OK, still here?

Months ago, after at least a couple years of just throwing all my feeds in Google Reader and sorting by newest, reading from the top down and marking all as read when I felt full of information or short on time, I went back to folders.

Back to the folders with the sort of labels I used when I first started with Bloglines in 2005, which predated my use of Newsgator, which predated the existence of the great and powerful, albeit Buzz-infected as of late, Google Reader.

Labels like “Media.” And “Technology.” Pretty vague stuff.

But they do the job — I check “Media” often to make sure I’m not missing anything, although the 2,000+ people I follow on Twitter rarely let news of that sort slip by them. And “Technology” is my dumping ground for TechCrunch, VentureBeat, and the like, which are more about Technology News than the technology itself. And I do enjoy those subscriptions, because it’s not the item that’s been retweeted 1,600 times that I’m interested in. (If it was, I’d subscribe to Mashable, eh?) But rather, it’s the activity on the edges of startups and green tech and Web applications that interest me most. So I keep the subscriptions, skip the obvious Google/Microsoft/Facebook/Twitter commodity news, and try to focus my attention on the smaller bits of detail emerging about newer companies, business models, and indeed, the hardware and software involved.

Work-related feeds are in another folder, and some stray ego searches and other research projects land in something I opaquely label “Searches,” the ingredients of which might change week-to-week as I move among projects, side projects, and side projects of side projects pretty freely.

But my favorite folder is labeled “Fun.”

Wait, don’t judge me yet.

It’s not for the Daily What or whatever your favorite Tumbly source of single-serving-site-of-the-day might be this season (I have Tumblr for that!), but it’s for the feeds full of ideas that I don’t need, but I want. Grown-ups with Ph.D.s like to use the word “serendipity” in this paragraph.

There’s the obvious, linkblogs that bring me more “Fun” fodder, like Fimoculous and Kottke, and slightly less obvious (or verbose) streams like Coudal’s Fresh Signals.

And there’s the Snarkmarkets of the world and the places they send me to, like HiloBrow, BldgBlog, and there’s This Recording, which I can’t remember how I found the first time.

There are the comics, guilty pleasure Dilbert and all, of course xkcd and indexed. These are probably the most “fun” things in the folder, rarely leading to anything but laughter and a vague desire for more geeky t-shirts.

There’s The Awl, which I’ve really been enjoying lately as a source of original amusement as well as links to Actual News About The World But Mostly New York City. Following NYC news 8.5 years after I moved out has a ring of Schadenfreude, to it, I know, but it feels like a window into some parallel universe I might have lived in had things happened differently in 2001.

So the game I play these days in Google Reader is twofold:

1. What redundant feed about the news business can I unsubscribe to today?
2. What feed about the weird possible presents and futures I haven’t fully explored can I subscribe to today?

When all I have left is my Fun folder, I win the game.

Here’s a Google Reader bundle with a selection of feeds from my Fun folder. I’m not going to give them all away in that bundle, but if you follow half the feeds in that bunch, they’ll lead you in the direction of more of whatever shiny niche catches your eye.

Enjoy.

Previously

• Using RSS to track the politicians you cover
• A Newsstand for the Tablet that might work
• How I share: A tour of my personal linking behavior

The Internet? Bah!
Published at Newsweek on February 27, 1995.
Clifford Stoll’s 1995 predictions included “…no computer network will change the way government works.”

What the Internet hucksters won’t tell you is that the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don’t know what to ignore and what’s worth reading.

Anonymous Polk Award Honors Citizen Journalists
Published at The New York Times on February 21, 2010.
The chain of people who moved video of an Iranian woman’s violent death from the street to the Web are honored.

The panel that administers the George Polk Awards, based at Long Island University, said it wanted to acknowledge the role of ordinary citizens in disseminating images and news, especially in times of tumult when professional reporters face restrictions, as they do in Iran. The university said it had never bestowed an award on an anonymous work before.

On foursquare, location & privacy…
Published at Foursquare Blog on February 18, 2010.
The Foursquare team responds to the conversation around pleaserobme.com and the perceived dangers of sharing your physical location on the Internet.

The truth is you could make something like this without using foursquare at all. Just try searching Twitter for the words “headed to”…

Coworking.com: The Next Generation
Published at dangerouslyawesome.com on February 18, 2010.
The Coworking community picks itself up by its bootstraps and raises money to buy the coworking.com domain. What happens next? They’ll figure it out as a community.

The beautiful thing about the internet is it’s made up of words. Domain names are technically pointers to ideas, and instead of having to remember IP addresses, DNS has allowed us to connect words with ideas.

Expert Labs, ThinkTank, Gina Trapani and our Grand Challenges
Published at dashes.com on February 17, 2010.
Anil Dash begins to claim territory for Expert Labs as a technology incubator for networking tools to help governments ask and answer big questions.

Today, I’ve been able to go to the White House and help make the case that a better technology platform, connected to the social networks we already use, could have the same transformative effect on policy making that it did on the world of media or business. And they were ready to listen, not just to me, but to our entire community.

Multi-Touch Will Change Everything
Published at trentwalton.com on February 2, 2010.
This post comes a bit closer to the way I’d like to see designers and developers think about the iPad. It *is* a completely new interface.

With multi-touch, DIVs are the new fold. Being able to tap on a section to zoom in will allow users to focus only on the content they want to see. This quadrant based page browsing will make skipping over uninteresting content & advertisements much easier.

kleinmatic: First correction issued in a news app? http://bit.ly/7Yd4HD
Published at Twitter on February 9, 2010.
Maybe not the first, but it becomes an interesting question. How long do you leave the correction on the page? How and where do you archive corrections that relate to databases? Is it worth having some sort of microblog — or at least a blog category — for every app to cover notes like this?

Gizmodo’s Comment System: How It Works and Why It’s Better
Published at Gizmodo on February 2, 2010.
A great explanation of how comments work on Gawker blogs, powered by karma, Facebook Connect, and heavy moderation of new commenters before they’re set free on threads.

There are three levels of commenters: Unapproved, Approved and Starred. You basically have to audition for the right to comment, by leaving a smart blurb—if it’s good, you’ll get approved by an editor, one of our moderators, or a starred commenter, and then people can see your comment.

So what do you think? Are all these bits and pieces signs that point to the future of communication, or the past? It’s difficult to look at today’s innovation without looking through the lens of everything that it’s built on, eh? Including, complicatedly, our own habits and biases.

Previously

• Carnival of Journalism: Five positive predictions for new media in 2009
• Unscheduled downtime
• Next Newspaper

And different philosophers said you know what you know for different reasons. George Berkeley, for example, had this whole “seeing is believing” thing, for example. If he didn’t perceive it with his own senses, it might as well not exist.

No retweets for him, I suppose. No newspapers. I seriously doubt he would have trusted cable news had it existed in his day.

(Scholarly friends: I am aware that Berkeley took the above given as step one, and then rambled off into metaphysics, yes. I am not going to go there today.)

And so we come to a few amusing events of the past week or so. I have three in mind.

1. Jason Calacanis, Web entrepreneur and investor, posts a series of tweets about the Apple tablet the night before and morning of its unveiling. Journalists at several surprisingly major news organizations repeat and report the rumors Calacanis starts.
2. Someone poses as the philosopher Jurgen Habermas on Twitter.
3. Someone pretending to be from a rich family claims to give millions to help post-earthquake Haiti.

In all three cases, [GENERALIZATION AHEAD] our desire to believe seems to have been the primary reason we did so.

You got duped by @Jason

The Calacanis story took advantage (and indeed, mocked) the breathless pre-announcement hype about the tablet. I probably saw it because someone retweeted one of Jason’s early posts claiming to have been a beta tester, and I have to ask myself why I clicked. The truth is, I was quietly reading everything I could get my hands on about the tablet, building up my own hopes and dreams of a magical and wonderful device.

Multiply me by millions, and you get an idea of what the demand was like for information, rumors, patent translations, and actual leaks about the tablet in the run up to the moment when the little heavy-thing-landing-in-a-pile-of-dust “iPad” text dropped into Steve’s slide on screen in San Francisco.

So Calacanis, just for fun (I think), provided some supply for that demand.

Was he a reliable source? Only if you’d never paid attention to him before, which really works out well for him when you do the math. There were plenty of people who had followed Jason’s work, attitude, and penchant for showmanship long enough to stay skeptical.

Of course, anyone with a search engine could also quickly become a skeptic.

The moral of the story for reporters? Consider your source’s history on the topic and motivation at all times. Then consider it again.

I got duped by @JHabermas

Look, I dropped a philosopher’s name earlier, and I’ve done bits and pieces of reading on postmodern philosophy, and I’m a big fan of Guy Debord and whatnot, but I haven’t studied Jurgen Habermas. But I do know he’s the “public sphere” guy, and when I retweeted @attackerman’s “THAT’S JURGEN HABERMAS” update, I didn’t do a whole lot of investigation. None, actually.

But, of course, someone knew better.

Jurgen Habermas’s audience knows more than I do. Follow the trail from that link and its comments, and you’ll even find someone who (claims to have) tracked down Habermas on the phone:

“He added that ‘my email address is not publicly available,’ which suggests that perhaps he didn’t quite understand what I was getting at. In fact, the father of the public sphere doesn’t seem to understand the internet very well at all, judging by his few previous references to the topic.” [The links are in the original.]

Wait, run that back a paragraph. Did you catch that little parenthetical disclaimer I dropped in?

“…someone who (claims to have) tracked down…”

Hedging my bets.

Why?

Because I don’t know the person who says they made the call to Habermas, and I didn’t take the time to even check their About page. The author did, however, include a link to an mp3 he says is the recorded conversation between him and Habermas about the Twitter account. That would be easy enough to listen to, and anyone familiar with Habermas’s voice could confirm it’s him.

But I haven’t listened, although I would be amused to hear some sort of creative remix of it if such a thing were to go viral.

Moral? If you don’t know the answer to a key question about your source, someone else probably does. Find them. And ask them.

Stefan Roberts didn’t dupe Wikipedians

A man says he’s Stefan de Rothschild, and he’s giving $2.5 million to Haiti.

Ingredients:

• Famous European name
• Unusually large charitable donation
• A few quick Web sites
• A handful of Wikipedia entries

I’m going to lean heavily on this Valleywag post to explain the sequence of events (I know, consider the source, right? But there’s lots of links in that post, too.) The important part is that the guy was a faker, and although no journalist caught it, he was busted when he caught the attention of Wikipedia reviewers who noticed he kept putting the same fake pages up on the encyclopedia I’ve linked to four times in this post.

Here’s a quote from Valleywag’s story:

“What brought Roberts down was one of the tools he used to hoist himself up, Wikipedia, on which he posted no fewer than five fake entries: for himself, for his fake line of Rothschild family members and for one of his fake companies, Rothschild Estates. His antics caught the attention of the Wikipedia Review after editors kept deleting the fake entries and Roberts kept trying to resurrect them.”

Moral: Give a small number of editors a reliable system for tracking down claims of truth, and it gets easier to spot falsehoods, whether the editors have expertise on the topic or not.

[UPDATE: So there's a comment below that points out an important factual error I made in the Rothschild bit. In fact, it's an error that makes this "moral" have no backup in the actual narrative of the fraud and its discovery. I'll explore it further and report back here, or in the comments, about what I figure out.]

I like tools and systems and truth, so I’m going to repeat variations of the aforementioned morals-of-the-story in a real general way for a moment. Bear with me.

• If you give journalists tools to help them spot anomalies in the system of the news, it gets easier to discern what’s true.
• If you give journalists tools to help them track how truthful sources are, it gets easier to tell readers what’s true.
• If you give journalists tools to ask their sources and readers good questions, everybody wins.

Did I mention I like tools? And truth? And also, links. Feel free to suggest a few more in the comments of this post, or wherever fine links are shared.

Previously

• SPJ’s News Gems blog to close?
• Who’s hiring? Blogs.
• Virginia Tech

Pretty quickly, I signed up for a free WordPress instance at Blogsome, where I enjoyed a bit more freedom to learn html and css by fiddling with the files in the WP admin. It was ryansholin.blogsome.com, and I’m pretty sure that was the point where I started calling it “Ryan Sholin’s J-School Blog.”

Straightforward enough, right?

Of the early posts I’ve preserved, the earliest in my archives, dated February 1, 2005, was about Steve Sloan’s visit to an undergrad-level journalism class I was taking, which I believe was called something along the lines of Internet Information Gathering. Steve talked about podcasting, and smiled when I mentioned I was subscribed to a few RSS feeds as Firefox live bookmarks. Wonkette was probably on my list, and PressThink, maybe Scripting News, and possibly Romenesko.

Nine days later I got Scobleized, and that pretty much changed everything.

By the end of the semester I was taking notes at online journalism panels and blogging them as fast as I could, and Chuck Olsen said that blogs were people (Soylent Green, style, though) and I got it.

That summer, my Web-savvy mom gave me ryansholin.com as a present, and I switched over to a hosted WordPress installation of my own, beginning a cycle of design, redesign, and play.

But mostly, there was a lot of blogging. A lot of ideas. A few kneejerk reactions. Some commentary on technology. Some hopes for the future.

When I was in journalism school, I blogged a lot about what I thought journalism schools should do.

When I worked for a newspaper, I blogged a lot about what I thought newspapers should do.

When I worked for a media company, dealing with hundreds of newspapers, I realized every single one of them was different, and trying to tell any of them what they should do was a Sisyphean task of very heavy-duty proportions, and moreso, a bit silly.

I learned to take everything I had picked up about the business of news and apply it in each given situation, instead of writing manifestos about What Newspapers Should Do.

But to rewind a bit, in the middle of 2007 when I worked at a newspaper, I wrote a blog post, slowly, over the course of a few weeks, and posted it at just the right moment on just the right day, and thousands of people read it.

10 obvious things about the future of newspapers you need to get through your head is still the most popular thing on this blog. It’s certainly possible (and probably, given the numbers in play) that one of the Sunday centerpieces I wrote for the Oakland Tribune and its sister papers in the Bay Area in the summer of 2006 was read by more people (the first few grafs, anyway). Likely, in fact. But it was extremely satisfying to see 10,000 page views on my blog post in a day.

Pointing out the obvious to an audience that might not have spotted it yet and then repeating myself over and over again has become, shall we say, my thing.

Occasionally this thought makes me flash back to a conversation with a political science professor who explained why he used so much repetition in his lectures. He said he kept bringing the important concepts up again and again, iterating his presentation of them, using different examples, drawing different diagrams, all in an effort to make sure everyone in the room who was going to understand it, understood it. He gauged reactions with eye contact and good questions, and if he saw too many blank stares, he’d push through the idea in yet another way, or come back to it next week, approaching it from a different angle.

For those of you keeping score, this blog has been instrumental in getting every full-time job I’ve had in the news business. You don’t get to act like someone who has ideas unless there’s some evidence of your ideas out there in the wild.

So as this blog turns five years old and starts asking for bigger and better toys when we go to the store, I must admit I have a few urges.

One is to take my old “Ryan Sholin on the future of newspapers, online news and journalism education” tagline and chop off the prepositional section so it’s just me talking about the future. Of anything. And everything. I’ll do it soon, but you know I’ll keep talking about news and newspapers and publishing and reporting.

The second is to redesign again. It’s been awhile, believe it or not. I’ll get around to it.

But mostly, I’m just going to keep pushing myself to write a bit more here, as per my New Year’s resolution.

Thanks for reading.

Previously

• The audience question
• About that resolution
• Blog posts I have written and not written this year

“Newsstand” by triin on Flickr.

Mario Garcia probably believes the lifespan (halflife?) of print newspapers will stretch out ever so slightly longer than I believe, but I’m constantly inspired by his original thought about the problems associated with sustaining any version of the existing structure of journalism, assuming for the moment that it’s a good idea.

And of course, he’s thinking about the Tablet. (I’m going to try to avoid focusing on any single product here, instead using the word “Tablet” as code for: multitouch slab of glass with applications and payment systems built in. Maybe there will be more than one entry in that genre.)

Here’s Mario on something he calls a street sales app:

“Based on this, I can imagine that the iPad could lure the undecided (or reluctant) newspaper reader by offering a menu of headlines from various sections of a newspaper—-or from various newspapers, of course, and make it so interesting, that I may click to read that story, and pay for that one-time user experience.”

Let’s take that a big step beyond a list of headlines.

We’re talking about a physical, visual device that allows the user to move things around with their hands. OK, their fingers. Fine. But that allows us to present the user with — instead of a list of headlines — a stack of newspapers.

Yes, yes, I know, I know, you don’t want to read a giant PDF on a Tablet, you want the Web. You want the full browsing experience, or if you’re thinking is slightly more advanced, you want a completely new sort of interface that’s more Minority Report than Washington Post.

I’m right there with you.

But there’s something that a “Washington Post” app for the Tablet removes from the equation, even if you’re smart enough to build it with in-app purchases of feature/exclusive/enterprise stories, puzzles, and databases.

It removes choice from the equation.

A choice that we do have when we open up an RSS reader and look at a list of 100 headlines in the morning.

A choice that we do have when we walk by a newsstand on the way to the subway station.

Now, truth be told, when I walked by the newsstand on the way to the subway station, I was already in a silo, with steadfast plans to purchase a New York Times and do the crossword on the way to the office. But at least I’d see the other papers, the other headlines.

So maybe a real live Tablet Newsstand is a good idea. If I’m not going to purchase a subscription to the New York Times, maybe I’ll glance at the headlines and buy a copy on my way to the office now and then. Maybe I’ll want to do the crossword. Or maybe I’ll see a great headline in the San Francisco Chronicle and buy that instead.

After all, the interfaces for a bookstore and library that Steve Jobs showed off the other day didn’t offer one chapter at a time, or one story at a time, they offered a book, sitting on a shelf.

Engadget’s photo of Steve’s slide.

(Yes, I’ve heard of Delicious Library.)

Of course, things brings up all sorts of interesting questions about which newspaper and magazine publishers would be willing to go in together on this sort of thing. They’d have to build the app themselves, decide how to split up the revenue, who to feature on which pages — this is all the sort of thing they might have preferred Apple take care of, eh?

So I’m interested. I’m interested in a newsstand that provides some opportunity for serendipity and revenue, not based on subscription models or paywalls, but based on the idea that I might pay something like 99 cents for a Tablet version of the New York Times when I’m in the mood to interact with it and, most likely, fiddle with the crossword on the way to work.

Previously

• Carnival of Journalism: Are we asking the right questions about online revenue models?
• Search drives serendipity, a continuing conversation
• Serendipity on the Web

Love you, Hugh. And my mom bought your book.

But folks, please don’t do this:

Seriously. Whatever you’re working on isn’t worth compromising your mental and physical health over.

Unless, it’s like, world peace or something, and even then, I’d recommend trying all the avenues that don’t lead to martyrdom before you go that route.

As for the rest of you, OK, maybe your mental health can come and go as it pleases, but certainly not the physical part.

That’s my advice to you.

Don’t die trying.

Really.

Previously

• Onward: My new job at Publish2
• Thanks, Howard.
• Working with developers and designers

All self-deprecation aside, one of the easiest, most satisfying ways to string words together was to attempt both brevity and wit at the same time. To write an epigram encapsulating one thought, hopefully with some sort of sarcastic or otherwise clever twist on a conventional concept.

I read a lot of Byron and Coleridge in those days, so here’s an obvious example from the latter, a 19th Century epigram that might be followed by a #meta hashtag today:

What is an Epigram? A dwarfish whole,
Its body brevity, and wit its soul.

CUT TO: 2007, and suddenly there’s a medium for this sort of thing. 140 characters at a time, with an audience, and buttons to push allowing that audience to give the author instant feedback on just how much cleverness they had managed to wrap up in a neat little tweet.

Compare Coleridge’s couplet to this tweet from Merlin Mann, currently high up on the ‘Popular’ list at Favstar.fm, one of a species of site that tracks Twitter ‘Favorites,’ for those of you that use the little yellow star to mark the tweets you find most clever:

As @homerjsimpson might say, it works on so many levels.

***

Obviously, I’m not the first to make the epigram-tweet connection.

Here’s Morgan Meis in what looks like July 2009, running down a number of examples and parallels, including Dorothy Parker and @badbanana:

Voltaire once said “a witty saying proves nothing.” Exactly. Proof, like narrative, is a creature of triples; premise, argument, conclusion. Wit is a cheater. Wit sidesteps. Epigrams try to steal a sliver of truth without having earned it. Witticisms look for knowledge on the cheap.

And a bit less literary, but here’s Tim O’Reilly in September 2008, referencing something Jay Rosen said regarding Robert Scoble:

I only follow a few hundred people out of millions of twitter users, so I’m thinking that there must be tens of thousands of great lines waiting out there to be captured into a book of twitter one-liners.

There were, of course, and Nick Douglas snagged a book deal to gather them up in a neat little package called Twitter Wit.

Other notable Twitter-based book (and/or sitcom) deals for what might best be called collections of epigrams include @fakeAPstylebook and @shitmydadsays.

***

Now, I’m not here to criticize the Cleverness Economy — far from it. I’m a participant myself, favoriting all sorts of cleverness left and right, and occasionally producing linkless, mildly topical epigrammary, like so:

In the grand scheme of things, however, that clever tweet has nothing to do with creating any lasting value, and everything to do with engaging my friends/fans/followers/audience/co-conspirators on a regular basis, to keep them on the hook for longer, less clever content, such as the blog post you’re reading right now. If all goes according to my plan.

That’s the idea anyway.

Over at Snarkmarket, Robin Sloan nails the important part of balancing the “flow” of updates, tweets, links, and general social participation with the “stock” of long-form writing, blog posts, articles, and even books. What’s your stock/flow balance look like today? This week? This year? Here’s Robin on what happens if all you do is file tiny tweets, reblogs, and shares:

Flow is a treadmill, and you can’t spend all of your time running on the treadmill. Well, you can. But then one day you’ll get off and look around and go: Oh man. I’ve got nothing here.

Robin also rightly points out that search engines are more likely to glom on to the long-form stuff over time. It’s what will show up two years from now, although your engaged and active Twitter/Tumblr following will be a pleasant and useful thing to have around.

***

There’s a good solid metaphor in all this somewhere for online news if you feel compelled to seek it out.

It goes something like this:

“Breaking News” is the treadmill. It’s the “flow” that keeps your audience engaged, coming back, checking your site or your blog, turning on the TV, visiting your national news site on their phone first thing in the morning to check if anything has blown up overnight, subscribed to your hyperlocal blog’s e-mail updates, checking their RSS feeds to see what’s new. And that’s crucial to building and engaging online news consumers.

But it doesn’t last. The stuff that does last? The most obvious answers include investigative and enterprise reporting, but I think there’s room these days for great infographics and data visualizations, too. For example, I’ve gone back to this New York Times piece on the 2008 Democratic primaries more than a few times over the last year, sometimes for political reference, and sometimes just to demonstrate the sort of displays of information that interest me these days.

Recommended: Find the balance, online producer, between churning out a steady stream of content and taking time to build something of lasting value beyond the next few hours.

***

There’s more out there to read about the Cleverness Economy if you’re interested. Anytime you see an analysis of Twitter’s codified “retweet” feature and it’s intentions, that might be part of it. The short bits of clever-set handwringing on the occasion of the shutdown of Favrd provide some insight into one corner of it. The somewhat related ebb and flow of Tumblarity appears to have played a part.

***

I’m not (ahem) clever enough to roll my ideas about this up into some pithy kicker to close with here. This is an ongoing exploration. There will probably be a Part 2.

Previously

• How Twitter saved Mark Luckie’s career
• I may never blog again…
• Recommended social media guidelines for reporters

And that’s the right way to think about it: Gather, filter, and deliver information. That’s a basic function of journalism, right?

Here’s one of my takeaways from a short tour of a few Q&A 2.0 spots:

“From Quora, we learn the value of frictionless real-time interfaces. Don’t assume your application has to follow patterns generated by its predecessors. You’re building next year’s tools, not last year’s.”

That’s a critical idea for anyone building user interfaces these days, isn’t it? Learn from best practices if you’re building, say, a hyperlocal news site, but you shouldn’t feel obliged to assume you need all the same pieces every other news site in history has ever had. It’s fine to emulate success, and well-designed presentations, but if you’re not trying anything new, the odds are long that you’re building something innovative, something that’s moving the needle ahead, something with a chance at mass, transformative appeal.

In other words, it’s OK to have new ideas. But I don’t need to tell you that, right?

Right.

Previously

• New at IdeaLab: The People Formerly Known as the Audience need a new name
• New at IdeaLab: What’s new in ReportingOn 2.0 and what’s been left undone
• New at IdeaLab: An interview with Baghdad Brian

I was wrong about a big piece of how this would work: I envisioned free wireless access blanketing the world, so that you could be sitting on a bench in downtown Santa Cruz with your laptop and find out, while reading a story in the Santa Cruz Sentinel’s food section, that Lulu Carpenter’s had a deal on day-old pastries right now.

This was pre-iPhone, and the most “super” mobile device I had at hand was a bottom of the line half-sausage sized thing from Verizon.

Now, that next step for local advertisers looking to capture walk-in business from real live human beings in their neighborhood is becoming far more clear.

Foursquare and Gowalla, location-based services you should be well aware of by now, are already getting into this business, opening up the market.

Here’s the “anatomy of a Foursquare special” as broken down by Cory Bergman at Lost Remote:

“Clicking over to the special reveals a useful offer for a free drink with a $20 purchase — if you show that you’ve checked in from the restaurant.”

Keep in mind, a note about a “nearby special” shows up in Foursquare next to the name of the business when you’re casually browsing nearby places, or checking in at the competition across the street.

Over at VentureBeat, a look at iPromote, a company building a mobile ad network to allow local businesses to advertise to anyone who happens to walk by:

“For a minimum of $5 per day, iPromote will serve ads to mobile phones near an advertiser’s place of business. The company serves both display ads, for which clicks aren’t counted, and cost-per-click ads where the advertiser only pays when a user clicks through an ad to their site.”

Sounds like a healthy model.

Of course, there’s a disruptive elephant-sized gorilla in the room named Google.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Push a button on your phone and Google tells you what’s nearby. As in, local businesses, restaurants, etc. How long before they start selling featured listings based on geography? Want to be the featured one-dollar-sign, four-star restaurant within a fixed square mile? That’ll cost ya…

Here’s the short list of location-based mobile apps on my iPhone right now:

• Foursquare – Mostly using this these days when I’m at a restaurant or otherwise non-routine location. Especially useful when I was in New York City over New Year’s.
• Gowalla – Trying it out. It’s cuter than Foursquare, but I don’t see how it’s any more or less useful yet.
• Yelp – I still use Yelp on my phone whenever I’m in a strange city and just want to know where the nearest Thai, Vegetarian, or Burrito  joint can be found.
• UrbanSpoon – Cute slot machine interface, but nothing special.
• Brightkite – I used to check in here socially, as I way to declare when I arrived in a new town for a conference. More for social check-ins than local business action, and I haven’t checked it in months.
• EveryBlock – Might be fun to check the restaurant inspections, Flickr photos, or crime reports here while walking down a block, but I haven’t.
• Honorable mentions on my phone for Redfin and Zillow — both real estate apps extremely useful when househunting, especially when you just want to know what’s for sale near your current location, while you’re cruising around checking out neighborhoods.

Have any favorite location apps that I’m missing? Are any local news organizations selling their own location-based mobile ads, or just buying into larger networks?

Previously

• Repackaging the unbundled
• 5 important things that happened in the last 10 days
• Five

Really?

What do we know about technology, business, strategy, and the machinations of multinational corporations?

A lot, apparently, judging by our visceral reactions, emotions, and excitement about every new shiny object released into the technosphere.

Over at Media Decoder, David Carr says “We are all gadget nerds now,” focusing on the way technology has driven the production of culture in recent years:

“Longtime players in the media space have been struggling to come to grips with an era in which the consumers serve as their own programmers. And now, the rapid rate of hardware innovation is metastasizing the trend, putting smaller, more powerful tools in their hands, leaving producers of all manner of software — not just the coded kind, but movies, novels, pop songs, magazine articles — struggling to format their content in way that pleases consumers and still provides a way to make a living.”

And he’s right, but I’d like to see some analysis of, say, the evolution of personal technology from 1984 to 2009, with the intention of identifying the key moments where it leapt not just into our everyday lives as users, but into our everyday conversations as amateur pundits.

Of course, I suppose when fire was discovered, early humans were pretty psyched about that, too, and said so.

Previously

• Five
• Street by street, block by block
• About that resolution