iPad Unveiled

A New Way to View

I have always been a big supporter of Apple since I first started using a Macintosh as a kid. Their products are sleek eye candy, their operating system has always been sturdy and easy to use, and pocket-tech like the iPod and iPhone are a pleasure to use.

And now the iPad.

I've been hearing a lot of complaints from the internet. "It's just a big iTouch." "It's xbox huge, why would anybody want to carry it around." Why wouldn't you just carry around a laptop?" And these complaints all seem reasonable. It's questionable if Apple has really produced anything special or new here.

It doesn't really do anything that existing products don't already do it's large there is no multi-tasking and the price... Starting at $500.00 and topping out at over $800 is a little prohibitive.

So who is this product for? Certainly not for someone who just wants an eBook reader the Nook and Kindle are cheaper. The price tag excludes the average iPod owner. Certainly it's not for someone that wants the real power of a laptop. So it must be for someone else.

There are people that love their iTouch and their iPhone's and their eBook readers. That gets to be a lot of technological riff-raff floating around in your bag or your pockets. The way I see it the iPad condenses this mess into one gadget. That is where its strength lies.

With 10 hours of battery life it's significantly more resilient than a laptop, while still allowing you to stay connected to the information superhighway. It has useful applications, it has your phone, and a giant screen for viewing documents on an actual screen. Do you like scrolling through documents on your phone? I don't.

With all the forms of media available there are a million different gadgets out there to view them with and the iPad keeps them all in one easy to carry and easy to use tablet.

And it does it while looking good.

Some Key Terms

The glossary of terms embraced by the internet are many. Some of them are self-descriptive: Viral, social-networking, texting. Others are more whimsical and require a little more explanation: Trolling, blogging, emoticon. Here are a few that I think will be useful to be familiar with while reading this blog.

Blogosphere:
a.k.a. blogland -or- blogistan -or- blogspace -or- blogdom
The shared intellectual space inhabited by bloggers (people who blog). It is actually more than the space, it is the community of bloggers itself and their collective voice.

Viral Marketing:
A clever form of marketing in which the user is actually promoting the company that provides a service.

Blog:
a.k.a. blogger -or- blogrolling -or- weblog -or- Web log
A Web site (or section of a Web site) where users can post a chronological, up-to-date e-journal entry of their thoughts.

Troll:
a.k.a. trolling
Online it originally meant the act of posting a message in a newsgroup (and later on a blog) that is obviously exaggerating something on a particular topic, hoping to trick a newbie into posting a follow-up article that points out the mistake. In general, to "troll" means to allure, to fish, to entice or to bait.


The above definitions are courtesy of http://www.netlingo.com/ and there are many more. It's a great reference for anybody unfamiliar with the ever expanding scene of internet distribution.

Welcome to Information Overloaded

The last 20 years have seen vast changes in the way information is distributed. With the rise of the internet information is no longer controllable by major media conglomerates. A dedicated individual with a computer and internet access can reach millions of people. This has created far-reaching ramifications straight from the pages of science fiction and changed the way we look at information.

Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Blogger, Tumblr, Digg, CNN, Fox, ABC, NBC, CSPAN, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal. I could go on but the mediums of distribution are nearly infinite, confined only by the creativity and motivation of the mind. But within this vast network of information the Truth is not so clear anymore. The fact is that we have so many choices vying for our attention that it's hard to know where to look.

In this blog I'm going to examine the many forms of media available to us and the many ways in which we can access and view this media. The rise of the information overload. Stick around.