I missed this bit of looni­ness out of Sil­i­con Val­ley this past week, but Katie Hafner’s got it cov­ered in today’s New York Times: Steve Jobs’s Review of His Biog­ra­phy: Ban It.

The impe­r­ial Jobs has decreed that no Wiley & Sons book shall be sold at any of Apple’s retail stores.

As it hap­pens, my book Dark­net, pub­lished by Wiley, goes on sale next month, and its sub­ject mat­ter is aimed squarely at the innovation-loving tech­nol­ogy crowd that the Apple stores target.

Nice going, Steve. Pun­ish your customers.

From Katie’s article:

In an image-obsessed fit of pique, Apple Com­puter has ban­ished books pub­lished by John Wiley & Sons from the shelves of Apple’s 105 retail stores — all because of Wiley’s plans to pub­lish an unau­tho­rized biog­ra­phy of Mr. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive.

It is not clear whether Mr. Jobs or any­one else at Apple has read the book — “iCon: Steve Jobs, The Great­est Sec­ond Act in the His­tory of Busi­ness,” by Jef­frey S. Young and William L. Simon, which will go on sale next month. …

In recent months, Apple showed its pen­chant for secrecy by suing a Har­vard stu­dent who oper­ates a Web site for Apple enthu­si­asts, accus­ing him of try­ing to induce Apple employ­ees to divulge com­pany trade secrets. It also filed law­suits to stop leaks of com­pany infor­ma­tion on sev­eral Web sites that traf­fic in Apple news.

Cross-posted to Darknet.com.

An old friend, Nor­man, put me up overnight at his company’s room at the Trump Inter­na­tional Hotel & Tower. Yes, it’s spiffy as all get-out, but lest you think I’m wal­low­ing in pure deca­dence, I thought I’d include the view from my bed­room win­dow, top. The sec­ond shot, from the entertainment/chillout room (my term, not Trump’s), is a view of lower Cen­tral Park on this dreary day. Oddly, I can’t get Trump’s wifi sig­nal from that main room.

27 years ago this month I was chair­man of the Samuel G. Black­man Jour­nal­ism Con­ven­tion and Tar­gum Reunion, a fancy name for a gath­er­ing of alums of Rut­gers’ daily col­lege news­pa­per plus a bevy of guest speak­ers, includ­ing Les­ley Stahl, Sally Quinn, Richard Reeves, Floyd Abrams, George Gallup and oth­ers. About 1,500 peo­ple turned out. That gath­er­ing led to the col­lege paper achiev­ing inde­pen­dence from Rut­gers Uni­ver­sity (in New Brunswick, NJ) two years later.

Well, for the 25th anniver­sary of the paper’s inde­pen­dence, today’s Tar­gum gov­ern­ing body flew me out from Cal­i­for­nia to give the keynote talk tonight. Norm, who was edi­tor in chief the year after I left, will be dri­ving me down there in a lit­tle while. Look­ing for­ward to meet­ing the kids run­ning the show.

It hasn’t quite been the week of rest and relax­ation I’d hoped for, after the launch of Our­me­dia and before the pub­li­ca­tion of my book Dark­net in a cou­ple of weeks. First, the first leg of our SFO to LAX to Loreto, Mex­ico, flight on Alaska Air­lines was can­celed because of mechan­i­cal rea­sons — leav­ing us stranded in San Fran­cisco for a night. Because Alaska Air­lines flies into Loreto (on the Baja Peninsula’s east coast) only twice a week, that meant we couldn’t get there for four more days.

So we decided at the ticket counter to go to Cabo San Lucas instead — we needed sun! I spent a cou­ple of hours online research­ing places to stay, and we booked three nights at the Pueblo Bonito Blanco on a scenic stretch of beach near Cabo’s land­mark Los Archos. (I’ll post a photo album some­time in the next week or so.) We had a fun, relax­ing time with our 6-year-old, frol­ick­ing in the surf, snor­kel­ing and knock­ing back chi-chis. On the last night, at a Mex­i­can restau­rant down­town called Mi Casa, I got a mild bout of food poi­son­ing, which knocked me for a loop but didn’t pre­vent me from get­ting on a plane from Oak­land to New Jer­sey early Fri­day morn­ing after touch­ing down in San Fran­cisco only 15 hours before.

Engad­get Interview:

Mike Foley, Blue­tooth SIG

For this week’s Engad­get Inte­view, vet­eran jour­nal­ist J.D. Lasica spoke with Blue­tooth SIG exec­u­tive direc­tor Mike
Foley from his head­quar­ters in Belle­vue, Wash., about wire­less head­phones, hands-free phone gab­bing, and what kinds of
Bluetooth-enabled gad­gets we’ll be see­ing in the years ahead. 

For those who aren’t famil­iar with Blue­tooth, what is it and why should we care?

From the big-picture per­spec­tive, Blue­tooth is a short-range wire­less tech­nol­ogy with its mis­sion in life to replace
cables and to allow devices to com­mu­ni­cate with each other with­out hav­ing to plug them together.

Work on this began in the mid– to late ‘90s. Since then, work has been done on enhanc­ing the spec­i­fi­ca­tion, cre­at­ing a
good test pro­gram that devices go through before they enter the mar­ket to ensure inter­op­er­abil­ity between devices, and
get­ting Blue­tooth into many devices so that it really becomes valu­able to the consumer.

The ini­tial use cases we’re see­ing lots of take-up now is in the mobile phone to a wire­less head­set for you to take
and receive calls on. Sim­i­lar to that is its use in the car, where you can take calls from your mobile phone hands
free, so you use your speak­ers in your car stereo and a micro­phone that’s typ­i­cally placed above your visor to take and
receive calls.

Begin­ning this sum­mer, we’ll see a wide num­ber of stereo head­sets avail­able, and then your mobile phone and portable
media devices will be able to play on those head­sets with­out hav­ing to plug them into the unit.

Stereo head­sets for music? 

Exactly right. The sce­nario there is either your portable music player like an iPod or your smart phone with music
capa­bil­i­ties would be able to play to that Blue­tooth headset.

Prob­a­bly next year you’ll be able to stream music to your car stereo so that you’d be able to access music from a
sin­gle dig­i­tal music store in your car as well as your home.

We recently pro­filed Motorola’s iRa­dio ini­tia­tive here. What other com­pa­nies are work­ing with
Bluetooth?

There are many com­pa­nies work­ing on the stereo music capa­bil­ity. Today you can buy an adapter for the iPod that
enables that with Blue­tooth to stream to a stereo head­set. Most, if not all, of the mobile phone man­u­fac­tur­ers are
look­ing at this to see how the mobile phone can be your No. 1 dig­i­tal music store device.

Let’s start with cars. Blue­tooth car kits are avail­able from Nokia, Motorola, Par­rot and other com­pa­nies. How does
that work?

One of the things that was excit­ing for us in 2004 was the num­ber of factory-installed options had increased from
fewer than 10 to more than 30 mod­els where you can get Blue­tooth fac­tory installed.

I want my Blue­tooth Jaguar!

Sure. There are also add-on kits where Blue­tooth is inte­grated with your car’s enter­tain­ment sys­tem. So if you’re
dri­ving down the road lis­ten­ing to the radio or a CD and a phone call comes in, you hit a but­ton on the dash­board or on
the add-in unit, or use voice con­trol to accept the call, and your music will turn off while youre tak­ing the call, or
the CD would pause. When you’re done with the call, the music resumes.

In some of the newer mod­els, you can see the num­ber of who’s call­ing on your stereo or on your rear-view mir­ror or on
the wind­shield at the bottom.

The most pop­u­lar use of Blue­tooth today would be in mobile phones, is that right?

That’s cor­rect. The most devices sold with Blue­tooth are the mobile phones. Ini­tially they were the high-end phones
but we’ve seen the trend where Blue­tooth is in more and more mod­els. We envi­sion that within a cou­ple of years it will
be dif­fi­cult to buy a mobile phone that doesn’t have Blue­tooth in it.

Any num­bers on Blue­tooth deploy­ment in cell phones?

Research from IDC found that 13 per­cent of mobile phones in the U.S. had Blue­tooth, and they expect that num­ber to go
up to 65 per­cent or more by 2008. Glob­ally, IDC is fore­cast­ing 63 per­cent of all mobile phones to have Blue­tooth by
2008.

What’s the advan­tage of hav­ing Blue­tooth in your cellphone?

There are a cou­ple of key advan­tages. One is the wire­less head­set — to be able to take your calls via that, or the
hands-free oper­a­tion that we dis­cussed ear­lier. Other advan­tages include syn­chro­niz­ing your phone with your per­sonal
com­puter to keep your con­tacts and sched­ule and task list cur­rent on your mobile phone.

Another usage for Blue­tooth in the phone that’s much more pop­u­lar in Europe and Asia than it has been in the States so
far is where you use your mobile phone as a modem for either your per­sonal com­puter or PDA. The rea­son it’s been more
pop­u­lar in Asia and Europe to date is they have faster wide area net­works. But now that we’re start­ing to see 3G
net­works being deployed in the U.S., I think we’re going to see that become more pop­u­lar here as well.

Why is Europe ahead of the U.S. in Blue­tooth tech­nol­ogy over­all? Is it sim­ply a tech­nol­ogy issue or do
cor­po­rate games­man­ship come into play too?

I think it’s also the per­sonal men­tal­ity that Europe seems to be more mobile phone-centric while the U.S. is more
per­sonal computer-centric.

I under­stand that Ver­i­zon Motorola V710 freezes out photo trans­fers to com­put­ers with Blue­tooth, instead
requir­ing cus­tomers to use its pro­pri­etary photo-transfer ser­vice for an addi­tional fee. Are you run­ning into those
kinds of issues?

We have seen that a cou­ple of times in the U.S. That has been dis­ap­point­ing because it’s con­fus­ing to the con­sumer.
Blue­tooth has got­ten to the point where peo­ple now have a pretty good under­stand­ing of what a good Blue­tooth phone
imple­men­ta­tion is, and when they take a pic­ture, they expect to be able to either beam it to one of their friends or to
a printer. When they haven’t been able to do that, it’s caused dis­ap­point­ment and con­fu­sion. “Why can my friends
phone-beam the pic­ture but yet mine can’t?” We’re try­ing to work through that.

Do you con­sider Blue­tooth an open plat­form? Mem­bers have to join and pony up some dough,
right?

We con­sider our­selves an open stan­dards group. You need to be a mem­ber of the Blue­tooth SIG to imple­ment the stan­dard.
There’s a free and a pay­ing mem­ber­ship level. And there is a one-time fee asso­ci­ated with cre­at­ing a Blue­tooth prod­uct
because of the require­ments for cer­ti­fi­ca­tion and testing.

Blue­tooth still hasn’t come into its own in the per­sonal com­puter field. Is Apple lead­ing the way
there?

I think your assess­ment is fair. We think Blue­tooth has a lot to offer to the per­sonal com­puter world, and it hasn’t been as widely adopted there.

You’ve seen Apple and the Mac be more aggres­sive in this space. Last Novem­ber, the lat­est ver­sion of the Blue­tooth spec­i­fi­ca­tion was pub­lished, and in Feb­ru­ary Apple released a Power­book con­tain­ing an imple­men­ta­tion of that spec that was excep­tion­ally fast. I wasn’t expect­ing to see that until this sum­mer. Apple is show­ing great inno­va­tion and lead­er­ship in that space.

What does the Blue­tooth Power­book do?

It’s able to inter­face and syn­chro­nize with your phone. You’re able to exchange files with other per­sonal com­put­ers or your PDA. You can use wire­less mice, key­boards, print­ers with the per­sonal com­puter. The main advan­tage for the new ver­sion of the spec is that it has a higher bit rate.
If you’re exchang­ing a pre­sen­ta­tion or pic­tures between two devices, it lets you do that faster.

I’m look­ing beneath my desk right now and I’ve got more cables and coils than a used car lot. The vision is that a lot of that is going to go away some day?

We’ll def­i­nitely be able to remove the wires behind your desk. Already you can remove the wires from your mouse, your key­board, your printer. The biggest chal­lenge Blue­tooth can’t solve today would be the cable to your mon­i­tor, which requires a higher bit rate.

Let’s talk about some other gad­gets. What does Blue­tooth add to a cam­era phone?

The largest cam­era man­u­fac­tur­ers are shift­ing to cell phones because they’re putting cam­eras in so many phones. Clearly, the opti­mum usage model is where you take a nice pic­ture on your cam­era phone and send it directly to a printer or to a per­son stand­ing across from you using Blue­tooth. As peo­ple get used to using the cam­era on their phone to get that kind of instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion, that will drive even greater use of those cam­era phones.

The other trend we’re see­ing is higher pixel den­sity on the phones. It won’t be long before 2– and 3-megapixel phones will be com­mon here.

What if you wanted to pub­lish your pic­ture to the Web? Blue­tooth is only for short range com­mu­ni­ca­tion.

You could take one of two options. You could use Blue­tooth to trans­fer the pic­ture to your per­sonal com­puter that’s con­nected to the Web and pub­lish from there. Or you could use the wide area con­nec­tion already in your phone to pub­lish to the Web that way.

What about the social dimen­sion? Howard Rhein­gold wrote Smart Mobs, about how peo­ple are using portable devices to com­mu­ni­cate and inter­act in sur­pris­ing ways. Will Blue­tooth be a part of this?

The owner of a Blue­tooth device can decide whether they want their device to be seen by other devices, that’s a term called dis­cov­er­abil­ity. You can search for all nearby devices and it will tell you all devices found. If you’re in an open area, the range can be 20 or 30 meters. You could find a long list in a place like a train sta­tion. Then, you’d have a busi­ness card, where instead of your name, you have a nick­name or han­dle and watch and see who looks at their phone to nar­row it down who you’re com­mu­ni­cat­ing with.

Why would any­one want to be dis­cov­ered, other than to hit on some­one?

Peo­ple have dif­fer­ent moti­va­tions. I always keep my phone dis­cov­er­able, because when some­one wants to send me a legit­i­mate busi­ness card, it’s just eas­ier to have the per­son send you it. It’s a clas­sic ease-of-use vs. pri­vacy situation.

What about the pri­vacy issues? Blue­tooth devices have been hacked or com­man­deered.

We def­i­nitely con­tinue to work with our mem­ber­ships to make sure that the devices out there can’t be hacked into. Not every issue has been solved, but the prob­lem has been min­i­mized. Most known devices with a prob­lem are either not sold any­more or a patch has come out.

We keep hear­ing about smart refrig­er­a­tors what will order a half-gallon of milk when we’re run­ning low. Will there really be Blue­tooth fridges, microwaves and toaster ovens?

There is some work in the appli­ance indus­try, but that’s not a major dri­ver today. Toshiba is work­ing on some of those implementations.

Home automa­tion or home secu­rity sys­tems offer tremen­dous value. If you install a secu­rity sys­tem, you’ll be able to install sen­sors on your win­dows and doors and have those trans­mit wire­lessly back to the secu­rity panel. That’s a very nice setup. Blue­tooth could com­mu­ni­cate with your mobile phone so you can arm and dis­arm your sys­tem as you enter and leave the house.

How might busi­ness trav­el­ers take advan­tage of Blue­tooth?

The one nice sce­nario for busi­ness trav­el­ers using Blue­tooth is dialup, where you use your mobile phone as a modem and con­nect your PC to the net­work that way. You could con­nect wher­ever you’re at using a wide area net­work — you don’t have to go search­ing for a hotspot. And you can run email appli­ca­tions, browse the Web, con­nect back to your cor­po­rate intranet to run appli­ca­tions, and so on.

When you look at the gad­gets we high­light on Engad­get, do you see most of them becom­ing Bluetooth-enabled?

I think a lot of them will be. It will depend a lit­tle bit on how suc­cess­ful Blue­tooth is in var­i­ous mar­kets. In the home enter­tain­ment clus­ter, those devices can poten­tially be very good to have Blue­tooth in for remote con­trol. What’s nice about Blue­tooth is that it’s not direc­tional and you can trans­mit data in both directions.

You can cre­ate a smart remote con­trol that dis­plays infor­ma­tion about the movie being played, or the tracks on the CD, or about the TV show being dis­played. You could trans­mit the guide to the remote rather than hav­ing to show it on screen.

In the portable devices space, that’s where Bluetooth’s strength is today, because it’s such a low-power and effi­cient tech­nol­ogy, and can be added to those devices with­out caus­ing their bat­ter­ies to drain sig­nif­i­cantly. So the portable gam­ing con­soles you see are prime type devices for Blue­tooth to enable multiple-player gaming.

Why haven’t we seen more in the way of inter­ac­tive tele­vi­sion? Will Blue­tooth let us com­mu­ni­cate with our TVs through our lap­tops?

Yes, your lap­top or a tablet-like device. You can come up with all sorts of inter­est­ing form fac­tors. To be able to out-of-band infor­ma­tion from the TV and dis­play it on the device in your lap, the pos­si­bil­i­ties there are tremendous.

Most inter­ac­tive TV sys­tems today take up a part of the real estate on your screen, and typ­i­cally peo­ple don’t want to give that up. Some of the TV man­u­fac­tur­ers are look­ing into it. So far I haven’t heard of any inter­est by Hol­ly­wood or the con­tent creators.

Does Blue­tooth need to become bet­ter known by the aver­age per­son in the street, or do you just need to be known by the device man­u­fac­tur­ers?

The con­sumer really cares about the func­tion, or what’s enabled. They want to be able to do hands-free talk­ing in their car. The real­ity is that peo­ple are com­ing to under­stand you need Blue­tooth for that. In the UK, there’s 77 per­cent brand aware­ness for Bluetooth.

What about in the U.S.?

In the U.S., aware­ness almost dou­bled from 22 per­cent to 41 per­cent of those polled being aware of Blue­tooth from 2003 to 2004. In Japan, that fig­ure increased from 43 per­cent to 61 percent.

Where do you see Blue­tooth going in the next few years?

This year we’ll con­tinue to see more Bluetooth-equipped cars, let­ting more peo­ple using the hands-free oper­a­tion. I also think we’ll see Blue­tooth extend into portable media play­ers for use in the car, so you can take your dig­i­tal music store with you.

We’re also look­ing at being able to address the video mar­ket in addi­tion to what we’re doing with audio.

Beyond that, we’re look­ing at tech­nol­ogy that enables its use in more ver­ti­cal seg­ments like indus­trial automa­tion. A con­veyer belt on a fac­tory floor, with sen­sors all over it, could use Blue­tooth to report the sta­tus of the wid­get being created.

Blue­tooth is an estab­lished tech­nol­ogy found in more and more devices, but we’re still enhanc­ing the tech­nol­ogy and mak­ing changes for new indus­tries to come on board, like in the med­ical devices field. So we’re really just on the tip of the iceberg.

J.D. Lasica’s new book about the dig­i­tal media rev­o­lu­tion has just been released: Dark­net: Hollywood’s War Against the Dig­i­tal Gen­er­a­tion (Wiley & Sons). This arti­cle orig­i­nally appeared at Engad­get.

I’m off to Loreto, Mex­ico, on the Baja penin­sula, for the next few days, so not sure if I’ll be blog­ging from there.

If you’re one of the folks wait­ing for an email response, my apolo­gies — my inbox has more than 3,000 emails and I haven’t found a way to dig out of that hole.

Bob Garfield of NPR’s On the Media inter­views the bril­liant Brew­ster Kahle, founder of Archive.org, today (lis­ten as an mp3 in RealAu­dio). Here’s the descrip­tion of the 8-minute program:

Nine years ago, Brew­ster Kahle embarked on a project of mas­sive pro­por­tion — archiv­ing the Inter­net. When Bob checked in on how the project is going, he learned that it has grown even more mas­sive. Kahle doesn’t want to archive just the Inter­net, he wants uni­ver­sal access to all infor­ma­tion. And he says it can be done.

Eric from Berlin and Holmes from Downhillbattle.org send along word of Participatoryculture.org, a new project and plat­form for Inter­net tele­vi­sion and video.

At the site, any­one can broad­cast full-screen video to thou­sands of peo­ple at vir­tu­ally no cost, using Bit­Tor­rent tech­nol­ogy. View­ers get intu­itive, ele­gant soft­ware to sub­scribe to chan­nels, watch video, and orga­nize their video library. The project is non-profit, open source, and built on open stan­dards. This week, they announced the project and released their cur­rent source­code. The soft­ware launches in June.

We hope to work with them so users can post their video to the Web via Ourmedia.org.

Britain’s The Econ­o­mist looks at the future of jour­nal­ism. Dan Gill­mor has some thoughts. Excerpt:

Blogs, more­over, are but one item on a grow­ing list of new media tools that the inter­net makes avail­able. Wikis are col­lab­o­ra­tive web pages that allow read­ers to edit and con­tribute. This, to dig­i­tal immi­grants, may sound like a recipe for anar­chic chaos, until they visit, for instance, wikipedia.org, an online ency­clopae­dia that is grow­ing dra­mat­i­cally richer by the day through exactly this spon­ta­neous (and sur­pris­ingly orderly) col­lab­o­ra­tion among strangers. Pho­to­blogs are becom­ing com­mon; videoblogs are just start­ing. Pod­cast­ing (a con­junc­tion of iPod, Apple’s iconic audio player, and broad­cast­ing) lets both pro­fes­sion­als and ama­teurs pro­duce audio files that peo­ple can down­load and lis­ten to.

It is tempt­ing, but wrong, for the tra­di­tional main­stream media (which includes The Econ­o­mist) to belit­tle this sort of thing. It is true, for instance, that the vast major­ity of blogs are not worth read­ing and, in fact, are not read (although the same is true of much in tra­di­tional news­pa­pers). On the other hand, blog­gers play an increas­ingly promi­nent part in the wider media drama—witness their role in America’s pres­i­den­tial elec­tion last year. The most pop­u­lar blog­gers now get as much traf­fic indi­vid­u­ally as the opin­ion pages of most news­pa­pers. Many blog­gers are wind­bags, but some are world experts in their field. Matthew Hind­man, a polit­i­cal sci­en­tist at Ari­zona State Uni­ver­sity, found that the top blog­gers are more likely than top news­pa­per colum­nists to have gone to a top uni­ver­sity, and far more likely to have an advanced degree, such as a doctorate. …

If I were run­ning a small com­mu­nity online pub­li­ca­tion today, I’d be doing a lot of what they’re doing down in Bluffton, South Car­olina, with Bluffton Today, which nicely takes advan­tage of local blog­gers’ pho­tos and other con­tri­bu­tions. Steve Yelv­ing­ton told me about it at the Uni­ver­sity of Texas’s online jour­nal­ism sym­po­sium ear­lier this month, and I’d enjoyed vis­it­ing every time I’ve stopped by.

Inci­den­tally, I just pub­lished on Our­me­dia a two-part video on Dan Gillmor’s pre­sen­ta­tion before the same gath­er­ing in Austin on April 8. The sound leaves a lit­tle to be desired, but that’s life in the com­pres­sion lane today. Here’s:

Part 1: Dan Gill­mor on grass­roots jour­nal­ism
Part 2: Dan Gill­mor, continued

Mitch Rat­cliffe reports that Audi­ble has jumped into the RSS pool with both feet. Emails Mitch:

I’m hop­ing you’ll help me con­firm their deci­sion by giv­ing them some pointage now that they’ve gone pub­lic. Their free audio feed is par­tic­u­larly nice… Lots of break­ing news dri­ven deep content.

Even­tu­ally, we’re going to let peo­ple self-configure their per­sonal RSS feed so that they don’t have to rely on vis­it­ing their Broadvision-based cat­a­log (which is vir­tu­ally invis­i­ble to the out­side world because all pages are cooked on the fly based on user IDs).

Any­how, they’ve worked hard on this and I hope you’ll give them some blog-and-fuzzies for doing it. Here’s my post­ing about it.

John Fed­erico, who also worked with Audi­ble on this, blogs about it here.

I won­der: How do I get Dark­net chap­ters onto Audible?