The Wave

Everybody's talking about Google Wave these days. What is it? Who the fuck knows; the beta is private, and the only people with invites are New Media Douchebags. It's their marketing strategy. If they just had a press conference and announced it's availability and what it did, it would hold the popular interest for exactly twelve minutes. But they make it a big, unattainable big ball of mystery, then people stay up nights thinking about it. You know your Gmail account? Remember when it was closed off and you had to get an invite? It was a hard time for me. I was in Virginia and people thought a wifi router was the thing that guys over thirty-five had to bend over in front of the doctor for.

Anyway, what do you need to know? Robert Scoble thinks it's pointless and will flop, so it's probably solid platinum.

The New Magazine?

Seems there's a rumor going around that Steve Jobs has been going around to big magazine publishers with a proposal to make something called a "Vook," which is like a new digital online version of a periodical, designed specifically for the mystery Apple Tablet that the blogosphere has been yammering about for 12 years. The publishers are responding by trying to come up with an alternative, loosely termed "The Hulu for Magazines," which reminds me of those "Facebook of Sex" ads you get on torrent sites. Neither will work, because there's already a great program for online magazines; it's called HTML. Seriously, what could you put in an online magazine that couldn't already run on a browser? It's all about payment and subscriptions, and you can do that over the web, too. iTunes is the only growth in the music industry, the independent software developer industry, and they want magazines, too. I just hope they come up with a better name before it launches, lest my computer asking me if I want to sync my vooks, because that sounds dirty. And Scandinavian.