Alexis C. Madrigal

Meet the interrobang. Unless you happen to be a typographic expert, you probably haven't encountered the hybrid question mark-exclamation point. It was actually invented in the early 1960s by ad exec Martin Speckter but as language researcher Anne Trubek suggested last year, it just might be the symbol of our times.

I discovered the interrobang, and I have been thinking about it all week. And no, not because I am a grammar nerd, but because I think [the interrobang] may just sum up something about our clever yet confused culture...

Might we describe our current cultural zeitgeist as surprise superimposed over curiosity,  mixed together with attitude? Is the interrobang a 1960s, type-based version of WTF?  Is the interrobang a 1960s, type-based version of WTF?  A certain informal, witty, knowing, WTF way of approaching the world? Many clever Facebook status updates and comments could be defined, as Wikipedia does the interrobang, as "A sentence ending with an interrobang (1) asks a question in an excited manner, (2) expresses excitement or disbelief in the form of a question, or (3) asks a rhetorical question."

By now, I assume that you're sold on using the interrobang in your next Powerpoint (or getting it as your next tattoo), so you should know how to find it. If you've got Microsoft Word, it's hiding in the Wingdings 2 font. Hit shift+6 and you'll see the zeitgeist mark appear.

One last thought on the interrobang: does anyone know how I could search for a piece of punctuation like this? Google says it ignores most punctuation, and I'm assuming Microsoft works the same way. I think most OCR systems do filter out non-standard punctuation.

Ok, I'll say it: I'd pay for Twitter, but only if it was free for everyone else. Let me explain.

In my line of work, it's by far the most useful social tool for delivering me interesting and relevant information. I hear similar things from other journalists and tech-lovers. Yet a USC Annenberg School of Communication survey released yesterday found that 0 percent of respondents said they'd pay for Twitter [pdf]. The obvious interpretation of the study is that people, even Twitter users, don't see a lot of value in the service.

But I don't think that's quite it. It's not that Twitter is worthless, but rather that in trying to charge for its value, you lose it. (The Twitter Uncertainty Principle?) A paywalled Twitter would destroy the healthy information ecosystem that's grown up around it. Users realize that Twitter has to be free to be Twitter, so of course they won't say they'd pay for it. The sum is worth a lot, but if and only if it's the sum.

Here's an iPad metric that you might not be looking at: Bible app sales.

Monday, a Bible cracked the top 10 highest-grossing book applications for the iPad for the first time, according to Drew Haninger, CEO of the scripture app's publisher, Olive Tree.

The theory of the case here is that if Bible applications continue creeping up the sales rankings, we can infer that the demographics of the iPad are broadening out from what we assume is an urban, liberal, fairly areligious base.

The Bible, of course, is a mainstay iPhone book application, and easily the most popular book in the history of the world. On the Kindle, which probably has the broadest range of eReader users, the Bible ranked 50 in their list of best-sellers at the time of publication.

Olive Tree's NIV Bible BibleReader is the highest-grossing iPhone Bible app right now, too, ranked second in books just behind Green Eggs and Ham. Between the iPhone and iPad, including free versions, Haninger said his company is getting 3,000 downloads a day. The iBible may not exactly be iBeer in its heyday, but sales on the iPad are growing, Haninger said, as the device has passed 3.5 million units sold. (Atlantic colleague Eleanor Barkhorn also pointed out to me that the NIV is considered to be the more "conservative" Bible translation and less likely to be used at more liberal mainline churches.)

The rest of the top-selling book applications also suggest that the iPad isn't solely being purchased by young guys with cash to burn. The paid app list is dominated by Toy Story and Dr. Seuss titles! Anecdotally, parents seem to love the iPad for the child pacification magic tricks it can perform. A study by the consumer research firm, MyType, found that parents were more likely than non-parents to own an iPad.

There are a couple of strong counterarguments against the Bible app as demographic probe. First, books are a tiny slice of the overall app market. Even the best selling book apps aren't in the top 100 apps overall. Second, book sales are messy because books can be purchased for the iPad in a variety of ways, most prominently through the Apple's iBooks and Amazon's Kindle applications. So, caveat lector, we're looking at incomplete and only suggestive data.

Still, book (and Good Book) application sales are interesting because the heavy-duty game and joke app purchasers get screened out. Perhaps they allow us to have a more complete picture of who iPad users are, beyond just "selfish elites."

Cisco recently posted it its semi-annual security report. It is packed with information, but as Alex Hutton of New School Security notes, the best thing about it is this hilarious graphic. The illustration is actually titled "The Artichoke of Attack," and the caption really spells out the metaphor.

"Modern hackers chip away at the hard-core exterior along the perimeter of the network to get to the heart of the enterprise, removing certain 'leaves' to reveal sensitive data," we read. 

Via Tim Maly

In the wake of the dot-com crash, Dell was the darling of the media and investment worlds. While other companies were struggling to survive, good old Dell was a paragon of success. Unlike its competitors, Dell used aggressive supply-chain management to deliver value to its investors.

As the company met or exceeded its earnings per-share targets quarter after quarter, all kinds of stories sprang up about what made the company so special. Usually it was their abnormally amazing supply-chain management.

"Still relentlessly striving to get better faster, Dell intends to slash $2 billion in costs. CFO Jim Schneider has indicated that much of the cuts will come from manufacturing operations and the supply chain," Fast Company wrote in 2004. "That will put even more pressure on Dell's component makers. Michael Dell is fond of saying that in the high-tech business, you either grow or die. It all just happens much, much faster when you're living in Dell time."

But now we know, courtesy of an SEC investigation, that the Dell secret sauce was payments from Intel that kept rival AMD's chips out of Dell boxes.

The Economist reports on the whole sordid affair, which ended with the SEC extracting a $100 million fine from the Texas firm, though Dell neither admitted nor denied guilt in the settlement (emphasis added):

The penalty seems rather light given the gravity of the SEC's accusations. According to the commission, Dell would have missed analysts' earnings expectations in every quarter between 2002 and 2006 were it not for accounting shenanigans. This involved a deal with Intel, a big microchip-maker, under which Dell agreed to use Intel's central processing unit chips exclusively in its computers in return for a series of undisclosed payments, locking out Advanced Micro Devices, a big rival. (Intel is expected to settle a long-running anti-trust case that has highlighted these payments in the next couple of weeks.) The SEC's complaint said Dell had maintained "cookie-jar reserves" using Intel's money that it could dip into to cover any shortfalls in its operating results.

The SEC says that the company should have disclosed to investors that it was drawing on these reserves, but did not. And it claims that, at their peak, the exclusivity payments from Intel represented 76% of Dell's quarterly operating income, which is a breathtaking figure. Small wonder, then, that Dell found itself in a pickle when its quarterly earnings fell sharply in 2007 after it ended the arrangement with Intel. The SEC alleges that Dell attributed the drop to an aggressive product-pricing strategy and higher than expected component prices, when the real reason was that the payments from Intel had dried up.

It's amazing to read the investor conference call transcript from the first quarter of 2007, the period in which three-quarters of the company's operating income came from the Intel payments, according to the SEC.

Intel is hardly mentioned, meriting just two short comments. Even an analyst question about Dell's then-new deal with AMD, which signaled the end of the payments, didn't generate a peep about the possible impact of the Intel arrangement. Yet insiders at the company must have known that they were in trouble, if the SEC allegations are correct.

It's yet another example to stack on top of the maxim: when it seems too good to be true, it probably is. Even in "Dell Time."

Jailbreaking, a way of modifying an iPhone to run unauthorized apps, has been deemed legal by the Library of Congress' Copyright Office.

Thanks to an obscure rulemaking procedure, the practice was granted an exemption under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, despite protests from Apple. The Electronic Frontier Foundation had sought the exemption.

"It's not just important because consumers have demonstrated they want to jailbreak their cell phones. It tells companies that want to create alternatives to the app store that there will be a customer for them," said Jennifer Granick, Civil Liberties Director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "If you have an application that Apple wouldn't like, you may well have an alternative outlet."

That could be important. Media observers have questioned whether Apple should be able to keep such tight control over the apps users' can put onto their phones. Such concerns flared when Apple initially rejected Pullitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Mark Fiore's app because it "ridicule[d] public figures."

Still, the new exemption is quite limited, in some senses:

Computer programs that enable wireless telephone handsets to execute software applications, where circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose of enabling interoperability of such applications, when they have been lawfully obtained, with computer programs on the telephone handset.

While the copyright ruling provides protections for jailbreakers, the people who make the tools to do it are not similarly guarded from legal action. That's just how the provision was structured, Granick said, and was not a specific decision of the Copyright Office.

The regulation also cannot prevent Apple from playing hardball with would-be jailbreakers or making their phones difficult to crack. 

Apple did not return my request for comment by the time I posted this story. I'll update if I hear from them.

It was just an average day on Twitter last week until I saw this Tweet: "@mikemckayecd: I have a writer position worth $70k. Funniest twitter response gets it."

Two questions sprang to mind: Who was this guy -- and was he serious? Turns out he's Mike McKay, executive creative director of Saatchi and Saatchi LA, an arm of one of the world's larger advertising firms, and yes, he's serious. 

"It's really hard to find good writers. I don't know why," McKay told me. "It's even harder to find people to write dialogue. It's even harder to find funny writers."

And funny, viral writers like the geniuses who scripted the Old Spice man's recent viral videos? Forget about it. "It's much easier to write long form," McKay said. "It's much harder to get someone interested in something in 140 characters."

This won't be the first time a tweet landed someone a job. It's not even quite unprecedented at Saatchi. The London office encouraged would-be interns to compete in a Facebook group challenge in which they battled to get the most members. But one tweet for a coveted advertising writing job? That's nuts even by Saatchi standards.

"I was like, 'Fuck it, I'm going to try it,'" McKay explained. "Immediately I get HR coming up and saying, 'What did you just do?'"

As it turns out, most of the good replies have come from people within the advertising industry. They have "books," portfolios of work from other agencies, and they've got some talent.

"I was thinking, maybe we'll get idiots and we'll be stuck: I'll have to hire one of these guys," he said. "But we got great writers."

Or so he claims. Here are his 17 finalists. McKay expects to pick someone by midweek with the help of this poll, so let him hear you in the comments or on Twitter if you like one in particular.

• @hiremesf: Does that $70k include a free iphone bumper?
• @Peglegington: You have to be concise on Twitter. Like a circumcision, everything extra gets cut off whether you like it or not.
• @BrotherlessGrim: Is the $70K contingent upon doing some "work" in San Fernando Valley?
• JDBeebe: 01101000 01101001 01110010 01100101 00100000 01101101 01100101 00100001 [Editor's note: That's binary for "hire me!"]
  
• @faketv: nigerian ad agency seek writers, send $$$
• @jough_stef: I should have an advantage because I can post my entire resume & referrals in less than 140 characters.
• @bwillenberg: $70K will secure an exchange deal between Aust and the US. You take me and Aust will take back Mel Gibson. Deal?
• @iscoff: Is this contest nearly over? I have to start training for the astronaut job I won on Facebook.
• @um_giz: Does $70k cover the cost of a boob job in LA? I'd be moving with my girlfriend and I'm worried about her self-esteem.
• @inrgbwetrust: Ever lie awake as your MacBook makes the wall gently throb with light? That's Steve Jobs playing 'Just The Tip' w/ your soul.
• @brendyn: I hope this job isn't for Scion. They're like the Twitter version of a car. 140 inches or less.
• @tontino: Oh, finally! This must be for one of those American Recovery and Reinvestment Act jobs I've read so much about.
• @paleofuture: I had another one about Bogusky and safe words, but I'm moving to LA and actually want the job.
• @moz85: I feel like if my iPhone could speak, it would only address itself in third person
• @MstrMn: I'am probabbly the moost qaulified four thes righter jobe.
• @azahnweh: What's the job number? I'm going to bill the shit out of it.
• @jacklovesnachos: For the least funny tweet, how about an AE position?
• @JDBeebe: Will bonuses be awarded for every "like" received on topical, work-related Facebook status updates?

The website Wikileaks has published more than 90,000 leaked U.S. military records about the war in Afghanistan. Marc Ambinder has a lot more about the content of the classified archive, but there's another fascinating aspect to the story: Wikileaks gave the New York Times, Guardian, and Der Spiegel access to the archive several weeks ago.

The rogue, rather mysterious website provided the raw data; the newspapers provided the context, corroboration, analysis, and distribution. "Wikileaks was not involved in the news organizations' research, reporting, analysis and writing," Times editors said in an online note. "The Times spent about a month mining the data for disclosures and patterns, verifying and cross-checking with other information sources, and preparing the articles that are published today."

While the impact of the documents and newspaper reportage on the war in Afghanistan will take a while to suss out, the publication of these documents will be seen as a milestone in the new news ecosystem.

Unlike the Pentagon Papers situation, we're "watching the traces of a major story unfold in real time," said C.W. Anderson, who studies media culture at CUNY. "If you're a PhD student or comm / journalism researcher who wants to study how news diffuses in 2010, here's your case study," he tweeted.

This story -- and the organization behind it -- is obviously singular. It's being described as one of the largest leaks in U.S. military history. (Though it's worth noting that the value of the information is not totally clear yet.) But it also fits into a broader trend. Traditional media organizations are increasingly reaching out to different kinds of smaller outfits for help compiling data and conducting investigations. NPR is partnering with several journalism startups to deliver their information out to a larger audience. The Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University broke a large story on renewable energy in association with ABC's World News Tonight. ProPublica's 32 full-time investigative reporters offer their stories exclusively to a traditional media player.

New conduits have opened into the most highly regarded newsrooms in the country; while that's probably a good thing, it adds a layer of complexity to a story like this. While ProPublica and others are certainly journalism outfits, Wikileaks is neither here nor there. The video that caused their last news splash -- "Collateral Murder" -- seemed like an attempt at an editorial. The group was harshly criticized in many quarters.

This time, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange told the New York Times that "some 15,000 documents would be withheld from release for a few days until Wikileaks could redact names of individuals in the reports whose safety could be jeopardized."

The New York Times' David Carr may have nailed the issue when he tweeted that it was the "asymmetries" that Wikileaks introduces into the equation that have the government spooked. An administration official told Politico, ""[I]t's worth noting that Wikileaks is not an objective news outlet but rather an organization that opposes U.S. policy in Afghanistan." But the truth is that we don't really know what Wikileaks is, or what the organization's ethics are, or why they've become such a stunningly good conduit of classified information.

In the new asymmetrical journalism, it's not clear who is on what side or what the rules of engagement actually are. But the reason Wikileaks may have just changed the media is that we found out that it doesn't really matter. Their data is good, and that's what counts.

UPDATE 7:16 AM: NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen calls WikiLeaks the first "stateless news organization" in an excellent post on this episode."In media history up to now, the press is free to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the laws of a given nation protect it," Rosen writes. "But Wikileaks is able to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the logic of the Internet permits it. This is new." [Emphasis added]

Nothing makes you long for the days of low-resolution, analog television quite like staring at the glorious high-definition pores of a news broadcaster. While digital cameras can capture everything in ultra high resolution, maybe they shouldn't. In this week's The New York Times Magazine, the brilliant Rob Walker looks into digital tools that mimic the imperfections of analog media, in effect making "progress toward perfecting flaws."  

A conspicuous example is the $1.99 Hipstamatic iPhone application, which, as one review put it, filters images made with the device's camera "to make them look as though they were taken with an unreliable plastic camera . . . rather than this complex mobile smart phone." In mid-July it was the 17th-most-popular paid app in the iTunes store; drop by the Hipstamatic Flickr pool to browse more than 53,000 digital images, with pleasingly washed-out colors or other beguiling imperfections resembling those created by glitches in analog processes.

What's the appeal of such tools? Walker argues that there is a link between "the flawed and the interesting."

A boringly perfect digital picture of a flower makes no impression. But an equally boring one marred by (digitally recreated) light leaks, exposure mistakes and focus inconsistencies presses the aesthetic button that suggests deeper meaning. Specifically, the image looks like one from a time before taking a thousand pictures in a weekend was routine. It taps into a language that predates digital abundance in order to layer on implied significance where, as often as not, none exists.

This is a wonderful passage -- and certainly the instant-patina effect is part of Hipstamatic's appeal. But I'm an avid Hipstamatic user myself (that's my best friend up there) and I think there is a more prosaic reason that the app has taken off: the previous generation iPhone cameras are terrible. The photos they take, particularly in low light, are often blurry and noisy. Imperfection is a given, but at least the blemishes can be interesting and serendipitous.

In other words, you can't beat the flaws of your iPhone camera, so Hipstamatic lets you own them.

Eight years worth of observations of the Red Planet by NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft have been compiled into the most accurate map ever of our neighbor.

A new NASA website displays all of the 21,000 images stitched and blended together, so you can seamlessly pan and zoom around. If you zoom all the way in, you can see Martian features as small as 330 feet across.

Maps like this pose an interesting question for space exploration proponents. Human spaceflight is a difficult and expensive enterprise, but is seeing the solar system through our robots' eyes enough?

Here's a weekend project for the intrepid and meticulous only.

A young woman is making usable thread out of spider silk. The woman, who goes by the handle Persona, posted a detailed account of her web-to-spool process on the how-to site Instructables. I was struck by how painstaking the work is. The first step, collecting webs, is probably enough to put off most people, but it's after they are in hand that the real work begins. They have to be cleaned, combined into longer fibers, and rolled together. (There are photos of the whole process at the site.)

The fascinating project is a wild DIY twist on biomimicry, a field dedicated to using nature's evolved designs to solve human problems. The painstaking craft isn't going to be commercialized any time soon, as Persona freely admits. "The reason for making spider silk thread is not for making a lot of thread," she wrote, "but is instead for having thread out of making the strongest, stretchiest material on earth."

We tried to contact Persona multiple times, but to no avail. We'll update you with more details if she gets back to us.

Images: persona/Instructables

The iPhone Antennagate is, for most intents and purposes, over. Apple's free-case quick fix for the problem tamped down consumer anger -- and Apple's great earnings report blasted its problems off the front page. Analysts predict the issue won't materially affect the company's next financial reports.

The long-term impacts of the problem are less clear. Will unforeseen negative repercussions emerge in the future? Did Antennagate cause some kind of fundamental shift in Apple's relationship with its core fans?

There are scholars who study Apple's consumers as religious devotees. Consumer behavior specialists Russell Belk of York University and Gulnur Tumbat of San Francisco State, even put together a framework for assessing Apple's mystical mythology. The company was built on four key myths, they argued.

Here are the four narratives, as summarized by media scholar Texas A&M's Heidi Campbell, who distilled their work for her May paper "How the iPhone became divine":

1. a creation myth highlighting the counter-cultural origin and emergence of the Apple Mac as a transformative moment;
2. a hero myth presenting the Mac and its founder Jobs as saving its users from the corporate domination of the PC world;
3. a satanic myth that presents Bill Gates as the enemy of Mac loyalists;
4. and, finally, a resurrection myth of Jobs returning to save the failing company...

The stories they identified aren't myths in the sense that they aren't true, but more in the Joseph Campbell sense of being a story that helps people make sense of their relationship with the world. These ideas are where consumers attach to attachment Apple, so we thought it would make sense to see whether what happened during the affair could undermine any of these key beliefs.

We can throw out the satantic and resurrection myths right away, which didn't really come into play. Antennagate wasn't an attack on Apple's countercultural heritage, and its origin story is well-established.

About the only part of the core Apple fan belief system that the event could have been compromised is the hero myth. Jobs, at first, did not come off looking good. Comedians parodied his admonition that users were holding their phones wrong.

But after last week's press conference quelled questions about the company's practices and this week's iPhone sales report, Jobs not only seems like a hero again, but he reinforced the resurrection myth too.

Jobs even let media representatives into an inner sanctum at Apple, the antenna testing center. Fans responded with appropriate enthusiasm at being shown one of the powerful shrines to Jobs' dedication to perfection. BoingBoing tastemaker Xeni Jardin  posted photos of the place with the headline, "Best thing to come out of Antennagate? Apple's 'antenna testing chamber' porn." Bloggers reveled in using the official name of the facilities, "anechoic chambers," which practically buzzes with gnostic appeal.

Heidi Campbell, for one, doesn't think the company has much to worry about.

"This resurrection myth, and the belief in the infallibility of Mac technologies is going to keep people still invested," Thompson said.

Recalling the pricing and availability problems following the launch of the original iPhone, she concluded, "Antennagate will make waves for a little while, but if what happened to Apple around the launch of the original iPhone and all that rigmarole didn't shake people's faith, I don't think this will."

Indeed, as illustrated in this (hilarious) video that's garnered 5.5 million views on YouTube, it is hard to shake the faith of iPhone buyer that they are purchasing the world's best device.

"What the hell entices you about the iPhone 4, if you don't mind me asking?" an imaginary store clerk says. "It is an iPhone," the cartoon customer response. "You do realize that doesn't mean anything. It's a brand," the clerk responds, but to no avail.

But that's just it: the iPhone does mean something, and it's the type of meaning that transcends rational optimizing about features and raw performance. "Apple weathered the storm because there is such brand loyalty through the religious narrative," Campbell maintained. "When you're buying into Mac, you're buying into an ideology. You're buying into a community."
  Image: Alexis Madrigal.