Cit Media

Engadget, the electronics blog, has a detailed iPhone 3G review today. Good overall, but then, near the top, is this whopper:

And its 3G network compatibility finally makes the iPhone welcome the world over, especially after Cupertino decided to ditch its non-traditional carrier partnerships in favor of dropping the handset price dramatically. $200? We’re still a little stunned.

The 3G makes it mostly world-wide in coverage, but the notion that Apple has dropped the handset price to $200 is absolutely, totally bogus.

Apple did nothing of the kind. The company calling itself AT&T is subsidizing the device. But cheaper? Not on your life. In fact, you’ll pay hundreds of dollarsa minimum of $160 more, and maybe lots more during your subscription period of you buy this thing. (Yes, you’ll get the 3G that the company calling itself AT&T offers as part of the deal, but not many other serious benefits unless you’re desperate for GPS.)

Engadget got suckered by the hype this time. A correction is in order.

For the past several years I’ve been involved in a variety of projects ranging from education to startups. All have involved collaboration, and in most cases the people involved were not in a single location.

One tool has risen above the others for helping keep projects running smoothly. It’s called Basecamp, an online collaborative-organizing system, and it’s gaining adherents all the time.

Basecamp was created by the team at 37signals, a company that offers a suite of Web-based applications aimed at helping you get things done. 37signals is also the crew behind Ruby on Rails, an open-source Web development framework that has a growing and passionate user base.

The philosophy at 37signals is to do a few things — the ones that users truly want and need most — really well, and skip the rest. Basecamp exemplifies this notion. It’s not nearly as powerful as some other project-management tools, but it’s proved to be indispensible.

I’ve used Basecamp in a number of things ranging from a class project, where we worked on creating a website for the new Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship (alpha site here); planning and operating a nonprofit center; and organizing and operating the development of a for-profit startup.

There’s enough flexibility in the service for lots of different uses. I’ve found the messaging; to-do lists; and milestone planning especially valuable.

You can create RSS feeds of almost everything, and there’s a nifty email method for handling message. Recently, Basecamp added the ability to respond to an emailed (via Basecamp) message in an email reply.

There’s also access to “Writeboards” — where you post documents you’re sharing. This is modestly useful, but doesn’t come close to matching Google’s online document collaboration system; if several people in a small organization are tweaking a spreadsheet, for example, Google or a round-robin email is far superior to the Basecamp method.

The system has its flaws. One that drives me nuts is the inability to add new people to projects in “batch mode” — that is, more than one at a time — forcing me to do each one separately, a time-consuming process. I asked the company in a support email about adding the feature and got the kind of non-committal response that I took to mean, “We’re not interested in doing that, so don’t hold your breath.”

More problematically for me and others who are offline (typically in airplanes) a lot: There’s no offline mode. By this I mean there’s no way to suck down the entire project to your personal computer, make changes and then have them reflected back to the online project when you reconnect. Admittedly, this is difficult, and can cause versioning problems, not to mention oddities in online conversations where the thread can get confused. But it’s not impossible, and I’d be much happier if Basecamp had this capability.

Overall, however, Basecamp has proved to be a great tool for small-team collaboration, and expecially so when people are distant geographically as they are in several of my projects. There’s a free, limited-feature version. Monthly charges for the more extensive features range from $24 to $149; I pay $49 a month for capabilities that include SSL encryption security and as many as 35 active projects at once.

On the All Things Digital site I have a piece today about tools that will help transform journalism. This one’s called “iPhone 2.0–Good, Fast, Cheap: Pick Two” — and the debate is still on.

For a number of reasons I’m now using a Blackberry Curve as my main phone. But its email system is beyond dreadful for anyone who’s not locked into a Windows-Outlook-Exchange environment.

Mainly, the Blackberry IMAP connection is pathetic, a kludge that is almost worse than nothing. It doesn’t understand folders. It doesn’t reflect answered messages on the server. All this is because Blackberry pretty much makes you go through its own servers to use email, and because its maker is only seriously interested in working with Exchange.

So I’m looking for an acceptable IMAP mail client for the Blackberry OS, one that connects directly via the Internet to my personal mail server and others. I don’t need fancy, just usable — and I’ll be delighted to pay good money for it.

Send me an email if you know of anything useful.

Journalists and technologists will rub elbows from April 30 through May 3 in Sunnyvale, California, at a conference called “NewsTools 2008” — a gathering that promises to bring together people who really need to know each other better. Pro journalists don’t use the available technology smartly enough — though they’re improving at this — and tech folks have too little understanding of why journalism matters and why they should be helping create the next version of the craft.

I’ll be bringing some students from Arizona State University to the conference, which so far has a lot more journalists than techies signed up. If you’re in the latter group, please give some thought to participating. This is a great opportunity to help create a future we all know we need.

Here’s a column I did for PR Week magazine:

A cliche of business holds that good ideas are a dime a dozen; it’s hard work and investment capital that turn them into businesses. As with most cliches, this one has a solid foundation of truth.

But something has changed, and it has profound meaning for the future of media and communications, including PR. Digital technologies are dramatically reducing the cost of entree for creating new products and services, and, in the case of digital media, those costs can be close to zero.

This is one reason that communications of all kinds are being disrupted for business, in both methods and models. Traditional media-related enterprises, including journalism and advertising, are feeling the effects earlier than most, but everyone is vulnerable.

Still, one person’s vulnerability - in a world of low-cost experimentation - is another’s opportunity.

Clay Shirky, a New York University scholar and writer, points out that a person holding a good idea “doesn’t have to convince anyone else to let them try it - there are few institutional barriers between thought and action.”

As a result, the research and development that the news industry should have done years ago is now being done in a highly distributed way. While some is being done by people inside media companies, most is not - and increasingly it won’t be. It will take place in universities, in corporate labs, in garages, at kitchen tables.

So while the old career ladders are disappearing, there may never have been a better time to become an entrepreneur in media. But there has also never been a greater need to instill entrepreneurial thinking in the next generation of media people.

This is one reason why I’ve just embarked on a new project, creating and running a new Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication. Our goals are simple: to help students understand the value of intelligent risk-taking; and to help them create new kinds of products and services in the media sphere.

Is PR a part of this? You bet it is. The PR business has just as much a need to think entrepreneurially as any other.

Much of what’s happening, happily, is made to order for the university environment. Universities provide time to think, research, build and iterate, and to do this with others who are on the same mission.

At the same time, semesters have start times and end times. The students also have other work to do besides our course and independent study projects. Entrepreneurship is about many things -and focus is one.

In the end, most of these projects will “fail” - fail, that is, in the traditional sense of the word. This is just like the real world of startups.

But the people who work on them will learn enormously valuable lessons. They will find themselves becoming more valuable to future employers - and they will understand even better the virtues to be found in taking intelligent risks. Maybe there are lessons here for businesses, too.

Walt and Kara at AllThingsD.com just posted a piece I wrote for them, “Waiting for the MacBook Air Pro” — which begins as follows:

Having seen Apple’s MacBook Air notebook computer up close, I’m as dazzled as everyone else who’s had a chance to examine this delicious piece of industrial design.

Dazzled doesn’t translate to handing over a credit card, however — at least not yet, and not solely because it’s almost never a good idea to buy Apple’s (or anyone else’s) hardware immediately after its initial release.

Even if serious flaws didn’t frequently surface in the company’s first batch of new models, I’d hold off on buying one of these despite my admiration for the genuine accomplishments in this one. Cost isn’t the issue; rather, there are just a few too many feature compromises for my work-style.

In Phoenix last week we used Google’s Mobile Maps on the Nokia N95 for a variety of tasks, and found the application to be a huge value. The software looks for the nearest mobile tower (or GPS location if you’ve turned on the GPS function), and when you search for a type of business — we were looking, for example, for a fabric store — you get the nearest ones.

This is the closest thing to a killer app for the mobile that I’ve found yet. News organizations are way, way behind the curve in meeting yet another local need.

It’s the smart move: Movable Type is now open source. This will make life a little more complicated for WordPress, but that’s all to the good.

Movable Type has some features WordPress still doesn’t have, but WordPress has developer community that is truly thriving and innovating. The competition will be good for both companies, and especially for users.

Note: This blog uses WordPress, but will be shifting fairly soon to Drupal, most likely — not that Drupal has a particularly good blogging system (it doesn’t) but to tidy up behind the scenes.