I just received my new 15-inch Mac­Book Pro Wednes­day, the one Steve Jobs unveiled ear­lier this month. Above is a photo of the new model (left) and the orig­i­nal Mac­Book Pro I pur­chased in 2006. (Photo taken with my loaner Nokia N96 cellphone.)

What I like about the 2008 Mac­Book Pro:

• Bright, bril­liant screen is worth the upgrade all by itself.

• The bat­tery no longer burns my lap.

• 232 GB hard drive on the new model vs. 93 GB on the original.

• The new Mac­Book Pro (Mac OS 10.5.5) con­nects to my Apple Extreme home net­work 10 times faster than my 2-year-old Mac­Book Pro run­ning Mac OS 10.4.11.

• The mousepad incor­po­rates the iPhone’s image enlargement/reduction/rotation soft­ware, though not as ele­gantly as in the iPhone.

What I don’t like:

• The mousepad. The cur­sor goes all over the place (or some­times doesn’t move at all), and it’s out of the box only for 24 hours now.

• No FireWire jack. Are they frig­gin’ kid­ding me??? Couldn’t trans­fer any­thing from my old lap­top to this one out of the box. (Update: see below.)

• Clunky hide­away stash on the bot­tom of the com­puter. Took me 10 min­utes to close it, and it didn’t close snugly.

• So far, I still the key­board bet­ter on the orig­i­nal Mac­Book Pro over the new Mac­Book Pro and Mac­Book Air.

The pre­vi­ous Mac­Book Pro bat­ter­ies don’t work on this one.

Still try­ing to fig­ure out what the Func­tion (fn) key is for.

David Pogue in today’s New York Times: The Mac­Book Makeover.

It’s a thing of beauty, clad in alu­minum like its more expen­sive Pro
sib­lings. It’s slightly lighter than the pre­vi­ous black or white
plas­tic mod­els (and, at $1,300, more expen­sive), but feels stur­dier and
more sculpted, thanks to the tapered edges. …

With a flick of two, three or even four fin­gers, you can rotate a
photo, scroll a doc­u­ment, zoom in or out, hide all win­dows, or flick
into a dif­fer­ent program. …

FireWire is how you con­nect tape cam­corders to the Mac. This is the part that kills me.

I’m big into home movies. I’ve got 100 MiniDV tapes care­fully
stored–of my chil­dren grow­ing up, of my TV appear­ances, of our trips
and mem­o­rable moments. The video qual­ity is amaz­ing. And because
they’re dig­i­tal, I sleep easy, know­ing that I can make fresh copies of
those tapes at any time, with­out any qual­ity loss. For 15 years, I’ve
intended, some­day, to edit those tapes down into a series of cher­ished
DVDs. Maybe when the kids get married.

But not if FireWire goes away. If that hap­pens, my tapes will be stranded and uneditable.…

Agree with Pogue whole­heart­edly on the wrong­headed move to elim­i­nate FireWire. MiniDV tapes may be on the way out, but for seri­ous shoot­ers (like me), there’s no way we’re going to go to all hard drive/memory card stor­age, when mov­ing video from com­puter to com­puter over the years is a night­mare. I intend to keep shoot­ing on my Canon HV20 and other hi-def MiniDV cam­corders for years to come. (Update: see below.)

Other than that ter­ri­ble busi­ness deci­sion, the new Mac­Book Pro is a delight.

The new Mac­Book Pro costs $2,000 for the 2.4 GHz model; $2,500 for the 2.53GHz model.

Update:

Andrew, in the com­ments, points out that the new Mac­Book Pro has the lat­est ver­sion of FireWire: FireWire 800. All the pre­vi­ous FireWire 400 cables won’t work. So today I’m order­ing this FireWire 9-pin to 4-pin DV cable here at Belkin ($27).

New at Terry Heaton’s PoMo blog:

Despite what you hear, RSS has not “peaked”

An insight­ful new report from For­rester (What’s Hold­ing RSS Back?)
sug­gests that RSS (Really Sim­ple Syn­di­ca­tion) as a tool for mar­keters
is vastly under­uti­lized and that growth of the tech­nol­ogy is hin­dered
by igno­rance of the pub­lic. While RSS use has increased since For­rester
first mea­sured it three years ago, it’s still only a sta­ple of just 11%
of North Amer­i­can inter­net users. The report prompted new media PR guru
Steve Rubel to declare that RSS “has peaked,” which set off a series of blog post­ings cry­ing “foul.”

From RSS Usage is Much Higher than 11% to RSS Adop­tion Stalling Because It isn’t Joe Six Pack Enough,
peo­ple jumped on Rubel and the report in gen­eral. It doesn’t appear,
how­ever, that any­body actu­ally read the report, because I don’t find
this “peak­ing” busi­ness anywhere.

What I do find is good infor­ma­tion, espe­cially for mar­keters, on how
to use RSS to make a dif­fer­ence for them­selves. The report does reveal
the weak­ness of the tech­nol­ogy in terms of con­sumer accep­tance, but it
goes the extra mile by prob­ing open-ended sur­vey ques­tions as to why.
Peo­ple don’t use RSS, because they don’t know what it is, why they
should use it, and how it works.

Report author Julie Katz goes on to make three rec­om­men­da­tions to address the ignorance:

1. Adver­tise syn­di­ca­tion as “easy information.”
2. Cre­ate RSS tutorials.
3. Col­lect and share cus­tomer testimonials.

For
information-seekers, RSS is a life-changing expe­ri­ence, and let me give
you an exam­ple of exactly what this report is talk­ing about. My 27-year
old future son-in-law is a man­ager at a GameStop store. He’s an XBOX360
guy and an expert at “Call of Duty.” He wants to make retail gam­ing his
future and is in with a very good com­pany. Think­ing that stay­ing
informed about the online gam­ing indus­try would ben­e­fit his career, I
asked him a few days ago if he’d ever heard of RSS. He hadn’t, but
that’s no sur­prise, so I walked him through set­ting up a feed reader
and load­ing it with news feeds from his indus­try. He faith­fully uses it
now, and I hear him quot­ing things he’s read from the feeds. He admits
that he is “the guy in the know” at work.

Now he knows what RSS is, why he should use it and how it works.
He’s a con­vert, and his information-gathering life is changed as a
result. …

News is a con­ver­sa­tion (revis­ited)

A new report [PDF] from Rubi­con Con­sult­ing reveals inter­est­ing insight into the world of online com­mu­ni­ties, and, in so doing, adds more evi­dence to the grow­ing axiom that news in the 21st Cen­tury is a con­ver­sa­tion, not a lec­ture. This is an old topic for me, and I don’t hear it dis­cussed much any­more. The basic premise is that peo­ple aren’t gath­ered in a the­ater watch­ing a stage any­more; they’re watch­ing (and in con­stant com­mu­ni­ca­tions with) each other.

A news department’s role in a “news is a con­ver­sa­tion” par­a­digm is to start — and some­times advance — the conversation.

The Rubi­con report notes that while online par­tic­i­pa­tion is ris­ing, only about 10% of web users pro­duce the vast major­ity of user-created con­tent. The rest are more or less voyeurs. This ratio is a fact at this point in the Web’s devel­op­ment, and a lot of observers point to it as evi­dence that the online world isn’t ever going to reach the Utopian level of par­tic­i­pa­tion that its pro­po­nents espouse.

But this view ignores the degree of influ­ence that this 10% group has on the rest. …

Recently on PBS’s Medi­aShift blog:

Mark Glaser: How ‘Fol­lower Spam’ Infil­trated Twit­ter — and How to Stop It. (Photo of Biz Stone.)

Mark Glaser: Cur­rent TV’s ‘SuperNews’ Com­edy Gauges Suc­cess on Web Views. A Q&A with the ani­ma­tor behind SuperNews. (I blogged the par­ody of social net­work­ing sites back in July.)

Mike Rosen-Molina: 6 Ways Authors Can Suc­ceed by Self-Publishing Books.

Once dis­missed as “van­ity pub­lish­ing,” self-publishing is today get­ting
a sec­ond look from many aspir­ing authors as new tech­nol­ogy makes it a
more viable alter­na­tive to tra­di­tional publishing. …

Sev­eral things have changed in recent years to make self-publishing
a more attrac­tive option for some writ­ers. First, a new breed of
pub­lisher, the “print-on-demand” ser­vice has come about with the rise
of the Inter­net. These ser­vices only print copies of a book as they’re
ordered, sav­ing self-published authors from the poten­tial night­mare of
a garage full of unsold books. For a fee, ser­vices like Book­Surge, Packt, Lulu, Author­House, and iUni­verse
offer a range of options, includ­ing proof-reading or cus­tomiz­able
cov­ers. Another dif­fer­ence is that some of these ser­vices even offer
pack­ages to help authors with pro­mo­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion instead of
leav­ing them to fig­ure it out on their own.

Besides sim­pli­fy­ing the print­ing process, new com­mu­ni­ca­tions
tech­nol­ogy has made it much eas­ier for self-published writ­ers to spread
the word about their books. And while it might still be dif­fi­cult to
get a self-published book sold in a brick-and-mortar book­store, many
self-published writ­ers now can sell their work on their own web­site or
arrange deals with online booksellers. …

Simon Owens: How Polit­i­cal Diarists Power Red­State, Daily Kos.

Happy Hal­loween! Photo repub­lished from moaan on flickr. I’m tak­ing Bobby trick-or-treating tonight.

eBay Giv­ing Works from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

Here’s a 9-minute con­ver­sa­tion I had ear­lier this month with Kristin Cun­ning­ham, gen­eral man­ager of eBay’s Giv­ing Works pro­gram, about how you can help non­prof­its through your pur­chases on eBay (and how non­prof­its can help them­selves). Giv­ing Works is about to cel­e­brate its 5th birth­day this com­ing Wednes­day, Nov. 5, and has raised $150 mil­lion for char­i­ta­ble causes on eBay. These folks rock!

Watch video in H.264 Quick­Time on Our­me­dia
Watch video in Flash on Vimeo (embed­ded above)

Chris O’Brien at the Next News­room Project: Sus­tain­abil­ity: Report­ing back from the New Busi­ness Mod­els for News Summit.

Chris O’Brien at the Ide­aLab blog: What News­rooms Can Learn from Obama Campaign.

what do videogames and Obama have to do with news­rooms? It’s clear that over the past year, Obama’s cam­paign has devel­oped a pro­found under­stand­ing of how its com­mu­nity finds and con­sumes infor­ma­tion across a num­ber of plat­forms. And Obama has embraced them all, and adapted his mes­sage to fit the way peo­ple use those platforms.

That’s an impor­tant les­son that every news­room should learn. Dur­ing the past year of research for The Next News­room Project, we iden­ti­fied six prin­ci­ples that news­rooms should adopt. One of those calls for news­rooms to embrace all plat­forms. It’s not enough to sim­ply say, “Hey, we want to be online first.” Instead, think about how to use all plat­forms equally: mobile, the Web, print, broad­cast (radio and TV). And be ready to exper­i­ment with any new ones that come along, includ­ing video games.

It’s crit­i­cal that a news­room under­stand its com­mu­nity, where they are, the dif­fer­ent ways the get news and infor­ma­tion, and how they con­sume it in those dif­fer­ent ways. …

UK edu­ca­tor Paul Brad­shaw writes:

I’ve cre­ated a social net­work for any­one research­ing news and jour­nal­ism. It’s at http://onlinejournalismresearch.ning.com/

It’s an attempt to pro­vide a way for jour­nal­ism stu­dents and aca­d­e­mics to get in touch with oth­ers research­ing the same area, exchange ideas and tips, and ask for help on every­thing from find­ing rel­e­vant lit­er­a­ture to sourc­ing con­tacts and the best research methods.

There are forums, you can use it to blog your progress, organ­ise events, upload video and pho­tos, form groups, and more.

Research is tra­di­tion­ally a soli­tary, frus­trat­ing endeav­our. It doesn’t need to be. If you work with jour­nal­ism stu­dents, please encour­age them to join the net­work and con­tribute a ques­tion or an answer.

Let’s get news research networked.

David Carr in today’s NY Times: Mourn­ing Old Media’s Decline. Excerpt:

It’s been an espe­cially rot­ten few days for peo­ple who type on dead­line. On Tues­day, The Chris­t­ian Sci­ence Mon­i­tor
announced that, after a cen­tury, it would cease pub­lish­ing a week­day
paper. Time Inc., the Olympian home of Time mag­a­zine, For­tune, Peo­ple
and Sports Illus­trated, announced that it was cut­ting 600 jobs and
reor­ga­niz­ing its staff. And Gan­nett, the largest news­pa­per pub­lisher in
the coun­try, com­pounded the grim­ness by announc­ing it was lay­ing off 10
per­cent of its work force — up to 3,000 people.

Clearly, the sky is falling. The ques­tion now is how many peo­ple will be left to cover it.

It goes on. The day before, the Tri­bune Co. had declared that it would reduce the news­room of The Los Ange­les Times
by 75 more peo­ple, leav­ing it approx­i­mately half the size it was just
seven years ago.

The Star-Ledger of Newark, the 15th-largest
paper in the coun­try, which was threat­ened with clos­ing, will
appar­ently sur­vive, but only after it was announced that the edi­to­r­ial
staff would be reduced by 40 percent.

And two weeks ago, TV
Guide, one of the famous brand names in mag­a­zines, was sold for one
dol­lar, less than the price of a sin­gle copy.

Stop and think about where you are read­ing this col­umn. If you are one
of the mil­lion or so peo­ple who are read­ing it in a news­pa­per that
landed on your doorstop or that you picked up at the cor­ner, you are in
the minor­ity. This same infor­ma­tion is avail­able to many more mil­lions
on this paper’s Web site, in RSS feeds, on hand-held devices, linked
and sum­ma­rized all over the Web. …

So who can still afford to pay for the phone calls that reporters have to make?

So, no one has to pay for those phone calls. They’re free now, with Skype. But few in the online medium are going to take up the tra­di­tional trade of jour­nal­ism. Because it’s hard work.