So tomorrow I’m catching a flight on the all-new Virgin America airlines to Las Vegas to attend BlogWorld Expo. The conference looks to be quite interesting, and believe it or not, I have never been to Vegas before.
My employer is paying my way, so I’ll be taking plenty of notes while I’m there, and hope to blog at least some of the sessions.
I’m psyched!
Seven and a half cents
Doesn’t mean a hell of a lot.
Seven and a half cents
Doesn’t buy a thing.
But give it to me every hour,
Forty hours every week,
And that’s enough for me to be
Living like a king.
— The Pajama Game
Well, the issue today is 4 cents versus 8 cents, but the lyrics are close enough.
I’ll miss The Daily Show, but good luck to the Writer’s Guild.
Noted today: a report on the state of PCs in Japan. The interesting part of the report:
“The household PC market is losing momentum to other electronics like flat-panel TVs and mobile phones,” said Masahiro Katayama, research group head at market survey firm IDC.
Overall PC shipments in Japan have fallen for five consecutive quarters, the first ever drawn-out decline in PC sales in a key market, according to IDC. The trend shows no signs of letting up: In the second quarter of 2007, desktops fell 4.8 percent and laptops 3.1 percent.
NEC’s and Sony’s sales have been falling since 2006 in Japan. Hitachi Ltd. said Oct. 22 it will pull out of the household computer business entirely in an effort to refocus its sprawling operations.
“Consumers aren’t impressed anymore with bigger hard drives or faster processors. That’s not as exciting as a bigger TV,” Katayama said. “And in Japan, kids now grow up using mobile phones, not PCs. The future of PCs isn’t bright.”
Is this a sign of things to come? Will the personal computer go the way of the dodo in another decade? Possibly, although it seems to me that Japan is a bit of an outlier when it comes to a passion for cutting-edge gadgets.
Perhaps the takeaway here is a reminder: consumers care more about what they can do than the tools they do it with. If they can do everything they need to on a cell phone, or with a DVR attached to their TV, then those tools will outsell PCs.
As for me, I’m a little old-fashioned. I like a full keyboard and a bigger screen when I’m writing blog posts, editing photos, or reading feeds. But 10 years from now, who knows what cellphones will be able to do?
UPDATE: Tony Hung weighs in with some good points.
Jason Perlow, the guy who helped me found the NYC Palm User’s Group, is also a food blogger, and his Off The Broiler has been nominated for the 2007 Weblog Awards in the “Best Food Blog” category.
If you haven’t checked out his blog and/or voted for him, here’s the link to the voting page.
Gimi’s a big boy (OK, I’ll admit it, he’s FAT), so he doesn’t do too well grooming himself. Still, it’s funny to watch him try.
So the tech press is on fire today with the announcement of Google’s new “Facebook Killer“, OpenSocial.
There’s a clear benefit for Google: more eyeballs, more advertising revenue, and more industry entrenchment. There’s also one for established brands and thought leaders with big audiences. They can further aggregate (and presumably monetize) their traffic.
What I don’t see as clearly is how all this benefits your average end-user. What does OpenSocial do for me?
![[Gimi on the couch]](http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2336/1801711361_fe7e4fef9f_m.jpg)