David Smith’s article in the Guardian asks, “Why the iPod is losing its cool” suggesting Apple’s flagship product is destine for the “recycling bin of history.”  I suspect that as a fashion statement the iPod is unlikely to remain on top – change is part of fashion.  But will the change spell the end of the iPod?  Not if you consider the iPod to be a platform instead of a device as I do.
The iPod is a powerful platform for the sale and consumption of digital media starting with audio, then television and soon movies.  It has changed the way more than 60,000,000 people across the globe buy and consume digital media.  The iTunes store, part of that platform, is a billion dollar business that exists because of the iPod platform.  Millions of us have bought into this platform and it will take a little more than a chance in fashion to get us to buy the latest Creative Labs mp3 player.

Paul Kedrosky, who I sent an iPod to last year when he told me he didn’t have one, points out that the Sony Walkman sold 60,000,000 units between 1979 and 1992.  I suspect that the platform nature of the iPod will give it a stickiness that Sony could only dream of.  The iPod has transcended its need for support from “teen pop culture.”  Yes, eventually iPod sales will stop growing – they have declined over the past two quarters, but just take a look at iTunes Music Store sales and you will get understand the concept of the “platform.”

How do you market a missle?  Just throw a model on the top and watch as the Air Force generals stop to discuss the specifications with her.  Talk about ‘social’ marketing.  Check it out:

According to INC Magazine, our PodServe solution is best for podcasting.  To be honest, we have not been investing much time in our free tools.  Instead we have focused our attention on the enterprise market for white label versions of the tools.  Our latest project is for a major television studio and their hit series.  PodServe, with Podcall functionality, will allow their cast, crew, directors and writers to interact directly with their viewers.

We need to remember that much of our ‘paying business’ comes as a result of the free tools we launched last year.  I personally will make an effort to keep our free tools.  In the meantime we will take the praise from INC and redouble our efforts.  Nice that we are sitting between two heavy-hitters like Yahoo and Six Apart.  Here is the scoop:

The founders of the wikipedia claim that most of the work is done by a small group of 500 contributors.  This afternoon I ran across an interesting post concerning, “Who writes wikipedia.“  Aaron explains,

When you put it all together, the story become clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site — the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it’s the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content.

And when you think about it, this makes perfect sense. Writing an encyclopedia is hard. To do anywhere near a decent job, you have to know a great deal of information about an incredibly wide variety of subjects. Writing so much text is difficult, but doing all the background research seems impossible.

On the other hand, everyone has a bunch of obscure things that, for one reason or another, they’ve come to know well. So they share them, clicking the edit link and adding a paragraph or two to Wikipedia. At the same time, a small number of people have become particularly involved in Wikipedia itself, learning its policies and special syntax, and spending their time tweaking the contributions of everybody else.

Other encyclopedias work similarly, just on a much smaller scale: a large group of people write articles on topics they know well, while a small staff formats them into a single work. This second group is clearly very important — it’s thanks to them encyclopedias have a consistent look and tone — but it’s a severe exaggeration to say that they wrote the encyclopedia. One imagines the people running Britannica worry more about their contributors than their formatters.

This explaination makes the most sense to me.  How could 500 people know everything?  It makes much more sense that tens if not hundreds of thousands of people have something to contribute and an elite group of 500 do most of the formatting.  Nice work. . .

Stowe Boyd has an extensive post titled, “Efficiency v Belonging: The Real Heart of Social Tools” where he proposes that many of the critics of social tools are chasing a red herring when they claim social tools do not improve personal productivity. Stowe correctly points out that this “lynch mob” is barking up the wrong tree.

Social tools were never really designed to improve productivity or efficiency (some may in fact do so), but instead he suggests that social tools “are about social involvement, learning and enlarging perspectives through connection…”

My favorite social tools (that don’t save me time) include: Upcoming.org, Wikipedia and Flickr. Why? They help me stay connected. In the case of Yahoo’s Upcoming and Flickr, they help me connect to a small group of people who I care about. In the case of Wikipedia it helps me stay connected to the world. Just ask my wife if adding pictures to Flickr help me save time…