Football makes for strange bedfellows. And exciting drama. Green Bay Packers’ quarterback Brett Favre retired. Then came out of retirement. Then retired again. Then came out of retirement. Again. Lane Kiffin was hired to run the Oakland Raiders and ran them to a 5-15 record, and a big mess. He was run out of town by team owner Al Davis. Kiffin went to Tennessee for a year. Now he’s gone. Again. Where did Kiffin turn up? Dan Wetzel:

USC, which is facing a multi-sport, department-wide NCAA bloodletting next month, just hired a guy who in his tenure at Tennessee was a walking secondary violation (six of them), had two players booted off the team after an attempted armed robbery and leaves with NCAA investigators looking into how the program used recruiting hostesses. And, of course, he was a Trojan assistant when the compliance trouble USC must answer for began.

A mess at USC, a mess at Oakland, a mess at Tennessee. Let me predict a mess at USC.

But can a loss of money stop the talking heads? File this under What Took You So Long? Advertisers drop inflammatory Fox entertainer Glenn Beck:

A total of 33 Fox advertisers, including Wal-Mart Stores Inc., CVS Caremark, Clorox and Sprint, directed that their commercials not air on Beck’s show.

Yet people watch but don’t listen.

Chris Schoenfeld created Station Stops, an iPhone application that publishes train schedules for New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA). MTA didn’t like that and asked Chris to stop. After blistering publicity exposed MTA’s ruthlessness in dealing with a one-man band providing a very useful app to the public, they relented and offered an agreement and data. The agreement required Chris to pay money. Up front. The data would be provided in a CD-ROM. In the age of the internet and instant changes to schedules, and a limited customer base (albeit large in NY), both were no go items for Chris.

Station Stops is for sale.

Unless you’ve been on a sabbatical to Elbonia, you know that Apple, Inc. is about to release a tablet computer. The unannounced, unknown device is commonly known as iTablet, iSlate, iPad, or Jesus Tablet by technology pundits. Arik Hesseldahl in BusinessWeek:

The hunger for information—and misguided speculation—reminds me of the mistaken prognosticating about the iPhone before its introduction three years ago. It may be time to step back and realize that Apple may uncork a product so surprising that the company again leaves the tech industry scrambling to catch up to its products’ smooth operation and sleek design.

So, what should we expect from Apple (besides the unexpected)?

Apple may throw everyone a curve ball here. Imagine an Apple tablet about the size of a 11-in. spiral notebook with an iPhone-like touch screen. How about the ability for the machine to recognize voice commands and dictation of text? A built-in video camera and maybe a mini-projector for meetings would be nice. And if the reports of Apple’s discussion to land print media content in the iTunes store are true, how about an easy-on-the-eyes display for reading electronic magazines and books?

Besides email, music, movies, TV shows, and browsing on a larger screen device, what will the Jesus Tablet do that isn’t already being done by an iPhone or a Mac?

We use PCs and laptops to get things done when we’re stationary; we use mobile devices to stay informed and complete small tasks when we’re out and about. This device, it seems, will either have to incorporate both paradigms or have to create one of its own.

Basically, nobody but Apple knows.

But I’ll buy one.

It was just a matter of time. Recording music on tape is long dead, replaced by digital recording on hard drives, which is about to be replaced by… the iPhone? Clive Young:

Ask anyone with an Apple iPhone what he thinks of it, and odds are you’ll hear a rave about how it can do most anything. As if to underline the point, indie band The 88 recently created its latest single, “Love is the Thing,” on the ubiquitous device, using FourTrack, a recording app by Sonoma Wire Works. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the song is now for sale on iTunes, where it’s the top-selling song of the band’s online oeuvre; what is surprising, however, is just how good the quirky chamber pop song sounds when you consider its origins.

What’s next? Indie movies recorded and edited on the iPhone?

UPDATE: First music video on the iPhone 3GS from Reyna Perez.

Remember coffee before Starbucks? Coffee used to cost pennies, now costs dollars. What did Starbucks do to convince people to drive out of their way, stand in line, wait for coffee to be made, then shell out $4 for the privilege? Mike Elgan thinks Apple is doing the same thing.

Starbucks transformed a generic commodity into a brand-name experience that people seek out. But the miraculous bit is that they changed American (and later, global) culture. Coffee is still coffee. They didn’t change the product as much as they changed the customer.

To move computer users away from the standalone keyboard and standalone screen, Apple introduced the touch screen iPhone. Step One in a series of steps to change popular culture, ala Starbucks.

They’re forcing those of us who want to use an iPhone to accept the on-screen keyboard. Later this year, when the rumored Apple touch tablet is likely to ship, everyone will be so happy with a larger version of the iPhone’s on-screen keyboard. Had they shipped the tablet first, we no doubt would have complained about that keyboard. But since they’ve lowered our expectations with the iPhone keyboard, we’ll love the tablet’s.

I’m not convinced that Apple lowered expectations with the iPhone keyboard. Changed expectations, perhaps. Elgan carries the premise too far, too fast.

I think the initial tablet will feature a 10-inch touch screen. The keyboard will probably span the screen. Then they’ll ship a 13-inch tablet. Then a 15-inch. By the time they ship a 27-inch desktop touch tablet (used at an angle like a drafting board), we’ll be just giddy with excitement about how wonderful the on-screen keyboard is.

Sorry. That won’t happen. Touch screen desktop PCs have been around for 25 years and have yet to make a dent in the market. Why? It’s mouse and hand vs. shoulder, arm, hand, and fingers. The mouse does the same thing and does it easier, better, faster, more precisely (with the exception of standalone kiosks, of course).

Apple led the mob that practically killed off the audio CD by getting us all into the habit of shopping for music in iTunes, rather than at Tower Records. Their tablets will lead a similar attack on renting movies at Blockbuster. Instead, we’ll download movies from Netflix and iTunes via our tablets. I believe they’ll also drive the Huluization of television, which is where TV is something that exists in a searchable online database, and shows will be something you “subscribe” to.

This reminds me of the old Popular Mechanics magazine articles which highlighted future products, most of which never saw the light of day. Subscriptions? Don’t we have that with Cable TV already? Music subscriptions haven’t exactly taken the download world by storm, either.

But the iPhone, and later the tablet will change our thinking on software even further. Rather than thinking of a software application as some massive, do-everything product, we’ll increasingly view software as apps, widgets or small features that are cheap and instantly available all the time. We’re already experiencing this with the iPhone. It’s getting to the point where its easier to download an app than find one already installed on your own phone.

We’ve been buying software online for many years. That’s not new, but Apple’s App Store makes the process wonderful on the iPhone. Will Apple move the same model to the iTablet device? That’s a given.

Five years from now, your PC will be an all-touch, no-keyboard giant tablet that replaces your cable box and DVR and facilitates the downloading and installation of software one small feature at a time. Apple is already working on the technology. And—don’t look now—but Apple is working on you, too.

Such prognostications sound plausible. I use my hand and fingers (and thumb) to navigate my iPhone and any one of nearly 180 apps, games, utilities, widgets, yes. But that’s a requirement due to the device’s size. A keyboard for a cell phone, handheld computer, et al, is silly, yes. Even a wireless tablet (think very large iPhone or iPod touch) can get by for multimedia use, and act as an excellent digital magazine, newspaper, or book. Even video and audio conferencing via a tablet seems ready to hatch.

No keyboard or mouse required, right?

Unfortunately, pocket and tablet devices will not replace my Mac or PC, but must learn to peacefully coexist. What about email? Database entry? Reports and documents? Spreadsheets? Graphic design? Multimedia development? Sorry, until voice recognition gets a whole lot better, we’re stuck in the 21st century with 19th century tools—the keyboard. And a 20th century tool. The mouse.

Tablets and pocket-sized devices trade precision and efficiency (try writing an article on an iPhone keyboard) for mobility and convenience. Five years from now we may use handheld devices far more than now, but the new doesn’t easily eliminate the old.

Apple is not training us to use new touch technology to transplant the Mac and PC experience with keyboard, mouse, trackpad, and screen. They’re training us to use new tools in new ways and to buy more of what they make.

Is blogging in the 21st century as transformative as the telephone was in the 20th century? Everyone has a blog and everyone has something to say, whether anyone is listening or not. Media mogul Barry Diller in 2006:

Self-publishing by someone of average talent is not very interesting. Talent is the new limited resource… There’s just not that much talent in the world, and talent almost always outs.

Scott Rosenberg paraphrasing Andrew Keen’s, The Cult of the Amateur:

The existing institutions of the publishing and broadcast world are already doing an efficient and thorough job of finding all that talent and giving it a platform. And all this other stuff that’s spewing forth from the Web’s profusion of blogs and podcasts and videos? It’s just dross that obscures the real talent’s output.

I blog, therefore I am not talented?