writing sucks. And most of them will be right! Learn how to respond to constructive criticism and filter out the trolls, and you can write the next great American novel in edlin.

Bingo.  Do yourself and read Mark Pilgrim on The Setup, which is interesting way, way beyond this little quip about writing.

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Robert Scoble:

The writing is on the wall. Small business marketing is moving away from focusing on SEO. Why do I say that? Because, well, Google and Bing are changing the rules so often and are getting so good at figuring out the real businesses that deserve to be on pages. Search Half Moon Bay Sushi and you get real answers from sites that didn’t focus on SEO. Yeah, there are exceptions, but they are increasingly getting rare.

With other searches, like one for Tiger Woods, you’ll get a page filled with stuff that SEO just doesn’t affect much anymore. In the middle of that page is a real time box that brings items from Twitter and Google News. It no longer is good enough to be just an SEO expert to get items onto pages like these. You’ve gotta be great at creating content that gets Google’s algorithms to trust it enough to shove it onto these new hybrid pages.

But there’s something deeper going on. Google has built systems that aren’t Page Rank controlled anymore and are giving far better analytics to small businesses than they did a year ago. They know a LOT more about your behavior now other than you clicked on a link, even to the extent that they know whether you called that business or bought something and THAT is changing the skills SEO/SEM types need to have.

No longer is it about optimizing search engine results and the new breed is going beyond just search engines to provide holistic systems that find and track customers not only on search engines like Google and Bing, but on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

I see the same thing.  I do very little SEO/SEM work on my employer's blog or main website, but our search performance has skyrocketed over the past year.

Why?

As near as I can tell, consistent content creation.  As a company that believes in engaging its community and customers, we try to post something to that blog every weekday, and we’ve done a pretty good job of it all year.  No author of that blog writes for keyword karma: we simply post content that we think will be useful or interesting to our customers, prospects and industry colleagues.  The rest just happens, and I attribute that to consistency.

Of course, our company has aircover from its Twitter and Facebook activity too, and as the new real-time web emerges, new content developed through these channels will factor into search performance.  Early this year, I was telling people how consistent, quality tweeting was important to draw new followers through Twitter’s official search engine.  Now, as 2010 approaches and social content is being integrated into Google and Bing search results, the importance simply cannot be overstated.

The ground is shifting away from static SEO keyword saturation and more towards behavior-driven merit systems.  Google and Bing are getting smarter at weeding out SEO farming sites (save a few examples, like appliance searches), and during 2010 I think we’ll see the semantic web in the sense that search engines will understand intent much better than they do now.  That’s not to say the system won’t be gamed anymore, but increasingly new content, interaction and effort will be rewarded rather than metadata and keyword concentrations on business websites.

So.  All that said, what’s the real value of intelligent, consistent social media activity for business?  If it wasn’t massive before, it is now.

(crosspost)

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Ignoring the terrifying fact that it’s Friday the 13th and my yogurt this morning was clearly expired long before its November 26 sell by date (spooky, no?), the Internet had a pretty good week.  And by good week I mean I found lots of things that were interesting to me, and in the name of social capital, trust and altruism, I share them with you.  Aren’t you lucky?  Of course you are.

• Robert Scoble has an excellent post about how Twitter lists have become his main news source, essentially mitigating RSS and standard info consumption models completely.  I find this fascinating personally, because most of the really fresh news I get via Twitter, but I can’t see RSS being marginalized just yet.  I’ll need time to play with this, because it’s truly disruptive, as least as far as my workflows are concerned.
• Want an effective ward against the heavy omen of Friday the 13th?  Want to also tear up a little, but in a good way?  Watch this video of a dog welcoming home a US soldier from Afghanistan.
• Tim Burton animates the MoMA logo. Fantastic.
• Gartner estimates the worldwide smartphone market share.  In a nutshell: Apple grew YoY from 13% to 17%; RIM from 16% to 21%.  HTC grew from 4.5% to 6.5% and Samsung held on at 3%.  Nokia dipped from 42% to 39%.  As John Gruber says, now is a great time to recall the words of Steve Ballmer, only two years ago: “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.”
• Slate’s Michael Agger decided to have some fun with Google’s search box, and the results are both awkward and fascinating.  As Rafe over at RC3.org says, it’s a search engine confessional of sorts.
• Check out the designy barcodes appearing in Japan.
• How you can avoid an untimely death.  I particularly like #2:  “Never get on a 4-wheeler ATV, as they have produced more quadriplegics than anything else.”  It’s worth reading the whole list. (via kottke)
• Speaking of design, Apple has overtaken Nokia to claim the profit crown in the mobile phone industry.  MG Siegler has a great piece about Apple’s pursuit of profit rather than raw market share.  You should read it.
• The New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert tears SuperFreakonomics authors Stephen Levitt and Stephen Dubner up one side and down the other on the pair’s geoengineering chapter of their latest book.  Ouch.
• A man, distracted by a low-flying pelican, drives his $1.6M Bugatti Veyron into a salt marsh.  Part of me died reading this.  (Thx to Chris for the heads-up)

(crosspost)

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I have a preternatural fear of skeletons.  The origins of this fear go like this: when I was 8, on some nondescript day leading up to Halloween, I was walking past my father’s darkened den, which was situated at the end of a long hallway.  Back then, house phones were beige and weighed the same as a mature watermelon.  As I was walking rapidly down this dark hallway – convinced, on some level, that something was shambling after me – I glanced into the office at the huge beige phone that normally sat perched on the desk next to the door.  All at once, in what to this day is the most bizarre visual trick I have ever played on myself, the phone morphed into a giant skull, its jaw disturbingly askew, with horrible eyes too large to be human.  I remember literally yelling and running down what was left of the hall into the kitchen, convinced beyond all reason that there was a huge, wet-eyed skull sitting on my father’s desk, waiting for me. 

Fast forward 32 years.

Strange, then, that I decorated my house for this Halloween in an almost pure skeleton motif.  I have a 4’ skeleton hanging from a tree outside my office with landscaping twine, an unintentional, amateur approximation of a noose.  My walkway is lit with little plastic skulls, their frozen grimaces chained together with electric cord.  I have a latex pirate skeleton – or at least half of one, as he has no lower body – perched on a stone bench leading up to my porch, a strobe light situated underneath him.  I basically have skeletons and skulls everywhere, mainly as a result of my son going as a skeleton for trick-or-treating tomorrow night.  And something being wrong with me.

The confession comes like this: when it gets dark and I’m outside amongst this spectacle, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t recall The Desk Skull.  I’d be lying if I said I don’t get a little irrationally afraid.  I’d also be lying if I said that I’m not embarrassed by this and wonder what deep-rooted unexorcised demon made me go whole-hog with the skull business.  I’d also be lying if I said I’m 40 years old and if you think any of this is funny, then you are sadly mistaken, because once you see a giant skull on your home office desk, nothing is quite the same.  Ever.  I don’t wish this curse upon anyone, so get that smirk off your face.

So.

In non-skull related news, I have decided to parse the Internet for its most precious harvest this week, so you don’t have to.  Here’s the bounty:

• So much for the Pre saving Sprint.  It’s latest quarterly results showed a loss of $478M and 135,000 subscribers.
• Excellent feature in Wired by Amy Wallace regarding the confusing social movement to skip childhood vaccinations.
• 37signal’s Jason Fried with a speaking tip that should be common sense, but isn’t: don’t tell the audience you’re not prepared.
• In keeping with the Halloween theme, here’s a great primer on H.P. Lovecraft, one of my childhood favorite authors.  All the required reading is here.
• Here’s an awesome, 3D-zoomable demonstration of cell size and scale, bounded from everyday to infinitesimal by a coffee bean and carbon atom.
• Apple’s 2009 advertising budget is huge, but Microsoft’s makes it pale by comparison. What’s working better?  See also: you can’t brute force everything.
• Google singlehandedly shrinks the dedicated GPS market by announcing a free turn-by-turn navigation app for Android 2.0/Motorola Droid.  A version for the iPhone is also in the works.  Translated: the standalone GPS market just got marginalized.
• The iPhone is still runner-up in terms of smartphone marketshare, but the trend is more than promising.  How long will it be before it overtakes the #1 spot?
• Om Malik’s karma can destroy MacBook Pros. Three of them, to be precise.

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