Made with Rainmeter and RocketDock.

As an avid note taker and Moleskine user this is pretty cool. They’ve launched an iPad application. According to their release:

[....] allows you to express your creativity through text, images and sketches. Pick a classic Moleskine notebook paper style, create a new thought and start to type or draw choosing amongst different colors and sizes. Once you are done with your thought, you can store it on your device and make edits whenever you want.

Don’t forget to map your thought by adding a geo-tag and share it with your friends via the most popular social networks or email.

Not enough to make me what to buy an iPad, but getting close.

“I literally never use the phone,” Jonathan Adler, the interior designer, told me. (Alas, by phone, but it had to be.) “Sometimes I call my mother on the way to work because she’ll be happy to chitty chat. But I just can’t think of anyone else who’d want to talk to me.” Then again, he doesn’t want to be called, either. “I’ve learned not to press ‘ignore’ on my cellphone because then people know that you’re there.”

“I remember when I was growing up, the rule was, ‘Don’t call anyone after 10 p.m.,’” Mr. Adler said. “Now the rule is, ‘Don’t call anyone. Ever.’”

I have never been a huge fan of phone calls. But I just finished a project with a client I only spoke to once on the phone. She would just never return a phone call. Email and text messaging are wonderful communications tools. Don’t get me wrong. But somethings a good old phone call can be more effective and even faster way to communicate.

Can’t wait to read Dan Gilmore’s most recent work. A quick review via Boing Boing:

Mediactive is divided into three sections. The first section is a history of the dismal state of current media—partisan and bickering, financially troubled, insufficiently critical of power and overly sensitive to Internet upstarts. Gillmor explains how reporters can (and sometimes do) use online media to get their stories straight, and in so doing, explains how you can do the same, and become a smarter consumer of, participant in, and maker of news. This is a crash-course in being a better consumer of the news, asking active questions about how the news you see and hear and read is constructed.

Part two is an information age journalism program encapsulated in a swiftly moving section on using tools and systems to make better news. Even if you’re not planning on starting up your own blog, wiki, mailing list, or even a newspaper, this section should be required reading for anyone hoping to understand how smart use of the right tool can put the news in the service to its community, structured around the values of truth, humility, and honor.

Part three is a big-think piece on the way that institutions—from j-schools to the FTC and Congress—can and should change the way they do things to clear the way for journalism that works with the net, not against it. Covering issues from pedagogy to DRM law, from comment moderation to Network Neutrality, Gillmor moves into the macro-scale with the same deftness that he brings to the details in part two.

Mediactive is available as a free, Creative Commons-licensed download. As you might expect, Gillmor’s Mediactive site dedicated to the book contains many other resources and a robust conversation on the book and topics it addresses.

You can view more of this UK artist work here. Pretty stunning stuff.

Google Inc., AT&T Inc., and Verizon Communications Inc. executives are meeting behind closed doors with U.S. officials in talks that critics say reduce the public’s voice in keeping the Internet open.

The companies sought a compromise, in a rare Saturday session last weekend at the Federal Communications Commission, on rules proposed by Chairman Julius Genachowski to regulate how phone and cable companies handle Web traffic such as Google’s YouTube videos.

“These kinds of meetings where the substance isn’t being revealed go against the chairman’s promise of an open, transparent and inclusive agency,” said Gigi Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, a Washington-based advocacy group, in an interview today.

The companies and senior FCC aides have been holding private meetings since June over the regulations, known as net neutrality rules, according to disclosure statements on the agency’s website. Issues include the extent of FCC power over Internet service providers, and whether phone and cable companies can favor some traffic, such as making their own videos run faster.

The FCC may be negotiating a “secret deal” that would keep Genachowski from fulfilling President Barack Obama’s pledge to back net neutrality, said Josh Silver, president of the Washington-based advocacy group Free Press. The agency may be about to “abdicate its responsibility to protect Internet users,” Silver said in an e-mailed statement.

I mean, I don’t think it takes a rocket scientist to understand why giant billion dollar telecom corporations are against it. They’ve found a way to make even more money off a universally loved and relatively affordable service by providing less service. What’s not to love about killing net neutrality for them? More money and more control. A win/win.

All three books in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy—”The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” “The Girl Who Played with Fire” and “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest”—are now in the top 10 bestselling Kindle books of all time.

I am not a Kindle owner so I don’t follow news related to it very closely. I would have thought another author would have already hit the million sales mark for their “entire body of work,” but I guess I would have been wrong.