Or, to put in another way, people are watching only 1.5% of the films on Netflix Instant.

With his math that number is 6% for iTunes. I feel the same way, I check Netflix first because I won’t have to pay more money for the movie, but they rarely have movies I want to watch — even if they have it I will sometimes opt for the iTunes movie to watch it in 1080p.

This strikes me as a real problem for Netflix, because right now Netflix is where my wife and I go to watch TV shows and that’s about it.

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A man traveling with his 4-year-old son contended that he didn’t know the gun parts were in his son’s toys.

That’s a crafty 4-year-old.

Speaking of crafty, the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general surveyed how well the TSA is doing at fixes problems after security breaches are found and as CNN reports:

The Transportation Security Administration is failing to adequately report, track and fix airport security breaches, according to the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general.

As a result, the TSA “does not have a complete understanding” of breaches at the nation’s airports, says a report from the inspector general.

Well, if you can’t fix the problem, hide the problem.

Speaking of problems, apparently the TSA doesn’t care if you are former advisor of presidents and Nobel Peace Prize winner — nope that won’t stop the TSA from groping you. Just ask former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, 89, who got the “full monty” from the TSA. Patting down an old man in a wheel chair is bad enough, but it’s pretty bad when he probably has a higher security clearance than your boss.

What’s worse than that? Well how about buying $184 million dollars worth of security equipment and instead of installing it you just store it in a warehouse in Texas? According to the Washington Post, that’s exactly what is going on. Actually what’s worse is when you are a government agency that knows you are about to be found out, so this is what you do:

The delay was a deliberate effort to get rid of 1,300 pieces of unused screening equipment before investigators arrived in February, the report said.

In the end, it didn’t work, but A for effort?

Speaking of the letter A ¹ , the TSA wants to remove the “human factor” from viewing the porno-scanner images, instead replacing the human body with an avatar — no word yet if you can use your Twitter Avatar or not.

Lastly, since we are talking about identity, a Newark Liberty Airport security supervisor is charged with identity theft (hat tip to John Gruber) — going back 10 years. Now I don’t think this guy was TSA, but I bet as a security supervisor, TSA didn’t think twice about letting him into secured areas. I have got to get me a security badge…

1. Ok that was a stretch.

Google makes the vast majority of their revenues when people search for something to buy or hire. They don’t have to stoke demand – they simply harvest it. When people use Facebook, they are generally socializing with friends. You can put billboards all over a park, and maybe sometimes you’ll happen to convert people from non-purchasing to purchasing intents. But you end up with a cluttered park, and not very effective advertising.

Really great (short) post that highlights a key problem for Facebook going forward.

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General Motors has announced that it would be pulling its paid advertising from Facebook, saying that it had too little impact.

You mean people don’t click on ads even when those ads are on Facebook? Huh, who would have thought.

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Unfortunately, while fiscally rational decisions have been good enough to get Microsoft to where it is today, such decisions have never and will never catapult a company into the top of the future. It’s the difference between a CEO who is good enough and one who is better. Ballmer, I think, is firmly in the good enough camp.

He might even be slightly better, because we should not forget this very consistently true fact: Microsoft makes around $5.5 billion every three months. In pure profit.

Don’t we all want a CEO that we can define as “good enough, maybe better”?

Curtis is right, Microsoft is profitable, but there’s another factor to success: value. After all a CEOs primary directive is to increase stakeholder value.

Let’s measure value by market cap, and the earliest market cap data I can find is from 6/30/2002, well after Ballmer took Microsoft’s reigns. At that time Microsoft had a market cap of $296.23 billion, as of this writing Microsoft has a market cap of $257.18 billion.

A loss in market cap value of $39.05 billon, Billion.

No matter what Microsoft nets quarterly, the company is still worth less today than it was when Ballmer took control.

And that’s being generous, take a look at this chart:

MSFT Market Cap data by YCharts

What this shows is that Microsoft’s market cap is highest at the beginning of the year, declining towards the end — it’s been doing this since 2008. So I think it’s safe to assume that by years end Microsoft will be worth far less than it is today (even if you average the market cap over the course of the year).

No matter how you look at it, Microsoft is not worth what it was when Ballmer took control. It doesn’t matter how well Ballmer does on a quarterly basis, because the aggregate shows the truth. Ballmer needs to go.

And, again, I own stock in Microsoft.

Without a doubt, Mr. Ballmer is the worst CEO of a large publicly traded American company today. Not only has he singlehandedly steered Microsoft out of some of the fastest growing and most lucrative tech markets (mobile music, handsets and tablets) but in the process he has sacrificed the growth and profits of not only his company but “ecosystem” companies such as Dell, Hewlett Packard and even Nokia. The reach of his bad leadership has extended far beyond Microsoft when it comes to destroying shareholder value – and jobs.

As I said a year ago, he needs to be gone.

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So now we have this shoulder bag that claims to be a diaper bag, something parents will likely need to carry almost every time they exit their homes for quite a while. And the bag we have isn’t very good.

I could list out everything wrong with the bag, but it’s just easier to say that there isn’t a single thing I like about our diaper bag. It almost offends me.

So I started looking for a better diaper bag. Weeks later I still hadn’t found a single diaper bag that looked suitable. They either looked like a diaper bag, or looked like something I would laugh at if I saw someone else carrying it.

Then I had an idea ¹ . The best bag I have is my Tim Bihn Smart Alec, so what if I just used that bag. There’s a problem: I don’t want to own two, and I don’t want to have to go through the process of converting the bag into and back from a diaper bag every time.

Yet, after thinking about it more I realized that most everything I keep in the Smart Alec are things I would like to take anyways in a diaper bag outing, I just needed a quick way to add or subtract the diaper specific items and things like my MacBook Air.

Enter Tom Bihn’s packing cubes.

Since I can easily remove the padded laptop sleeve, and that being the only item I wouldn’t want when using the Smart Alec as a diaper bag, this looked like a simple fix.

I ordered two of these packing cubes (Tri-Star small-all fabric and the same in the non-all-fabric option) and hoped they would be enough. Turns out they are perfect, but a third cube is needed for bottles, so I ordered this one.

Now I have one packing cube with diapers and wipes. Another with a change of clothes. A third with all the other miscellany that ends up in the diaper bag and bottles. It takes me less than two minutes to go from computer bag to diaper bag.

That’s acceptable because I get to use a bag that I love.

What’s also neat is that the packing cubes still fit in the ”real” diaper bag, so it is still always ready to go for my wife (I toss the packing cubes back in that bag when I change out my backpack). So now I have a diaper bag that I love at very little extra cost, and a system that is very flexible.

I only wish I had thought of this weeks ago.

I know most of you don’t use the Smart Alec, but the nice thing about this is that there are probably packing cubes that fit your setup very nicely — it’s worth playing with, because diaper bags suck.

1. Which can be dangerous and is often expensive.

For starters I like the idea of two dedicated pages, one for settings and another for music, that show page specific controls below the menubar. The double-tap home button is massively convenient, but right now I think Apple is limiting its usefulness too much.

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1. Still the place to find the best content on The Verge.

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A report from the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) talks about rumored upgrades to iCloud — all of which make sense if you really think about how important iCloud is to Apple. iCloud is essentially the sanity glue for all iOS+Mac users out there — of which there are millions.

iOS and OS X can survive on their own without iCloud — that much we know from history. However, at this point, iOS and Mac OS X cannot survive together without iCloud — because without iCloud the alternative is Exchange or iTunes, both of which are cumbersome at best and downright aggravating most of the time.

Apple products are often described as something that ‘just works’ and while you may disagree with that, it’s hard to disagree with the notion that a large part of the ’just works’ ideology is: seamless integration of hardware and software.

That’s easy with laptops, that’s easy with mobile, but it’s hard if you want the seamless integration between two different (or same for that matter) devices. This is why most of us nerds love Dropbox sync, because Dropbox makes it easier to work on two Macs in a back and forth scenario. This is what iCloud is trying to solve between not only Macs, but Macs and iOS.

This is why iCloud success is crucial to Apple.

This is a problem Microsoft will also need to solve, but by the very nature of Google, it’s not a problem that Google need solve — because they have solved it as much as they want to: use Google products only on the web, we don’t do desktop.

It only makes sense then that iCloud keeps expanding, because the more tasks it takes on between devices, the happier users will be and Apple will also strengthen two key areas:

1. Bullet point checklists when compared with competitors.
2. Platform lock-in. If all your data lives in iCloud and not Microsoft or Google, well you are far less likely to undertake such a large data migration.

I would be surprised if iCloud wasn’t a very large part of WWDC this year. Apple will be putting the finishing touches on iCloud’s integration with iOS and Mac OS X, but they will also need developers to give widespread adoption to its use for the service to catch on.

This should scare Microsoft and Google, but more than that I think it should scare Dropbox. As much as I love Dropbox, iCloud is easier.

A widely adopted, seamless, fast, robust iCloud is the greatest threat to Apple’s competitors — and this time around I think Apple knows it.

The article reports that Kaspersky Lab had “begun the process of analyzing the Mac OS platform at Apple’s request” to identify vulnerabilities. This statement was taken out of context by the magazine – Apple did not invite or solicit Kaspersky Lab’s assistance in analyzing the Mac OS X platform.

That doesn’t sound so much like the publications fault, as much as Kaspersky stretching the truth. Good luck working with Apple now, Kaspersky.

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Ultimately, I would like to see a system of cascading alerts. My devices make their best guess about which one is primary at the moment, and display any alerts on just that one device. If I dismiss an alert there, that’s the end of the story. If a few minutes go by without any action from me, the next-most-likely device displays the alert, and so on. But regardless of where I ultimately see that alert, explicitly dismissing it makes it disappear from all my screens.

I like that idea and think it may be the most simple from a users perspective. I always thought another way would for Macs and iOS devices to somehow know (maybe by WiFi network) when they are near each other and only sound the alert once.

This is a really tough problem to solve for Apple, but I think we can be assured they are working on it. If evidenced by Messages on the Mac alone. When you are iMessageing you don’t get alerts on all your devices under very particular circumstances — that’s Apple’s acknowledgment of the annoyance factor that comes from multiple alerts. And Messages largely works in a very similar manner to what Kissell is suggesting.

So if you want to know the direction Apple may take with calendar alerts, I don’t think you need to look any further than Messages on the Mac.

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The end result of which was a massive increase in funds spent. I look forward to reading more of their posts about their Kickstarter experience.

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And you might work on a lot of devices – a Mac, an iPhone, an iPad – in a lot of places. You might work on the road or maybe from home (with your Aeropress and clickity keyboard). And that makes it hard to securely use a shared drive, coordinate with clients and collaborate with your team.

Igloo offers a complete digital workplace – you get full access to all your files, project discussions and plans for world domination. The information you need to work is available anywhere in the world, literally at your fingertips.

Igloo has a space for your team. Each team gets dedicated file sharing, Twitter-like microblogs, activity streams and a host of other collaboration tools in one cloud-based platform. Plans start at just $4/user/month.

Work better, not harder.

Enter to win an Aeropress and try Igloo free for 30 days.

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After weeks of have to fish around the floor to plugin my phone and then try to discern in the dark if I had a hold of the iPad or iPhone charger, well I broke down a bought these. This is easily in the top 10 of best things I have bought for $10 or less.

They just work perfectly, no really.

So if you notice that you have a cable that keeps dropping to the floor when you want it on your desk, or wherever, do yourself a favor and order these.

(They also come in other colors, like white.)

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The fact that the page-flip animation is “slow,” that’s a feature. As someone who teaches literature and language every day, processing time can be a huge factor in a reader’s ability to internalize and apply information. Pagination can be helpful in doing so with digital content.

After reading this I couldn’t help but notice that I do enjoy that fraction of a second break that I get when I “flip” the page.

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Macworld just reviewed the PDFpenPro and PDFpen for iPad, giving them 4.5 and 4 mice respectively.

As a TBR reader you can save $15, allowing you to get both the Mac software and iPad app for the price you would pay for just the Mac app. What a deal.

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It’s easy to believe that Facebook can stay in control of the Web in perpetuity by acquiring tech’s prettiest young things. But remember that a decade ago, Google looked like the substrate of the Internet. Nearly everything about the way we surfed flowed through Google. Now, not so much. While Google is far from toppled, a tectonic shift has created new land masses in the ocean, where previously there was only misty horizon.

Google was in trouble the minute TV ads started showing their Facebook URLs instead of their web address. Companies now say: “find us on Facebook” and that’s bad for Google because Facebook has its own search box free of Google ads.

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In 1962, Mr. Shelby created the first Shelby Cobra, borrowing British Ace Bristol sports car bodies and mating them to Ford V-8 engines in his Venice, Calif., garage. The Shelby Cobras finished first and second in a race held around the Dodger Stadium parking lot. The race prompted Ford to sponsor his project.

That car was a game changer.

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I’ve been using it for a while, and it’s a great way of listening to great podcasts do go get it.

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It’s so unbelievable that I went to the primary source, a 40 minute video interview with Mr. Kessler, which draws a fascinating picture of HBO’s business strategy. After listening to the entire interview twice, I could not pinpoint where Kessler actually said “temporary phenomenon.”

It turns out what HBO’s president, Eric Kessler said was more along the lines that he thinks the Internet is big, but it can’t replace the deal they have going right now with cable. Which makes sense.

So good job with the Linkbait Forbes.

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So: why? Well take a look at the images posted on this link, they are shot at ISO 6400 and ISO 10,000 and yet they have very low noise compared to most other cameras.

That’s why.

Also the B&W looks excellent, cool camera — just wish it was in my price range.

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So if you swipe up on the dash, you get an em dash. Swipe up on the dollar sign and you get the cents symbol. One thing I like is that this is one way to get smart quotation marks.

I had no clue.

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When searching for a particular subject, a list of Facebook friends who may know about that topic is displayed in a light-gray sidebar on the right-side panel of the results page. “So if you query ‘Hawaii,’ user models in the network look at public information in your profile such as where your friends live or have lived, what they’ve liked on Facebook, and photos — and turn up a list of people who likely have information relevant to your query,” says Sandy Wong, principal development lead for Bing. “You’ll still see search results for Hawaii within the traditional Web search results. But now you’ll also be able to consider the advice of your friends who may know something about Hawaii.”

Bing will pull from Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Yelp, LinkedIn, Quora — man there’s one missing isn’t there? Hmm. Oh yeah, Google+ — yeah doesn’t pull from that. So let’s recap:

• Bing: Pulls from all non-Google social networks.
• Google: Pulls from Google+

I’m still a DuckDuckGo fan, but this is a smart move from Microsoft.

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Thanks to our fine show sponsors: Igloo Software and Hover.

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Still, interesting to think about.

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One important note (that I didn’t know) is that buying the Mac App Store version only grants you a license to use it on a Mac, whereas buying the downloadable version from Adobe (same price) grants you a license to use it on Mac or Windows. So if you like to use Macs and have to use Windows, this is something to think about.

Update: Jim Dalrymple notes some more caveats with Lightroom 4 in the Mac App Store — so many I would recommend that you buy it from Adobe’s website instead.

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The younger the person you ask, the less likely it is you’ll find that link between wanting to know what’s going on and grabbing a paper or opening up a news website. They use Pinterest to figure out what’s fashionable and Facebook to see if there’s anything fun going on next weekend. They use Facebook just the same to figure out whether there’s anything they need to be upset about and need to protest against.

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This is about how these two universes should collide and that means what I’m really talking about is gamification. There’s a reason I didn’t mention this until paragraph 17 because there are a lot of folks who think gamification means pulling the worst aspects out of games and shoving them into an application. It’s not. Don’t think of gamification as anything other than clever strategies to motivate someone to learn so they can have fun being productive.

Great point, and one that I hadn’t thought of when we talk about gamification. The type of gamification that Lopp is referring to sounds fantastic, but rare.

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Paperless takes the mystery (and fear) out of going paperless with your Apple technology. The book includes 32 screencasts, 4 movies, over 26,000 words, and other rich-media assets to turn you into a paperless ninja.

Sold.

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If I was a magazine publisher I would figure out how to get an iPad app that updated to the latest content in less than 30 seconds.

That’d be goal one.

Goal two would be to whittle that time down to 10 seconds.

Most current iPad magazines fail before readers even get a chance to view them.

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The agent was very aggressive in his pat down and he was patting me down where no one is suppose to go and it got very uncomfortable, so I moved his hand away

That sounds like it would cost extra.

In Salt Lake City a Type One Diabetic (hat tip to Douglas Stephen) — the type that wears an Insulin pump 24/7 — was forced to go through the body scanner, even after she showed TSA “officers” a note from her doctor explaining the pump should not go through such scanners. No worries, it ended up a-OK, well if you consider a broken $10,000 Insulin pump, and putting a teenagers health at risk to be an a-OK outcome.

I don’t. Also when you have a 16 year-old calling for a government agency to be better educated, well then you kind of know you failed.

As a result of the CIA, not the TSA, foiling a bomb plot — well the TSA took it upon themselves to send a “security guidance” to other countries. No word yet on whether the other countries have stopped laughing.

Oh and speaking of that foiled bomb plot — yeah looks like the TSA wouldn’t have even noticed the bomb had the person wearing the bomb been scanned with a body scanner — so there’s that.

And that is your TSA update for today.

Anybody else confused about Evernote’s endgame?

I genuinely am confused by what their goal is, but Federico Viticci points out their goal on the Evernote site, quoting:

Save your ideas, things you like, things you hear, and things you see.

That’s really only one part, as Evernote claims it has three goals: capture anything, access anywhere, find things fast.

So where do Skitch and Penultimate come in?

Evernote says Penultimate will help with handwriting recognition, ok. I just don’t see the value in these acquisitions at all. A few others chimed in with thoughts on Evernote’s endgame too.

Michael Schechter guesses:

Evernote wants to be our external brain and our brain tends to capture a variety of media in a variety of ways. That doesn’t always lend itself to a single application. As it continues to evolve, I see a world where Evernote’s prime offering becomes less about capture more about storage and recall.

Schechter sees Evernote needing more apps to accomplish this goal, but Gabe (ye, Macdrifter) points out something I certainly feel:

I’d like Evernote to stop buying sharing buttons and start buying Evernote enhancements.

I’m with Gabe on that one — even though I am not currently an Evernote user, I do try it from time to time because it can be a powerful tool.

All of this brings me to the one glaring problem that I have always had with Evernote, and it is noted by Viticci:

If Evernote really wants to stay around for the next 100 years, they have to build a solid foundation of connected apps now.

Agreed, but more than that — they absolutely must make their tools excellent, because right now they only have good tools. There’s a big difference between good and excellent.

If Evernote truly wants to be the place that I “capture anything” then it has to make it seamless for me to do so. Every time I give Evernote a go, I get held up on the capture process — and it is a process.

Entering text should be as easy as it is in Drafts if Evernote truly wants me to use it as a capture tool. Until you reach that level you just have a tool that captures things, but in a cumbersome manner.

Evernote does a good job at “access anywhere”, but really they should have been the Dropbox in this category. If I was Evernote I would have squashed the Dropbox powered text editor movement on iOS by opening and pushing the Evernote engine as the sync engine. That’s truly access anywhere, because right now — truthfully — they are “access anywhere we have an app, and only in our apps”. Again, there’s an important difference here.

Lastly we have “find things fast”. I can’t comment very well on this because I don’t have enough data in the app, so let’s just say this is acceptable since I don’t remember having complaints about it — or hearing complaints.

Even if Evernote succeeds at “find things fast” I think it largely does just an average job at its first two goals. Which brings me back to my question: what’s their end game with these acquisitions?

How does Skitch and Penultimate tie in to make “capture” and “access” better? There are some obvious areas where these two help the capture aspect, but then why require users to download, install, and use multiple apps if the goal is “capture anything”?

Evernote, in my head, has always been billed as a tool of that nature of: “you only need this tool, it does everything.” In that sense Evernote is a lot like a Leatherman — very handy, but not the best at anything other than being really handy.

That’s not to say it doesn’t have its place — I own three Leatherman tools — but it is to say that what makes a Leatherman handy is that all the tools are in one package. What Evernote is doing is selling the Leatherman, but also saying there is a neat hammer and a neat drill that you can buy to go along with it — which makes the entire package a bit less handy.

Facebook also has a CEO concerned about rivals usurping it. If you had a huge pile of data about websites and services that might pose a competitive threat and billions of dollars in cash at hand, what would you do? Right: You’d buy Instagram. And you’d be able to make a very informed decision without consulting anyone, because, well, math.

Great article.

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I’ve always hated litigation, and I continue to hate it

A lot of people took that to mean that perhaps Cook was more open to settling a lawsuit than Jobs was.

Here’s Florian Mueller, today, quoting an Apple legal filing against Samsung:

Samsung’s infringement of Apple’s intellectual property has already resulted in damages that reach billions of dollars. [...] It is critical to Apple to start trial on July 30, to put an end to Samsung’s continuing infringement.

So, yes, perhaps Cook is willing to settle, but if this filing is any indication — the settlement amount and terms will be massive to Samsung.

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Advertising-supported writing might leave a bad taste in some people’s mouths, but it’s been this way for a long time for a reason — because it works.

I’d argue it’s not working at all, as evidenced by the race to the bottom nature of advertising revenues, the exploration of pay-wall systems in big publishers to help pad advertising revenue (because ad revenue isn’t enough), the fact that more than a few blogs I know need the extra money from members to make writing work full-time, and the overall on-the-verge-of-bankruptcy nature of most news publications.

No, I don’t think advertising works any longer as the sole revenue stream.

It may not have failed, but it’s only a matter of time.

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If Internet users cannot protect their own constitutional rights, the only hope is that Internet companies do so.

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“He is not a bad guy,” the executive says. “Maybe he’s not a good guy, but he’s not a bad guy.”

I don’t like it because it bashes Zuckerberg, so much as I like it because that’s the very real sense you get about Zuckerberg from this post.

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One use case that I think is really interesting, as reported by Matthew Braga:

Or, if your boss has a new version of the document to distribute, access to the old file can be revoked.

That feature alone could make a great tool for teams that are collaborating.

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We can read and watch inspiring content all year long without running dry.

But who is paying for it?

In a popular article by the editor-in-chief of Technology Review, Jason Pontin lays out how this problem of free content arose:

For publishers whose businesses evolved during the long day of print newspapers and magazines, the expansion of the Internet was tremendously disorienting. The Internet taught readers they might read stories whenever they liked without charge, and it offered companies more efficient ways to advertise. Both parties spent less.

Publishers didn’t see a potential problem with going free and because of that, content creators on the web are paying for it.

The problem is further exacerbated by the fondness that publishers have with advertisements. They are everywhere on the web. But they are simply not the solution to the problem of paying the bills. They are a band aid that we have all been wearing for far too long.

I say this as someone who makes money from writing that is solely supported by advertisements.

The reason advertisements don’t work in the long run is because of the open nature of the web. It’s not hard to install a plugin that blocks ads (even easier if you buy a Mac given the fondness advertisers have for Flash based ads). ¹

Ads are likely not the future, or the answer, because as readers we have many, many, tools that allow us to ignore, gloss over, or outright remove ads from content. Even if an advertiser still registers a page view on their ad, when they stop seeing returns on their advertisements they will no longer desire to pay publishers. This is where the market is beginning to head — the race to the bottom.

The Often Asked, Often Ignored, Question

The most frequent question I get, is also the one I most frequently ignore: are you planning on going “full-time”? By that readers simply want to know if and/or when I will start writing this site full-time.

The reality is that the landscape is so competitive and experiencing such a race to the bottom, that to go full-time is no easy task. I have much respect for those that have gone full-time with a site that was only a hobby before, but it is no easy task because its about so much more than ads, money, readers, or page views.

Ads in the sidebar simply don’t pay that well — which is why so many sites have more than one ad. RSS Sponsorships pay better, but are very difficult to fill unless you are a Tier One blog ² . And so back to the often asked, often ignored question, of when I will go full-time: when my income from writing matches or surpasses my income from my day job.

And thus, we have a problem, because as readers on the web we are conditioned to not have to pay with anything more than (sometimes) looking at advertising. But that’s wrong — it’s destructive — and it needs to change.

Contractors don’t build houses for free, just so long as you look at ads on your walls for the rest of your occupancy — they charge real money, because it takes real money to build a house. So too does it take real money to write a site like this.

To support writing this site full-time I need income to pay for many different things, not the least of which is paying me.

The Way Forward

I could sit here all day and talk about why I think the current model is broken, but that solves nothing. I personally only see one way forward: asking readers to support you.

It’s the direct model, it’s old-fashioned, but it works. If blogs are no longer driven by page views, then we — as a whole — get better content ³ , content we as readers deserve.

Because I personally don’t see what Pontin saw back in 2009 as being a web that I want:

Editors can charge readers for content that is uniquely intelligent; that relies on proprietary data, investigation, or analysis; that helps readers with their jobs, investments, or personal consumption; or that is very expensively designed. Everything else should be available free, because it is news or opinion, which are commodities and must be offered up to the aggregators, social networks, and feeds. Such content can be monetized (to use the ugly jargon of our industry) only through traffic, which drives ad impressions. Here, although the quality of the editorial should meet the minimal standards of a publication, editors shouldn’t invest too much time or money: good enough is best.

We see this model now, it’s the jackasstic type of writing that propelled Mike Daisey to fame, keeps The Macalope from running out of content to mock day in and day out.

When the metric for how much money you will make writing on the web becomes how much traffic you can drive, then the metric for the level of quality and truth needed in your writing is severely diminished.

This is not the web I want.

I can see a future where the readers of the web find the writers that they love to read and decide that it is worth supporting those writers so that they may continue their craft. It’s not utopia, it’s not impractical — it’s just hard to see through the dust cloud that has been formed by a stampede rush to the free content — a model that was created by the very companies that are now on the verge of bankruptcy because of it. Expectations were set, and unfortunately for us all, they were the wrong expectations.

I’ve long held contempt for free, and while ads are not free — they are also positioned in an incredibly competitive landscape with many people willing to take much less money for the same work — until of course they realize they should be paid more, by which time someone else will be willing to be paid less.

That’s a nasty cycle.

There is a place for ads on the web, but it should no longer be the default revenue model.

As content creators on the web, we need to decide who we, individually, want to pay us.

When I stop to think about asking a reader to pay me directly, I often worry that such an ask comes across as greedy.

However, when you stop to think about it, is it that I am being greedy for asking you to support my content — my writing — or is it that society has condition web users to be greedy by asking — no demanding — that content on the web be free for all?

A race to the bottom is occurring, yet I don’t want to stop writing, but I also am not willing to write for free.

As a wise duo once said:

“I can’t go for that, no”

“No can do”

1. New Macs don’t ship with Flash installed.
2. Think The Loop or Daring Fireball
3. This site included.

I had a stack of a hundred of pages of paper. Nothing too important, but everything important enough that it needed to be kept. I could scan it all, but that gives me a bunch of files that needed renaming and sorting. So I worked up a little foo.

All scans go into a folder called OCR from my ScanSnap, that part was easy enough.

From there, this handy AppleScript from David Sparks does the heavy lifting. The Script opens each PDF in PDFpen and does OCR on the document, then saves the file back. Now that my document is fully searchable I don’t need to worry about sorting or naming.

From there, Hazel moves the PDF into my PDF archive folder.

All of this is done without me touching a thing. It’s like magic and I doubt I will ever run into a build up of paper again.

I use PDFpen daily, it’s the default PDF application on my Mac. It’s a great app, add to it the iCloud sync with the iPad version of the app (which I really love), and you can begin to get a clear picture of how I keep minimal paper in my office.

PDFpen is $60, PDFpenPro (which I use) is $100. As a reader of The Brooks Review Smile on my Mac is offering you a special code: $15 off PDFpen or PDFpenPro. That means that you can buy PDFpen (or PDFpenPro) and PDFpen for the iPad, for the same price that non-TBR readers would pay for just PDFpen. (Expires May 15, 2012. Does not apply to upgrades.)

These two apps are essential to my daily workflow.

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I think it says just about everything, both the good and the bad of the system.

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