I was on KUOW's The Works last night talking about Apple's year in review and what's to come. The audio is archived as streaming Real and MP3 audio.

Apparently, I'm actually pretty good on being involved in trends when people think they're relatively stupid and faddish but turn out to be transformative. Latest trend-turned-mainstream? Blogging. The Pew Internet & American Life Project says that according to their most recent survey, seven percent of the 120 million adult Americans who use the Internet have created a blog; 27 percent of them read blogs; five percent use aggregators; and 12 percent have posted comments on blogs. Only 38 percent know what the term blog means, which makes sense as newer blogs don't go on and on about being blogs.

I was trained in high school, by accident, as a typesetter. I thus wound up working in desktop publishing back in 1985, and pursued it seriously in parallel with my degree in graphic design at Yale (1986 to 1990) as an undergrad.

I hopped on the Internet first in 1987, but

In Tuesday's Wall Street Journal, I'm mentioned (and quoted) along with a number of other entrepreneurs who run price-comparison engines for book prices. (That's a free 7-day link to the Journal to read that article.) Addall.com is the granddaddy, having launched in 1998. They're pretty good now. They look at 41 bookstores. My site, isbn.nu, looks at 17, but they've got a big tent and I'm pretty picky.

The article gives a good flavor of the pros and cons of finding the best price, and the range of arbitrage that's available. A smart consumer might be able to buy books from Overstock and sell them on eBay or Half as new, but the market usually is too efficient for that to work.

The reporter who wrote this piece focuses on the media and publishing industries, and the article represents the point of view of the publishers rather than

Peak behind the kimono: my latest editorial blog, The Digital Radio Weblog, launches tomorrow at droxy.com, part of the Weblogs, Inc. (WIN) network.

I read this piece on a proposed 10 percent (37 cent to 41 cent) first-class postage increase in the Wall Street Journal that had a quite editorial statement in the second paragraph:

Such a rise would push the price of a first-class stamp to at least 41 cents -- and hurt consumers and businesses that already have shouldered three rounds of rate increases in the past few years.

The article also notes that First-class stamps have jumped 12% since early 2001. The rate won't take effect until 2006 if they get through the various hoops. The USPS says it's for inflation plus a pension contribution issue.

But I went and found historical postage prices and graphed them against inflation. In fact, in 2003 dollars, a 41-cent stamp will cost less than any time since 1974. Real dollar postage increase took place during the Depression amid inflation, when an increase in

I interviewed The New Yorker's Cartoon Editor Bob Mankoff for three articles that I've written about cartoonists, two for the New York Times, and one for eCompany Now (a publication which acquired Business 2.0 magazine's name).Mankoff has come out with The Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker, which is a project he started in 1997, and I wrote about the beginnings of which in 1998. He intended to digitize and categorize every cartoon ever published in the magazine. He's not only done that, but the book includes CD-ROMs with every cartoon on them in viewable form. A pretty monumental achievement. I saw the actual cartoon archives at The New Yorker's interim offices (after their move from their original space, before the Conde Nast Building move): shelf after shelf of clippings. Now, just a few little discs at lower resolution, and some gigabytes at full size--a bagatelle, a hard

The New York Times quietly turned off the fees for retrieving articles in the Technology section of its Web site, including Circuits. Good news for folks like me who like to research articles, and who have articles published in that area of interest.For instance, you can now read my very first Circuits article from July 1998--and see a picture of me bald--without paying. Related to this, many many libraries with good online sites offer their patrons access to article databases at no cost. I keep finding whenever I need to do research, that I should start at my library's site, log in with my library card, and start looking at their databases.

Frank Catalano has moved from the active pundit to not-a-pundit-any-more category. As opposed to myself, the unsolicited pundit.It's a terrible thing, as Frank has one of the best radio voices in the business! I'll miss hearing him on the old vacuum tube.

Some very kind words about my blog in The Seattle Weekly:BEST INDEPENDENT LOCAL TECH BLOGSBlogs (or Web logs) are often no more than very public personal diaries. But they’ve turned into labors of professional love for two local tech bloggers who have found their online niches. WI-FI NETWORKING NEWS (www.wifinetnews.com) from long-time Seattle tech writer Glenn Fleishman is a blog of record for the Wi-Fi industry and—like journalistic old media—breaks stories (such as the failure of Wi-Fi service provider Cometa Networks).

My article on Webmail in the latest Macworld was just posted online. I run through the options and storage limits of the major online Webmail services. Hotmail upped its storage offerings to a few hundred megabytes after the article went to press, but otherwise details are accurate.

I broke the news on Tuesday at about noon that Cometa Networks was ceasing operations. Several sites immediately hailed the fact that I'd beaten mainstream media with the scoop; Dan Gillmor posted an item, for instance.

It's also slightly ironic that I'm being praised for breaking the news in a blog. If I'd had more confirmation and time, I would have written about it for one of the newspapers I contribute to. But given the timing and other factors, including getting sources on the record, I opted to break it locally and track it over the day so I could add details and keep it up to date.

It was interesting to track the credit on this, though. The sequence started with an anonymous email from a Yahoo account. I discredited that email due to misspellings and the lack of any way to confirm it. But I did call and

A few weeks ago, I posted an item on this blog critiquing an article about a colleague. Don't bother looking for that post; I've removed it for reasons I'll explain here.

The subject of my blog entry contacted me a few days after the post went up. He was astounded that I'd written about him without calling him for his comments on my critique. We went back and forth in email: me, appalled that he'd call me out for writing my opinions about the article and about him; he, appalled that I would offer opinion based on an article without seeking direct comment from him to respond to some of the statements of fact I made.

That stopped me cold: call someone because I was writing about them in a personal blog. How strange. We agreed to talk by phone, calmly, after I returned from a week away, which we