Tonight is Conan O’Brien’s last night on The Tonight Show and he exits with a $45-million parachute. Meanwhile, Jay Leno and David Letterman have renewed their long quiet feud. Letterman:

I’m telling jokes and making fun of Jay Leno over and over and over, relentlessly, mercilessly simply for one reason. I’m really enjoying it.

Leno:

Letterman has been hammering me every night. You know the best way to get Letterman to ignore you? Marry him. He will not bother you. He won’t look you in the eye.

The real losers? NBC. They screwed up late night on NBC back in 1992 when they bypassed Letterman for Leno as host of The Tonight Show. Letterman skipped to CBS but Leno won the subsequent ratings war. This time, NBC loses O’Brien and $45-million.

Since the iPhone’s launch in mid-2007, AT&T has been roundly criticized for poor network performance, both with dropped calls, and slow data speeds. Is it AT&T’s fault? Or, are network problems caused by the iPhone? Colin Gibbs on GigaOm:

AT&T isn’t the only operator whose network shortcomings have been exposed by data-hungry iPhone users. O2 — which until recently was the only UK operator to carry Apple’s gadget — said it will spend $166 million over the next several months to shore up its network to meet ever-increasing demands from smartphone users. Additionally, the carrier said it will build 40 new cell sites in and around London in advance of the holiday season.

It’s the iPhone phenomenon.

It’s a blast from the past. Google, the high technology advertising company, launched a billboard advertising campaign to promote Google Apps vs. Microsoft Office.

Commuters in New York, San Francisco, Chicago and Boston will see a different message promoting Google Apps each weekday throughout August. Called “Going Google”, the campaign targets IT managers stuck in traffic and informs on the benefits of switching to Google Apps.

The billboards are distinctively black text on white background with a simple message in a plain typewriter font.

The new campaign for Google Apps can be widely seen as a direct stab at Microsoft’s productivity and e-mail offerings, explaining the benefits of using cloud computing solutions. Microsoft is also planning to launch Office Web Applications, free of charge, together with the 2010 of its desktop productivity suite.

It’s a good thing we don’t have roadside billboards in Hawaii.

I have a love and hate relationship with text-messaging. Interestingly, it’s easier to get a response from the younger generation than voice mail or email. Christopher Null in PC World:

It is not necessarily rude to text while you’re in the presence of others—if the point of the text message is to involve the recipient in the physical gathering. On the other hand, communicating extensively via text when you should be fully engaged in what’s going on in the real world will surely annoy those around you. Again the comparison of a texting session to a phone call is apt and should give you a sense of how to behave.

Amen.

The latest exoplanet to be discovered is the M-dwarf GJ 1214b, a watery planet barely 40 light years from earth. John Trimmer in Ars:

...the latest discovery comes from some pretty mundane hardware—a collection of 40cm telescopes—and has some very compelling properties: a super earth that’s likely to harbor liquid water, and orbits a star that’s close enough to allow current observatories to image its atmosphere.

How special is earth compared to a super earth far away?

Depending on how reflective the planet’s atmosphere is, it may have temperatures as high as 555K, or as low as 393K—the latter figure is only 20°C above the boiling point of water. That’s far and away the coolest planet we’ve yet spotted, and a far cry from the only other super earth we know much about, which is hot enough that its atmosphere probably contains vaporized titanium oxides.

Ouch.

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?

Remember Sony’s Walkman? 25 years ago it was the cat’s meow. I started a commercial audio recording business lugging around a Walkman so customers could hear what I could do. That was then and this is now. The BBC invited 13 year old Scott Campbell to swap his iPod for a Sony Walkman for a week.

When I wore it walking down the street or going into shops, I got strange looks, a mixture of surprise and curiosity, that made me a little embarrassed.

The iPod is a click or two to any of thousands of songs. The Sony Walkman was revolutionary—one cassette tape at a time.

The need for changing tapes is bothersome in itself. The tapes which I had could only hold around 12 tracks each, a fraction of the capacity of the smallest iPod.

The Walkman was nice and the article brought back memories, but I prefer my iPhone. It’s too bad that eight years after the iPod that Sony still hasn’t figured out how to make a music player for the 21st century work with a cell phone.