Open source natural language processor that attempts to identify idiotic comments on the web — like a spam filter for stupidity.

UPDATE: Their server seems to be struggling to handle the traffic, at the moment.

Content is still king. Talk all you want about new media, but someone has to write the content, and someone has to like the content so that advertisers will spend money to cozy up to the content. Yes, I know there’s plenty of content online. Does it serve the community and world? Or does it serve the ego of the writer?

True and true. We are in an ad-subsidized world. It would be royally great if subscription content services could compete in news distribution, but they simply do not scale.

That said, current research indicates that the burgeoning online ad sales game is taking off in spades. JupiterResearch (via CNET) recently reported that 2008 will boast 20% growth in the online advertising space while offline advertising does the Shrinky-Dink. Of course, when you look at raw numbers, there is still room to grow. Online ads represent only about 9% of total ad spending in the US, forecasted to hit 14.3% by 2013. Lots of headroom there — one could say, so much headroom that the downside is the very, very large, gaping maw of a gap between that 14.3% and the other 86% that’s in the air out there to be claimed.

And that really is the story here, more than anything else…

Granted, the Internet has given some very talented people their 15 minutes of fame. They may write well, and have enormous talent with video and audio. But do they have a compass? Can they be bought with a freebie, a pat on the back or the neighbors’ praise?

The Internet is in the process of giving rise to a new breed of journalist thanks to all these layoffs in mainstream media. This is an important shift, because it centers on the people who report the news, not the ego-bloggers and serial editorialists.

For example, take a look at Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo. Josh started the site as a personal platform for his political views. The site has turned into a news portal for political journalism supplied by a network of journalists. He’s still got the leftist blog, but the site is a destination for millions each year to keep up with left-bent political action.

Even more robust: The Huffington Post. As strange as I think Arianna Huffington is, she is openly working to create a network of solid reportage that rivals mainstream media. She’s built a network of citizen reporters around the world who are able to cover breaking news with speed and accuracy that rivals all but the biggest networks — and on that point, not for long.

If America’s great experiment in democracy is to survive, a free press (broadcast, etc), one that doggedly tracks the actions of government and the powerful, is the only protection we have from those who could evenutally undermine freedom as we have known it.

Outlets will continue to close, to re-org, to downsize. That’s the fundamental nature of change. But journalists will always be journalists, whether they are working for CNN or Arianna Huffington. They report the news. This will not change.

What will change is our base habit around news consumption, for a while. See, convergence is happening on more fronts that will impact media than just changing business models that throw a wrench in mainstream media dominance. Luckily, the end result may be more transparent than we think.

The first is technology. Right now, we can look at what is happening with media delivery systems like YouTube, Vimeo, BitTorrent and the like and build a personal broadcast system where consumption takes place more on your computer than your TV. And once it’s on your computer, it’s on your iPhone, your Blackberry, wherever. The pendulum will swing back as more and more cable and telecom operators penetrate the suburbs with their high-speed data, pulling coax in favor of fiber to the home and making those computer media streams ubiquitous across screens. The changing media hegemony is not about the decline of one TV screen in the living room. It’s about the virulent increase in the number of screens all around us, all the time.

And with more screens, comes more content. I should say, the need for more content. This should sound familiar to anyone who switched from rabbit ears to cable in the 90’s. As our technical capacity to shove signal into our homes increased exponentially, so did our need for more content to fill that signal. And so was born about 1,000 channels of nonsense to supplement the 3 channels of value on our cable bills. Those being Comedy Central, Sci-Fi, and Porn, of course, in no particular order.

What this increase in signal has done for news junkies is massive. Think about it this way…

The first Gulf War ushered in the era of 24-hour, round-the-clock cable news and catapulted the news channels from kitschy obscurity to mainstream competitor in about 48 hours. The viewing habits of your average news junky were pretty predictable: turn it on, keep it on, glue yourself to it.

New media journalism offers the same benefit to news junkies on a virtually unlimited content spectrum. Streaming news video from multiple sites, multiple freelance journalists, multiple war zones, all delivered in high def wherever your screens may be.

But the new media business model is even more interesting. A smart outlet with a good network of stringers can start subsidizing news production with direct ad contracts much more efficiently than the current model.

Things will change. Things will likely get worse before they get better. But there is a model in the offing that will at once upset the current system and offer something even better for consumers with every bit of the investigative and research talent that the best houses support today.

As it happens, as I’m writing this I’m catching up on This Week in Tech since I’ve been on vacation for the last few weeks. In TWiT 150, Leo Laporte and guests Jason Calacanis, Tom Merritt and Dwight Silverman have a fantastic discussion on just this issue — old media embracing and extending the new in reportage — it’s worth a good listen.

In summary, Ed Moran at Deloitte did a survey of 100 major brands that have online communities. They all suck. What does “suck” mean in this case?

Thirty-five percent of the online communities studied have less than 100 members; less than 25% have more than 1,000 members – despite the fact that close to 60% of these businesses have spent over $1 million on their community projects. “A disturbingly high number of these sites fail,” Moran tells us.

This tells me a few things. First, these companies have spent WAY too much money on their community software. Part of the magic of building a community network lies in using tool that are familiar and easy to use for the largest number of people. Since the vast majority of successful communities use similar forum and photo sharing tools that are largely open source, rolling your own makes less sense, particularly for a million bucks. That is to say, go where the people are.

Second, they don’t actually have anything worth talking about. That’s not to say that they don’t have great brands, or great products. But they might not have great brands or products that inspire conversation. For example, the Purina hard-to-classify-as-”network” network has only four paltry pages of user comments. It’s just hard to talk about odor control at any length.

In contrast, Mercedes-Benz has an incredibly successful community at BenzWorld.org, offering a place for user support and discussion on the cars — even premium membership for the high-dollar owners.

The Mercedes example gets to one of the key points in the survey: offer a community only when it provides a service to the community — not to you.

Third, the survey ignores companies making great use of existing tools. Back on my first point, if you are really going where the people are, then a network on Facebook or MySpace allows you to tap into known quantities, vast numbers of connected users, on an (arguably) stable platform.

The upshot is this: in spite of the doom and gloom from Deloitte, don’t shake down the social networks just yet. We’re entering an era of connectedness unlike any we’ve yet experienced. If you know your customers — if you truly understand them — a community might be your next best home run.

I’ve been talking with my man Brad Trnavsky for what seems like years about his need for Internet Greatness. But, Brad isn’t a would-be pornographer, as far as I know, and he doesn’t have any direct connection to the Revision3 Internet Mafia Clubhouse.

He’s a sales guy. And a geek.

So about four months ago he moved from Wordpress.com to Ning and launched his sales media empire, salesmanagement20.com. I’ll be damned if people didn’t start subscribing.

Today, Ning reps surprised Brad by profiling SM20 on the front page of Ning.com, and gave him a bit of love on the Ning profile blog. If you’re in the sales game, this is a site you should join. It’s highly focused and growing nicely!

WWDC Keynote Snooze

Part of the challenge was all about bad timing. In a special event months ago, Jobs took the stage and told the world that the iPhone SDK was coming, that all developer prayers would be answered, that they would have access to the iPhone core API’s, allowing the masses to write apps just like Apple does. They would just have to wait. Be patient. It’s coming.

Then, they seeded the developers. Certain developers. OK, not very many developers. Still, the applications that were teased out of the process looked good. Really good. The world was getting excited.

June. WWDC. iPhone3G has been leaked. The furor and frenzy about this next gen device is at an all time high. Devs are counting on Apple to deliver. The public is paying more attention to this developer conference than ever before. They’re tracking secret shipping manifests for boxes on the way to Apple stores. They’re lining up at the retail locations for this product that has not been announced. It’s a drumroll of a million crazed fetishists at terminal speeds.

It was an announcement for an announcement. The iPhone3G isn’t coming for another month. iPhone 2.0 firmware, another month. App Store, another month.

This challenge of timing is non-trivial, and most likely not an accident either. From the lay perspective, the market expected a punchline to this long-running joke; a release to the flood of expectation. What was announced yesterday underdelivered on those counts.

First, the next-gen phone is less than the market expected. Yes, we knew it was going to be 3G. Yes, we knew it would have GPS. Yes, we knew it would cost less. But Apple has a history of delivering so much more than expectation, of blowing away the market with things no one has thought of yet. The iPhone 3G satisfies the market. It does not blow it away. Where is the forward facing camera for handset video conferencing, for example? How did that rumor get so out of control? Where is the 32 GB model? 16 GB has been around a while in the iPhone, after all.

Second, the App Store. The keynote languished on and on and on with demos of software we’d seen, tools that developers had been discussing for months. Screenshots had been leaked. Apps are already running on millions of hacked phones. And we had to suffer through nearly an hour of old news from a platform stage architected to deliver WOW. There was no wow. (To be completely fair, the gaming apps are amazing. You should take a look at the keynote just to see what’s coming — cell phone manufacturers have been trying to reach this level of quality for a long, long time).

Third, OS X. The next version of OS X, 10.6, will be called Snow Leopard, and it’s likely the most interesting of the big WWDC 2008 stories so far. The news? No new features.

OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: Hidden Gem

Which, of course, is not true at all. According to Jobs, it’s an opportunity for Apple to take a step back, to focus on efficiency and security, and to build in some core evolution to the OS, while keeping on a one-release-per-year schedule. It’s a truly interesting strategy, actually, and bucks a pretty well accepted gestalt that for public consumption, there must be eye-candy. Apple is betting they can change the course of things with Snow Leopard.

And actually, they’re in a great position to do it. Look at Vista, for example. Microsoft took five years to build XP’s successor and where the OS has received it’s greatest criticism is in usability. The reason for the so-called XP Downgrade Program is because the company has put so much effort into making XP actually function over the years that it does meet user expectation at this point. If you go back in time 6-7 years, you can see Microsoft faced with the same question of direction in OS development that Apple took a stand on yesterday.

1. Focus work on XP and deliver core refinements that make the OS better, more stable, more expandable, more cooperative with more hardware, and increase performance and security… OR
2. Do everything in option 1, plus take several years to re-jigger the interface and add a bunch of eye-candy to the mix, completely changing the way users interact tactilely and visually with the OS, because then we’ll actually have something to talk about.

Vista, as it turns out, is the result of choosing option 2.

Leopard, on the other hand, is both widely accepted as structurally excellent, and functionally elegant. Users like to use it. They aren’t actually screaming for new features. They’re content with letting Apple define what it is they need to be excited about. Exposé. Dashboard. Bells. Whistles. Whatever. Apple is banking that they can cash in on this wide-eyed enthusiasm for the OS and take a break from delivering the bells and whistles, breathe deep and focus on building something truly next gen for the Mac platform.

While they’re at it, they’ll do something really special: they’ll get the consumer public excited about core OS technology. 64-bit. Multi-threading. Multicore. OpenCL. Javascript. They’ll have people using these terms, driving discussion they don’t really understand, and setting an expectation around OS excellence in a way that others will have to emulate to address. Again.

Apple has a recent history of defining a market dialog. Yesterday, they did it again. The keynote may have been a snoozer, but the hidden gems are special. In the coming months, watch how the company frames their discussion on core technology. Watch how they make it special, interesting, compelling for all-comers.

For the record, I’ll be buying a new iPhone. I don’t care about the 3G. I don’t really care about the GPS — the current system actually works quite well for me. I need the memory. And my wife needs an iPhone of her own. When Jobs made the announcement for the first iPhone, he said they’d targeted 10 Million phones by the end of 2008. Given the announcements yesterday, I don’t think 10 million is even in the cards — they’ll top 10 million before 10/1/08.

From scientificblogging.com:

The HoloVizio is a 3-D screen that will allow designers to visualize true 3-D models of cars, engines or components. Better yet, gesture recognition means that observers can manipulate the models by waving their hands in front of the screen. The function offers enormous scope for collaboration across the globe.

Make sure to scroll down for the demo vids. They really are incredible.

http://www.scientificblogging.com/news_releases/star_trek_holodeck_1_0_holovizio_3d_makes_its_debut

And after the list of headlines came the list of mentions in the blogosphere; post after post of opinionated bloggers and students, some slamming the organization for one reason or another, largely for things we could do little to rectify (I lost my financial aid money, I can’t drive, the school hates me, my lemonade monkey peed in my hair, etc.). But most of the blog commentary came from conscientious, diligent writers, passionate about their cause, and eager to share that passion with the world.

What always struck me about those wonderful Google News pieces is this: I was one of only two people on the fourth floor who did not stop reading when the “News” bits ended. The clipping services, the executives, the communications team on the PR side of the house, they all poured over the headlines rigorously, and dutifully ignored the blogs.

[The other gent who read the blogs is Joe Cockrell, who is one of the most competent blokes I know in the PR biz, and a true gentleman, who smartly took a job as director of PR at Jobing.com, loves his pets, and twitters here.]

The other side of this lesson was brought into focus this morning when my new PR bff dropped me an email bright and early. Her message was about this very site, and included to a Google Blog email displaying a link to a post I’d written about Burgerville, for which she serves as account manager. See, I’d only just mentioned the name of the company, complimentarily, but when she came into my site, the database had blown a gasket and she couldn’t see the post. I got the database fixed and the post back online, then promptly called her back to talk about the company, and the progress I’m making on the video highlighting the team there.

What she knows, and what so many others have yet to learn even in this progressive industry, is that the power of connectivity reaches far beyond A-list press. A quick scan of relevant blogs can give you a snapshot of your market landscape, and indeed, the so-called “populist” media will give you a more accurate picture of your company than much of the mainstream press.

How To

To set up your own Google News Alerts, just visit http://www.google.com/news, and click on “Create a News Alert” in the right column. A simple box on the next screen will allow you to enter the terms you’d like to search, your company name, for example, and the type of search you’d like to perform. In the associated drop-down, you can choose from a number of options from News, Blogs, the Web, Google Groups… I typically choose “Comprehensive” to ensure I capture everything about the brands I’m researching. In some cases, where there is too much traffic, I set up separate alerts for blogs, and news, for the same alert search term.

The result rivals many paid clipping services, but it’s absolutely free. I swear by it. Stop reading and go sign up now.

Good. Now, final lesson then I’ll stop on this: Take a point from the lesson my new best PR friend already knows. It’s perfectly reasonable to reach out to the people that are writing about you. It’s OK to email them. It’s OK to call them. It’s OK to write about them on your own site. It’s always been OK to do this with reporters, but if you’re not equipped with an agency to handle your PR, you will likely get far more response from your bloggers than reporters when you pick up the phone yourself. Use the opportunity to cultivate a relationship with them. Correct them kindly when they’re in error, and praise them reasonably when they give kudos. Share the love and build your populist media empire around you. Feed them, keep them shod, and they will serve you well for years to come.

On the flip side, Joe Klegseth (pres), Courtney LeBoeuf (account manager), and Stasia Brownell (project manager), appear to be quality people in a budding quality agency. If I was looking for agency marketing and branding assistance, this is a company looking to build and extend an already impressive reputation; I’d certainly give them a holler on the short list.

Check ‘em out. And thanks for the coffee and snacks!

Massive Friggin’ Annoyance Factor: All the niceties aside, why does every single marketing and branding agency have to lead with a completely bombastic Flash website? It’s heavy, ostentatious, pretentious, and it completely gets in the way of the message you’re trying to tell. 2Plural/evive is certainly not alone in this, they just come as the latest example of agentius adobus flashititus, an overwhelming need to prove to potential clients that you can deliver content in a medium that completely hides the fact that you have nothing of substance to say.

That, and if you try to visit the site in your iPhone, you’re plum out of luck.

The intent of the project was spot on, however. The company was looking for a way to promote it’s own goodwill. I was — and still am — a staunch believer that the best way to frame goodwill is through the voices of your best customers: guilt by association.

Oregon Humane Society: Health Net Customer Story Part 1 from Pete Wright on Vimeo.

The slow progress on this particular project has been surprising. I’m not sure why it is that so many of the Health Net customers have been so leery to work with us. Whether it’s the “association” with a major health insurance concern that bothers them, or suspiscion that another company would produce this sort of promotion on behalf — and with the financial backing of — a third party, we’ve been through nearly a dozen potential clients who have been tough to nail down to a commitment to participate.

On the flip side, the second film is on Burgerville, and my experience there was fantastic. I’m going to be cutting the piece in the next week or so and will post the film to the Health Net YouTube channel, and eventually to my clips on vimeo.

The third and fourth films we’re working with Keen footwear and SelMet machining. I’m not sure yet what SelMet is all about, but as for Keen, let’s just say I’m crossing my fingers for a few samples to join my collection.

Here is another wonderful opportunity to see one of today’s great orators discussing the primary process, the disaster that the Clinton-Obama race has become — and the danger that race serves to deliver in the face of the real race, after the convention — and what Penn students and residents can do to support the cause.

That’s true. My name is Damon. It’s my middle name, used six years ago the hide my participation in the Apple campaign from my then-day-job. I had thought that I’d exhausted my 32 weeks of fame, but someone has just posted all the old “Switch” commercials to YouTube. Actually, not sure what took so long.

Permanent link, for those who haven’t seen it, is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umHGfSAQb-s

Fearless

This is, after all, an example of how to describe the wonder of a beginning-middle-end story arch from a single point in space and time. The viewer wonders excitedly at how this story was set up, and with greater anticipation about how it will resolve. It is timeless.

I had never heard of Desroches, but will certainly be paying attention to him from now on. Congratulations on a wonderful capture!

This is more of a cardinal law of organic self-promotion, and less of a journalistic technique. But it flies in the face of Lacy’s interview strategy: put herself in the middle of every story, the sun around which all her subjects orbit. On this last note, it’s certainly time to stop talking about her, even as an object lesson.

In this personal interview with a YouTuber Omar Gallaga, I think she says it all — and highlights through what she doesn’t say just how backward it is to call her a “journalist.”

http://www.viddler.com/explore/allfacebook/videos/13/

For more Sarah Lacy goodness, head here: Facebook is All Grown Up. In it, she takes her low-brow sorority chiq to turn an ‘interview’ between her and a grown-up into a name-drop-a-thon in which she completely destroys the thread of the discussion by turning herself into a pundit.

This is not a discussion of Sarah Lacy as an accomplished media personality. It’s a sad reality check on the level of acceptable behavior that comes with finding yourself both a reporter of news and a celebrity yourself.

With Zuckerberg, the audience was not amused. Enough so that many began to yell out questions themselves, rather than listen to Lacy’s self-aggrandizing inner-circle-speak. Her public response in the interview? “You guys try doing what I do for a living. It’s not as easy as it looks, OK?”

Where Sarah went sideways.

1. She shunned any healthy respect for her audience. From the interview questions, and the direction she took the discussion early on, it was clear she had her own agenda for the Facebook founder and showed little interest in the caliber of both social and technical expertise in the room. To be fair, Zuckerberg likely had put some constraints on the kinds of questions Lacy could ask — it’s a reasonable PR expectation. But her dismissal of the audience heckling showed a rampant disrespect for her listeners and her role in addressing their needs.
2. She is not a humble person. I had never followed Sarah Lacy. I’d heard of her and read her blog from time to time when linked. In catching up on her work, it is clear that she is a media personality first, and a journalist a very distant… let’s say… fifth. She’ll be a great addition to “Inside Edition” one day. Once the audience revolts, concede and rebuild the relationship. Simply spitting in the fire will not put it out.
3. She pretended it never happened. On her Twitter feed: “seriously screw all you guys. I did my best to ask a range of things.” That, for Lacy, appears to be where the story ends. In the post-keynote interview between Zuckerberg and Lacy, the interview falls soundly back into PR speak, her nodding acceptance of his every word punctuated with a resounding “Uh-huh” precisely ever three seconds. Her questions completely ignorant of the events preceding this interview, which had occurred minutes prior on the keynote stage.

Becoming a savvy interviewer takes a great deal of media training and experience in front of a camera. If her ego can handle it, this experience is a ripe learning opportunity on how to handle yourself professionally, maturely, clearly, and confidently online, in the media, on camera, and in life.

http://www.airpoo.com

If you don’t think the writer’s strike has been good for new media producers, check again. As far as pilots go, I would watch this over … I dunno … “Class of 99″ any day.

If you head over to ICN, check out “Inappropriate Workplace” too. There’s some good humor in that there broadcast.

If you have feedback, leave it on Daniel’s wall over on Facebook.

Put on those headphones and proceed at your own risk!

One of my favorite podcasts is WebbAlert, a technology news show hosted by Morgan Webb, highlighting daily tech news and social media memes. It’s daily, no more than about six minutes per episode, and Webb does a good job of covering the geek news I need with a ripe sarcasm I crave.

For the last few weeks, WebbAlert has had a compelling new sponsor: DeVry University. It’s a perfect match — while I know very little about the place, I know they have technical and gaming programs that fit the market of the show. But more important than that, it shows that the adult education industry is dipping its toes into some more progressive waters.

Don’t get me wrong here: this is not an issue of conservative advertising values. It’s an issue of ignorance. The new education marketplace that so many laud as leading a new era of access is not so daring when it comes to ad space. They count even more than many sectors on consistent and dramatic lead flow.

With podcast popularity apparently growing as fast as it is, likely precipitated by the ongoing WGA strike and the dearth of traditional media that results, more and more people are turning to the net for their entertainment and their news. It shows a cool savvy that some lucky DeVry marketing manager pushed this initiative through.

Slightly related, I got an email from a good friend who just started working for DeVry:

Started at Devry this week, feels like foreign lands. When I asked when my matrix starts I was told “Take your time, learn the culture here…we don’t want to shove you out there before you “get it”.” I thought they were screwing with me.

If you’ve ever seen the enrollment rooms at Phoenix, you know just how funny that is.

Leo’s Song from impactist on Vimeo.

Senator Barack Obama
Originally uploaded by Stephen Voss

I saw the “Yes We Can” video (in the “Featured Video” box on the front page) for the first time a day or so after it hit the net. Until that point, I had passed on this election cycle’s rhetoric. After eight years of a declining quality of voice in our administration, I found little point in hitching my attention to pundits looking to tackle the center of American low-brow.

The video is a haunting homage to Obama’s New Hampshire concession speech which went largely uncovered by mainstream press. Black Eyed Peas’ Will.I.am opens the piece in stark black and white. He’s familiar, but not household. And when he opens his mouth, it’s not his voice that comes out.

It’s Obama’s.

More stars follow. I know most of them, but couldn’t tell you their names. The video doesn’t tell either, their voices added the Candidate’s own in celebrity anonymity. Twisted.

And it struck me, about half-way through, just how different this campaign really is on all fronts. This campaign is led — in both camps — by candidates not afraid of language, not hobbled by words, not mystified by routine turns of phrase.

Sure, I’m enamored by Obama, but I was and Edwards fan from the start. What many saw as a silver tongued charlatan I saw as confidence and composure under great pressure. However you look at Edwards, the guy could talk.

Clinton has a way with words, too. She has an incredible ability to turn from stern matriarch to warm grandmother, and showcases this in her language. She talks of experience. But polls show people want change — and the fact that she’s the first woman to win a presidential primary in … ahem … history … isn’t quite enough. She doesn’t know how to turn all that experience-speak into language which conceptualizes change for America’s 5-head household.

John McCain has a tough road ahead. From McCain’s corner, how thrilling would it have been to run against another short, stocky, lock-jawed and brooding white guy in the general? No, he has to engage his own, convince the red line republicans that he’s not actually a democrat, and somehow play nice to the center at the same time. What he has going for him in his language is his experience. He talks war. He talks foreign policy. Unfortunately, he talks other wars. He talks foreign policy from other generations. He’s savvy with a teleprompter, but he’s tied to the role of Poppa Smurf to Clinton’s Grandma. To counter that appearance, crazy Pat Buchanan said on the Today Show this morning that “If McCain wins, he’ll make Bush look like Ghandi.”

Both Romney and Huckabee share a gift of speech. Romney is the story-teller, hanging his hat on all that the current administration hasn’t accomplished. Speaking in negatives is hard, and is the sources of many of the current president’s verbal flubs. But he’s so able at the mic that he can deliver terrible news and still make you feel that you’re on a beach, being fanned by an island native holding a left-over giant foam “Go Mitt” finger.

Huckabee goes for statistics. And while his penchant for bullet points communicates a great natural sense of logic and form, it will likely matter little to the sleeping audience.

But make a note of what you don’t see: opportunities to poke at inadequacies of the common. The current administration has had to tow a long line of spin around Bush Jr.’s verbal guffaws. ‘He’s common man… just like aMERicans’,” they’d say. That has become abundantly clear over the last eight years. I believe that many have come to the realization that the office of the president of the United States is one for the best of America, for a representative who showcases the traits to which we aspire.

This year, for the first time in a long, long time, it would appear that we have a real choice no matter what color your vote.

It’s why I get to say things to myself like, “Man, if Will Smith only knew me, we’d be buds. Best friends.”

Same thing with Wil Wheaton, Tom Cruise circa “Top Gun”, George Clooney, Jamie Foxx, Edward Norton, Judd Apatow, Joss Whedon, and the list goes on.

I’m one degree from Tom Cruise, which is sad, because since he went crazy, he’s not that high on the list anymore so I’m not really pursuing it. And Wil Wheaton commented on my blog once — something witty which I’ve since lost to a server crash or somesuch and has to live on in memory alone. Bummer, that.

But always near the top of my “movie stars who would really like me as a person” list is Heath Ledger. He seemed like the quiet guy in the corner, brooding a bit, taking on the tough roles, challenges, and opportunities for others around him to find a piece of spirit. When you’re a child of the 80’s, and you hitch your ride to these storytellers, it’s a blow when they pass so suddenly.

And so it brought some joy to me this morning to read Ledger’s most recent director Christopher Nolan put his thoughts down for Newsweek. He captured for me a piece of that relationship I know Ledger and I would have had, if only he’d known me at all.

When you get into the edit suite after shooting a movie, you feel a responsibility to an actor who has trusted you, and Heath gave us everything. As we started my cut, I would wonder about each take we chose, each trim we made. I would visualize the screening where we’d have to show him the finished film—sitting three or four rows behind him, watching the movements of his head for clues to what he was thinking about what we’d done with all that he’d given us. Now that screening will never be real. I see him every day in my edit suite. I study his face, his voice. And I miss him terribly.

While it’s thrilling that the company has enough cash to cover the bond and the finding, investors should note: the company has likely learned very little from the experience.

Like most organizations the size of Apollo, when dealt a blow of this sort, executive leadership takes great strides to insulate operational elements of the company from potential disruption. It’s a hard thing to do, by the way, because the army of employees and faculty are savvy people, and they read their Google alerts daily on various court proceedings involving the company.

One way to calm the waters is to take a hard stance in favor of business as usual, pushing forward as if there were no legal troubles, no jury finding. And as such, the company learns nothing.

According to Apollo, troubles which allegedly lead to artificial inflation of the stock would have been the purview of former leadership, CEO Todd Nelson, who resigned at the bidding of the board on January 11, 2006. Nelson took a few down with him including former CFO Kenda Gonzales, who put the last nail in the coffin of this particular case when she testified that leadership did, in fact, bury a report germane to investors regarding enrollment practices.

“When we received the program-review report, we felt very strongly we did not want it basically tried in the press,” Gonzales told the federal court jury in Phoenix.

Apollo says they acted responsibly. That they consulted expert advisors on the issue. That the jury verdict is not supported by facts or law. Still, Nelson was resigned over the issue and, by in large, the organization shook off the affects of the transition to new CEO Brian Mueller without much trouble.

And as such, the company learns nothing.

I have no doubt that the company feels strongly about this latest storm. And may, based on the facts of the case, stand a better-than-reasonable chance at winning on appeal in the coming months. But none of that changes the fact that the rank and file in the organization operate a guerilla enrollment operation based on numbers and head-count — even if the compensation plan is craftily designed to hide that fact. It is, as they so often say, an “Enrollment Organization”, and no lawsuit will change that on its own merits.

There are other disputes in the offing for Apollo. The constant turmoil surrounding the company’s enrollment efforts, EEOC brouhaha, defrauding investors — they’re all part of a cycle of directed blindness designed with the intent of protecting the company’s assets. The result, instead, is the creation of an environment doomed to repeat past mistakes more gloriously in the future.

Today we stumbled on this feature in the Apple.com Science section, promoting the creative things you can do with a Mac. Robert Lang uses traditional materials — and his giant 30″ Cinema Display — to make some of the most incredible origami I’ve ever seen.It serves to remind me of two things. First, I’m really lousy at making small folds. I can serviceably fold letters into envelopes. I can fold cardboard into piles for recycling. And the extent of my ability to fold money ends at folding it in half, into my wallet. But what Lang can do with paper is the rough equivalent of folding space.He uses Mathematica to get it all done. He builds simulations that extrapolate the folds and show him how the finished piece will look based on the sim. And he does these things commercially.

Lang can design and fold some projects in an hour. More complicated patterns take months. “When I have a commercial job, of course,” he adds, “I work on it until the schedule says I have to deliver. I can guarantee that I can produce something in a couple of days that’s going to meet the needs and expectations of the client.”

This story gets to the heart of my mission as a storyteller: that people are motivated to buy through images evocative of use and success thanks to it. And Apple has built on this concept magnificently over the last five years, using the website to deliver some of the most compelling use tales in mass marketing computer marketing. What most companies deliver in the unapproachable white paper, Apple delivers through a sound investment in corporate media.What stories can your products and services tell?

I found this thanks to John Gruber at Daring Fireball and have been waiting days for the video to come back on line. It’s Edward Tufte performing a superficial dissection of the iPhone’s human interface design choices.

It’s a treat to hear someone as adept in the field pulling apart the elegance of the iPhone and finding — largely — very little fault in the choices the design team made. He makes an point between the iPhone’s use of “image resolution” and “Cartoon resolution” that I don’t get completely — that it’s somehow a bad thing that the Stocks widget looks cartoony compared to his example of a stock chart, which looks more like Excel. His re-imagined Weather app compared Apple’s elegance to something you might see on a screen at NIST.

It’s short, and worth watching if you’re an iPhone aficionado.

I’ve been using Twitter and Pownce for the last six months, on and off, and I’m torn between the two. Which is a whole lot better off than I was before, when I was torn between just how stupid I thought they both were in the first place.

Twitter, Pownce, and legions of tools that have adopted the “Status” function, all appear to address the question, “what are you doing right now?” With Twitter, I didn’t really care at first. The public posts range from invites to meet-ups to updates on bathroom performance, to shots at sports teams, to cries for help.

Then, I ran into some folks on both services who know how to actually use them. Take Alex France, for example, who goes by the Pownce moniker dignews. Alex posts tech news and links with short headlines, and has become one of my favorites to follow, because he seems to share my interests. Alex is 16-years-old, from Manchester, England.

Or how about Thomas Hawk, president of photo-sharing site Zooomr, who is using Pownce as part of his photographic jihad to share a half a million finish, corrected images with the world. Every day I’m greeted with a handful of gallery-quality photography.

For me, where Pownce takes the hands-down lead is in offering the ability to group my friends into sets. Close friends? Co-workers? Each can have their own group, and you can ensure that messages you send to one group don’t clutter up the inboxes of others, who might find the message inappropriate.

Look at it this way: I set up a new “Clients” group. I can use the tool to send quick status updates to my clients who might need to know timely information about our work together. In a recent software launch, the client group served as a key lynchpin in delivering timely information to the people who needed to know it. And that, after all, is the key to employing a tool that actually fits the job.

This is the biggest hurdle, still, and I hope the Pownce launch drums up enough mainstreamish press to get the message out: these social aggregator/micro-blog services aren’t just for tweeners and programmers — there’s a business use, too. Finding the sweet spot where tool and utility intersect will help us all be more productive, and efficient.

If you use either tool, find me here on Twitter, and here on Pownce. And don’t forget to find me here on Facebook, and here on LinkedIn, too!

It’s deeply ironic: For a company that famously celebrates individuality and Thinking Different, Apple has in the past decade kept its image remarkably impersonal. Other than the trinity who go onstage at press events — Steve Jobs, Jonathan Ive, Phil Schiller — how many people can you name who work for Apple? How many engineers?

Mr. Mailer belonged to the old literary school that regarded novel writing as a heroic enterprise undertaken by heroic characters with egos to match. He was the most transparently ambitious writer of his era, seeing himself in competition not just with his contemporaries but with the likes of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.

I just thought the only ONLY thing that defined the Red Sox was that they couldn’t win the world series. So then they won, and they’re not really the Red Sox anymore. They’re just some anonymous team that players leave so they can go cut their hair and join the Yankees.

- Curt Siffert