Today begins the first day of a “journalism adventure” and one that I hope succeeds. Which also is to say that some of the hand-wringing about the death of print media is kind of overwrought. In my hometown, Phoenix lost its second newspaper back in the 1980s when the Phoenix Gazette folded. Back in the 1980s, the Gazette had no “web-only” option to fall back on. The P-I does. That’s a good thing. Try not to fuck it up. At least 20 newsroom employees’ jobs depend on it.

Several of us in the BATP constellation have been watching the bad news over the last couple of months about print media and discussing it — some of us don’t read a physical newspaper anymore, some of us do (I use mass transit each day, so I do; I still need something to read) — but it’s kind of clear how antiquated the delivery system is. A while back I was stunned to hear that printing the New York Times costs twice as much as sending every subscriber a free Kindle. That is stunning. No, really stunning.

So that said, I hope Hearst isn’t just scuttling the franchise, because this is a real opportunity to try something new. And outside of the Bay Area maybe, I can’t think of another place in the country that isn’t more technologically savvy than Seattle. Go with it.

But go big. Real big. Make sure every single article is permalinked and let the website make assloads of cash on content that’s already there. The now-defunct New York Sun is just sitting there online with big 300-pixel ads on the right margin collecting hits.

As a web-only entity, the Post-Intelligencer can’t argue that they’re losing subscribers to the internet, since that’s all they’re doing. Embrace it. And while you’re at it, why not consider putting everything from its 146-year history online? The New York Times recently made available its .pdf’ed ProQuest articles dating back to 1851 online and it’s fantastic — it’s an amazing archive that researchers and interested people can now access. And if you pay attention to Google, you’ll see that the Times’ articles have kind of body-snatched search queries since the paper went big online. Now perhaps an article from Seattle in the 1800s isn’t a big Google search hit, but it could be. Go with that, too. It’s worth a try.

In short, I want to believe. Let’s do this . . .

It was a bookend moment.

President Obama on Monday evening became the 10th American president to call on Helen Thomas at a White House news conference. And he was the first to call on Sam Stein, a reporter for The Huffington Post, whose Internet publication sprung to life during Mr. Obama’s candidacy.

. . .

Mr. Obama glided through the questions without making any obvious news. Then, he turned to Mr. Stein, 26, who last month became the White House correspondent for his publication.

“Are you willing to rule out — right here and now — any prosecution of Bush administration officials?” Mr. Stein said, asking whether Mr. Obama intended to endorse an investigation by a so-called Truth and Reconciliation Committee.

As he did with Ms. Thomas, Mr. Obama essentially bypassed the question, saying, “My general orientation is to say let’s get it right moving forward.”

It was not the answer but the very fact that he took a question from Mr. Stein that created a buzz and signaled yet another shift in the ever-evolving news media landscape.

Ever had to go while playing golf? Can’t hold it for all 18 holes?

A New York-born urologist came up with a solution to golfers’ bothered bladders – a faux club that fits in a golf bag, but is really a mobile urinal.

“I wanted people to feel a level of comfort,” said Dr. Floyd Seskin, inventor of the UroClub. “Worry where the pin is, not where’s the next bathroom.”

His inspiration came after a patient who underwent a prostate procedure came back months later to rave about his improved condition.

“I used to hit my ball directly into the woods so I can urinate,” the man told Seskin. “You took five strokes off my game.”

Seskin, 49, who lives in Miami Beach, set out to find a device that can help other golf enthusiasts, many of whom are over 50 and suffer from prostate problems.

He came up with a contraption that looks like a 7-iron with a wider opening on top, a handle that can hold about half a liter of liquid and – most importantly – a tight-fitting seal.

It comes with a golf towel that attaches to the belt and the club to allow a private, hands-free relief.

“You can do it anywhere,” Seskin insisted. “It looks like you’re practicing your swing or something.”

Can Martha Stewart take a pie in the face — even one she baked herself? Fine Living Network is about to find out.

On Sept. 16, Fine Living will unveil a new original comedy series built around a provocative premise: mocking Ms. Stewart. For a half hour, two hosts will critique — in “candid and often acerbic” language, according to the channel — old clips from her 1990s cooking and craft show. Fine Living, part of the E. W. Scripps Company, calls the series “Whatever, Martha!”

For Fine Living, a fast-growing but small channel available in about 50 million homes, the endeavor comes with a built-in punch line that doubles as an insurance policy. The co-hosts of “Whatever, Martha!” are Ms. Stewart’s daughter, Alexis Stewart, and Jennifer Koppelman Hutt, who is the daughter of the chairman of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Charles Koppelman.

Martha Stewart is not widely known for her sense of humor. But she is in on this particular joke. In fact, she created it, dreaming up the premise after watching reruns of “Mystery Science Theater 3000” during a sleepless night. That series, produced from 1988 to 1999, delivered sarcastic commentary about old horror movies, and had blossomed into a cable cult hit.

“They promised not to be mean, and I had to trust them,” Ms. Stewart said in an interview. “I’m not going to have a heart attack.”

Oh and (4) we need the damn revenue.

What I find interesting is that Google had already hired away one of the founders of Danger, Andy Rubin, who’s now working on Google’s mobile phone platform, Android.

I don’t know if one can read too much into this, but it certainly seems emblematic of something: Microsoft seems to be buying the body after Google’s already scooped out the brains.

In fact, I’d go even farther. Having my Facebook contacts on my phone is almost more important than my phone’s own address book. Facebook could and should become a cell-phone operating system in its own right.

An NYPD detective will be charged today with lying on the witness stand about how he interrogated a teenage shooting suspect after the savvy 17-year-old captured the whole thing on his MP3 player, sources told The Post yesterday.

When Detective Christopher Perino of the 44the Precinct took the stand last year against Erik Crespo in Bronx court, he denied he asked the teen numerous questions during an interview about the shooting of a man in a Bronx elevator on Christmas Day 2005, sources said.

But when Crespo’s lawyer, Mark DeMarco, produced a DVD and transcript of the interview – as captured on the MP3 player – it became clear Perino was flat-out lying, sources said.

“[The teen] was recording the whole conversation and the detective never knew it,” one source told The Post. “He said, ‘No, no, no’ – and then everything he said he didn’t say was on the tape.”

This makes me weep, it’s so beautiful and pointless:

The downside is DRM: it’s a totally closed system, so you can only buy what Amazon can sell you. John Gruber argues that there’s a related problem. Namely, you’re restricted in what you can and can’t do with the content down the road:

So the Kindle proposition is this: You pay for downloadable books that can’t be printed, can’t be shared, and can’t be displayed on any device other than Amazon’s own $400 reader — and whether they’re readable at all in the future is solely at Amazon’s discretion. That’s no way to build a library.

I’d argue that’s a minor concern. Sure the lock-in is an issue. I’d love to be able to drop in any PDF book or RSS feed and read it. But I can’t say I really care about having the books in the future. I’ve listened to my favorite albums hundreds of times, but I’ve only read my favorite books once, maybe twice.

Now, granted, I’m not the bibliophile my fiancé is. She treats books like sacred objects. So I can certainly sympathize with Gruber’s point of view. But I bet there a few people out there like me, who would gladly accept the restrictions in exchange for never again having to fill moving boxes with books.

Of course, I’m not going to buy one, so what the heck do I know?

Making all this information relatively easy to retrieve is a system known as Wide Area Information Server, or WAIS. More than 300 WAIS data bases are now accessible without charge, and a standards committee is finishing work on a text retrieval standard that will permit companies to charge for specialized data bases. In concept, the effort will allow users to search for information without much technology talk and to use the same search procedures for participating data bases.

Additionally, gateways exist so that WAIS users can retrieve information from non-WAIS data bases like Gopher, developed by university users of Next computers, and the World Wide Web, which makes available physicists’ research from many locations.

The real money quote, though, is further up in the article:

“I’m an electronic mail addict,” she said. “People can find me wherever I am. I have negotiated several business deals recently without even using a telephone.”

Imagine!

(via)

“You would subscribe to music,” Rubin explained, as he settled on the velvet couch in his library. “You’d pay, say, $19.95 a month, and the music will come anywhere you’d like. In this new world, there will be a virtual library that will be accessible from your car, from your cellphone, from your computer, from your television. Anywhere. The iPod will be obsolete, but there would be a Walkman-like device you could plug into speakers at home.”

People have taken this to mean that Rubin is forecasting the end of the iPod and very bad news for Apple. But, of course, there’s no reason why Apple can’t shift with the tides. John Gruber explains:

The iPod as we know it might be obsolete in such a world, but why couldn’t the Walkman-like device that plays the subscription music be an iPod? I’ve been saying this for years: just because Apple hasn’t engaged in subscription-based plans for music yet doesn’t mean they couldn’t. And if they did it now, theirs would be more popular than all existing ones combined.

This would, of course, be a titanic shift for Apple. In some ways, Apple’s decision to sell music a la carte makes it the last of the old media companies. That may be one reason why they’ve been so successful: they’ve taken a well-known business transaction (customer pays store $10, customer receives album) and adapted it for the digital age. They’re still selling a discrete product (downloads instead of CDs or vinyl), and not trying to introduce customers to a new paradigm (monthly subscription). Buying music from the iTunes store is a familiar experience.

But down the road, as customers are slowly weaned from the era of physical media, the subscription market may become more viable. Gruber thinks this a non-starter because of DRM (Digital Rights Management, a.k.a. copy protection):

But here’s the problem with subscription-based music: you can’t have it without DRM. Because without DRM, what’s to stop someone from subscribing for one month, downloading every song they might ever want, then unsubscribing but keeping the music? And the thing with DRM is that people hate it, because it restricts what they can do and where they can play their music. To argue that subscriptions are the future of music is to argue that DRM is the future of music, and the evidence points to the contrary.

I don’t think that’s necessarily true. It’s certainly the case that today, subscription-based services like Rhapsody download DRM-encoded music to your computer or MP3 player. But that’s just because the data networks are still too shaky to support true streaming. In 10 or 20 years, when cell phone networks are all blazing fast, your handheld device (the “Walkman-like device” that Rubin refers to) will be able to link up to a music service and stream your music in real time. This device will have no hard drive, no local storage (except maybe a buffer for when the cell signal is weak).

Can the world’s most famous BlackBerry addict — Karl Rove himself — really be using an iPhone?

…to actually control the hand, the researchers relied on neural activity recorded from a monkey’s brain. According to MIT’s Technology Review, that resulted in the fingers on the hand performing their intended movement about 95 percent of the time. While the system doesn’t currently work in real time, the researchers are reportedly planning a live demonstration with a monkey within the next six months.

Awesome. The fact that they were actually able to use neural impulses from the brain to control the hand’s movements is truly astonishing. The next 10 or 20 years are going to see a flurry of sci-fi-like advancement that is going to make our collective heads spin (and open up a flurry of ethical questions).

In the meantime, we’re one step closer to the day when we can all get a new hand like Luke Skywalker’s.