When Apple added a camcorder to the iPod Nano the resounding response was: “Nice camera. Wrong iPod.” Everyone expected the iPod Touch to be the rightful heir of the iPhone’s tiny but mighty video recording capability. Maybe Apple didn’t want to cannibalize iPhone sales (not a very Apple move) or maybe there was a supply chain glitch. But, for whatever reason, the Nano got the camcorder. It’s a great freebie. Continue Reading

Gizmoville correspondent Wayne MacPhail writes:

It is now as certain that Steve Jobs will unveil an Apple tablet later this month as it is he will wear jeans and black turtleneck while doing it. This, despite Apple execs being as tight-lipped as trumpet players on the subject. Over the years, months and last few days supply chain leaks, ex-employee tattles and general industry buzz have, taken together, created an imagined shape for the mythical device — dubbed the iSlate by some industry observers. We don’t know anything, but here’s what we speculate: the iSlate will run a variant of OSX with functionality closer to a Macbook than an iPhone. That said, the iSlate is supposed to be able to run iPhone and iPod Touch apps and some developers are, apparently working on demo apps for the unveil presumed to be on January 26. Continue Reading

David George-Cosh, a technology reporter for the Financial Post, had what was described as “a total Twitter melt down” on February 11 — aggravated by marketer April Dunford, whose failure to return a call in regards to a story he was working on led her to tweet: “Reporter to me ‘When the media calls you, you jump.  OK!?’  Why, when you called me and I’m not selling?  Newspapers will get what they deserve” Said reporter already had one foot out the door to a job in Abu Dhabi, but he also brought the service to the attention of many a newspaper type who hadn’t quite figured out what Twitter was for. From there, the articles started appearing: a week later, Antonia Zerbisias of the Toronto Star wrote about her conversion. By early March, when LeVar Burton proposed a spontaneous tweetup at Hemingway’s Pub in Yorkville, reporters were sure to follow — including Ivor Tossell, who flipped the experience into a column for The Globe and Mail. By the end of March, however, the obsession started spinning out of control: story after story after story asking the same question: what is this thing and how can we exert some authority over it? Ian Brown of the Globe even hosted a live chat on March 25, incredulously called “Why Twitter is a matter of life and death.” After that existentialism came the stunts: Twitter images appeared above the banner of the April 3 Toronto Star, who hoped for 140-character meditations on the meaning of life but got nothing too profound in return. Toronto Sun tech columnist Steve Tilley announced on May 4 that he was going to tweet 1,000 times in a week — he stopped at 500, but lived to tell the tale. And then we all got on with the rest of our lives, except for Leah McLaren, who announced in print on November 6 that, after being clued in to the parody account @LeahFiles, she would now tweet under her own name. Yet, she never followed through.

Below, the six most annoying articles from Twitter’s late-March tipping point, each worse than the last. Continue Reading

PREVIOUSLY ON MONDOVILLE:

The best of our conference tweet recaps

TEDxTO: the revolution will possibly not be tweeted [Sept. 10]

CaseCamp: where the internet still refuses to grow up [Sept. 17]

MIXX Conference: the second ‘x’ is for exasperation [Sept. 29]

Personal Brand Camp: we are all doing this for a show [Oct. 16]

Mesh Marketing: the dance floor where spin has been left for dead [Oct. 22]

A city resets, one hashtag at a time: #CPandS vs. #opendataTO [Nov. 4]

Marketing Week: where viral is dead, data beats opinion, and kids steal TV [Nov. 12]

nextMedia conference: how to win people and influence friends [Dec. 1]