As everyone probably knows, Amazon made a big stink recently with the launch of its ebook reader the Kindle (and the associated ebook store). I’m on a mailing list for authors who distribute on podiobooks.com, and the Kindle set that normally very quiet mailing list on fire. Everyone seemed to have a very strong opinion.

I know everyone and her dog will be talking about this, but I have to admit that it’s the first announcement Apple has made that actually excites me. The iPhone is an entirely new design, with a wide touchscreen as opposed to buttons. It’s a phone, iPod and tiny computer that runs a version of OS X. It has wifi and bluetooth and is a quad band GSM phone on the Cingular network.

My talk from the Podcast Academy 3 at Yahoo! this past summer is up now at the Podcast Academy channel. Check it out.

“You” are Time Magazine’s person of the year. But why are they talking about citizen created media now? It’s not about youtube, blogging or getting famous on the internet. It’s about actively sharing ideas, not just passively receiving them.

I give an example of the strong multi-directional nature of citizen media, when I talk about the show with ze frank. Check it out.

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I’m one of those people who thinks that in this day and age it’s pretty embarrassing that we’re still interacting with machines using a WIMP (windows, icons, mouse, pointer) interface. So I was thrilled to see this video of someone who’s trying a different approach.

(via William Gibson’s blog)

If you’re a power podcast user like me, you’ve probably found that iTunes doesn’t have the feature set you’re looking for in a podcatching client. That’s why I was thrilled to discover that myPodder, the client that goes with the online site Podcast Ready, now supports iPods. I was less than excited, though, when I discovered that “support” means that the application runs, not that you can actually play the stuff you download directly on your iPod.

In last week’s Tech Watch, I talked about net neutrality - particularly the fear that some internet service providers might charge content providers extra to “guarantee” that their content is accessible. I didn’t mention the other boogeyman with respect to net neutrality - throttling.

New technologies are blurring the line between public and private discourse. In this episode I talk about the tension between too much information and the “pull” nature of the internet.

The Golden Hammer: Tech Watch is a proud member of Techpodcasts.com - if it’s tech, it’s here.

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Check out the first glimpses of the MIT media lab’s $100 laptop (the cornerstone of the One Laptop per Child program).

For more info, watch the Pop!Tech 2005 feed from IT Conversations for a talk from Nicholas Negroponte about this project. The talk should be posted in a couple of weeks.

Update: You can now hear the Nicholas Negroponte talk here.