If you'd like random words to float around your screen when you're not using your computer, it's easy to set up Wordie's recent words feed as a screensaver.

If you're using a Mac, open System Preferences and in the "Desktop & Screen Saver" section select "Screen Saver," then choose "RSS Visualizer" (this is the effect Apple stores usually have going at their "Genius" bars). Under "options" enter http://feeds.feedburner.com/WordieLatestWords. When the screen saver fires up, you'll see the latest nonsense from Wordie floating dreamily across the screen.

If you're using Windows, NewsGator offers a screensaver add-on for their feed reader, and Lifehacker has a post outlining a similar download.

Labels: Apple, features, feeds, lifehacker, newsgator

Apple's Steve Jobs, talking to The New York Times about Amazon's Kindle:

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

Which means sixty percent of people in the U.S.--180 million people--are, to some degree, readers. More if you count newspapers, magazines, and the web.

It strikes me as odd that Jobs, the head of a company that is doing very well with a less than 9 percent market share*, doesn't appreciate that.

* UPDATE: Notice how I conflate the size of a market with market share? I think that's called lying with statistics. Still, I think the larger point stands.

Labels: Apple, kindle, reading, Steve Jobs

This post actually has nothing to do with social media, its death, or the iPhone, I just thought a sensational title that was also a transparent lie would drive traffic*. What this is really about is pimping my own post in the Silicon Alley Insider. Which is not a transparent lie (neither the fact of the post, nor its contents), but it is, like the title above, a naked, grasping attempt to drive traffic to Wordie/Errata, and to get my name in a blog I like.

* This will be the title of all Errata posts from now on.

Labels: Apple, iPhone, lies, Silicon Alley Insider, social media