AppleInsider | Multi-touch video iPods to arrive in August – report:
>During a private meeting last month, Apple’s traditionally tight-lipped chief executive Steve Jobs all but broke the silence on the future of the video iPod. Speaking to employees at the Apple Town Hall, he said a division of the company was hard at work on next-generation iPods that, like iPhone, would run an embedded version of the Mac OS X operating system.
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> Picking up on Jobs’ comments were Wall Street analysts such as Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster, who in a report to clients earlier this week suggested that the current iteration of iPhone represents much of what Apple’s flagship iPod line will soon be.
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> “Specifically, we expect Apple to release high capacity iPods based on OS X sometime during or before Macworld ’08 in January,” he wrote.
If it’s got wifi (hmm, and especially if I can add Skype), then I won’t *need* an iPhone.

Hugh Forrest, the indomitable lead organizer of South by Southwest Interactive has announced a public process for voting on and vetting panel ideas for next year’s conference. Apparently it will take several rounds, with the first round narrowing down the 173 panel proposals.

The voting is open to anyone, but the votes of past attendees of SXSW are weighted more strongly and those of past presenters are given even further weight.

Here’s part of Hugh’s announcement:

I wanted to alert you that the online interface for panel proposals for the 2007 SXSW Interactive Festival is now live. This page allows users to give us their feedback on which of the many outstanding panel proposals they feel are most appropriate for next year’s event.

…

Complete directions for the voting process are listed on the site. Deadline for voting is September 8.

I’ve got two panel proposals in the running, the first of which is more directly related to the mission of this blog:

Every Breath You Take: Identity, Attention, Presence, and Reputation Online

No privacy? Spy on yourself and commodify your attention stream! Countless representations of ourselves flood the net with information daily. What is happening to our models of attention? trust? reputation? Rate my new fighting style unstoppable and I’ll trade you this artifact I forged in Worlds of Warcraft… Expect a lively debate from noted experts on attention and identity and skeptics who think most of the sentences above are content-free.

(filed under blogging and education / sociological)

and

You’re It! Tagging is so over! It’s the People, Stupid!

Resolved: the tagging meme has overstayed its welcome. No, tags aren’t going away but they are not a user-experience panacea. Are we folksonomic yet? Some ideas about the next frontier in malleable, emergent information architectures and classification schemes. Plus, how to apply the lessons of the global social internet to more niche oriented web application development projects. Tag pioneers, theorists, and skeptics beat a dead horse.

(filed under social networks and user generated / open source)

Vote for my panels and eight others! (occasional RFB contributor Liza Sabater has three great proposals up, including one on net.art and another on blog “sheroes” and Jon Lebkowsky, my partner in hosting the blog conference on the Well has a couple more worthy of a vote). I also recommend Prentiss Riddle’s panel idea bout teaching children to program with Lego Mindstorms.

I just don’t post to RFB much these days. Nor do my other contributors. Does that blog need to continue? Should I put it to rest? I like the “this day in” stuff from the past, but of course a lot of it is dated. Is there any value to a legacy blog-on-blogging that doesn’t even have a post about, say the recent beta release of Vox from Six Apart?
Plus what do I do with the moderate traffic pointing there from Google? Redirect it to x-pollen?
Likewise, do I need to keep supporting The Power of Many till the end of time? I swear, next book I write I’ll blog about it in an existing blog instead of spawning a new one. If the book needs its own website, it can get its blog content by republishing a feed from my main blog on the topic, along with a set of delicious bookmarks tagged with ‘presence’.
I would like to recommit to blogging here daily. I’ve been neglecting the personal side of my life blogwise, at the expense of professional concerns and the occasional political or other current-affairs type posting.
I miss the daily journaling aspect of blogging and I think it’s helpful – for me, at least – to reflect on a daily basis on what’s going on around me.

This is a test post from Flock. So far, so cool.

If only my minor email lossage of the last week had been the end of the story, but through superior advanced dimwittedness, I managed to lost my entire personal computer archive (email, desktop wiki notes, and all documents) since roughly December of last year. It feels a bit like having a house burn down. You keep reaching for missing objects and then feeling their loss all over again.
I am in fact posting this from the Apple Store in Emeryville, where I’ve spent perhaps 20 hours over the last three weeks trying to diagnose and fix the problems with my iBook.
Wait, I think I’m next. More to come.