Taylor Ansley (dot) com

So happy to see a replacement for the dearly-departed Wordle!  Meet Tagxedo.

I finished with 70%.  Let me know how you do.

This makes a lot of sense to me, though I have doubts as to whether this first-generation iPad will deliver a death knell to the laptop.  But the beginning of the end?  I’d buy that prediction.

Via bobulate:

Amit Gupta starts saying his farewell to the laptop based on a pattern he knows well:

When you need a really great photograph you use an SLR. The rest of the time, you use a phone. The point and shoot is dying, relegated to a niche middle ground.

It’s all about to happen again, he says:

Enter the iPad. Simpler, more convenient, and for 99% of uses, good enough. See a pattern? [L]ike your cameraphone, it’s going to sneak up on you. But one day, pretty soon, you’ll realize that you haven’t used your laptop in days. That you tend to grab your iPad first whenever you need to visit a website or answer email. That your laptop never leaves you desk anymore. …. I’m calling it now: The laptop starts dying tomorrow.

I agreed then, and do now.

This is a brilliant post based on the premise that Amazon is sitting on a wealth of thus far un-exploited data on the reading habits of Kindle users:

I’ve been reading all my books lately using Kindle for iPhone.  […] One feature of the Kindle software is called Whispersync.  It keeps track of where you are in a book so that if you switch devices (from an iPhone to a Kindle or an iPad or desktop), you can pick up exactly where you left off.  Kindle also stores any bookmarks, notes, highlights, or similar markings you make in the cloud so they can be shared across devices.   Whispersync is a useful feature for readers, but it is also a goldmine of data for Amazon.  With Whispersync data from millions of Kindle readers Amazon can learn not just what we are reading but how we are reading.  In brick-and-mortar bookstore days, the only thing a bookseller, author or publisher could really know about a book was how many copies it sold.  But now with the Whispersync Amazon can get learn all sorts of things about how we are reading.  With the insights that they gain from this data, they will, no doubt,  find better ways to help people find the books they like to read.

He goes on to mention a number of interesting categories that could be deduced by Amazon’s Whispersync data, including:

Trophy Books – books that are most frequently purchased, but never actually read.

Interesting iPad reaction.  I would find this similarly frustrating:

[W]hen I fired up Safari and ran into Web site after Web site interpreting that the iPad was a mobile device and showing me the iPhone version and not the “normal” version, it became clearer to me that this was not what I wanted.

A device the size of the iPad, with a screen as clear as the iPad, deserves fully capable Web sites. Even if I am using the iPad for content consumption and casual computing, I want to get a fair shake and the fully-functional site, not a dumbed down one for limited computers.