Culture clash

I'm just back from the Online News Association's sixth annual conference in New York city.

The closing session, meant to look at where online news will be in 2010, descended into a sniping match between the "blogger" camp (aka non-mainstream) and "dinosaurs" (aka folks who work for mainstream outlets like nytimes.com).

In a parting participant blog post I pointed out that the battling is a waste of time. Both sides have something to learn from each other. The "bloggers" will continue to innovate and the "dinosaurs" will do what they do best: bring standards, depth, and quality to the product.

"Cliff Notes" for iPod

Well, to be more accurate, it's "SparkNotes" for iPod. A company called iPREPpress announced today that they're offering "study guides" (aka shortcuts for lazy students) for download to iPod.

For a fee students can thrill to classics such as "Lord of the Flies" and "Pride and Prejudice" on iPod Video, iPod Nano, iPod Photo, and 3rd generation and higher iPod and iPod Minis.

Video on a brick: Not exactly new

Apple’s new video iPod drew the usual feeding frenzy when it was launched a couple of weeks ago. However, as PC Magazine’s Kyle Monson points out, there’s nothing new about portable MP3 players that also “do” video.

Although, the list is fairly short. Among the also-rans: the Cowon iAudio X5, which I reviewed a while back.

Apple, of course, has tightly tied the new video iPod to its iTunes application and store, making it easy to download and watch motion pictures on the run. And the Apple player gets higher marks for sound and video quality than the others.

So, why worry about the other guys if you’re thinking of buying? There are some subtle differences that might be attractive to folks who aren’t interested being “limited by the iPod's fairly restrictive format requirements,” Monson writes. Here’s the magazine’s comparison chart.